New York, NY (June 2, 2025)—Many bands have biographies written about them, but there’s only one whose P.A. has its own book, too—Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection (St. Martin’s Press), which hits stores this month. Over the course of nearly 400 pages, author Brian Anderson traces the legendary loudspeaker system from its nascent roots at San Francisco “acid tests” in the late 1960s to its full flowering as the audio behemoth that graced Grateful Dead stages in 1973 and ’74.
Developed by sound guru/LSD chemist Owsley “Bear” Stanley with boutique bass guitar/audio manufacturer Alembic and a loose knit team of pros, the Wall of Sound was an actual physical wall of speakers—a collection of six separate P.A.s, ground-stacked within scaffolding and placed onstage behind the band to act as a simultaneous monitor and house system. The band’s instruments had their own dedicated speaker columns within the wall, so each performer naturally stood in front of his own section to hear himself. Vocal mic feedback and stage bleed were solved by placing two out-of-phase condenser mics at each mic position; one was sung into while the other captured stage ambiance, so summing them together canceled out everything but the vocal. While the system was groundbreaking for its time, its production costs eventually grew as large and unwieldy as the P.A. itself, until finally the Wall came down for good in October 1974.
Phil Lesh cuts loose in front of the Wall of Sound. PHOTO: Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images
“One of the things I try to illuminate in the book is that the Wall of Sound didn’t just drop out of the clear blue sky fully formed one day,” says Anderson, speaking from his home in Chicago. “It was the logical culmination of a progression that started at the beginning of the band. So many people from so many walks of life were involved in actualizing the ideas behind it, and this whole crazy cast of characters is super-fascinating in its own right. All of the drama and interpersonal relationships, the machinations and the grind of the road, make for a compelling story that really is about obsession.”
Exclusive Excerpt: Testing the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound
Anderson was raised as a second-generation Deadhead—his earliest memory is attending a late-’80s Dead show as a toddler while his father worked as a local stagehand—and he’s heard about the P.A. since he was a child. “On long road trips, my parents would talk about seeing the band in the early Seventies with a massive mountain of speakers on stage called the Wall of Sound and how it would blow your mind—so the thing has always captivated me,” he says.
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While Anderson first wrote about the P.A. for Vice in 2015, he continued to research it and interview key figures from the Wall’s history in the years that followed. Then, when a Wall speaker came up for sale at a Sotheby’s auction in 2021, he placed a last-minute bid and, much to his surprise, won. The speaker’s presence inspired him as he scraped away decades of myth and hearsay to write the definitive Wall of Sound story, but Anderson sees it as far more than a mere motivational tool. “I’m looking at it now, here in my home office,” he says, “and knowing that it touched hundreds of thousands of people, and both my parents received the sound waves flowing out of it, makes it really special to have this thing.”
