Brian Anderson > Quotes

“But the Wall was so technologically groundbreaking in its short run that it still thrums decades after its physical dissolution. Though simultaneous sonic innovations were popping off elsewhere, albeit on smaller scales, around this same time—notably in the lofts and clubs of gay underground dance scenes in New York City and Chicago—the Dead’s sphere of sustained influence in the realm of audio is astounding.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“the Dead placed their monitors—like my artifact—behind the band, so they heard exactly what the audience heard. The point of the Wall, moreover, was to eliminate monitors, so it’s not only that the monitors were behind the musicians. The PA was their monitors.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“The group had a shared vision of the ecstasy of song and dance being a sacred rite, according to the bassist, and proportional to that framework Bear yearned to create a soundsystem. “His ideal was musical sound undistorted by the artifacts present in the sound-reproduction system—the entire signal path from pickup through preamp through power amp to speaker. Only the vibrating string and the vibrating air had purity,” Lesh wrote. “Everything else was compromised and must be made transparent. A noble goal, and one we endorsed gladly.” To put it another way, as Kreutzmann later wrote of the Dead’s time with Bear in LA: “Somehow we were placed inside his dream of building the perfect soundsystem for a live band.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Name another band in the history of the world where a soundsystem was something you would remember fifty years later,” Chris Coyle, Dead & Company’s lighting designer, told me.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“The first time Scully saw the Dead, at a December 10 benefit for the Mime Troupe at the 1,300-capacity Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, he was tripping on Owsley acid. About an hour into the Dead’s set, Scully recalled, the room was “breathing deeply, like a great sonic lung from which all sounds originate and which demands all the oxygen in the world.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Buchla-made banana-shaped bass cabinets, newly stenciled with thirteen-point lightning bolts—Bear’s design, meant to differentiate the band’s gear on stages.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“2338 Santa Catalina Street in Palo Alto in”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“The idea was to summon a hive mind through drugs, sound, light, and improvised music, and the Pranksters brought their own soundsystem too, making all kinds of disorienting sonic feedback loops. “When the Dead were playing through their own equipment, that sound was washing around the hall,” Kesey later said of these early Tests. “Nobody had ever heard anything like this—where they were part of the ambience of the sound.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“At its apex, the Wall weighed seventy-five tons. The operation required four semis and teams of crew members to leapfrog from city to city.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“The array itself was a literal wall, sixty feet end to end. The system was made of nearly six hundred speakers and stood over three stories tall. The PA drew around 28,000 watts of power from forty-eight heavy-duty McIntosh amps. Dead sound crew members determined the rig could only be wired up using arm-thick military surplus cabling originally designed for plugging in docked ships to shore power.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“For the audience, the movement of enormous volumes of air created an effect of presence; they weren’t just hearing the music but feeling it.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“off,” he said, using a “pile” of ultra-limited transformers that weighed four or five pounds each.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“I think the Wall of Sound was one of the greatest achievements of the neurodivergent community that ever happened,” Silberman said. “It was a collaboration between neurotypicals and neurodivergent Bear.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“The Dead pioneered the stacking of speakers in curved vertical arrays that “throw” sound over the audience, now industry standard from stadiums and arenas to auditoriums to beer-soaked clubs.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“But in another bit of foresight on Bear’s part, Tim Scully’s centralized preamp also housed a tape deck. The Dead could now easily and regularly record their own performances and practices.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Swanson’s lasting memory of these early jams is not of the music but the volume, and how the whole place seemed to vibrate, especially the sandwich-like hi-hats. “While they’re playing this music all that stuff is rattling,” Swanson said.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“We’re experiencing the evening’s first blown speaker,” Weir said, to shouts and applause, shortly into set one. “That poor speaker gave its life for you. We’re gonna send it back home to our little speaker graveyard. In the middle of that speaker graveyard is this great big tomb where they have the Tomb of the Unknown Speaker.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“In his living room, Bear wired up a personal stereo system beyond what even serious high-fidelity aficionados at the time could have fantasized about ever owning: a set of massive Altec-Lansing Voice of the Theater speaker horns, originally designed for movie houses. “If I could not be at a live show, next best was listening to music at Bear’s,” Rhoney Gissen, another of Bear’s partners in chemistry, who also lived with him on and off into the 1970s, later wrote in her memoir Owsley and Me. “He modified his home audio system by exchanging the components of the amp and preamp with precision parts he ordered from an aircraft manufacturer,” wrote Gissen. “He changed the type of cables and the wiring of the connectors. He had the best speakers—JBLs with the cones exposed. He even altered those, adding a subwoofer to increase the amplitude of the bass. His placement of the two tall speakers was calculated to optimize the quality of the sound.” Already shining through were two concepts that helped make the Wall: souping up hardware and attention to acoustic directivity.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Ampex MX-10 dual-channel tube mixers stacked”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Some people, their memory now? They’re getting old,” Parish told me. “They forget stuff. You remember things in a halcyon way where the bright light was on you for a minute there in different ways, so you think things are more important in different ways.” I was warned, too, of others making things up about the Wall, just to mess with me.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Bear, who had a knack for audio through prior service-related ham radio and television experience, liked the sound of that. His own home at the time, a cottage in Berkeley, was an audiophile’s sanctum, a hideout “filled with the most fantastic gear,” Scully recalled. “All these amazing toys.” As Scully would say decades later, “I should have seen the 75 ton ‘Wall of Sound’ coming as far back as Owsley’s sound lab in Berkeley in 1965.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Resurfacing this seeing-sound story in interviews over the years, Bear drew a direct line from that experience to his “original vision” for the Wall, as Kurt Torell, an associate professor emeritus of philosophy at Penn State University-Greater Allegheny, noted in a 2019 essay on synesthesia published in the scholarly journal Dead Studies. “There is evidence that certain members and crew of the band were quite self-conscious about thinking of sound and music in visible, three-dimensional, and synesthetic terms,” Torell wrote, “and deliberately sought to foster that perception in the audience through the music and its amplification.” That rings clear across a patchwork of concerts and events where Bear’s innovations met the Dead’s audience head-on, laying groundwork for the technological skyrocket that was soon to launch.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Trust. That’s what it came down to. One of the key reasons why someone like Silberman believed that autistic people form such attachments, say with audio gear, is precisely because human behavior is unpredictable and not reliable in a way autistic people might prefer or need.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Glendale showroom of Analogr, a seller of rare and one-of-a-kind studio gear and memorabilia. The selection included four fully functioning”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“The band “piled in with their equipment,” Wolfe reported in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and began to play. “The Dead’s weird sound!” Wolfe wrote. “Submarine somehow, turbid half the time, tremendously loud but like sitting under a waterfall, at the same time full of sort of ghoul-show vibrato sounds as if each string on their electric guitars is half a block long and twanging in a room full of natural gas.” The sound shattered Bear’s realm. He couldn’t not be a part of what the band was onto, and he remained an inspiration—and sometimes foil—to their sonic pursuits for decades. Simply hearing Garcia play was enough to push him “to go to work for the most amazing group ever and have a fabulous time of it,” Bear later said. “I just hitched a ride and tried to make a positive contribution.” What he brought to bear on the Dead’s audio efforts, up to and through the end of the Wall, always pointed back to the “as above, so below” worldview. The ancient occult expression was the bedrock of Bear’s belief “that whatever happened on any physical, emotional, or mental level while he was tripping was not a fantasy,” Robert Greenfield wrote in Bear, a biography”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“In the meantime, they jammed for the next seven hours. Lesh was so hyped on playing an electric instrument, and with this particular group of musicians, that he couldn’t fall asleep that night. “It felt as though the electricity flowing through the instrument had permanently amped up my aura to a new intensity,” he said.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“summer run, which grossed $115 million, was made possible by an UltraSound-provided Meyer Sound rig, the PANTHER large-format linear loudspeaker array. This compact audio technology can push upward of 150 dB with unequaled clarity and “headroom.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Previously, only studios used racks for fixed, permanent installations.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

“Later that night, Bear drove Gissen back to her apartment. Shifting in the front seat, Gissen realized she had been perched on “some sort of machine” that was the size of a Cracker Jack box and housed in a black leather casing. “That’s part of the Grateful Dead’s new approach to sound,” explained Bear, clearly excited. “It’s a condenser microphone. I’m making live recordings with a state-of-the-art soundsystem that captures the transformative moment of expression and creation with the audience who are also high on my LSD.”
― Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection