Grateful Dead books now rival those about Springsteen, Dylan, and the Beatles in the rock publishing market. Brian Anderson’s Loud and Clear chronicles its quest to create a Wall of Sound concert experience that reproduced the clarity and separation of home stereos. Stanley Owsley, the audiophile designer—and the real-life inspiration for Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne”—insisted on separating as many audio channels as possible. The band poured its resources into realizing Owsley’s hi-fi ambitions, striving for maximum concert fidelity marked by exceptional clarity, volume, and balance. The Dead’s story runs parallel to the Beatles’ studio innovations in the previous decade and has influenced everything from modern touring workflows to venues like the Sphere in Las Vegas. Anderson, who grew up outside Chicago with Deadhead parents, interviewed many key crew members for this vivid account…
Tim Riley:
So, I want to start by talking to you just about your background. Your parents were Deadheads, they met at Dead shows, and so you came of age in a house where the Dead were like this staple, right? Give us an idea of your background, what your first show was, and what led you to this book project.
Brian Anderson:
Thanks for your interest in the book. It really means a lot.
We don’t like plugging our own product. Just sign up and leave us alone.
My parents were early Deadheads who were orbiting the band, and each other, while seeing the band perform in the early to mid-'70s, right in this Wall of Sound era. I really grew up hearing my parents talk about the sonic clarity of this sound system that the band was touring with, right? So, my parents would just kind of regale us with stories about seeing the band back in this era when they had this mountain of speakers behind them. Every time they saw the band, this mountain was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And this mountain of speakers was called the Wall of Sound, and it kind of blew everyone's mind.
…one point that I really try to drive home in the book is that the Wall of Sound did not just drop out of the clear blue sky fully formed one day in 1974. It was this years-long progression that really began when the band began, you know? It was this show-by-show incremental growth and evolution, through fits and starts and trial and error.
When I was just a toddler in the late '80s, I went to my first Grateful Dead show. Really, my earliest flashes of memory are seeing the Dead performing on stage when I was just two, three years old. So, this stuff has been around for my whole life.
I've always been captivated by the visual of the Wall of Sound. Fast forward to 2015: I was an editor at Vice, and I wrote and published an initial 9,000 word feature story about the Wall of Sound. It just happened to coincide with the Chicago run of the Fare Thee Well shows that were celebrating the band's 50th anniversary. That story ended up getting a bunch of attention, and I remember foolishly thinking after that story came out that "surely this is the definitive take on the Wall of Sound."
It only took a couple of days or weeks after that for me to realize that the initial 9,000 word web story really only scratched the surface of a much deeper story about obsession and titanic human achievement in the Dead's quest for audio perfection. So I kept gathering bits of string, and I kept in touch with sources that I spoke with for that initial story, and reached out to new ones as well.
Then, in late 2021, I ended up acquiring a part of the Wall of Sound—and that really kicked this whole story into high gear.
The meat of the book moves chronologically through this first grand 10-year era of the Grateful Dead, from the founding of the band in 1965 through the end of the Wall of Sound, right when the hiatus hits at the end of 1974. There've been so many books written about the Grateful Dead, which I think is a testament to the enduring legacy of the Grateful Dead phenomenon, but I knew that I didn't wanna write just another book about the Grateful Dead. You know, as a journalist you're always looking for, "What new can I say?" When I acquired this artifact from the Wall of Sound, I knew immediately that I had a very unique angle. I had a window to tell this much bigger story about obsession and titanic human achievement in the Dead's quest for audio perfection. And I could tell it through this artifact—it let me do that.
Tim Riley:
Most people don't understand what it takes to put an act like that on the road with equipment like that and how much expertise and familiarity it requires. And it turned into a beast that they were tweaking, as the Dead were playing.
So, the first guy we have to talk about is Augustus Owsley Stanley, who you describe as an eccentric Kentucky born chemist, which I think is a very neat summary for a very big personality, big person. Talk to me about Stanley. He's been dead since, since when? You have a lot of testimony, and he has a very interesting story arc in this book. Tell us about Stanley.
Brian Anderson:
Yeah. Owsley is a very interesting character. He earned the nickname "Bear," because he had a very hairy chest. A lot of people in this world just refer to him as Bear. Bear died in a car accident in Australia in 2011, so we were never able to talk. He was a character in the book who is no longer around, who I wasn't able to interview, but he was so instrumental to leveling up the Dead from the very beginning. He first saw the band in late 1965, so very, very early days. He saw them at an early Acid Test, right? The Acid Tests were these psychedelic-fueled audio-visual happenings that took place along the West Coast over a number of months in late 1965 and early 1966. They were organized by Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. And the Dead were effectively the house band at the Acid Tests.
Where the Grateful Dead story gets really interesting is in early 1966, when they spent a couple months in Los Angeles, where Owsley rented a giant house for them. And at that point, he basically gave the band his home Hi-Fi stereo system. So, that became an early iteration of their sound system. It was a single Macintosh and a pair of theater speakers—the big, horn-shaped speakers that you would see in old movie houses. So that was Owsley’s home Hi-Fi rig—and he gave that to the band. He would be sitting around watching them rehearse or perform around Los Angeles, and he would be high on his own supply of LSD, and he saw the sound of the band emanating out of his speakers in color.
Owsley had synesthesia, so he could experience one sense through another. So, he saw sound as color, and this really had a profound impact on the way that he would be a force of ideas behind what eventually grew into the Wall of Sound. He had this realization, like, I have to remember what this is doing, what this feels like. And at the same time, he had an aversion to unclean signals, so distortion really bothered him.
When you look at what the Wall of Sound grew into, over the span of 10 years, the Wall of Sound was six individual PA systems. Each performer had their own rig, and that eliminated what’s known as "intermodulation distortion." What that meant was that no two sound sources were going through the same output, right, because every musician had their own rig. That eliminated distortion. You can see Owsley’s influence there, with his aversion to unclean signals, which he was making very clear to the band from the very early days. He’s like, "we need to purify the signal path from the instrument to the speakers to the minds of the audience," right?…
MORE
* Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection, by Brian Anderson (St. Martin’s, 2025)
* Owsley and Me: My LSD Family, by Rhoney Gissen with Tom Davis (Monkfish, 2013)
* No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Deadby Peter Richardson (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015)
* All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows, by Ray Robertson (Biblioasis, 2023)
* Mangrove Valley, substack HQ
* Dick’s Picks Vol. 24: 2/23/73 (Cow Palace, Daly City, CA), by date from Wall of Sound era 1973-1974
Come See About Motown
"Ross was a space oddity, an outlier, and so became the natural object of others’ lust and disgust ('b***h-goddess'). She was the only Motown star you could imagine dancing with fellow freak Groucho Marx, her snaky shape in mid-frug just as semiotically recognizable as his cigar,” Devin McKinney in "The Motown Story: The First Decade, or A Star Is Born," American Music Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: MOTOWN, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025 (Tim Riley, issue editor). With more from Riley, Olivia Davis, Kit O’Toole, and Ben Greenman.
noises off
* From the archives: Get started with the Guarneri box set, 49 CDs and way too many superlatives; The Simpsons gets a thorough history by Alan Siegel, with writer’s room stories and quotes to refresh reruns; and George Clinton’s memoir gives an insider’s view of Motown and Phillie scenes, and how Bootsy Collins hangs out long enough to get the call from JB …
* Coming soon: Peter Richardson’s new book, Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine
* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link
