#owsley

Owsley at an Acid Test

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The way Owsley’s hearing was affected eventually shaped the way in which he would record bands as they performed onstage. “When I got into sound and began taking acid, I developed a remarkable facility insofar as my hearing was concerned that intensified my art. I do hear in stereo, and I absolutely hear the separation, but pan pots do not move the sound for me. A stereo record done with pan pots sounds to me like a mono record. I have to put on headphones to make any difference at all, and then it’s still blurry, so I don’t ever put a single source into both channels. There’s always a second microphone, and if I want a single source in both channels, I use two because I’m only interested in differences and my ears do know that.”

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What came to be known as the Wall of Sound made its debut at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on March 23, 1974. Standing forty feet high and seventy feet wide, the system consisted of 88 fifteen-inch JBL speakers, 174 twelve-inch JBL speakers, 288 five-inch JBL speakers, and 54 Electro-Voice tweeters.

In Dennis McNally’s words, the array was “not merely a sound system, it was an electronic sculpture.” Encased in a huge framework of metal scaffolding, it also closely resembled something that had only ever before been seen in a science fiction movie. Driven by more than twenty-six thousand watts of power generated by fifty-five McIntosh MC-2300 amplifiers, the music that the Dead were making came through nine different channels as well as a four-way crossover network before being fed through the amplifiers and speakers into the house.

In Phil Lesh’s words, playing through the Wall of Sound was like “piloting a flying saucer. Or riding your own soundwave.” Financed by the Dead, the Wall of Sound had cost $350,000 to develop, the equivalent of nearly $1.8 million today. At a time when the band was trying to keep the cost of tickets low, the system required a crew of sixteen to transport and maintain. The Wall of Sound took so much time to set up that two different stages had to be purchased at an additional cost of $200,000. Four trucks were then needed to haul seventy-five tons of equipment from one gig to the next.

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Aptly, Kreutzmann described the Wall of Sound as “Owsley’s brain, in material form. It was his dream, but it spawned a monster that rose from the dark lagoon of his unconscious mind.” In ways that Bear himself had never anticipated, the Wall of Sound was, in Kreutzmann’s words, “impossible to tame.”

Despite all the problems, he had achieved precisely what the Dead had asked him to do. “The Wall of Sound was a system which gave every iota of control to the musicians onstage. With a central cluster and all the monitors pulled back so everything was coming from one spot, the sound turned into something that no one had ever heard before. It was loud without being too loud. It was articulate. Every single note had a space around it. Once the system was set, I could walk away from the board because it all came from the musicians, which had been my goal right from the beginning.