"Dead Sound"

Produced by CBS News Radio Assignment Editor Gauthier Giacomoni

Narrated by CBS News Radio Correspondent Jim Chenevey

There’s a truism in Rock N Roll. If something’s worth playing, it’s worth playing loud. Of course
when you do that, you learn pretty quickly that there’s a limit to how loud you can play
something through small speakers - like a smartphone or a laptop - before the music starts to
get distorted.

That’s one of the reasons why going to concerts is so rewarding. It’s your favorite artists, playing
your favorite songs, and loud. Crystal clear music washes over you while bass thumps in your
chest. But it wasn’t always like that. It turns out that many of the breakthroughs that led to how
we experience live music today can be traced back to a single band: The Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead were a psychedelic rock group founded in San Francisco in 1965. The band
is known for its live performances which rarely repeated setlists, featured extended
improvisation sequences, and songs that morphed from one to the next. This made each
concert a unique experience that drew legions of fans to attend as many shows as possible.

BLAIR JACKSON: It’s hard to communicate how bad concert sound was like in 1965 and
1966. It was so weak and nobody cared about it. Now it’s not unusual to find good
sound. It’s unusual to find bad sound, but the Grateful Dead and their mates were really
a lot of the reason why that happened … I’m Blair Jackson. I am a writer and editor, and
I’ve also written a number of books about the Grateful Dead.

Jackson is the author of Grateful Dead Gear: The Band’s Instruments, Sound Systems, and
Recording Sessions from 1965 to 1995. He says Rock bands were the first to care about how
concerts sounded.

To give you an idea of how far live music technology had to go, here’s an example of what The
Dead sounded like in 1968.

(MUSIC: Grateful Dead - China Cat Sunflower - February 24th, 1968 - Dick’s Picks Vol. 22)

All the instruments sound muddled, there’s a lot of distortion, and the vocals are barely audible.

BLAIR JACKSON: When the Grateful Dead and all the other bands of the 60’s first were
starting out there weren’t really many venues that were designed for music. Clubs were
clubs, you know you’re just kind of putting a system into a fairly small room. That’s not
that hard to manage, but there was no real concert industry until the late 60s. Then, as
the bands got bigger and more popular they started playing larger places, and so that’s
 when you find bands starting to go into hockey arenas, basketball arenas, you know all
these giant places that were really not designed for music at all.

Over the years, the Grateful Dead and their sound engineers would make considerable efforts
to improve the listening experience of concert goers. This crusade began with one man: Owsley
“Bear” Stanley.

BLAIR JACKSON: He’s best known really for being an acid chemist, sort of one of the
original exponents of LSD in the Bay Area and in California and across the world as a
manufacturer of it, but in the Grateful Dead world he’s best known as sort of being their
original sound man.

DENNIS MCNALLY: Bear instilled into the Grateful Dead the pursuit of quality. The
absolute pursuit of quality. He would go to any lengths... Sometimes intractable ones - to
get the best possible result whether it was sound or anything else … My name is Dennis
McNally, and I was the publicist and the historian of the Grateful Dead.

Members of the Grateful Dead describe Stanley as a wild eyed radical visionary idea man with a
mad scientist’s mind. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann says they found themselves inside Stanley’s
dream of building the perfect sound system for a live band. According bassist Phil Lesh, Stanley
was a on quest to purify the path from instrument to speaker. The goal was that the equipment
for amplification should not cause any distortion to the music.

Stanley financed and housed the band for three months in 1966. During that time he kept
everyone in the house on his strict diet of nothing but red meat and milk. McNally says Stanley
was not one to negotiate.

DENNIS MCNALLY: It’s all he would allow in the house. Considering there was a baby in
the house… this led to certain amount of conflict. He finally had to give in on the baby
food. Bear was kind of an absolutist. When he decided that X was the thing, then X was
the thing, and he would not really hear any alternatives. So, it was a refrigerator filled
with giant steaks that they would saw off and fry - and milk, and that was what was in the
refrigerator.

Along with frozen steaks, he also provided the band with some serious gear. According to one
of the Grateful Dead managers, Bear spent a fortune on equipment so there was nothing left for
the band. McNally says Stanley had a background in electronics and had worked as an
engineer for TV and radio stations.

DENNIS MCNALLY: The Dead’s first significant sound system was his home stereo,
which were these giant speakers... I mean, lord knows it was sort of overkill in a private
home - and the problem was that they were very delicate. They weren't really made to
 be moved around. Ultimately, you know, it didn’t work all the time... putting it at its best.
But, you know, when it worked it was a thing of beauty. It was a remarkable thing.

There’s a good reason why Stanley’s speakers were both overkill in a private home and difficult
to transport to gigs. Blair Jackson says they were refurbished movie theater equipment.

BLAIR JACKSON: He was the guy who pioneered the notion that “hey, some of these
movie theaters - movie palaces have pretty good speakers. Why don’t we try that for
Rock N Roll.” So, he put this system together and that became extremely influential.

DAN HEALY: You have to understand that sound equipment to that point had been...
The only real research that was ever done in high powered and high quality sound
equipment was done in the mid 1920s by the movie industry, and most of it was done by
RCA and by Western Electric, and it was for developing talking pictures. So, all of the
designs of the amplifiers, and the speakers, and the horns, and all of the equipment that
we used was really based on a mid 20’s research … My name is Dan Healy and most
people who know me that’s enough said. If you don’t, I’m one of the sort of music
revolutionaries from the San Francisco music scene that began in the early ‘60’s.

Healy says Bear’s solution to bring movie theater speakers to shows was already an
improvement from the status quo at the time.

DAN HEALY: In the early days - the band would come in set up their equipment. The
sound system was called a public address system. It was operated by some individual
entity, and there were no communication between the two.

Healy wore many hats during his tenure with the Grateful Dead.

DAN HEALY: It was my goal to take a Rock N Roll band - in this case the Grateful Dead,
and go to a venue, and set up a … Contrive, and then install, and set up, and operate a
sound system so that everybody in the audience - no matter where you were seated -
were the equivalent of sitting in front of your dream stereo in your living room. Okay? So
in other words, you buy a ticket, and you go in and you sit down, and you just get blown
away by the huge immense quality, and happiness, and niceness of the sound.

Healy says over the span of the Grateful Dead’s career they accomplished this dream with room
to spare. One of the ways they leaped towards that goal was by tuning their sound system to
the venues they played in. Around 1972, Healy started measuring how individual audio
frequencies bounced around different rooms. Band members credit the original concept to Bear
and his Alembic Inc. co-founder, but everyone seems to agree that Healy is the one who figured
out how to make it work.
 DAN HEALY: I’m not really the one that invented that idea, but I’m probably the first
person to use it in the world of Rock N Roll and concert sound. But initially the concept is
- if what goes in comes out, then you’ve created a system that’s a faithful reproducer of
sound and music.

McNally says comparing the differences between the sound they played through their system
and the sound that came back was subtle work.

DENNIS MCNALLY: Every room has acoustic idiosyncrasies. What they would do was
run white noise - which is sound from all frequencies - through the sound system, and
they used a wave measuring device which was actually invented to test the harmonic
strength of metals, and this would measure the room, and you discover which
frequencies would resonate too much, others too little, and so, the idea would be to tune
the room flat, and so you would start from there with equalizing the sound system to
make it sound perfect to the audience.

Healy says it’s more accurate in this case to call it random noise.

DAN HEALY: I would literally make drawings of the place. Map out the sound quality in
terms of using random noise, and measuring the response curve which people would…
an average person would call it an echo. You go into a big sports arena - you clap your
hands - you hear the sound bouncing around and stuff, alright? So, those are the kind of
things that stand between perfect sound and the audience. So, the object would be to
track all that down. To codify it, and then to be able to treat the room, and treat the
sound system in such a way that as much as possible you could nullify that. Therefore, if
you can extract the sound of the characteristics of the room, and just have the band, and
the music, and the audience that would be the ideal listening environment.

The Grateful Dead did not keep the information they were gathering to themselves.

DAN HEALY: There were times when the band actually refused to play venues unless
we were able to reconfigure them in a way that we know the audience would hear the
best sound.

McNally says some venues were willing to listen to and act on The Dead’s advice.

DENNIS MCNALLY: The classic example being that there were panels that went up in to
the ceiling in the Springfield Civic Center as a result of long conversations with the Dead.
So, they shared their information, and they shared it freely, and they spent a lot of time
working with people, because of course that would make for a better environment when
they came back.
Most places they played did not call for solutions as drastic as architectural improvements. One
of the smaller and more portable ways the Grateful Dead treated different venues to create as
consistent a sound as possible was to cover the stage with carpets and drapes. Healy says that
was to cut down on the sound reflecting back from the surface of the stages.

DAN HEALY: The various stage surfaces can vary from an old Vaudevillian theater from
the 1920s to someplace with a marble floor like the Greek Theater in Berkeley. So, part
of preparing the environment for good quality sound is addressing the reflections which
is another word of talking about echoes and stuff.

Here’s what the Grateful Dead sounded like in 1972.

(MUSIC: Grateful Dead - China Cat Sunflower - September 27th, 1972 - Dick’s Picks Vol. 11)

The improvement to their sound in just four years is notable. In addition to Healy’s work, the
group's gear was heavily customized in-house by Alembic Inc.. The company built, repaired,
and installed electronics in the band’s instruments and amplifiers. This contributed to a lot of the
sound’s progress. Blair Jackson says overall, the Grateful Dead had a substantial impact on live
music technology.

BLAIR JACKSON: They were one of the first bands to ever use stage monitors so that
the singer could actually hear themselves from something other than the PA system.
And they always had great insistence on quality all the way through the recording chain.
Whether it was the type of cable they used. The connective equipment or the actual
pieces of gear. They were one of the first groups to ever use sort of hifi equipment rather
than what was just standard public address system equipment before that. So, that was
very influential. I mean, very early on they got a reputation for having the best sound of
any band that was out there touring, and so a lot of the other sound engineers copied
what they were doing, or talked to them about what they were doing, and how they were
able to isolate instruments, and how they were able to combine instruments in interesting
ways in the PA, and give a faithful reproduction of what was actually being played.

Much of this has become standard fair for both musicians and venues alike, although it all pales
in ambition to the monstrosity the Grateful Dead unveiled March 23rd 1974 at the Cow Palace
just South of San Francisco. It came to be known as the Wall of Sound. Now, when you hear
the words “Wall of Sound” some of you may be thinking of Phil Spector’s recording technique.
This was not that. The Grateful Dead build an actual wall of speakers to reach their fans.

More than 600 speakers stacked a towering 40 feet in the air, and spanning 70 feet across the
stage - all lined up behind the band. The bottom half served as on-stage monitors and the top
half was used to project the sound into the audience. Each instrument had its own column of
speakers, and there was yet another cluster of speakers just for the vocals.
 DENNIS MCNALLY: Literally, it could create a sound that was - as their prospectus put it
at the time - perfectly acceptable at a quarter mile. So, think about that. Visualize 440
yard. Being that far back from the stage, and I’m talking about just the speakers on the
stage, and a quarter mile away you could still feel that sound as a powerful and palpable
thing. It was extraordinary …

The Wall of Sound was a sight to behold.

DENNIS MCNALLY: It looked like an alchemical sculpture.

DAN HEALY: It probably looked like something from Mars. It was set up on scaffolding, it
was all on the stage, it wasn’t in the form that we know sound systems today being on
the sides of the stage and hanging - usually from the ceiling in large venues. This was
set up on the ground or on the stage and it was behind the musicians and there was
scaffolding erected.

It took a brazen team to build and maintain the Wall of Sound, but it was conjured up out of the
the mind of just one man: Owsley “Bear” Stanley. Although it wasn’t unveiled until 1974, it’s
something that Bear had been thinking about for years. Dan Healy says there came a point
when they knew they had pushed things as far as they could with the technology based on the
1920’s research by the movie industry.

DAN HEALY: By the early 70’s we realized that we had bottomed out all of the research,
and then it became time to bring in mathematicians, and theoreticians, and people who
knew about stress and weight and rigging, and so on and so forth; and we began to
completely rethink the presentation, and not only how we only presented it, but each and
every piece from the microphone clear to the loudspeaker, and everything in between.
And so, the Wall of Sound was... I guess you would say it was the test model. It was the
X One spacecraft that we used to test all of the theories on.

One of the people the Grateful Dead called on was John Meyer.

JOHN MEYER: I’m John Meyer. President of Meyer sound.

Meyer says he met Stanley in 1969 while he was building speakers for McCune - a company
that provides rental gear for live events. Bear was trying to solve an obvious problem before he
could move the speakers behind the band. Having the microphones for the vocals placed in the
path of the speakers that carry both the music and the vocals would create a feedback loop
resulting in a deafening screech.

JOHN MEYER: He was doing some experimenting with microphones. So, he said he
wanted to build… Do some differential mic techniques to subtract out and get better
gain for feedback.
 DENNIS MCNALLY: What they had to invent was what called a phase cancelling
microphone. Because microphones in front of speakers cause feedback, what they had
to do was set up two microphones. What it boiled down is that one would register the
voice, and the other would cancel out the sound of the music coming from behind them.

While it toured with the Wall of Sound, the band set up two thin microphones on top each mic
stand. The first was at mouth level, and the other about two inches below, sort of at chin level.
Both microphones were plugged into a small box that fit in the space between them. That
allowed the speakers to be placed behind both the band and the microphones - without getting
feedback. Meyer says the technology came out of the military.

JOHN MEYER: This is used… Was used in aircrafts. You know like fighter pilots and
things like that were using differential mics. It came from that industry. You know, the
engines were really noisy... The props, and so that was the only way they could
communicate.

One microphone would register the sound of the engines, and that would be removed from the
signal of the microphone that registered both the pilot’s voice and the engines, leaving only the
voice in the transmission. The same concept has since been applied to making noise cancelling
headphones. Meyer says he liked working with the Grateful Dead because they cared about the
quality of their sound.

JOHN MEYER: Most Rock N’ Roll at that time was just.. Everyone was trying so see
how loud they could get. I was never.. That wasn't my interest.

This quest to be the loudest was epitomized in the 1984 mockumentary ​This Is Spinal Tap​ when
the guitarist shows the band's stage amps to the filmmaker.

(CLIP: This Is Spinal Tap)

Nigel Tufnel: If you can see: the numbers all go to eleven. Look right across the board,
eleven, eleven, eleven, eleven.
Marty DiBergi: And most amps go up to ten.
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it’s louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it?

Meyer says The Dead were trying to do something more advanced than many other bands.

JOHN MEYER: A lot of time sound was just kind of an afterthought for most people. It’s
something you do at the end. The lights are what’s important to most of them. You know,
they don’t think about it, and The Dead were fun that way because they really wanted to
push the envelope all the time, and I like to experiment.
They were also willing and able to fund the research.

JOHN MEYER: It’s financially difficult to get money for research. It’s just hard, really
hard. Generally banks won’t loan you for money for research. That’s just out of the
question. You know, investment people want ten to one return - which makes it risky. So,
you have to find someone like a band or someone doing a festival or something like that,
that wants to... That believes that it matters.

Blair Jackson says the band spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop their sound
system.

BLAIR JACKSON: The Wall of Sound was a work in progress sort of for about a year or
more before it was formally launched in early 1974. So, you know, they were just
constantly adding to it, doing different things to it, and it coincided with a time when the
Grateful Dead were really popular, had become really popular in the early 70’s you know
70… 73, 74 they started playing those hockey arenas, and small stadiums, and that kind
of thing. So, they had a lot of money coming in. Really for the first time, and that’s what
they chose to to spend it on. None of those guys had a huge salaries all through that
period in the early 70’s. It was kind of all for the band in a sense. And they were happy to
do and it obviously paid of. It was, it was, you know it was a legendary sound system.

In a newsletter to its fans from the early seventies, the band wrote that 18 percent of its cash
went to buying and maintaining equipment. The letter read: “the physics of sound projection
dictate that any given increase in the size of a hall requires exponential rate of increase in
equipment capability to reach everyone in the hall with quality at volume.” Translation, we’re
spending a fifth of our income to make sure that everyone who comes to see us perform gets
good sound. Dennis McNally says the research paid off.

DENNIS MCNALLY: One of the engineers later told me that the saying, you know there’s
that running joke in ​Spinal Tap.​ The thing is as you turn it up to eleven or ten or
whatever to get it good and loud, which for many Rock N Rollers that’s the best they can
do is to get it loud, but when you turn it up louder and louder - it distorts. That’s what
happens to electronics. The Grateful Dead could produce a sound that would - you know
- peel the face of the people in the front row and rattle the chest cage of the people in
the back row of the building, and they never got above two. And as a result there was no
distortion at all.

John Meyer was inspired by the dedication to prevent distortion.

JOHN MEYER: They were really concerned about fidelity. I mean, they had someone
watching the amplifiers all the time - all these macintoshes they had - with meters so that
they wouldn't clip them or overrun then. Later, that gave us the idea - working with them
 later in the 80s - to develop monitoring systems, so that we could watch it remotely. You
know, monitor everything using a networking system, so that they wouldn't have to have
people watching the amplifiers.

Dan Healy says there were three basic principles that made “the Wall” sound so good. The first
is that it was designed to combat what’s called time smear.

DAN HEALY: Spacing and distance of speakers meant that the sound from each
individual speaker would arrive at a listener’s ear at a difference time, and that's what’s
called a time smear, and so one of the theories of the Wall of Sound was to eliminate
time smear.

John Meyer explains time smear this way.

JOHN MEYER: When you put a bunch of speakers together, it’s like throwing a bunch of
rocks into the water. You get all kinds of kind of grating lobes or waves that go
everywhere. It’s not like one big rock that creates one nice wave. So, trying to get
multiple elements to behave in a controlled way is time consuming. It’s hard. I mean, you
could imagine like trying to throw a bunch of rocks in the water, and making it coherent
enough that it would just look like a big rock. And that’s what you’re trying to do.

The second principle involves intermodulation distortion.

DAN HEALY: if you have a person singing and a person playing a guitar through one
loudspeaker then the theory is that the person’s voice will interrupt the clarity of the
sound of the guitar, ‘cause the speaker will have a hard time reproducing both things
independently simultaneously. So, instead only the voices came through some speakers
and only each instrument came through other speakers. No two things came through
any one loudspeaker.

Meyer says that meant each musician was his own source of sound.

JOHN MEYER: This is one of Bear’s idea: that the bass player would have all the bass
from him, and the piano would have its cluster… There'd be a vocal cluster. Each
instrument was a complete P.A.

Healy says the third point is that the Wall of Sound was set up on a modular basis.

DAN HEALY: Each speaker was reduced to one single cabinet. And the purpose of that
was so that at any given venue you could create a set up… a configuration of the sound
system based on the needs of the particularly venue you were in. So, if you were in an
old movie theater you set it up one way. If you were in sports arena you would set it up a
different way. And so this let you reconfigure or arrange each and every speaker down to
 a single speaker at a time - just solely so it was custom design to have maximum effect
in whatever theater you were in.

The Wall of Sound also served as the proving ground for another theory that went on to be
adopted by major music venues. John Meyer says Bear asked for his input on how to get their
sound to reach the balconies.

JOHN MEYER: I said: well, the problem you have is that you.. You’re not making the
columns... They have a tendency to focus what you’re doing. You can either make them
taller or you could, we could curve them. He said: what do you mean? I go: well, like a
sphere. He says: what about a barrell? I said: that would work it’s just… that would work.
So, I started to work with on them on developing a kind of a barrel.. If you look at what’s
called the piano cluster and the vocal cluster - I don’t really remember which one is
which anymore. I didn’t actually build it, I just basically designed it kind of create better
dispersion.

A curved speaker was a first in the world of music, and if you look at the columns of speakers
hanging from the ceiling of venues today that Dan Healy alluded to earlier, you’ll notice that the
top and bottom of those columns point in different directions - creating a curved surface of
sound waves. Meyer says the piano and vocal clusters he designed for the Wall of Sound were
probably the first practical implementation of textbook theories.

JOHN MEYER: In the theory you could, it showed that if you curved the arrays you could
create a curved surface. Nobody was doing that that I know of on the planet. That
doesn't necessarily mean that nobody was doing it or ever done it but I sure didn’t know
about it, and I read everything I could find. But, we didn’t have the internet then, you
know this was all books and library stuff like that from any research point of view I think it
was unique for and it kind of set the idea that you could do this, but you know... I’m not
going to claim we invented it because that’s too hard.

This is a recording from the Wall of Sound era.

(MUSIC: Grateful Dead - China Cat Sunflower - June 16th, 1974 - Road Trips Vol. 2.3)

If you’re listening to this in stereo you’ll be able to hear different instruments coming individually
through the right or left channel. That’s an approximation of what it would’ve sounded like to be
in the audience based on where the players and their stack of speakers stood. The Wall of
Sound was a behemoth. Between building the scaffolding, placing all the speakers properly to
optimize the sound for the given venue, and then wiring it all up, it took several days to set up
and break down. Because of that, the Wall of Sound was actually not one, but two sound
systems. While the band played in one location, roadies would already be setting up the second
system at the next venue on the tour. That means the Grateful Dead were on the hook for
renting multiple venues at once while the Wall of Sound was being built and taken down. It also
means that it took double the number of trucks to transport. That was less than optimal in the
early seventies.

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON (November 7th, 1973): I want to talk to you tonight about
a serious national problem. As America has grown and prospered in recent years, our
energy demands have begun to exceed available supplies.

DENNIS MCNALLY: 1973 there was a major gasoline or oil crisis.

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON (November 25th, 1973): As we reduce gasoline

supplies, we must act to ensure that the remaining gasoline available is used wisely and
conserved to the fullest possible extent.

DENNIS MCNALLY: There was literally rationing gasoline in America, so it certainly

became much more expensive.

Dennis McNally says ultimately it was not financially viable.

DENNIS MCNALLY: The Wall of Sound required double the number of crew and two
sets of staging that had to you know... Leapfrog each other to different venues, so it was
extremely expensive. Which is not the least of the reason that in the fall of 1974 the
Grateful Dead took their one and only vacation which was called the hiatus where they
just simply stopped touring for two years because they couldn't afford it.

So, the Wall of Sound was dismantled.

BLAIR JACKSON: Even though it didn’t last beyond 1974… But you know, it really was
just that one year and it turned out to be kind of too cumbersome and expensive to
maintain, and this and that. But you know, the concepts behind the Wall of Sound, and
some of the gear that they started using during that period is something that then it
carried through in their later experiments with sound… So, it was a valuable if crazy
thing to do.

Blair Jackson says one of the reasons the Dead had such an impact on live music technology is
that they took the same approach to their equipment as they did their music.

BLAIR JACKSON: Not only is their music experimental in the sense that it changes
every time it’s played, and it’s improvisational, but it’s almost as if every night they ever
played it was maybe something different in the equipment. Somebody’s trying something
this night, and they played a couple of thousand of shows or whatever but they were
always experimenting. Always saying: well, you know, what if we did this? Well this didn’t
really work too well last night, what if we changed this? … The Grateful Dead is a great
ongoing - was a great ongoing experiment, and they both the guinea pigs and the drivers
 of it. You know, they wanted to see what can this do? What can we do? How can we
make this better? And I think that’s one of the reasons that Deadheads loved them, is
that they knew that everything was to make it sound better, to be better, to make it a
better concert experience.

In less than a decade, the Grateful Dead changed the landscape of live music performances.
From 1968. You can hear the difference in this montage from 1968, to 1972, to 1974.

(MUSIC MONTAGE)

The innovations they funded and developed drove the industry to new standards.

BLAIR JACKSON: Because they had the reputation they did, people listened to them
and would try to cater to them. And then of course when people in other parts of the
industry saw what the Grateful Dead were doing, they would say: “well, how did they do
that?” That would force them to go back to their own R&D department and say: “well you
know the Grateful Dead are doing this. Maybe we should take a look at this too,” or
something. So, that’s sort of how it spread.

After the Wall of Sound, the Grateful Dead went back to renting sound systems rather than
trying to build their own.

BLAIR JACKSON: As you would expect they were extremely careful about that too, so
when they came back they chose the gear, and the people who ran it, and all that very
carefully. And in a sense by the time they did come back to performing in ‘76, ‘77, the
industry had caught up with them a little bit - finally. So, it wasn’t quite as much of a
struggle to find the equipment they wanted.

The band may have shuffled off the responsibility to develop its own sound system, but it
maintained its experimental ethos. The Dead were an early adopter of MIDI components, in-ear
monitors, and their equipment remained heavily modified. The end for the Grateful Dead was
punctuated by a string of early deaths. Three of the band’s keyboard players died between 1970
and 1990. They were all under 40 years old. Lead guitarist Jerry Garcia died in 1995. He was
53. Owsley “Bear” Stanley died in a car crash in Australia in March of 2011. He was 76.
Surviving members of the band continue to tour in various combinations of line ups and
monikers, but the Grateful Dead officially ended with Garcia’s death. The group left a
wide-ranging legacy that includes catapulting concert sound forward. So next time you go to a
show, take a moment to appreciate the cleanliness of the sound, and remember that you, the
audience, and the artist on stage all owe a debt of gratitude to the good ol’ Grateful Dead.