Grateful Dead Wall of Sound System Detailed in New Book – Billboard

This August, Dead & Company will celebrate 60 years of Grateful Dead music with three massive concerts in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Fans can reasonably assume – as they can with most major touring artists today – that the sound will be impeccable. But six decades ago, when the Grateful Dead began gigging around that very same park, quality sound was far from a given. Audiences routinely endured terrible audio, and bands also struggled to parse the noise and play together. Modern cornerstones of concert production, from monitors to digital delay towers, had yet to be invented. The Grateful Dead didn’t just embrace new advancements in audio technology – as journalist and Deadhead Brian Anderson chronicles in his new book, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection, the revered band actively drove concert sound forward, creating many of today’s standards in the process. Trending on Billboard Loud and Clear specifically tackles the first decade of the band’s history, from its Bay Area formation in 1965 to the Wall of Sound, the gargantuan sound system worth nearly $2 million in today’s dollars that it took on the road in 1974. During those years, the band
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