The Wall of Sound

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

In the 1960s, the band the Grateful Dead became consumed by a quest that would take up 10 years, cost millions of dollars, and almost break up the band. It was the quest for audio perfection – to bring crystal clear sound from the front row to the nosebleeds and back again. It’s a story that takes us from the infamous acid tests of the 1960s to standing in front of a 60-foot tall wall of 600 speakers…and to tell it we’re joined by Brian Anderson, author of “Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	I work from home for the most part. And, you know, in my home office, as much as I have one, I kind of end up working all over my house. Anyway, you know, I have plants. I've got some souvenirs, stuff I've collected from trips. But in my friend Brian Anderson's home office, he has what you could describe as a very, very large paperweight.
0:24.9	It is a 65-pound speaker, the size of an oven, that does not work.
0:31.6	And actually, when I talked to Brian on Zoom, I could see this giant thing lurking in the background just behind him. Yes. So big. Oh, my God.
0:43.9	Yeah, I could like crawl inside of it if I wanted to. Is it wired up? No, it's not. I kind of, at least like
0:49.2	right now, I kind of like the idea of just like preserving its integrity as just this like road-born
0:55.0	Hunk of Junk of Junk of Junk of yeah it just hangs out it's just a little slice of audio history here
1:01.0	this is a special speaker it is very much secondhand very well used but the thing that makes it special is that it used to belong to the band, The Grateful Dead.
1:15.2	I won it at a 2021 Southern Visa auction, a decommissioned gear from the Grateful Dead's
1:21.5	Northern California warehouse.
1:23.9	The final hour, it was me and just someone out there just going like tit for tat and quickly escalated
1:29.6	and at a certain point I'm like I'm I'm locked into this now I'm I've gone too far I've gone too far
1:35.4	there's no coming back the point of no return Brian is a grateful dead super fan and in part it's because
1:42.7	he was kind of born into it.
1:44.7	Both his parents are serious deadheads.
1:47.9	Brian went to his first Grateful Dead show when he was three years old.
1:51.4	But this is actually not why Brian wanted to own this speaker.
1:56.1	Brian wanted this speaker because he had a hunch that this speaker was an artifact of a groundbreaking
2:04.4	piece of technology, something called the Wall of Sound.
2:11.9	The wall was a singular public address or PA system that really revolutionized and in many ways kind of set
2:22.0	the blueprint for the modern entertainment industry as we know it today. From the very beginning,
2:30.4	the dead wanted to do something pretty radically different with their concerts.
2:36.0	They started out in the 60s during the acid tests in San Francisco.
	...

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