On August 21, 1972, Bear rejoined the Grateful Dead as they performed onstage at the Berkeley Community Theatre. Although he had survived his time in prison, Mountain Girl would later tell David Browne that when Bear began working for the band again, he seemed “completely changed, and not in a good way. He was dark and dour. He’d lost most of his sense of humor. Prison was hard on him.”
Having attained a brand-new level of popularity after the release of their wildly successful Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty albums, the Grateful Dead were now regularly playing stadiums rather than the theaters and ballrooms where they had performed before. In John Perry Barlow’s words, “The scene was completely different when Bear came back from prison. That was a mutagenic couple of years. Hell, we all thought it had been a long strange trip in 1969. We didn’t know anything about long or strange. Bear just had a difficult time not being in an autocratic position anymore.”
By far the single most difficult thing for Bear to accept was that the road crew, whose drugs of choice had now become cocaine and beer, were all performing separate and distinct functions while the band was onstage.
“The thing that had changed while I was locked up was that it had all become partitioned. The guys onstage had little black curtains between their little cubbies and it became, ‘This is my territory, that is your territory, this is my job, that is your job.’ People had stopped hanging out together backstage and had started going into their own dressing rooms before shows, and everyone had their own little cubicles onstage, and when I came back out of the joint, all that was absolutely alien to me.
“Whether or not cocaine was the source of that, I don’t know, but that was what I experienced. A bunch of individuals and more of a star trip. Somebody told me, ‘We’re much more professional now.’ Weren’t we always professional? I mean, we had been writing the book on what that meant in rock ’n’ roll.”
Although Phil Lesh, who had always been Bear’s staunchest supporter in the Dead, felt that the band now had “three really strong skill sets working together” with Bob and Betty Matthews mixing the sound in the house, Dan Healy as “the supremo hands-on troubleshooter,” and Bear as “the wild-eyed radical visionary man,” the problem was that “each of them wanted some of the other’s turf. Both Healy and Bear, for example, wanted to mix real-time.”
Bob Weir saw that “there was a lot of water that had gone under the bridge during the time Bear was in prison in terms of our development, particularly in regards to the equipment we were using and our approach to it, so he had a lot of catching up to do. And he disagreed in a major way with some of the direction in which we had chosen to go, and he was capable of being fairly bullheaded.”
In Bear’s words, “I found on my release from jail that the crew, most of whom had been hired during my absence, did not want anything changed. No improvement to the sound, no new gear, nothing different on stage. They wanted to maintain the same old same old which under their limited abilities, they had memorized to the point where they could sleepwalk through shows. Bob Matthews, who had been mixing since my departure, did not want to completely relinquish the mixing desk, which was a total pain in the ass for me, since he was basically a studio engineer and no match for my live mixing ability.”
Despite having spent the last two years in prison, Bear was also offended by the profane language the crew now regularly used and went so far as to gather them all together to say, “I’m used to working with my friends. I don’t want to work with people who use language like you guys do.” Not surprisingly, his heartfelt plea fell on deaf ears.
The confrontation that had been brewing between Bear and the rest of the crew was not long in coming. When Bob Matthews did not show up for a university gig in the fall of 1972, Bear persuaded some local college kids to help him load out the gear, only to then discover that one of them had taken the mixing board to his dormitory room.
After the crew blamed Bear for this at a meeting before the next gig, words began to fly. The argument got so heated that one of the Dead’s roadies picked Bear up and threw him across the room into a watercooler. Bear then went to the band and asked that he be given the power to hire and fire the crew so they would all know that they were now working for him.
“I said to the band, ‘Look, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to fire anybody, but I want the power to fire everybody and then hire them back so they’ll know they are dependent on me for their jobs, and that if I need something done, they have to listen to me. Because if I have to be dependent on them, they just say, ‘Fuck you. I don’t want to do that.’ And the band wouldn’t do it. Instead, they marginalized me.”
Bear described the limbo in which he now found himself to Dennis McNally as “Here’s a piece of your job back, just a taste—and stand over there.” In McNally’s words, “He wanted to be the soundman and he was not the soundman, and he never got this because he had a single vision. That was his strength and his flaw. If everyone would have gone along with that, fine. In this case, they didn’t.
“You had a bunch of macho cowboys as crew who were snorting blow and drinking a whole lot of beer, and here was Bear, who was offended by their language and offended by their beer, and he was tiny. Most of the crew were big guys, and Bear was about five feet six inches tops and weighed about a hundred and forty-five pounds, so it was not as though he had this imposing physical presence.”
Although Bear continued working for the Grateful Dead for the next three years, he did so primarily to earn enough money to keep his head above water. As the band became increasingly fixated on the way they sounded in concert, they finally decided that only Bear could devise the kind of system they were dreaming about. The band then authorized him to construct what would become the single greatest technical achievement of his career.
15
Wall of Sound
On September 3, 1972, the Grateful Dead performed before sixty thousand people at Folsom Field, the football stadium at the University of Colorado in Boulder. During the show, a huge lightning storm began. In John Perry Barlow’s words, “Bear had a whole bunch of notions about electricity, and one of them was that the stage should always be grounded to itself, thereby becoming what is called a ‘floating ground.’
“Once this huge electrical storm started, the energy potential of the stage was different from its surroundings, so we literally had Saint Elmo’s fire on everything. Balls of lightning were rolling around the equipment, but the band went right on playing while standing in two inches of water. There was a big canopy over the stage and we ripped holes in that because of the wind, so the water onstage just got even deeper.
“At one point, some madman with an electric Skilsaw in his hand began cutting holes in the stage so the water would drain away. For some reason, nobody got electrocuted. Which I guess we could all thank Bear for.”
The Wall of Sound in all its awesome splendor at PNE Coliseum in Vancouver, Canada, on May 17, 1974. (©Richard Pechner/rpechner.com)
After his chronic alcoholism had led to failing health and caused him to stop touring with the Grateful Dead nine months earlier, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan died, at the age of twenty-seven, after suffering a gastrointestinal hemorrhage on March 8, 1973. Although the Dead continued touring without him, Jerry Garcia returned to his bluegrass roots and joined David Grisman, Peter Rowan, Richard Greene, and John Kahn to form Old and in the Way. The band went out on tour and played eighteen club dates, all of which Bear recorded, and he is credited as one of the recording engineers on their four live albums.
As so often happened when Bear was in charge of the sound at a performance, he also became part of the show. At an Old and in the Way show at the Keystone in Berkeley in March 1973, whenever guitarist Peter Rowan and Jerry Garcia repeatedly stepped up to the microphones, the feedback was so loud that they could not begin to play.
As guitarist Peter Rowan described it, “I was standing next to Garcia when he nudged me. He said, ‘Hey, man. Look up in the sound bo
oth. Look at Owsley.’ And there was Owsley in the sound booth like Lucifer. He had patch cords around his neck. He had wires in his teeth. From way down below, we could only see this maniacal grin on his bottom-lit face. Garcia said, ‘He really loves his job, you know? He really loves it, man.’”
In July of that same year, the Dead fulfilled their contract with Warner Bros. Records by releasing an album entitled History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One, which then became more commonly known as Bear’s Choice. Composed entirely of tracks that Bear had recorded while the band performed at Fillmore East on February 13 and 14, 1970, the album was intended as a tribute to Pigpen and was both engineered and produced by Bear. The back cover of the album also featured the first appearance of a logo that became known as “the dancing bears” (as Bear pointed out, they were actually marching) that had been designed by Bob Thomas.
Beginning in 1993, various other shows that Bear had recorded while he was on the road with the band began to be released as part of the extensive series known as Dick’s Picks, which were initially compiled by Grateful Dead tape archivist Dick Latvala. Had it not been for Bear, the tapes would never have existed.
“I had kept a diary of my sonic mixes whenever I worked with the Dead, starting with my second or third gig with them in 1966. I was mixing the sound and I had a stereo recorder with me and I thought, ‘Why not put this all on tape so I can listen to it later?’ So if I had microphones attached to the mixing board and I was mixing, there was a tape. Since I was doing all that work, why just let it all go out in the air and be gone forever? And then for a while when we’d go back to the hotel after the show, we’d all be high and we’d listen to the tape. That went on for a few years, and then they got tired of it and I got tired of it as well.
“I’d say that I’ve never listened to ninety percent of the show tapes that I’ve got in my archives. No one has. I never thought of making an album out of any of them until Dick’s Picks came along. And neither did the Dead. It was always, like, ‘Oh, that’s just something that Bear does. What a nuisance. What a waste of time. Why does he do that? Well, it’s his machine. So, who cares?’ Back then nobody cared about it but me.”
Despite Bear’s efforts to continue serving the Dead in every possible way, the band “kept shifting me around in the scene. They wanted to play bigger and bigger shows, and they had to keep renting sound systems that didn’t coordinate very well with their gear, and so they asked me, ‘What can we do? Do something.’ I was the guy who had started rock ’n’ roll sound, and I said, ‘You can build something big, but you may not like it. It will take a lot of design work.’ But they were game and they went for it.”
Bear’s initial concept was to create “a single source for each instrument and each voice. Garcia’s system was a single column that had a very high gain in level like an antenna with all of the speakers stacked one on top of another so they would add and multiply the sound without distributing much of it vertically. I wanted it to function as a line radiator because the audience was on the ground in front of the band.
“The entire system consisted of a cluster of line arrays that I developed and then tested in the way that line arrays work. Number one in a line array, if it’s composed of three different clusters, each of which is a certain frequency range with a crossover, then the bass is the longest column of speakers, the midrange is shorter, and the highs are shorter than that. But, much like a radio transmitter, they must all be the same radiating wavelength. Each array must be as wide as it is tall or it doesn’t work right, and you can’t hang them in isolation. I see myself as an innovator and a conceptualist. When I work on things, I don’t ever look for somebody else’s solution to a problem. I don’t even think there might be one. Because I don’t care.”
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.
During the Grateful Dead’s first show outdoors with the Wall of Sound at the University of Nevada in Reno on May 12, 1974, the wind started blowing so hard that the twelve-hundred-pound sound cluster above drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s head began swaying back and forth. Terrified that if all the gear that was now hanging directly over him from a single winch ever came crashing down, he would be “as flat as a penny on a railroad track,” Kreutzmann insisted that the crew rerig the setup before he performed beneath it again.
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.”
Although Phil Lesh would later write that the music made by the band during the forty-odd shows they performed through the Wall of Sound are still regarded by their legion of devoted fans as the pinnacle of the Dead’s live performances, the system soon proved to be completely impractical.
In Bob Weir’s words, “The Wall of Sound worked just fine. It was just a logistical near impossibility. By that time, we were selling out hockey arenas, but as we went from one to another, they had to have a full crew call the day before just to set it up in time for the show. We were selling out everywhere we played, but losing money because the overhead put us in the hole. It was insane.”
At a band meeting in August 1974, everyone working for the Grateful Dead was informed that the band was going to stop touring in October. Chronically unwilling to ever fire anyone, the Dead had finally realized that they could no longer afford to pay the outsized crew they had brought on board to install and transport the Wall of Sound. Bear himself had “no idea how much it cost to put the Wall of Sound together. It was huge and just what I wanted in the beginning, but no one could sustain it and I got blamed for it in the end.”
Richard Loren, who was now the Dead’s road manager, told Jerry Garcia that the Wall of Sound was ruining the band financially. Realizing he had no other choice in the matter, Garcia reluctantly agreed that Bear’s state-of-the-art sound system had to be scrapped. For the Grateful Dead, an era had come to an end, and it would be two years before they again performed live.
With the band that had provided him with his livelihood ever since he
had gotten out of prison no longer on the road and his career as the world’s greatest LSD street chemist now long behind him, Bear had to find some way to earn a living. Moving to Marin County, he began growing dope.
16
Growing Weed
Carrying flashlights and placards that read BETTER GIGS, BETTER P.A., and EGYPT OR BUST, Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh came to Bill Graham’s Marin County home late one night in 1978 to ask the promoter if he would take the Grateful Dead to Egypt so they could fulfill their current fantasy by performing live before the Great Pyramids. Graham’s reply was “There’s a fucking war going on over there.”
Refusing to take no for an answer, the band made the trip happen on their own. Accompanied by a large retinue of friends, fans, and family that included Ken Kesey, Paul Krassner, Bill Graham, and Bill Walton, who was then recovering from foot surgery as a member of the Portland Trail Blazers, the Grateful Dead performed their first show in Egypt at sundown on September 14, 1978. By then, Bear was already deeply involved in what had become his newfound avocation.
“When they quit in 1974, I had to support myself somehow, so I started growing weed. I didn’t have time to go over to the warehouse in Novato every day like Dan Healy and hang out with them. When the band came together again, they didn’t pick me back up. No one came out and said, ‘Bear, we want to start playing together again. Do you want to come be our soundman?’ like they had done after the Carousel Ballroom had ended. Even though he couldn’t mix a cake from a Betty Crocker package, Dan Healy became their soundman again just like he had been back in 1967.”
Phil Lesh, who had always been Bear’s staunchest ally in the band, then came to his rescue by bringing him back out on the road for a couple of Grateful Dead tours as his personal roadie. Before long, Bear once again found himself at odds with the rest of the crew.
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