Hey all -been reading up on the GD’s record company lately, and came across this Rolling Stone article I had not read before. It is fairly long, and mostly focuses on the band’s business model in 1973, the characters around Front Street, etc, but there is mention of the WOS set-up process...thought some folks here might be interested... - This is what the crew does on a working day. We're in the Oklahoma City Fairgrounds Arena at 9 AM, where 12 hours later people will be trying to get messages to Garcia. The two trucks are backed up to a stage. First, the bass speakers come out. They're lifted into place in the scaffolding on either side of the stage by fork-lifts—or, if the hall's structure makes fork-lifts impossible, by hand. For this show 12 bass speakers are being stacked up on each side, one on top of another. "They couple when we stack them vertically," explains Dan Healey. "More volume." By 10:30 the 12-inch speakers are also in place—today a bank of 32 on either side, slightly fanned out for sound dispersal. On top of them go two banks of five-inch speakers, 32 in each, in semicircular cabinets the crew has designed for horizontal dispersal. The two banks are aimed with a sight level at different parts of the grandstand for complete sound coverage, then tied into place. Twenty-four tweeters go on top of them. Fifteen more speakers of various sizes go on each tower for the piano and guitars, making 163 speakers on each side of the stage. So much for the PA. The monitors, meanwhile, have been set up with amplifiers interspersed among them. These 133 speakers will keep the musicians in tune and make up for the missing area of sound coverage right in front of the stage. Now comes the puzzle of tracing the miles of coiled cable from the right amplifier to the right speaker. The electrical equipment is massive; the onstage power, which is completely separate from the power needed for the 326 speakers on the scaffolding, comes through a military surplus ship's connector, which was designed to plug in ship-to-shore power when a boat's in port. Dan Healey points down at the cable thick as an arm that will ultimately bring in all the power. "This would power six blocks of tract homes," he says. "It's 600 amps, three-phase. And we started out with just two extension cords. Now just our power equipment alone would fill a pickup truck." The ship's connector is not exceptional. The Dead use a lot of military surplus equipment. "We've got to have equipment that's waterproof and destruction-proof," says Healey. "It's got to be rock & roll specs, which are tougher than military specs. We know, because a lot of this surplus falls apart on us." Out of two huge military lockers have come the Genie lights—telescoping towers powered by air pressure that will support the stage lights and the black backdrop. Altogether there will be some 48 lights on the stage, between the Genies and the lights on the scaffolding. On top of that, there will be four follow spots up near the roof of the arena, provided by the promoter and operated by local union men controlled by Candace with headphones. By 3 PM the speakers—all 459 of them—are set up well enough that the musicians can make a sound check and set the volume levels. By now the union cleanup men have broomed up the popcorn cartons and spilt beer from the last show, and a few score adventurous Dead freaks have gotten into the hall to listen to the sound check, which sounds like a rehearsal. When the quippies have adjusted level knobs to the musicians' satisfaction, the musicians go back to the hotel for dinner and the quippies finish lashing everything into place for the concert. Before the show, by custom, they are provided a steak and lobster dinner, and in some places souvenir T-shirts of the concert. "The crew are actually working for those shirts," jokes Scully. The bare stage of the morning is transformed. The black backdrop, the color-changing lights Candace operates, the towering banks of speakers, the amplifiers glowing cybernetically in the dusk—it's the stage that Dead fans know. Right down to the hunched forms of a dozen quippies. "We're part of the Dead," Steve Parish had said. "You really put your whole heart into the system, right from the vibration of a guitar string out to the back of the hall." As it happens, this show we see that in action. Something is wrong with the speaker balance as the show starts. The audience doesn't mind—even here in Oklahoma City, apparently, Dead fans are Dead fans, and the gathering of 8,000 or so together is a happy occasion in itself. The dark arena floor is rich with potsmoke and a sort of soft contented mumble is rising from the whole great floor. But something's wrong. Ramrod scrambles up a scaffold, then runs to crouch over an amp. Finally, after five numbers the band stops playing to let the crew straighten out the sound. Bob Weir covers by telling an exceptionally pointless story about two Martians while the quippies work frantically. Bingo. The audience starts taking notice of the music—there is cheering during the next song and part of the audience is on its feet. Good old Grateful Dead. The excitement level is moving up in a regular, even curve. By the time of "Playin' in the Band" the whole audience is on its feet and demanding two encores. It nearly stomps down the plywood barriers in front of the stage under the stolid gaze of the rented Airport Police, but at last it lets the Dead go. A New Life for the Dead: Grateful Dead Handle Their Business - Rolling Stone
All that for one of the finest Dark Star > Morning Dew sequences ever performed in this and several adjoining realities. Well worth the effort. Kudos for finding and sharing this, @JRM.
Back of the FOH console William & Mary 4-15-78. Lots of other good photos here Grateful Dead Concert Photographs | Shows from 1971 to Present Day Member Bands | James R Anderson Photography
Ha, things noticeably cleaned up in the back by 3-5-94 Sticking with the console theme a bit: 10-9-82 6-20-83
Great thread, bmoregnr! Lots of great pics, videos, and articles. It's taken me at least a week to get to the end after following a lot of the great trails in it. Though I'm not a follower of the band or its music, I've taken to heart and practice a lot of their PA innovations and tools. The history of the Dead's PA companies, which you indirectly allude to periodically, would also be an interesting story. All the main characters: Owsley, Healey, Meyer, and Pearson, were significant characters and really advanced the state of the art (duh). I lost the thread of that progression near the end of Ultrasound (if their role ended, I don't even know that). Is Healey's son still involved? FWIW, I'm getting 404's from the John and Helen Meyer interview and Owsley's Sonic Journal links on the first page. Again, nice work!
Check out the Bob Heil interview as well. I don't know how long his tenure with the Dead lasted, but he did get them out of a significant jam when Bear was busted. From Front of House magazine: One night, he received a call from the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia on a tour stop at the Fox Theater, asking for help. The band’s gear — and sound mixer — had been “detained” in New Orleans and Heil was asked to provide a sound system for the show. “Hey man, I heard you have a big P.A.,” Heil heard Garcia say. Heil listed the components of his system, and Garcia ended the conversation with “Well, get it up here!” The Grateful Dead loved the P.A. so much they took it on the rest of the tour. He has his own exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - right as soon as you go up the escalator to the second floor. The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive is your friend: Internet Archive: Wayback Machine
Here's an Archive.org link to the Meyers interview: John and Helen Meyer Talk Audio on Grateful Dead Radio Show | Meyer Sound News
Yes, thank you, I did watch all of Bob's interview just before posting. That video Internet series looks like it could have some interesting things, too. Didn't know about the Wayback Machine or how to use it. Thanks! However, specifically looking for the John & Helen Meyer interview shows that it was snapshotted 5 times, but all of them say "Oops, sorry, can't find that file". Are you able to find it? I have generally terrible google-fu, so the problem could very well be with me. And thanks for posting the pics from the R&R Museum; do you remember what the consoles were? I assume from the interview you posted that the console on the right in the 1st pic is the Langevin that they customized? 15 mighty inputs! But it's not! It's The Who's Mavis mixer! Nice description HERE. Actually, it might be one just like The Who's, it's not clear from a comment Bob makes on that page. Haven't been able to find pictures of his original Langevin; one article in FOHonline seemed to conflate the Langevin and the Mavis, but they are separate units at different times. The lower left speaker is one of the rear speakers from the Quadrophonic system, according to the Who's website. What's that in the upper left, on top of the speaker? It looks like it might be purple, so maybe it's an early Heil mixer? The second picture shows one of the Sunn boards on the lower left, with 8 rockin' inputs. The larger console on the right looks familiar but I can't place it. The white strips on each channel look like meters but they must be labels or something similar. That one seems to get up to 16 inputs. Another mystery mixer in the middle top. Thanks again for the info, hope some of this is interesting, too.
I am glad you are enjoying it @DMortensen and I'm glad you are working the Wayback machine as a lot of these links have been going dead. I like your idea of sketching out a timeline of various PAs; maybe touching on the highpoints and major changes pulled together from Blair Jackson's Grateful Dead Gear book among other sources. As far as Ultrasound, they were there until the end. Another link has gone dead but Pearson mentioned they were planning beam steering experiments when Jerry died. Pearson and Danchik (Hot Tuna's FOH mixer) started Ultrasound in '78, since about '75 they were working for a company doing Hot Tuna; Pearson and Healy were pretty tight by then having used the Hot Tuna PA for a Bobby Ace tour together and then began doing experiments here and there culminating in some NYE PAs '76 onward it seems; for the NYE '78 Pearson was pretty heavily involved as they time aligned it with some delay units Dennis Fink of UREI made (Pearson in '78 was doing fft analysis that seemed to evolve into things like Meyers SIM or Smaart); again in Oakland '79 which used some of the Hot Tuna/Starship stuff Pearson had, FM Productions stuff and some Meyer stuff and I think the Ultrasound/GD relationship took off from there. You would really like the Gear Book by the way if you have not run across it. Ultrasound continued for a bit after the Dead and then was sold or merged with Pro Media in 1998. I think in the end why I don't talk much about '80s PAs or certainly not '90's PAs is that they were so damned refined by then. My first show was in '85 and I would say the PA evolution seemed pretty gradual tour to tour even by then. Plus I have found the PA just doesn't get discussed too much for whatever reason in the 80's. I would say in late '89 or Spring '90 it had a major change; everything was flown and it really got to be the same looking every tour thereafter; no longer were there as many "experiments" I guess is the word where you noticed oh look, that seems different. Late '89 on it became locked in I guess; really refined where they wanted it and the differences were much harder to spot. Sure there were still nuances everywhere, like the mic gate pads, or the in ear monitors, or Healy leaving (which was more mixing style), but the PA itself always seemed pretty much the same configuration to me. I had to dig up another dead link, but I highly recommend you read this Healy interview The Absolute Sound: The Concert Sound of the Grateful Dead It really shows to what degree they had things dialed in by '93. Here is another Healy interview around that time: '91: Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead | A Conversation With Dan Healy Also I have never heard anything about Dan Healy's son, maybe someone else here knows that story. Edit: also your noting that you are not averse to picking up on some of their methods made me think of this thread on rukind I ran into recently where apparently someone got some FOH tips from Healy regarding kick drum mic'ing; it seemed to be an interesting discussion and may or may not be widely know already as this stuff is way over my head to all Dead bands!!! - Grateful Dead Music Forum
Hard to believe, but the Who found the huge sound system they were looking for in the tiny town of Marietta, IL. Glad to let you know about it. Brewster Khale, the guy who started it, is one of my personal heroes. Rather than buying houses or expensive cars, he decided to make the world a better place. It was on SoundCloud, and I don't know where to find those files if the original uploader has deleted it. I'll have to look around. I've only been to the Rock Hall twice, and I didn't have a camera with me. I should write Bob Heil - he has a weekly show on Twitter.tv called Ham Nation, devoted to his other passion, Ham Radio. Joe Walsh has been a frequent guest - and a long-time customer of the Heil Talk Box. Not sure. I got into sound just after the Sunn days, when Tapcos ruled the Earth, and the first BIG board I got my hands on was the Yamaha PM-1000. No idea, but that box on top of the rack is a tape-based delay. I'm pretty sure they actually are tiny analog meters.
I just figured out that those photos of the Bob Heil exhibit were taken by someone I've known for thirty years, and whose house I stayed at last month when the Megabus I was on broke down and I missed my train to Kansas City.
If you have that book you are lucky; it's US$110 for a used copy... I bought my first few batches of Meyer UPA's from Ultrasound, and Howard was who I talked with and made the deals. I went to a show at the Seattle Coliseum to meet him in 1981, and also met Don, Harry Popick, and a few others, but not Healy (is it Healy or Healey? I've seen his name both ways). Just went in the afternoon before the soundcheck IIRC, definitely didn't stay for the show, had something else to do. It was fun seeing the big Gamble consoles, their power distro, speaker cabling, and snake. That was all impressive. PA must have been MSL-3's. Now that you mention it, I do recall the Pro Media absorption. The Absolute Sound one is mentioned earlier in this thread and was a good read, the latter was also a good read and made Dan sound more human. A couple of months ago I read Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III and enjoyed learning about that legendary figure, although the technical aspects were watered down for a more general audience compared to the two articles you recommended about Healy. I may be wrong, I thought I read that his son was involved with sound, too. As with all rules about sound, there is room for personal preference IMO, and I have no need to start an argument. Yes, what he says is the best. Thanks for all the good and fun info.
As a reformed sound engineer, the sad truth is 90% of them are operating on lore...stuff picked up from other sound engineers, most of whom picked it up from their predecessors. Maybe 10% of them actually try to come up with new techniques, actually engineering. The rest of us put the kick drum mic where we've seen others put the kick drum mic without experimenting with positioning ourselves. I can't really hold most of them to blame as the day to day life of a house sound engineer is a different band every night with maybe a half hour for a sound check. The touring engineer gets to work with the same band every nigh, but in a different place, and with less sleep.
My facetiousness didn't come through that last post. If what he says is correct, why are all these stupid drummers insisting on carting around the biggest drum, when they could get the same effect by using a close-mic'd tambourine without the little jangles?
If it didn't have the little jangles, it would hardly be a tambourine then, would it? It would be, I dunno, a piccolo bodhrán or something.
Sorry for killing the thread; I was wrong, it is clearly best to delete everything below 100Hz in a kick drum PA channel. While researching to see what those other mixers in Heil's R&RM exhibit could be, these links to a history of PA came up: History of PA pt. 1 History of PA pt. 2 which give a nice overview of the whole thing and who was involved at many steps of the evolution. It's relevant to this thread in that part 1 uses a picture of the Wall of Sound as its central theme across pages. The theme picture for part 2 is unidentified and considerably scruffier. Still can't find those exact mixers, although the Sunn was ID'd as the Colisseum, and was hand built. Here's another link to a FOHonline article about Bob at his 50th year anniversary of maximum rock and roll Bob Heil 50 Years of Innovation which elaborates on his story and mentions the original Garcia connection story. (The little picture showing "his original cast off PA system" shows JBL 4550's and not Altec A4's, which I thought were mentioned in an article or the Triangulation video as being his first PA speakers. My first were 4550's, so that's why it jumped out. So the picture must be of a later PA.) Still no luck finding pics of the original Langevin console. (Hope this counts as penitence for the derail.)
Never a problem. Is this it maybe? This guy claimed to have owned it for a while says it was the one used for the GD and was in the RNRHOF (I'm not sure about the GD giving Heil this however; that doesn't sound right unless they tried it and didn't like ala the console John Curl built around '70-'71 (off the top of my head) and they didn't like and went back to the ampex mx-1o mixers. VINTAGE LANGEVIN CONSOLE FADERS / USED BY THE GRATEFUL DEAD, WHO, MANY MORE | #293835037
Cool thread, I just discovered it. I'm no expert, but was a taper starting in 1985, trader, etc and have a fair amount of knowledge of some aspects of the discussion. Less so about the PA gear. I've just read all 8 pages so I'm going to respond to some earlier comments.
I don't see the photos, but if they are the the 9-24-67 Denver park show as I beleive, the amps and organ are all Kustom. Those Kustom amps were well know for their padded "tuck-n-roll" stylings. The Kustom organ itself was very cool, an electronic combo organ (like a Farfisa or Vox Continental) with built amp and speakers, in the same tuck-n-roll padding.
Not so much about the Dead/ABB or the sound system, but a cool article about a pirate radio station operating at Watkins Glen and story about the festival overall: Concert Free Radio - CFR
Yes that was the photo. Cool find thanks. Pig looks dangerously close to being in Murph and The Magic Tones!
I was in one of the chains of DATs at that show as well, but I only managed to get plugged in for the 2nd set. That was the only time I ventured off the west coast. I did the 3 Atlanta shows then the 2 Dean Dome UNC in March 1993. Otherwise it was CA/OR/WA/AZ/NV for me. My first show (just after graduating high school) was 8/28/82 Veneta OR, the 10 year anniversary of the famous Springfield Creamery benefit. Earlier that spring a friend of mine had loaned me Skull****, Live/Dead, and the 1st album. Wharf Rat was the first song that really hooked me. The night before the Veneta show we stayed up practically all night listening to Dead and playing board/card games. I actually dozed off during space at the show. I remember seeing someone's tape deck laying on their blanket recording, my first exposure to taping. I headed off to college in Pasadena a few weeks later. The residence house I ended up in had a sort of house band that played mostly Dead so that continued my early education. The drummer in the band was a taper (used a D6 with Nak 300s) and after the October '82 Frost shows (which I had the opportunity to attend, but declined, being my first weekend of real college homework) he held a dubbing party, so those were my first tapes. I found another house member who had a collection of ~100 tapes so I ended up dubbing a bunch of his as well. The next spring, the drummer/taper held another dubbing party for a bunch of reels that he had borrowed and we had a 24 hour session, waking up every 45 minutes to flip/change tapes. First show I taped myself was Long Beach Arena, 11/17/85. Would have done the 16th, too, but the band I was in was playing a party. I borrowed a D6 from the bass player and "checked out" two Shure SM58s from the AV department. Next shows I taped were Irvine Meadows April 1987, after I had graduated and bought my own gear (again a D6 and SM58s). The SM58s were obviously not the right mics for taping, but I was inexperienced and they served double duty as vocal mics for band activities as well. A few years later I got a pair of Audio Technica shotguns (AT835b) and then a D5. I was active in rec.music.gdead and had a number of trading partners and amassed ~500 cassettes by that point. In Spring '92 I switched to DAT, getting a Sony TCD-D3 and Sony 75ES, bought from the Oade Brothers. I became friend with a fellow west coast taper and started patching off him instead (AKG 480+CK8 short shotguns). Then for the next ~10 years I traded/recorded a bunch of DATs, at one point I had two Fostex D5s *and* two Panasonic SV-3800s so I could clone more. I ended up with ~1000 GD or related and another ~1000 non-GD DATs. I got rid of most of my cassettes (other than masters) many years ago, but still have the DATs in a couple of racks in my home office. Out of the 84 Dead shows I saw (ending with 5/21/95) I taped 71 of them.
In case you haven't come across it.... Bobby's isolated feed from 8/19/89 Greek: gd1989-09-19.139782.sbd.weir.miller.pearson.flac1644
