![]() This casual, stoned suggestion would change the way audio engineers thought about concert sound. In a 1969 meeting when brainstorming ideas for musical exploration and solutions for their technical problems and smoking ‘special’ cigarettes, Owsley proposed putting the P.A behind the band. Rumored to have taken inspiration Buffalo Springfield’s monitoring setup, Owsley was not satisfied with the standard speakers and amplifiers that were available to him and began modifying and manufacturing his own audio gear with his apprentice Tim Scully, eventually founding the company Alembic. He insisted on sound checks and encouraged them to listen to tapes of their performances, so that they could hear how they sounded, and also correct him on what he was doing. Keeping a sonic journal of each performance of the band, he would use it to improve on his setup and mix for each concert and highlight issues to the band members. After a hallucinatory incident, where Owsley ‘saw’ the Grateful Dead’s sound, he became obsessed with aural perfection and started on an endless path, working with the band, to achieve it. He was also the person who along with his good friend Bob Thomas, helped design the iconic lightning bolt logo, which would sell countless t-shirts. Owsley, or ‘Bear’, as he became known, began to work with the band as their sound man and financed them with his earnings cooking acid. An engineering dropout, he met the Grateful Dead through Ken Kesey, during one of his infamous ‘acid test’ parties in 1965 and became friends with them. The band which formed in the San Fransico bay area during the hippie days of the mid-1960s boasted of a huge cult following. A former ballet dancer and craftsman from Kentucky, Owsley was also jailed twice for manufacturing and distributing LSD, the profits of which he used to finance the Grateful Dead for some time. Whispering to the huge mass of equipment, Bear said, “I love you and you love me- how could you fail me?” This story sums up Owsley’s obsession with sound, both as a concept and as a physical thing. The famous story goes that in 1974 the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart walked on stage to find Owsley “Bear Stanley standing in front of a wall of over 600 speakers with tears streaming down his face. ![]() Owsley Stanley, left, with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead ![]() Though incredibly frustrated with the noisy, feedback-laden, underpowered situation, they did not want to give up playing live, and the Dead had Owsley on board to help solve the sound situation. It was after this era that the band, the Grateful Dead, became obsessed with their sound, largely thanks to their eccentric and dedicated sound engineer. Things were so bad that the Beatles quit touring in 1966 because they couldn’t hear themselves over the audience. Screaming fans meant that low-wattage guitar amps could hardly be heard and without the help of monitoring systems, bands could barely hear themselves play. ![]() While rock concerts grew in size and scope throughout the 60s, audiences grew larger and louder, without the technical sophistication of amplification ever changing to meet this scenario. It was a time when live sound problems plagued engineers, bands, and audiences equally. A vision during an LSD trip is what inspired Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s sound engineer’s mammoth feat of technical engineering, “The Wall of Sound”, irreversibly changing live sound and engineering for the better.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |