Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection

The debut title by award-winning journalist Anderson is a history of the Grateful Dead’s live sound systems, from the various pre-Dead groups up through the legendary Wall of Sound, an unprecedented speaker system that the band used during their 1974 shows. A key insight of the book is that the Dead were always sonic innovators when it came to their live performances, and in this context, the Wall of Sound was simply the perfection of their pursuit of clear, clean, undistorted sound. Through original interviews with those who worked on the Wall of Sound and the Dead’s live performances, Anderson reveals that many of the innovations of the Wall have since become standard at contemporary live shows of all kinds. Although some of these innovations have now been surpassed, the Dead often got there first.