Skip to main content

Grateful Dead Fan Creates a Faithful Mini Replica of the Band’s Famous “Wall of Sound” During Lockdown


A few years ago we told you about the Wall of Sound. Not the one created in the studio by Phil Spector, but the one created by Grateful Dead tech engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley out of over 600 speakers. Before the Dead worked to revolutionize how rock concerts could sound, the speakers at live shows were trebly, underpowered things, having not been designed for the sudden change in musical texture and sound during the 1960s. In the early days, speakers were mostly used to make sure the drums didn’t drown out the other band members. Stanley’s three-story, 28,800-watt massive wall, with columns of speakers dedicated to each musician, promised crisp fidelity more so than pure loudness. In developing the set-up, Stanley and his fellow engineers helped introduce ideas still being used in live sound today.

For all that, however, the Wall only got used for seven months of touring in 1974. It took hours and hours to assemble and disassemble. For those who heard it, the system lived up to its hype. And it was immortalized in the Winterland, San Francisco shows filmed for The Grateful Dead Movie (watch it online).

Now, nearly 50 years later a dedicated fan has rebuilt the wall as a 1/6th scale model in his basement. While some of us took up baking during 2020’s COVID lockdown, Anthony Coscia began to work four hours a day, every day, for two months, on this model. He posted his progress on Instagram and Deadheads, most of which hadn’t seen the real thing in person, lost their minds. (See this video to get a good taste of things.) Coscia also had never seen the fabled Wall in real life—he would have been a toddler at the time. But he made up for it later in the late ‘80s, seeing the band 35 times, and the Jerry Garcia Band 25 times.

 

An architect by day, Coscia insisted on the smallest details being replicated, urged on by social media. The finished model is 6 foot, 8 inches tall and 10 feet wide, and features 390 working speakers. It pumps out a not-exactly-Winterland-worthy 800 watts.

“It’s a massive glorified clock radio but it sounds better than I thought,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

And although he spent $2,000 in total, he’s already been offered $100,000 for it from an anonymous donor.

The obsession with the band continues a half-century later. A just announced series of shows by Bob Weir’s Dead & Company in January 2022—in Cancun, of course, where it’s warm—have sold out.

Related Content:

Watch the Grateful Dead Slip Past Security & Play a Gig at Columbia University’s Anti-Vietnam Protest (1968)

Take a Long, Strange Trip and Stream a 346-Hour Chronological Playlist of Live Grateful Dead Performances (1966-1995)

The Grateful Dead Movie: Watch It Free Online

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Grateful Dead Fan Creates a Faithful Mini Replica of the Band’s Famous “Wall of Sound” During Lockdown is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3uQlsu0
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more