Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast

Season 6, Episode 9

Long Strange Tech, part 1

Archival interviews:

- Owsley Stanley, by David Gans, Conversations With the Dead, 1/13/91.

JESSE: Today’s Deadcast begins with a participatory activity. Go to Google and type in a date the Grateful Dead performed. Very likely, the top 10 search results you see will be dominated by links to pages about the Dead show that was played on that date in history, outweighing all other world events that might have occurred.

AUDIO: “The Music Never Stopped” [Winterland June 1977, 6/7/77] (0:00-0:33)

JESSE: That was “The Music Never Stopped” from June 7th, 1977 on the Winterland June 1977 box, and 6/7/77 is one of the dates that definitely works. Okay, to be fair, Bing down ranks the Dead a bit, and this doesn’t work on Baidu, but for the most part, the Grateful Dead’s concert history is deeply baked into the way the internet is indexed. In some ways, the reasons for this are pretty obvious — the Grateful Dead are one of history’s most influential bands, and Dead freaks are pretty obsessed with dates. But the story goes much deeper than that, and goes beyond just the Dead’s concert history and into the make-up of both the Dead and the internet itself. In the summer of 1966, the BBC show Panorama hosted by John Morgan sent a crew to California to survey the burgeoning technology scene.

JOHN MORGAN [Panorama, 1966]: The Shape of Things to Come has arrived in California. The astonishing moonwalking products of its technology remain a science fiction for Britain and Europe. In the far West, the wildest dream populates the landscape.

JESSE: Journalist Don Hoeffler would coin the term “Silicon Valley” in 1971, but northern California was a center of tech long before that.

JOHN MORGAN [Panorama, 1966]: The scale of investment is beyond anything ever seen before or anything this country could conceive.

JESSE: And the youth of northern California were ready for it. Longtime WIRED journalist and author of NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman.

STEVE SILBERMAN: So many of the original psychedelic San Francisco proto-jam-band performers were into science fiction. Paul Kantner, who I've talked with in an interview that's online; David Crosby — ”Wooden Ships” was, of course, a science fiction song. And one of those people who was into science fiction that much was Phil Lesh. Everybody thinks that Owsley must have sort of arrived fully formed—the sound systems, the acid—but that's not true.

It was actually Phil Lesh who convinced Owsley, or Bear, to get into being a soundman. Phil encouraged Bear to take up sound technology, and that came from Phil's feeling that being with Bear was like being in a science fiction story.

JESSE: Owsley Stanley, known as Bear, introduced himself to the Grateful Dead in January 1966 at the Fillmore Acid Test. He’d already studied electronics and engineering in the Air Force, and moved onto psychedelic science by 1965, becoming the world’s preeminent underground manufacturer of LSD. But, if anything, that only amplified Bear’s interest in technology, striking a keynote for the next three decades of the Dead’s career and beyond.

AUDIO: “Mindbender (Confusion’s Prince)” [Panorama BBC clip, Fillmore Auditorium, 6/66]

JOHN MORGAN [Panorama, 1966]: The psychedelic dance halls of San Francisco offer other more peculiar insights into a possible future. The city is known as Psychedelphia — Trips-ville.

JESSE: Props to whichever head fed that one to the BBC, maybe the same one that told them they should head to the Fillmore Auditorium.

JOHN MORGAN [Panorama, 1966]: The group is the Grateful Dead. They sing “The Mindbenders.”

JESSE: That was the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore Auditorium in early June 1966, performing “Mindbender.” Unbeknownst to the BBC film crew, they were witnessing one of the most peculiar intersections of California technologies. Onstage, the Dead were playing through their new experimental sound system, built from repurposed Voice of the Theatre speakers. And operating that sound system was Owsley “Bear” Stanley. Over the three years of this podcast, we’ve discussed many of the technological innovations that surrounded the Dead. We’ll have plenty of fresh interviews today, but we’re also gonna soutback to a few previous episodes. Our special “Bear Drops: LA ‘66” delved deeply into Owsley and the Dead’s first forays into live sound, drawing on David Gans’s great 1991 interview with Bear featured in Conversations with the Dead.

OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: I knew nothing when I started, I just said, “Hey, sure, I’ll be the sound man and we can use my hi-fi.” I did notice one thing straight away, and that was that the instruments that they were using looked like somebody built them in the garage. When you opened them up, they looked like they had parts that looked like they came out of a 1932 radio. And in fact, it was about right — I think it was Les Paul, who took apart a radio and put the parts in his guitar. Basically, the guitars in 1966 were identical. They still had a magnet with coil wire around it, six screws in the top of the magnet. And sometimes not even the screws, but often the screws. They had a wax capacitor, and a cheap potentiometer. And that was it. I knew we had to do something because the technology was so primitive. It seemed like it was holding the music back, that we could go to another level if we had better instruments. Half the time, things would crackle and pop and there would be distortion of the speakers that wouldn't be controllable and the guys would make a sound [that wasn’t] what they wanted. So, we went wholly the other way.

JESSE: It was the beginning of a long quest for just exactly perfect sound that continues to this day.

OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: One of the Acid Tests—I don’t know which one it was, it might have been Watts—was a very strange experience where, all of a sudden, I was looking at sound coming out of the speakers. This happened on several occasions. It also happened in the house that we were staying in in Watts, where I actually saw sound coming out of the speakers.

DAVID GANS [1/13/91]: I always wanted to have that happen.

OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: What’s that called… kinesthesia?

DAVID GANS [1/13/91]: Synesthesia.

OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: Synesthesia, yeah.

JESSE: Bear’s synaesthetic experience would become foundational to his understanding of sound and how he would work with the Dead. The alchemist responsible for the LSD explosion was also very much part of the California technology boom, or perhaps they were one and the same. Mindbender indeed. BBC host John Morgan was surely one of the first to draw out this connection.

JOHN MORGAN [Panorama, 1966]: How close was the connection between Psychedelphia’s self absorption, the prevalence of drugs and the new technology? Dr. Frank Barron, a psychologist at Berkeley,

FRANK BARRON [Panorama, 1966]: I think that the rate of social change, which itself has been accelerating rapidly, and sparked by the technological and scientific revolution, is closely related to the use of LSD.

JESSE: In 1964, Frank Barron presented his study “The Creative Process and the Psychedelic Experience,” published the following year. Someone who shared Barron’s ideas was his colleague Myron Stolaroff who, in 1948, helped invent the Ampex Model 200A reel-to-reel tape recorder, revolutionizing the music industry. A few years later, Stolaroff came across LSD, still legal, and still considered a miracle drug of sorts. Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience, a first-rate scholarly book, details what happened to LSD between Albert Hofmann’s 1943 synthesis and when it achieved illegality in 1966. By the early 1960s, Stolaroff led at least one LSD retreat for Ampex engineers before founding the International Foundation For Advanced Studies in Menlo Park, a for-profit enterprise that led people on their first trips at fairly top dollar. One of those was future Merry Prankster Stewart Brand; another was future Dead archivist Dick Latvala. One way of putting that is to say that the company that manufactured the Dead’s preferred brand of recording tape had deep psychedelic roots themselves. Another way of saying that is that LSD was everywhere on the San Francisco Peninsula even before Owsley Stanley set up shop and began to manufacture his own — and it was already deeply entwined with the technology world as the space age transitioned to the computer age.

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN: I like to think, and the sooner the better, of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in neutrally programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

JESSE: Poet Richard Brautigan was a Haight Ashbury neighbor of the Grateful Dead, and first published his evocative poem, “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace” as a hand-distributed broadsheet via the Communications/Company. It was passed around and hung on telephone poles in the Haight.

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN: I like to think, right now please, of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics, where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

JESSE: The poem set the tone for a countercultural approach to technology that was at once radical, symbolic, and deeply complicated.

JOHN MORGAN [Panorama, 1966]: Of the American defense budget, nearly 40% has gone to California.

JESSE: For the heads in computer science, the goal was perhaps occupation and eventual liberation. That’s not exactly how the deal went down. Erik Davis is the author of several far-out books, most relevantly today, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.

ERIK DAVIS: Cybernetics is kind of like the big idea, and it ends up influencing the mainstream. And the counterculture.

AUDIO: “Feedback” [Live/Dead] (0:02-0:16) - [Spotify] [YouTube]

ERIK DAVIS: The idea of a feedback loop is a very key sort of postwar development, because cybernetics as we know it emerged from both technological practices and theoretical insights that come out of World War II. It's a basic way of thinking about both how we learn and how systems learn, but also how the individual or individual agents interact with a larger environment. There's a form of cybernetics that goes into communication and control in command economies and military industrial complex in the organization of consumerism and surveillance — all that kind of mainline oppressive system stuff. And there's a sort of softer, gentler kind of cybernetic, or system science, that goes into cultural software, that goes into ecology, and particularly goes into the idea that we don't look at individuals as standing alone, making their own decisions, but as embedded in these larger systems of flows. [These] could be ecological situations, like you're in nature and you're immersed with the flows of energy and matter, and even consciousness — that move between the individual human and the larger ecology.

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN: I like to think it has to be of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.

ERIK DAVIS: Let's take the example of a freak drinking some Kool-Aid at an Acid Test. What's happening there? Well, it's actually a very cybernetics situation, where you're breaking down the boundaries of your kind of individual consciousness, where there's stuff that's inside you and stuff that's outside you, and that boundary dissolves. And what does it dissolve into? It dissolves into this immense sort of invocation of the feedback loop as a kind of principle of cultural ecstasy. Because there's all of these loops going on — literally, microphones over here at one side of the hall, and they’re going through some sort of feedback mechanism. Or they’re getting doubled up, and then they’re coming out on the other side of the hall.

AUDIO: “Some High Powered Rocket Fuel” [Acid Test field recording, 1/8/66] (0:44-0:55)

ERIK DAVIS: The idea of the feedback loop, which is really a key figure of cybernetics, [is] where something goes out of something, changes, and comes back in and changes the function of that person.

AUDIO: “Feedback” [Live/Dead] (3:27-3:44) - [Spotify] [YouTube]

ERIK DAVIS: What's really important to recognize is that this kind of multimedia environment already is becoming part of the postwar mode of organizing culture and consciousness. There's a great book by Fred Turner, who also wrote the classic, absolutely necessary book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. He wrote another book called The Democratic Surround, and it traces the origins of the multimedia environment as this key element of postwar ideology and cultural production. And in a way, the Acid Tests are just a crazy, Bohemian psychedelic expression of a larger sense that media and, particularly, layering and fusing different elements of media, is a way of organizing human collectivity and human identity and human cultural expression in this expanding technological environment of the postwar world.

AUDIO: “Some High Powered Rocket Fuel” [Acid Test field recording, 1/8/66] (0:00-0:16)

KEN BABBS [1/8/66]: Some of that high powered rocket fuel? Well, let me take a sip!

ERIK DAVIS: You can see the way that that influenced how the Dead saw what they were doing once they started to really roll, and particularly how they integrated the fans — how they integrated people or allowed a space for the Dead Head to develop. They were willing to give the environments, the world of fans, and people [who came] to their shows some kind of agency, because it makes the feedback loop more interesting, more crazy. Where's this going to go?

JESSE: By 1967, there was already a developing feedback loop between the freak underground and the technology world, a feedback loop to which the Dead were well-attuned. Please welcome to the Deadcast, the sound wizard of Alembic, Ron Wickersham.

RON WICKERSHAM: I was what you’d call a consulting engineer, building radio stations. I got to work at the first UHF TV station in the country. This was before videotapes, so everything was live on TV. That's a different experience. I was attracted to live performances rather than studio work, because there's some excitement that you get.

JESSE: Ron would get plenty of that in the future.

RON WICKERSHAM: I ended up seeing an article for the Fillmore Auditorium. It was in Newsweek magazine. You opened it up, and there was this centerfold of the light shows and all that kind of stuff. So a friend of mine that was working at the TV station, we decided to migrate to California and become a hippie, all that. I came out [during the] Summer of Love, whatever year that is. I found it was pretty boring watching the grass grow. So, a couple weeks later, I just migrated down to Ampex and said, “I’m bored. Do you have anything to do?

JESSE: Though LSD-fueled creative retreats hadn’t become part of the corporate plan at Ampex, the tape company was one of the most progressive and open-minded of the new technology companies on the Peninsula.

RON WICKERSHAM: It was totally experimental. In fact, they pretty much didn't hire anybody with a degree. They hired people from the field. So, if you wanted to be an engineer there, you came from broadcasting. They built equipment that could be maintained and maintained at peak. It wasn't people doing theoretical stuff. But then, around the outside wall of the office areas, they had the guys from Stanford and Berkeley that wrote the textbooks, and they would show up one or two days a week. So you got to talk to the real guys.

JESSE: Through a chain of events, Ampex sent Ron Wickersham to Pacific Recording to work their new multi-track recorder, and straight into the claws of the Grateful Dead.

RON WICKERSHAM: I guess Owsley kind of invited me to do it. At that point, he was saying I should not only work in the studio but toward their live stuff, and work on the instruments as well.

JESSE: At Pacific, Ron had met his future wife and business partner, Susan Frates.

SUSAN WICKERSHAM: Over and over again. I don’t know if that’s poached, hounded, or just drafted…

RICH MAHAN: Eventual assimilation?

JESSE: By 1969, Ron and Susan Wickersham founded Alembic, the company that provided audio support for the Dead for the next half-decade and beyond, developing the instruments, amplifiers, and live sound reinforcement for which the Dead would become rightly famous. By the late 1960s, it was pretty hip for bands to have their own in-house electronic geniuses.

MAGIC ALEX [1968]: Hello, I’m Alexis, from Apple Electronics. I would like to say hello to all my brothers around the world, and to all the girls around the world, and to all the electronic people around the world. That is Apple Electronics.

JESSE: That was Magic Alex from Apple Electronics — the Beatles’ Apple, not Steve Jobs’s Apple, but we’ll get back to that one. Magic Alex didn’t quite pan out with the Beatles. The Dead did better with Ron Wickersham. For comparison’s sake, if you’ve seen the Beatles’ documentary Get Back, the same week in January 1969 that Glyn Johns was building an 8-track studio in the basement of Apple Records by lashing together a pair of 4-tracks, the Dead sound team was lugging their own Ampex 16-track up the stairs at the Avalon Ballroom to start making Live/Dead. Within the next year, they’d build their own monitor system, too.

But it wasn’t luck. The Bay Area was positively wired with electronics heads. Another was Bob Cohen, who did sound at the Family Dog’s Avalon Ballroom and helped develop noise-canceling headphone technology that he’d eventually sell to NASA. John Markoff covered technology at the New York Times for nearly three decades, and I recommend his books, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, as well as his new biography of Stewart Brand, titled The Whole Earth. Welcome to the Deadcast, John.

JOHN MARKOFF: There was a whole range of ideas, and all that coalesced on the peninsula, circa ‘65 to ‘75, during that same period that the Grateful Dead was forming. The advent of the microprocessor meant that you could have your own computer. You had this group of mostly young men on the mid-peninsula in the early ‘70s, mid-’70s, who had a hunger for computing. They wanted to get access to their own computers. They weren't even sure what they were going to do with them — they thought of them as fantasy amplifiers.

JESSE: Which sounds a lot like LSD, actually, in the very clinical sense that a half-century of studies have subsequently shown.

JOHN MARKOFF: There were a whole set of different paths to augmenting the human mind going on on the peninsula at the same time. There was the Esalen stuff happening, the personal growth stuff, there was the psychedelic stuff happening. There was Engelbart’s intelligence amplification, IA stuff, happening. All of that was swirling right at the same time, and Stewart Brand set himself down right in the middle of that, right at the right time.

The Whole Earth

AUDIO: “Are You Lonely For Me” [Dick’s Picks 30, 3/25/72] (1:10-1:35) - [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: That was the Grateful Dead at the Academy of Music in New York on March 25th, 1972, now Dick’s Picks 30, the Hells Angels party that we talked about in both our “Donna Jean” episode and our “Europe ‘72: Prelude.” One person who was backstage that night was Stewart Brand, who’d organized the Trips Festival in 1966 with the Merry Pranksters, the Dead’s first big San Francisco show. They weren’t exactly best brahs, but they remained colleagues in the New World. Brand was on his way to the United Nations environmental conference in Stockholm, one of the world’s very first, set for early June 1972, where he’d meet up with Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm. We discussed it a bit in our Europe ‘72 episode about the Netherlands. Stewart Brand’s journal contains some stray notes that indicate that the Dead were actually considering heading to Stockholm after the conclusion of the Europe ‘72 tour to play at the alternative Life Forum. It would have put the Dead on a bill with both the Holy Modal Rounders and Swedish psych legends Trad, Gras, och Stenar. But alas, it wasn’t to be. And maybe for the best, the Life Forum was a bit chaotic, with the Swedish environmentalists a bit suspicious of the Americans, but it would have been an inspired pairing by Stewart Brand, who was fast becoming one of the most critical bridges from the counterculture to the dawning computer age. In 1968, two years after the Trips Festival, Stewart Brand published the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog.

JOHN MARKOFF: The Whole Earth Catalog was a pivot. What he set out to do was take books and tools to his friends who are working on the communes. He didn't want to live on the commune; he spent a couple of weeks on the Lama [Foundation] commune and decided it was boring. He wanted to live in the city. But he thought he could go out there and give them the tools that would help them build their communities, these utopian communities. And then he found out within two trips that none of them had any money, and that wasn't going to work. The idea of the Truck Store was a nice idea, and he pivoted to the Catalog.

JESSE: Though communards would certainly be among the Whole Earth Catalog’s readership, over the next half-decade, the Whole Earth Catalog would become a backbone of the countercultural technology scene.

JOHN MARKOFF: Information was hard to come by, and he curated it. The really striking thing about the impact that the Catalog had in that first five year period, it was on people like me: people who would stumble across something in that catalog and their life would go off in some different direction. The serendipity of finding interesting things, not people who are going back to the land. There were three million copies sold in that first period. It was the Bible of a generation.

JESSE: “Access to Tools” was one of the catalog’s mottos, but its eclectic assortment of far-out things engendered a kind of community of its own, even more so when they opened their own Whole Earth Access Store in Menlo Park. Some of the nearby neighbors were John and Helen Meyer, a young couple involved in sound amplification. John devised a new kind of speaker in their living room.

HELEN MEYER: The store was around the corner, and we put a brochure in the store.

JOHN MEYER: We gave a demo to Stewart Brand outside, and he put in his catalogs. “Well, if you want something to take your head off, here it is.”

JESSE: It was called the Glyph. “The first loud sound I’ve heard that didn’t make me want to run,” Brand wrote in the Last Whole Earth Catalog. “I wanted to stay and shake.”

JOHN MARKOFF: If Stewart found it interesting, it showed up in the catalog.

JOHN MEYER: So we built the eight-foot horns and [San Rafael club] Pepperland started to happen.

JESSE: The Meyers moved in and out of the Grateful Dead’s orbit in the 1970s before building the Dead’s PAs through the ‘80s and ‘90s on behalf of UltraSound. From the moment the Dead had any money to spend, they spent it on gear, and their budgets for audio gear—modified guitars, amplifiers, and PA systems—became an enormous driver for technology for three decades. In the years 1971 to 1974 especially, the band was deeply involved in what was first known as the Alembic PA, eventually morphing into what’s remembered as the Wall of Sound. In February 1973, they booked a show at the Maples Pavilion on the Stanford campus to test the system’s latest iteration, their first hometown show since the Palo Alto Be-In. They couldn’t have picked a more symbolic spot to try out the latest technology. Wavy Gravy introduced the second set.

SAIL

WAVY GRAVY [2/9/73]: And now, the Rainbow Makers — here they are.

AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [2/9/73] (0:00-0:30)

JESSE: One person who saw the Rainbow Makers at the Maples Pavilion was graduate student Paul Martin. His origin story is similar to many Dead Heads. He saw the band at Woodstock, but he saw lots of bands at Woodstock.

PAUL MARTIN: I came out to Stanford in 1972 after finishing college in North Carolina. I think it was January, maybe February of ‘73, the Dead played their only ever indoor concert at Stanford, at the basketball stadium. It was fairly easy to get tickets, and a bunch of friends that I watched other psychedelic music with out that way said, “Oh wow, the Dead are playing at Stanford.” Even though there was a big party I wanted to go to, I said, “Okay, great, let’s go.” I joined them and I was totally blown away — it was a legendary show. I came away from it going: if I don’t have to break too many laws to do it, and the Dead are anywhere within shooting range, I’m going. I came after the show, it was a bit after midnight, I went to the party that I was missing and folks were whooping it up into the wee hours there. I talked to them about the show, and a bunch of them ended up going to the shows after that. It was an amazing transition. A big switch in my brain flipped.

AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [2/9/73] (4:43-5:19)

JESSE: But Paul differed from many Dead Heads because, as a Stanford graduate student, his base of operations was the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, known as SAIL.

PAUL MARTIN: The Stanford AI lab was miles away from campus — I didn't have to spend a lot of time down on campus. It was a building donated by the telephone company, surrounded by horse pastures, up in rolling grazing area owned by Stanford. So once you got up there, the influence of all the bureaucrats of the university down on the main campus was very weak.

JESSE: And at SAIL, Paul had something that virtually nobody else anywhere had in 1973 — his own office with a computer, keyboard, and access to the local and national computer networks.

PAUL MARTIN: When you showed up, it was your own private office with black and white—or actually black and green, because it was persistent phosphor—TV, a fairly modest sized screen, probably less than 15 inches diagonal, and a keyboard. That was hard-wired through coax cables to a disk that was as big as a large coffee table for each platter, and there were a half a dozen platters. It was sold by a company called Data Disc, but because it was so flaky, we called it Data Risk. It produced channels of black and white TV. You would be looking at a screen display that basically just echoed your characters when you type, but could also display something like, for instance, if you used three of the channels together to get grayscale, you could see what the camera view was from one of the robot cameras that we had. The lab had a big arm doing robotics, and it also had a mobile cart that we were studying, rolling around with one or two video views of the world, trying to figure out how to make a car drive itself without getting in trouble. So those were all things you could see on your display. It was back to being like the Mod 33 Teletype, but you had a much more instantaneous connection to a much more powerful machine. That was the local network, so you could do things like… there were simple commands to just see who was currently logged in all the slots on the machine.

JESSE: As it turned out, there were a lot of Dead Heads at SAIL. When I spoke with the lab director Les Earnest for my book, Heads, he clarified that he wasn’t a Dead Head. He only saw them a few times a year. Here’s what Les told me about how he invented a crucial piece of online infrastructure.

LES EARNEST [2013]: People were working around the clock, and I needed to intersect with them. For a time I lived 25-hour days. Each day, I would go to bed one hour later and get up one hour later. That way, over 25 days, I would intersect with everyone.

JESSE: That didn’t quite work, so Les wrote a new command for the system called FINGER, so people at the lab could post updates about where they were or what they were working on.

LES EARNEST [2013]: FINGER had a plan file, so that people could tell what they were planning to do, either go on vacation or come back at some particular time or whatever. And it got flipped into blogging, before that term came into existence. People could state any given position, political or technical or whatever. That became surprisingly popular — it wasn't my intention.

JESSE: It was the invention of the status update, the world’s first digital away messages and now the basic unit of social media in daily life around the planet. In some ways, Paul Martin was late to the party. There’d been Dead Heads at SAIL for years. One of them was James Andrew Moorer. I interviewed Andy at length for my book, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, and only got to use a few small bits. He’d started at the lab a few years before Paul and was, and is, a serious hero of electronic music.

ANDY MOORER [2013]: Groups of us would go to concerts — the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore were operating full time; there were free concerts out in Golden Gate Park we would go to. It just permeated the air. At the AI Lab, the computer music group was working on modern music, but it was also working on different kinds of music synthesis, synthesizing sounds. How do you use a computer to synthesize sound? What's the point of having a computer synthesize sound? We were struggling with all these questions. The work of John Chowning, which I was quite heavily involved in, ended up as the DX7 synthesizer from Yamaha, which, to this day, was the largest selling single model. I personally come from a pop and folk music background, so I really wanted to push technology in that direction. The fellows at Stanford, Chowning and Rush, were modern classical composers — the Philip Glass vintage, the music school graduates. They wanted to push it into that direction. I did go up to the San Francisco Tape Music Center several times, went to Mills [College] several times, visited. I connected with some of the local composers, Terry Riley.

JESSE: They were working on early iterations of some very heady stuff that wouldn’t come into common use until the early 21st century.

ANDY MOORER [2013]: I can make a claim to have actually invented what could be called an audio workstation, back at Stanford on this great honking machine — partly inspired by problems that were coming up in performance and making music. It wasn't what you’d call real practical at the time. But if you looked at the screen back in 1972 and looked at today’s modern digital audio workstation, you can see the similarities: there’s the waveform display, there’s the toolbar, and the operations are related.

JESSE: Of course, the SAIL PDP-10 had internal email too.

ANDY MOORER [2013]: I was one of the first programmers on the ARPANET, which later became the internet. Mind you, I can guarantee you that nobody, nobody had a clue as to what it would turn out to be. I can claim one of the longer continuous email addresses around. When I went to Stanford, we chose three-character names for our email addresses: “Jam” is what I chose because those are my initials, J-A-M. If you want to free-associate on “jam,” you can think of jam session — I like that association. And now, 40-some odd years later, I still use the email address “jam.”

JESSE: Another thing the SAIL PDP-10 had was an addition to its mail program, as Paul Martin discovered.

PAUL MARTIN: The mailing list was just an extension somebody added to the mail program. if what you put in was actually a file name, then the mail system would read that file, and pretend you typed in whatever was in it. So a mailing list was just a bunch of lines that you had put people's local or, in the case that they were on a different machine, remote addresses. Once you had mailing lists, you could just make up a name for one, put it in a common directory. Or you could have the mailing list just in your own directory, have your own private [list] who were housemates, except none of my housemates were on email, anywhere. Email was rare enough, and just sitting in front of a computer all day was rare enough that most people didn't have a big circle of friends doing it. It was more of colleagues from work.

JESSE: One thing that Paul and many of his work colleagues had in common outside of work was the Grateful Dead. And so not long after the show at Stanford, Paul established the very first Grateful Dead email list. If you had an account at SAIL, you sent a message to dead@dis, short for distribution. No domain name needed.

PAUL MARTIN: It was initially just a way to say things like, “Hey, so and so got a recording of the show — ping him if you want to make a copy.” Or, “Wow, that was an amazing new song they did, third tune in the second set,” that sort of thing. And of course, announcements of shows and tickets and rides.

JESSE: Andy Moorer.

ANDY MOORER [2013]: Every time the Grateful Dead were playing somewhere, you'd get a notice that said, “Say, they're out in Stockton, so everyone show up at 4pm for a smoke-in.” Something of that order.

JESSE: Another early piece of tech they developed was the news alert.

ANDY MOORER [2013]: At Stanford, we had the AP wire service Teletype feed coming into the computer, and we had a demon running in the background that indexed the daylights out of it. So you could put an automatic filter on it that would pick out all stories related to music or Grateful Dead, and they would pop up in your email.

JESSE: Paul and computer chess researcher Dave Wilkins invented something else that’s now found commonly on the internet — crowd-sourced lyrics.

PAUL MARTIN: The lyrics thing was something that Dave Wilkins and I just started on our own. We toiled over what the lyrics to tunes were, and if it was based on just your memory, it was pretty flakey, especially if it was tunes that had only been performed a couple of times, or that you had only heard a couple of times. So we tried to get tapes from people that we could play more than one performance of a particular tune that we were trying to puzzle out the lyrics and write them down. Because we had shared computer files, we could just keep a file that had our best guess in it, and all of our notes that weren’t quite so sorted out yet: “We’re pretty sure about the first round of this, but second and third rounds, we’re not real sure.” Especially Bobby’s songs, he would do them without quite knowing what the lyrics were too, and sometimes go back and do a different verse in the wrong place, things like that. Anyhow, that was our impetus. We had computer printers too, so we could make printouts and give ‘em to friends who weren’t on the computer. If they had firm opinions about what the lyrics were, they could mark ‘em up and hand them back to us. We could decide to correct them the way they said or not, because it’s a little hard to figure out the lyrics sometimes.

JESSE: The machine at SAIL was also connected to ARPANET.

PAUL MARTIN: DARPANET, the real span of the country[‘s] data connection. With that, you could log onto any other machine that was connected to it across the country and, shortly thereafter, across the world — assuming you had an account there and they’d let you log in. You could send email to other places; you had to address what machine it was going to. The whole idea that you could talk to people far away like this was pretty novel. You could transfer files — FTP was File Transfer Protocol. Even in its earliest days, people grumbled that it didn’t mean Food Transfer Protocol, because the AI lab was far away from any place to get anything to eat, if it was the middle of the night and you were starving. So we always joked about the next step for the network would be to be able to order a pizza and have it show up.

JESSE: The tech has progressed a bit since then. In fact, just by listening to this, your local pizza place now knows that you want pizza right now and will be dispatching one momentarily. Blink your eyes for five measures in 7/4 time to opt out. It was by these means that Paul and Dave’s lyric file began to make it out into the world.

PAUL MARTIN: At one point, we started seeing copies of the thing floating around and other people not necessarily saying where they got it. So that's when we decided the Bondi Pier belonged in the collection.

MC [The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, 1972]: We’ve got a great new chartbuster, just lobbed in from Australia. He’s going to sing you one of his most meaningful and urgent compositions.

PAUL MARTIN: That's an old Australian drinking song that a guy named Rod Brooks [told us about]. [Rod] was at the Stanford AI lab and then went on to found iRobot. He was a big proponent of going to Mars one-way. Brooksie sang that song for us and we wrote it down and we added it to our lyrics, even though the Dead never performed it. So if you've ever found a collection of their tunes that had that song in it, you knew they'd ripped it from ours.

AUDIO: “Down By The Old Pacific Sea” [The Adventures of Barry McKenzie] (1:31-2:05)

JESSE: “Bondi Pier” was Australian and it was certainly about drinking, but it wasn’t that old. Its real name is “Chunder in the Old Pacific Sea” and was written in 1965 by Australian comedian Barry Humphries, where the original lyric was “Manly Pier.” It appeared in the 1972 comedy The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. The title was incorrect, but a copy of the SAIL lyric file made its way deep into the internet. To this day, if you search for the phrase “Bondi Pier,” you get nothing but Dead related search results, plus one spoiler tweet from me. Sorry about that. Partly it’s because it’s not the song’s real name, but it’s nonetheless a testament to how deeply-rooted and redundant Grateful Dead related information is out on what’s left of the open internet. Sometime in 1974, an actual member of the Grateful Dead showed up at SAIL.

PAUL MARTIN: Phil was good friends with Ned Lagin and a couple other people who shared the computer up there to do computer music research. In fact, they made one of the very first CDs ever made. Phil came up to visit and hang out with these guys one evening.

JESSE: In the mid-’70s, Ned Lagin’s Seastones project was the place where computers and the Dead’s music intersected.

AUDIO: “Seastones 67” [Ned Lagin, Seastones] (0:01-0:20)

JESSE: We delved deeply into the world of Ned Lagin and Seastones during our “Nedcast” on season 2 of the Deadcast. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh had befriended Ned when he was an undergraduate at MIT and started making music with him soon thereafter. From 1970 through 1975, Ned collaborated heavily with the Dead, David Crosby, and members of the Jefferson Airplane, especially. By 1973, Ned had relocated to the Bay Area. Andy Moorer.

ANDY MOORER [2013]: Ned and Phil came down and we chatted about everything we're doing. They were quite interested, and Phil Lesh wanted to dive into that more deeply. He approached us because he was interested in some of the stuff we were doing, some of the sounds. You could do it on these large sprawling mainframe computers, but you couldn't do much in a form where you could take it on the road.

JESSE: Ned Lagin would be the Grateful Dead’s deepest link to high technology in the early 1970s. We are so happy to welcome back to the Deadcast, Ned Lagin.

NED LAGIN: John Chowning was a professor there, Andy Moore was a PhD or postdoc. Chowning went on to create and own the Yamaha FM Synthesis patents, and was a great guy. Andy Moore was the same, and he eventually left to form Sonic Solutions, which was a noise reduction algorithm company. They're the ones that invited me and Phil when they heard about Seastones to come to SAIL.

JESSE: As an MIT undergraduate with an interest in all things new, Ned had heard about SAIL.

NED LAGIN: We were invited to visit the Stanford facility, which we did. When we got there and drove up, there with some robot, a very crude robot, crawling and rolling around the parking lot. In any case, we were invited in, we toured everything. They were enamored of course of fandom, but Phil knew nothing about what any of this was. I was invited to have an account there, a user account there and a password and everything, which they gave me. I was loaded up with almost a carton of manuals: one was SAIL, which was their programming language at the time for using their system, and BAIL, which was their debugging writing programs.

JESSE: Obviously, the SAIL Deadheads were psyched that Phil Lesh was visiting. Paul Martin.

PAUL MARTIN: We knew he was coming, and wanted to have a chance to shake his hand and all that. We printed up a copy of the current state of our lyrics and presented it to him. He said, “Oh, this is great. We don't have all this shit written down anywhere.” And we said, “Well, I'm not sure these are right, especially some of the Bobby tunes. Sometimes, he sings it one way and other times it sounds like he's doing something else.” And he said, “Oh, no, no, these are right. I'm gonna show it to Bobby and tell him to sing them this way.” That's one way to get it right.

JESSE: Mainly, they were there to speak about ways to control quadraphonic sound, a going concern at SAIL. Andy Moorer.

ANDY MOORER [2013]: Phil Lesh had his guitar wired for quad. The original setup was one string, one speaker, or one stack. He said he had great fun bouncing stuff off the speakers.

NED LAGIN: It wasn't initially a quad bass, it was just having a separate amplifier and pickup for each of the four, because there were only four strings. So it could be used as a quad bass, because there were four outputs. But it was initially quad in the sense of four channels, rather than quad in the sense of quiet space. Because there were no quiet spaces.

ANDY MOORER [2013]: We did have a prototype quad reverb device, but it was really a joke. It was really to demonstrate the principle more than a practical musical instrument. For instance, the reverb was done by an old car stereo spring reverb that we had down the bottom of it, and the quad panning was done by radio potentiometers that we swiped out of trash radios. But I'm sure it helped inspire them.

JESSE: Nonetheless, they lent it to Ned to try out.

NED LAGIN: I was loaned their quad joystick because, at that point in time, they were doing experiments in how you detect changes in the position of noise sound sources. And that led to FM Synthesis and all their other stuff. But they were originally [asking]: How do you encode and decode positions of sound moving in space? So they had a quad joystick, which they loaned to me and I used on Seastones.

JESSE: This little bit is from our Nedcast episode.

NED LAGIN: The interesting thing about quad, that I discovered in playing with it… Dan Healy had set up a primitive system for speakers and amplifiers for me at Mickey's, to experiment a little bit with how disturbing quad could be — how it wasn't necessarily immersive, which is what we were looking at as the desirable effect of quad. When you hear sounds behind you, you turn around. So it wasn't really a very desirable thing to have people turning around, or hearing and being frightened by sounds behind them.

JESSE: Ned dove in slightly deeper.

NED LAGIN: I went back there a few times, because of the long commute and driving and everything down to Stanford, and used their system. But I never really got totally into programming their system — more exploring it. Phil never went back during that period of time. I was using the system to learn the system, so I could do music on it. And you’ve to remember, this was a time when hard drives were big cabinets, and most of the backup was done on tape machines, which you see in old science fiction movies. The most valuable tool was obviously the quad joystick, which I wired up and used.

ANDY MOORER [2013]: Ned eventually settled on a system where he had a computer controlled analog synthesizer rack from E-Mu Systems, which are acquaintances of ours down in Santa Cruz.

JESSE: Seastones was biomusic, a place where music and computers were beginning to exist in “mutually programming harmony,” as Richard Brautigan put it. Here’s how Ned described it to us on The Nedcast.

NED LAGIN: One of the key things in Seastones was that you could extract signals from one musician through envelope followers or triggers and gates, and then use them to modulate or affect other musicians’ sound. So, you could have the personality imprinted by one or more parameters. Say Jerry plays guitar — we're not hearing the guitar sound. We're hearing the attack, sustained decay of the guitar, but it's affecting my piano sound or Phil's bass sound, and vice versa. With ring modulators or voltage controls amplifiers, you could have two signals cross modulate one another. What this did was it changed the hearability—if I can create a word—of musicians from their personality being directly identified by their musical or vocal sound into their idiosyncratic personalities, independent of their musical instruments. And of course, during the times that we were doing this, we were all heavily intoxicated [on] LSD — we were in alternative places and spacetimes. This made a lot of sense, not because we were so high, but because we were looking at new forms of expression, and new forms and ways of being musical. One of the reasons to use computers was to extract the personalities—the imprinting, the techniques, the habits—that various musicians had, and use them to affect the sound of other musicians, or the entire ensemble.

AUDIO: “Seastones 66” [Ned Lagin, Seastones] (4:18-4:30)

JESSE: That was from the expanded edition of Seastones, the voices of Jerry Garcia, Grace Slick, and David Freiberg not so much harmonizing as completely fusing. The CD is available from Ned’s website, spiritcats.com, along with much of Ned’s writing and visual art. If you’re intrigued by Seastones, we definitely encourage you to check out our episode about Ned, the expanded Seastones, and especially Ned’s more recent album, Cat Dreams. Starting in October 1974, the Dead took a road hiatus that would last until June of 1976. During this period, they pursued a number of tech projects as alternatives to touring, some more vaporware than others. One was holographic sound technology.

NED LAGIN: [laughs]. That was a Garcia–[Ron] Rakow thing. They just cooked up lots of stuff.

JESSE: A surprising number of publications reported on it straight-faced.

NED LAGIN: Rakow was a monster bullshitter.

JESSE: Though the holographic sound technology may’ve been bullshit, but the Dead kept very earnestly looking for the next path, even as they were retired from the road, apparently even commissioning legendary theorist R. Buckminster Fuller to design a floating venue. Dan Healy has said that copies are in his collection, and I hope they surface someday. It was during this period that Garcia threw himself into the production of The Grateful Dead Movie. When they shot the film in 1974, they employed a very early sound sync technology, different from the very early sound sync technology Ron Wickersham devised when making Sunshine Daydream in 1972. And when The Grateful Dead Movie was released in 1977, you might be shocked to learn that the Grateful Dead did it their own way, bringing in promoter John Scher to distribute it.

JOHN SCHER: I think they only cut about less than 10 copies of it, 35-millimeter. And what we did, which was sort of innovative at the time, is we went to each city that we knew that they were the biggest, and we four-walled movie theaters — meaning, we rented the movie theaters, and took all the chance ourselves whether people would come or not. We advertised it, and we knew where and how to advertise a Grateful Dead anything. It was very successful, and then we took those prints and piggyback to, say, another 10 or 15 markets. Brought in sound systems. In those days, the movie theaters just had one big speaker behind the screen. So we brought in concert sound systems.

JESSE: Later on, the film went through a normal independent distributor with presumably more normal sound set ups, but those original 1977 screenings sound amazing.

Homebrew & Apple

JESSE: We’re going to backtrack slightly to talk about an important Silicon Valley company founded by a pair of live bootleg fanatics during this period. We are so pleased to welcome to the Deadcast, Daniel Kottke. Technically, Daniel was Apple employee #12. But that’s only going by badge number.

DANIEL KOTTKE: The very first day I met Steve Jobs, which was like two weeks into freshman year at college, I had another friend who was on the same floor and in the same dorm as Steve. He said, “You should go meet this guy, Steve, he’s interesting.” So I went up to his dorm room, and there were other people hanging out, and Steve had a big expensive TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck — a multi thousand-dollar tape deck. I don't know where he got it or how he afforded it, he didn’t really have any money. But he obviously got a good deal on it. And what he was so proud of was his hours and hours and hours of bootleg Dylan. Decades later, I learned that it was Woz who was going to UC Berkeley, Woz knew the underground Dylan sourcing.

JESSE: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were serious Bob Dylan freaks. They’d been involved in an earlier business venture that possibly resulted in Jobs being able to afford a sweet stereo.

DANIEL KOTTKE: Steve was still in high school at the time, but it's also true that that is the year that Woz and Job were doing Blue box. That's the year, 1971, when the Captain Crunch story came out in Vanity Fair all about phone phreaking. Since Woz was already at Berkeley, he tracked down Captain Crunch and he brought Steve Jobs along. The two of them went and interrogated him, to find out how this whole scheme worked of phone phreaking. Then Woz immediately went and designed his own better version and started building them by hand. Between him and Steve Jobs, they went and sold them for a few hundred dollars each, which was a lot of money back then.

JESSE: Daniel and Steve Jobs would travel together in India in 1974. Back in California, in the spring of 1975, a new group had started meeting in Menlo Park, the Grateful Dead’s home turf — the Homebrew Computer Club.

DANIEL KOTTKE: I went to Homebrew meetings with Steve Jobs and Woz would always be there. I was such a newbie: I didn't know anything about computers, or electronics in general. So I was just like, soaking it up. But I didn't understand how exciting it was that the Altair had come out.

JESSE: Also attending the Homebrew Computer Club meetings was Ned Lagin, who’d dropped out and gotten a job at Processor Technology.

NED LAGIN: I went to some of the early Homebrew Computer Club meetings, at Stanford Linear Accelerator, because I was required to for my job at Processor Technology. There were only two or three companies at that point in time.

JESSE: Many of the hackers at the Stanford lab and elsewhere didn’t take the Homebrew Computer Club seriously, thinking of them as hobbyists.

NED LAGIN: It's very simple — it's academia versus grassroots.

JESSE: But the Altair, the world’s first truly home computer, had opened the door.

NED LAGIN: I had number 113. I have all of the manuals and schematics and everything. I even have the original Popular Electronics from January 1975 when it first appeared.

JESSE: There’s a fantastic photo that recently surfaced of Ned at the center of the full Seastones ensemble at Dominican College in San Rafael in June 1975, posted on NedBase.

NED LAGIN: It's sitting right there in the center of the picture, on top of the other computer. That picture includes a whole bunch of technology. It has [Janet] Furman’s state-of-the-art preamps; it has an E-Mu modular synthesizer, it has a polyphonic computer keyboard; it has an Altair computer; it has an Inner Data computer, and other stuff. At that point in time, it was a snapshot of the present and future of technology in music.

JESSE: But by a few months later, Ned was onto a different fork to the future, working at Processor Technology. Some of the longhairs from Homebrew showed up at Processor and Ned was sent down to talk to them.

NED LAGIN: When Jobs and Wozniak came to Processor Technology, what they offered me was: Could I help them make this computer work? The circuit board, really. And I said no, but it certainly was an offer to do work for some compensation.

JESSE: Ned had a job. The two Steves found their own path. Daniel Kottke.

DANIEL KOTTKE: My college buddy Steve Jobs started this little computer company in his garage. So I showed up in his garage in 1976 to help build Apple Is. During that year, no Grateful Dead: we were listening to all Bob Dylan, all the time. It was Blood on the Tracks. We wore that tape out.

JESSE: Whether or not Steve Wozniak drew the connection between live concert recordings and open technology platforms, he was definitely into both.

DANIEL KOTTKE: Woz was completely in favor of open… they didn't use the word “open source,” but open technology. The schematic for the Apple I, that was freely given away; the code for the Apple I was freely given away. The Apple II was not secret, the schematics were available. Apple DOS source was not available. Woz was, and still is, in favor of open source.

JESSE: It wasn’t until Apple got going that Daniel really discovered the Dead.

DANIEL KOTTKE: American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, that was my senior year in high school. I was not a Dead Head. One of my regrets of high school is that I never took the train to Port Chester to the Capitol Theatre. My first Dead show was in Manhattan in like 10th grade, which was 1970[-1971]. And that was okay, but not earthshaking, not life-changing.

JESSE: That was probably at the Manhattan Center in April.

DANIEL KOTTKE: By 1977, Steve and I had rented a house together in Cupertino, and he wasn't around much. He was just at Apple all the time — always, just all the time. And then he had a girlfriend and wasn't even sleeping there anymore. I didn't really have any friends, and it wasn't till I went to a Winterland show up in San Francisco… and it's like: oh my god, my people!

JESSE: And Daniel connected to the deep and wide scene of Bay Area Dead Heads, some of them working in various tech related fields, plenty of them not.

DANIEL KOTTKE: The bright line in my mind is the acoustic shows they did at the Warfield in 1980. There was a whole series of acoustic shows in October of 1980, so I mailed away for… I went to three of those shows. And for one of them, I got AA tickets. AA! I thought AA came after Z. So I was expecting to have seats way in the back. No, I was front in center. And as the concert was starting, some guy came down with a Visine bottle of LSD: “Put out your hand…” That’s a life-changing event. Oh my god.

AUDIO: “Bird Song” [Reckoning] (1:48-2:09) - [Spotify] [YouTube]

DANIEL KOTTKE: I was in this Grateful Dead cover band called Graceful Duck. We used to play at the Stanford coffee shop, we played at parties just around Palo Alto. I didn't know all the Dead's history in Palo Alto at the time. But I wasn't very good. So those two guys moved on. But I started a three-ring binder, writing down all the lyrics and the chords to all the Dead songs. I was on the Mac design team; I was a co-designer of the Macintosh. I left Apple at the end of ‘84 in a leave of absence, got my backpack and traveled all around Europe. Great experience. And then when I got back, I was at a Dead show, and one of my Dead Head friends was Allen Baum. So I ran into him at a Dead show one day and he goes, “Well, all of the lyrics for all the Grateful Dead songs are all online for free on Usenet.” It took three Macintosh [floppy disks], because the floppies only held 440 [kilobytes]. So, what he had done is he took that giant file and split it up into three, put it on three Macintosh floppies. I ran into him at this Dead show, might have been at the Greek Theatre, and he traded me those floppies. I might have traded in some LSD or something.

JESSE: In turn, Daniel split the songs into their own individual files, and recompiled them onto a few more floppies.

DANIEL KOTTKE: Somebody copied the floppies that I had created with all these Dead song lyrics, and brought copies of it to the Dead office in San Rafael and left them there, without my knowledge. Then, another couple of months go by, and I’m at a Greek Theatre show. What year is this, it’s probably now late ‘85… and Allen Baum walks up to me and slaps me with a backstage laminate. He goes, “Barlow wants to see you.” [laughs] That was kind of a life-changing event. So I made my way backstage. I didn’t even know who Barlow was, but, as you can imagine, he was the only member of the extended Dead circle who had a Macintosh. He had one. And what he said to me when I met him that day is, “Daniel, I want to thank you, because I wrote all these songs”—all the songs he wrote, anyway—”I never had a copy of my own songs on my computer. And now I do.” So that became my long friendship with Barlow. Barlow was a very smart guy, a very inquiring mind, very interested in all aspects of technology.

JESSE: By the turn of the 1980s, the Dead were well established as rock and roll’s premier research and development lab. Their Bay Area shows had become testing grounds for new equipment. And when we spoke with John and Helen Meyer of Meyer Sound, we learned how the band’s new UltraSound system acted as demonstration equipment for some of the best sound engineers in the world when Dan Healy let them use the set-up during the afternoon off between the band’s 1983 Madison Square Garden shows.

HELEN MEYER: When they were at Madison Square Garden, they had a whole system at Madison Square Garden and they let us use it for a demo for AES. We brought a whole bunch of customers to Madison Square Garden in the afternoon. We turned on the whole system, and it was an amazing demo for everyone.

JOHN MEYER: We went from this very, very low level sound to shaking Madison Square Garden at full power. I said, “This is what digital can bring us…” You cannot do this analog.

JESSE: For the rest of that story, check out our “In and Out of the Garden, 1983” episode. The piece they used was from an early digital demonstration CD that also included a very short track composed by Andy Moorer of Stanford, which is where we’re going to end today. We’ve got a lot more to say about the Grateful Dead and technology, tune in again next time for the rest. Andy’s piece was written in 1982 and originally titled “The Deep Note.” We’ve posted a link to the sheet music at dead-dot-net-slash-deadcast, as well as Andy’s latest project, The Man In The Mangrove Counts To Sleep, an opera-novella. But this is definitely Andy’s biggest hit. You might recognize it. Sing along if you do.

AUDIO: “The Deep Note” [Andy Moorer] (0:00-0:30)