SOUNDCHECK :: DAN HEALY
by Paul Liberatore
FOR
ONE reason or another, there won’t be a member of the band at the
first major university conference on the legacy of the Grateful Dead.
But Woodacre’s Dan Healy is the next best thing.
“Someone asked me why we didn’t have a band member,” says band
historian Dennis McNally, an organizer of the Nov. 16 to 18 event at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “My answer was, ‘We have
Healy.’ After (Grateful Dead lyricist) Robert Hunter, he’s the next
guy who was considered a member of the band.”
Healy will be among the panelists at “Unbroken Chain: the Grateful
Dead in Music, Culture and Memory,” presented in conjunction with the
graduate history seminar “American Beauty: Music, Culture and Society,
1945-’95”; and the undergraduate course “How Does the Song Go: the
Grateful Dead as a Window into American Culture.”
“It’s probably an excuse to get together and have fun,” Healy says
with a laugh. “I don’t want it to be too technical, so I’ll probably
talk about the roots of the band, how we stumbled together and what it
meant in terms of the San Francisco music scene and our philosophy as
a group.”
In the world of the Grateful Dead, Healy is famous as one of the
designers of the band’s legendary Wall of Sound. McNally
describes him as the “famed enabler of the Dead’s improvisational
style” and considers his sound system “like another instrument” in the
band.
“It’s an intimate, powerful and complex role to mix a band’s sound,
and Healy did that for 22 years,” he says. “In some bands, the sound
engineer is just a technician. But in the Grateful Dead, he was as
much a part of the philosophical bent to the music and how they
approached it as any band member.”
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the
Wall of Sound was the largest portable sound system ever built.
In his book “Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful
Dead,’ McNally describes it as “not merely a sound system, it was an
electronic sculpture. To walk into a facility for a Dead concert was
to see something like the pylon on the moon in Stanley Kubrick’s
‘2001,’ something so grand, so elegant, so utterly preposterous, that
words simply failed. The Wall was 604 speakers I using 26,400 watts of
power from 55 McIntosh 2300s.”
Phil Lesh, the band’s bassist, said it was like “piloting a flying
saucer, or riding your own sound wave.”
The 62-year-old Healy shrugs it off as no big deal. Quick-witted and
articulate, he’s a voluble, heavy-set man with a reputation for not
suffering fools gladly.
He ended his association with the Dead shortly before Garcia’s death.
Nowadays, if you’re looking for him, you’ll find him where he’s always
been – in the studio. He spends most of his time in “the Shack,” a
recording studio he built on a San Geronimo Valley horse ranch.
“If you’re me, you continue on,” he says. “What I do hasn’t really
changed at all.”
A proud gear head, he thinks of himself as “a Gyro Gearloose type,”
but he wants people to know that he brought more to the table than
mere technical expertise.
“I don’t want to just be in the Grateful Dead legendary soundman bag,”
he says, sitting at the studio’s mixing board one recent afternoon.
“My role in the Grateful Dead was a lot bigger than the outside world
saw me. I was also involved in determining where and when we played,
and I had a lot to do with the administration and business part of
it.”
When he isn’t in the studio, he manages to find time to play guitar in
West Marin’s Sky Blue Band, and he produced and recorded the group’s
CD, among several other recording projects. With Marin’s Harold Jones,
the drummer in Tony Bennett’s band, he’s making plans for an
instructional video on drumming.
As a sideline, he oversees an antique radio-restoration business he
calls Classic Radio.
Healy is a wealth of inside information on the Grateful Dead and,
whether he likes it or not, he’ll always be revered by Deadheads as
the band’s legendary sound man,
Of all the band members, he was closest to the papa bear himself,
Jerry Garcia, working with him on numerous albums and on “The Grateful
Dead Movie.” Every conversation about the Dead always begins and ends
with the beloved Garcia.
“Jerry and I worked in the studio for years and years,” he recalls. “I
spent tens of thousands of hours in the studio with him.”
Healy says he may never have reached his potential or achieved what he
achieved if it hadn’t been for Garcia’s gentle encouragement.
“The one thing I’ve gotta say about Jerry: As far as perceiving
potential, he was a master at that,” he explains. “He would have made
a great movie director. He made you feel good about taking your best
shot even if you didn’t feel that sure of yourself. He pulled that out
of you. He enabled peoples’ creativity. He would look at you and say,
‘I know you can do it, so just go do it.’ That kind of magic exists in
life.”
Healy came into the orbit of Garcia and the Dead in 1965, after they’d
been together for a year. At the time he was a novice sound engineer
learning his trade in a studio in San Francisco that specialized in
commercial jingles and radio spots. He was living on a houseboat in a
slough of the Corte Madera Creek in Larkspur, a bohemian enclave for
musicians and artists.
Through a neighbor, he met John Cipollina, guitarist with Quicksilver
Messenger Service, who introduced him to Garcia and the Dead.
“We were all teenagers and in our early 20s,” Healy remembers. “Nobody
had any money. So, if your guitar amp broke, it could mean you didn’t
play a gig. If you broke a string it could stop you. No one had a
spare chord or strings or any of that stuff.
“When they discovered I knew about electronics and how to work in the
studio, it was, ‘Hey, Dan, fix my amp.’ So I started doing things like
that.”
Garcia used his powers of friendly persuasion to enlist Healy in the
band’s creative vision and philosophy. As he describes it, he was
“being thrust into becoming a recording engineer at the onset of the
San Francisco music scene.
“It launched me, or rather slung me, into it big time,” he says. “It
was the birth of sound and music becoming one thing. That’s how it
started with the Grateful Dead and me.”
By the end of the ’60s, Healy had done pretty much all he could do
“hot rodding,” as he puts it, the old-school technology available in
sound at the time.
“I had a lifelong vision that I wanted to be have everybody in the
audience perceive the sound quality as equivalent to being in their
own living room in front of the most expensive stereo system known to
man,” he explains. “In other words, the dream was to go to the show
and hear the heavenly choir, so to speak, through the heavenly sound
system. That was the dream. The question was: Is it possible to do
this? Can we pull this off?”
A high school dropout, Healy knew he couldn’t pull it off without a
basic technical education.
“In my mid 20s, I spent four or five years schooling myself, checking
books out of the library,” he says. “I had no idea how uneducated I
was, and education was necessary.”
Given carte blanche by Garcia and the band, he made the dream real in
1973 with what famously became known as the Wall of Sound.
“Without the Grateful Dead, I could never have done it,” he admits.
“No other band would have put what amounted to 90 percent of its total
earnings into this. There were times when we spent the money on
speakers and nobody got paychecks, from Jerry on down. It was a
devotion and commitment based on my dream, which may have not even
been reliable, but nonetheless people still took a chance on it. When
I think of it, gratitude is the word that comes to mind.”
It took four semi-trailer trucks and more than 20 crew members to haul
and set up the system, which weighed 75 tons. It had its own monitors
facing toward the back of the stage so that the band could hear
exactly what the audience was hearing.
“The work was pretty intense,” recalls crew member Richie Pechner.
“Now you would say that it was high stress, but at the time we were
young and dumb and energetic and we didn’t know any better. It was
idealistic and hard and painful on one level, but you could sit behind
Garcia’s Fender Twin (amp) and listen and it would heal you.”
Pechner remembers Healy as an older brother-like figure who taught him
everything he needed to know. “He was the smartest electronic guy,” he
says. “He knew more than anybody. He had the best knowledge of how to
make it work.”
The Wall was viable for only about a year before it was “retired”
because of high fuel costs brought on by the gas crisis of the ’70s
and the rising personnel costs of the crew.
“We were working for the machine, literally,” Healy says. “We had
gotten to the point where the very reason where we were there, the
music, had lost focus. We got to where we were slaving for this ideal.
It was either retire the Wall of Sound or stop playing music.”
After the Wall came down, the Dead took a break for six months or so,
and the Wall became a colorful footnote in the band’s history.
“The truth is, the Wall of Sound’s purpose was to cultivate new ways
of doing things,” Healy says now. “And that’s all it was. It was never
meant to be an end product. It was solely moving us out of the
limitations of existing sound equipment. It was an experimental
workshop.”
From then on, using what the Wall had taught them, Healy and his
allies in a San Rafael company called Ultra Sound put together more
practical and efficient systems that could travel around the country
from show to show without instigating bankruptcy proceedings.
Healy stayed with the Dead until just before Garcia, suffering from
the ravages of drug addiction and decades on the road, died in a
Forest Knolls drug treatment facility.
“In the last year of the Grateful Dead, I bowed out,” he says.
“Technically, they said they fired me, but I quit. I couldn’t go on. I
would go back to the hotel after a show in tears. I saw Jerry, a man
who I had great love and respect for personally and professionally,
killing himself. And there was nothing any of us could do anything
about except ride it out. But the emotional strain was more than I
could bear.”
These days, Healy lives within walking distance of the Shack with
Patti, his wife of 33 years. He’s proud of his 38-year-old daughter,
Ambrosia. a former vice president of worldwide marketing for Capitol
Records who now works as a publicist for major rock bands.
In this digital age, he’s as enthusiastic and excited about his work
as ever. He raves about the infinite possibilities of digital
recording and sound technology.
“It couldn’t happen fast enough for me,” he says with a smile.
But then he’s always been way ahead of the curve.
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