When Sotheby’s held an auction of the Grateful Dead’s gear and ephemera in 2021, the writer Brian Anderson wanted a piece of history. The child of Deadheads, he attended concerts as a toddler which set him on an early path towards Dead fandom. The Sotheby’s auction presented a unique opportunity for lifelong obsessives like Anderson: to acquire a piece of the band’s long and well-documented lore. After sweating through the online auction he was the proud owner, to the tune of $4,000, of a tattered speaker monitor from the Dead’s monolithic Wall of Sound. He calls it “The Artifact.”
There’s a story behind The Artifact. In 2015, Anderson, then an editor at VICE’s Motherboard, wrote a 9,000-word piece about the Wall of Sound, the 75-ton sound system that revolutionized how we consume live music and almost ruined the Dead and their finances. At the time Anderson thought, “surely, this is going to be the definitive take on the Wall of Sound.” Oh how he was wrong. His new book, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection, came out in June and immediately made the New York Times bestseller list.
I first met Anderson in November of last year, when I recognized his face from his author photo, at Rattleback Records in Chicago where he was working part-time while he finished Loud and Clear. Before writing his book, Anderson worked as an editor at VICE, Vox, and The Atlantic, where he won a Pulitzer for the magazine’s pandemic coverage.
Three Point Four Media called up Anderson to talk about the economics of writing a book, what he teaches his journalism students at Northwestern in the year 2025, and how to convert a Dead skeptic. I intended to start the interview by asking Anderson about process and the loneliness of book writing, but he had some sort of mystic intuition and went in as soon as the video chat opened.
Brian Anderson: Writing a book is like running an ultra marathon. You just keep running. You don’t see anyone for most of the day. Every once in a while you come to a trailhead and maybe there’s some people and they wave at you and hold up a sign, then you have to keep going. That’s what it feels like for years while you’re working on it.
Three Point Four Media: Loud and Clear started as a 2015 article for VICE. How long did it take to go from longform piece to book proposal to book deal?
In 2018, I took a meeting with an agent and told them, “I want to tell the full story of the Wall of Sound.” But that book proposal, which took me a year to write, ended up taking a different shape. It was more of a pop science book about sound, in which the Wall of Sound was a passing reference.
We shopped that around and got no bites, which I’ve come to learn is a rite of passage in the book world. It stings a little to hear crickets because a book proposal is a tremendous amount of work.
You’re effectively writing a New Yorker-length story.
Totally! It came in at 10,000 words. After that, I put the book idea on the back burner. In 2022 I was working on a grant-funded one-year position at Vox launching a vertical on the biodiversity crisis. As that project came to a close I was getting—the only way I can describe it—signals from the universe that I should maybe start working on the book proposal again, and stick to my guns. The amazing journalist Evan Ratliffconnected me with his agent. I took a meeting and right out of the gate said “I want to write the full story on the Wall of Sound” and they were like “let’s go for it!” It was off to the races from there. We sold it just before the holidays in 2022. January 1, 2023, I sat down to write the book in earnest.
Let’s talk about the economics of writing a book. A friend of mine wrote his book on Metro North and in the mornings before his job as an editor. Everyone does it differently, based on their circumstances and advance. Did you focus solely on writing and reporting? Did you have any side gigs? What did the economics look like for you?
I was in the very fortunate position to have received a handsome advance for this book. My editor at St. Martin’s wanted this book. He wasn’t going to lose it. When I was taking meetings with interested publishers the first words out of his mouth were, “I’m ready to make a deal.”
I was very, very fortunate to be in the position where I could focus solely on the book for 18 months. In early 2024,when I was about three quarters of the way through writing the first draft of the manuscript, I started to get a little stir crazy. I hit up the owner of the record store down the street where we met and told him I was feeling stir crazy and looking for some very light hours to get out of the house. I ended up working two mornings a week at the record store, which was great to get out of the house and interface with people and use a different side of my brain.
Did that give you some structure? Not to say that you didn’t have structure in your day-to-day writing and reporting.
I’m a self-driven and disciplined person. But having those two mornings a week where I would go to the record store from 10am to 1pm? I had to make good use of my morning hours before I went in and think about how to use the rest of my day after I got home from my shift. Usually I would spend the mornings writing and dedicate the afternoons to reporting and follow-up interviews.
I’m not an audiophile. I’m not a gearhead. I’m probably the least tech savvy person I know. So I could use my ignorance as an advantage when I was interviewing the people who built the Wall of Sound.
Was it instructive to talk to people about music and audio quality? Did it shape any of the book or shake loose any ideas you were working on?
Totally. I could bounce ideas, themes, or concepts I was working through off whoever happened to be working or visiting the shop on a given day—including folks who know of and appreciate the Dead to varying degrees. I wanted the book to find a crossover audience of readers who are audiophiles, into music and cultural history, and also people who have a passing familiarity with the Grateful Dead. So when I worked at the shop, I could see how the general reader might react.
The challenge, when you’re on a health, tech, or science desk, is how do you frame really dense and heady material in a way that the layperson can understand, make sense of, carry with them, and apply to their own lives.
That dovetails right into my next question. I’m a Deadhead, but one thing I noticed is that even though it’s a 300-page book about the Grateful Dead’s sound system it’s not full of all the inscrutable, insider baseball language of the Dead. You didn’t make it a walled garden. I’m assuming that was by design?
I’m so happy you picked up on that. I didn’t want to pander to Deadheads. From the get-go I had a couple of self-imposed bans on certain phrases like “a long strange trip.” I was not going to use that unless I was referring to Dennis McNally’s book. I thought it would be a good challenge to avoid some of that low-hanging fruit that is a little too easy and a little too on the nose.
But that was really all in service of hitting that crossover audience of people who I didn’t want to turn off with a lot of Dead stuff that people can roll their eyes at.
That style of writing must have been informed by your decade-plus of working in health and tech verticals synthesizing really specific information for a larger general interest audience?
For sure. The challenge, when you’re on a health, tech, or science desk, is how do you frame really dense and heady material in a way that the layperson can understand, make sense of, carry with them, and apply to their own lives. I didn't know it at the time, but all of that work was training for this book. How do I present all this mind bending acoustic theory and harebrained engineering that went into the Wall of Sound digestible for someone who isn’t an audiophile?
That’s another thing! I’m not an audiophile. I’m not a gearhead. I’m probably the least tech savvy person I know. So I could use my ignorance as an advantage when I was interviewing the people who built the Wall of Sound. This isn’t a technical tome. It’s not a journal article for the Audio Engineering Society. It’s a book for St. Martin’s, a big five publisher for a general audience.
At various points in the book you say, and I’m paraphrasing here, “well these people were on a ton of drugs and their stories all conflict.” How difficult was it as a reporter to pull apart the various hazy threads?
[Laughs] I had to put up that signpost caveat that, hey, these events transpired 50-plus years ago! That’s a long time to begin with. Memories can fade and warp and change over time; then you add in crazy amounts of mind-altering substances and things get even more warped.
To tease out those conflicting memories I did a lot of work going through the written record and looking at show posters and old press clippings to verify certain dates and locations. I did a lot of triangulating of information. Sometimes I would ask a dozen other people about a certain thing in question and more often than not it would help me zero in on the truth of what actually happened.
I feel like every generation in media has a different set of crises to deal with.
Switching gears. What does a journalism professor teach students in the year 2025?
That’s a good question. It’s a totally new thing for me and sort of surreal because I did my masters in journalism at Northwestern years ago. So it’s a trip to be on the other side of the table. I taught a class on magazine editing and over the course of the quarter we teased out what is a magazine in 2025? Getting them to think outside the box. Can a magazine also be an experience? Can it be audio? Can it be video? So thinking about the possibilities of what a magazine can be in this day and age.
In my 101 fundamentals of reporting and writing the news class I tried to instill the importance of being a good listener to 18-year-olds and also how to get through to people who have no trust in the media right now.
Do you have to talk to them about the realities of the industry? Are your students asking you about what a career in journalism looks like now?
That is a totally fair question that all of the students are asking. I’m always upfront about the reality of getting caught up in a round of layoffs. I was let go at VICE after nine years in a massive bloodletting where hundreds of people across the company lost their jobs. That’s an unfortunate reality of where we’re at right now in media. So I’m always honest about that with students.
But I’m also trying to get through to them that it can be a really exciting time, especially for some of the worker-owned media start-ups right now that are killing it, like 404. I always tell my students that media has been in a state of crisis forever. Even back in the new journalism era where you could write one story for The New Yorker and be set for the year. People at the time were still probably like this sucks.
I feel like every generation in media has a different set of crises to deal with. That’s not to diminish or minimize the very dire situation we’re in right now. It can be bleak in one way for young people staring down job prospects. But I think there are some older, more sour instructors that can be down and uninspiring to some of the younger students. I just turned 39. I’m much older than these students. But I’m also not some checked out old newspaper guy. I fall somewhere in the middle! I'm trying to get it across to them that there's a way to make this work. Stick to your guns and you’ll find a path through.
Last question: How do you convert someone who is allergic to the Grateful Dead?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the way to convert someone who is skeptical of this massive universe. The way to do it is to steer folks away from the band’s studio recorded output. They were never a studio band. They were never geared to that kind of controlled environment. Europe ‘72 is the perfect entry point for people who want to know what is it about this band people are so obsessed about?
Another thing I’ve learned over the years is attraction rather than promotion. You can’t push or force the Dead on people. You can open the door for people and they can walk through it if they want to, but the second you start forcing it they’re going to push away from it. Just let it come to them when and in whatever way it’s going to.
