The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast is thrilled beyond all audible frequencies to begin its 12th season by welcoming Dan Healy, the Grateful Dead’s in-house sound wizard for most of their career, for tales from three decades in pursuit of high and higher fidelity.
Dan Healy 80 supplementary notes
by Jesse Jarnow
From the late 1960s through the mid-1990s, Dan Healy was the Grateful Dead’s on-call/in-house sound wizard, and we are delighted beyond all audible frequencies to finally welcome him to the Deadcast. A radio freak from a young age, Healy came up through the Bay Area studios. Challenged by Jerry Garcia to improve the Dead’s live sound, Healy spent three decades on the trail of the highest possible fidelity, live and in the studio, becoming one of live music’s great audio innovators.
Though Healy connected with the Dead by late 1966, his biggest ‘60s work was as in-house producer for Mercury Records, recording hit singles by the Sir Douglas Quintet and others. Joe Jupille dug into San Francisco studio paperwork several years back, and many of the Mercury sessions he found were engineered by Healy (1968, 1969, 1970).
In the late 1960s, Healy also played in his own band, originally called Hoffman’s Bycycle, but later the Bycycle, or just the Bicycle, named after Dr. Albert Hofmann’s infamous adventure on his bicycle (documented in Brian Blomerth’s Bicycle Day). Corry Arnold has reconstructed their performance history, and (thanks to Dan Healy!) we are excited to present some never-heard clips of the Bycycle in action in this Deadcast. (You can see young Dan in action on his one-time bandmate Stephen Fiske’s page.)
Besides mixing the Dead’s live sound, Dan Healy was responsible for the band’s earliest FM broadcasts from the Carousel Ballroom, constructing Mickey Hart’s Rolling Thunder studio in Novato, and building out practice spaces like Club Front. He was a contributor to the Wall of Sound (documented by Brian Anderson’s recent book, Loud and Clear), but was especially the prime mover in the band’s sound when the Dead returned the road in 1976. From the 1970s onward, he half-accidentally accumulated a massive and historical Dead t-shirt collection, which I wrote about for GQ Style. Since retiring from live sound, Healy has become one of the world’s foremost experts in vintage radios.
