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The band “piled in with their equipment,” Wolfe reported in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and began to play. “The Dead’s weird sound!” Wolfe wrote. “Submarine somehow, turbid half the time, tremendously loud but like sitting under a waterfall, at the same time full of sort of ghoul-show vibrato sounds as if each string on their electric guitars is half a block long and twanging in a room full of natural gas.” The sound shattered Bear’s realm. He couldn’t not be a part of what the band was onto, and he remained an inspiration—and sometimes foil—to their sonic pursuits for decades. Simply hearing Garcia play was enough to push him “to go to work for the most amazing group ever and have a fabulous time of it,” Bear later said. “I just hitched a ride and tried to make a positive contribution.” What he brought to bear on the Dead’s audio efforts, up to and through the end of the Wall, always pointed back to the “as above, so below” worldview. The ancient occult expression was the bedrock of Bear’s belief “that whatever happened on any physical, emotional, or mental level while he was tripping was not a fantasy,” Robert Greenfield wrote in Bear, a biography
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Brian Anderson (Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection)