The infamous sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Owsley Stanley, in addition to creating the Grateful Dead’s speaker system, The Wall of Sound, and his legendary lysergic creations, was also well-known for his many “Sonic Journals” — a collection of around 1,300 tapes capturing over eighty different artists recorded by Stanley in San Francisco during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Owsley’s son, Starfinder Stanley, has been tasked with the job of cataloging and transferring his father’s reel-to-reel concert recordings to a digital format. The first fruits of the younger Stanley’s labor will arrive with the release of the seven-disc box set, Doc & Merle Watson: Never The Same Way Once, which is due out on June 23rd.
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Owsley Stanley was known as a brilliant sound engineer, whose focus on microphone placement over the use of a soundboard to equalize the sound characterized his work. For his Sonic Journals, Stanley would capture a set as a whole rather than cutting out and remastering the individual tracks, as noted by his son Starfinder in a recent article in SF Gate, saying, “He really viewed them as capturing a musical event and not as a recording that could be cut up and overdubbed and reconfigured. . . . What he wanted was to present the show as it was experienced. Its warts and all. He wouldn’t fix mistakes.”
After Owsley died in 2011, the responsibility of dealing with the immense Sonic Journal archive fell to Starfinder. With these reels having lived in storage for over fifty years, time has increasingly become an issue if these musical records are to be preserved. In the same SF Gate article, Starfinder elaborated, “[Owsley] had told me that if he didn’t manage to deal with the tapes before he died, he expected I would deal with them to his exacting standards. . . . We have to transfer the music off the tapes before the tapes deteriorate and the music is literally lost. . . . They’ve got a finite life span, and it’s just about up.”
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Never The Same Way Once is the first Sonic Journal release and foreshadows the release of increasingly more concert recordings from Owsley’s archive. In addition to the Grateful Dead (including the group’s double bill with Miles Davis), other recordings include Johnny Cash, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and more.