these days, you always hear the advice “wear hearing protection onstage if you don’t want to go deaf” in the situation of live shows. but… what in the hell were they doing back then??? you don’t hear every musician from the 60s and 70s saying they have significant hearing loss, apart from the odd pete townshend. but even so, they were loooooud back then, and they had to be. amplification was less reliant on venue speakers, and the power was in the amps and how loud the drummer was… which is suuuper loud. these days, playing drums without hearing protection (i don’t do it regularly, if at all) for me literally brings pain to my ears, and i don’t understand how musicians played live with such loud playing environments and loud instruments without being in constant pain. think beatles shows, cream shows, any rock show being onstage with a drummer.
Not every musician from that time has hearing loss. Some of 'em are dead. </very bad black humor>
Seriously though, a lot of the guys from that time are dealing with hearing loss of some kind, whether they publicly admit it or not. The guys from the early 60s (i.e. Beatles) had it a
little easier, but by Woodstock, on-stage wattages were ridiculous. Many of them "got used to it", as soldiers of the day got used to the volume of small arms fire. Nobody really realized the long-term damage they were doing to their ears until years later, and anyway there really wasn't much else they could do; foam or wax earplugs that seal the ear canal change the timbre and even pitch perception of the ear, and the only other option until IEMs came along were big clunky shooting earmuffs, which weren't exactly a great stage look. Technology like brickwall limiting circuits that enable modern electronic hearing protection were studio monoliths, they wouldn't be small enough to fit in a pair of earphones until the late 90s, and they've really only just become cost-effective for the average musician. So, suffering for your art was really the only viable option.
As for why stage rigs got as ridiculous as they did, Colin Short, of the YouTube channel CS Guitars, has a pretty good digest of what was happening in this time to give us monsters like the iconic Marshall Plexi full-stack:
The short of it, for those who don't like inline YouTubes or Scottish accents, is that when the British Invasion first started, American pop music crowds, mostly teenage girls, had turned their "appreciation" for Elvis's gyrating hips into a fashion of spending the
entire show screaming. This wall of high-pitched peri-pubescent noise totally overwhelmed the limited power of the amps of the day, forcing bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones into a volume war with their own fans. PA systems used for vocals weren't up to the task of amplifying a full band either, requiring the guitar amps themselves to get louder. 15W 1x12 combos became 30w 2x12s, then 50w 4x12s, then 100w full-stacks. The iconic pictures of a wall of Marshalls behind Hendrix at Woodstock quickly became the fashion and expectation for rock shows, carrying this trend for high-wattage amps into the 90s, well after PA systems had
finally caught up in power and response to the point that you could and did mike up the full band in the mains and zone fills used in the heyday of arena rock.
Bass players, for our part, were caught up and dragged along in this volume war, in which we were at an immediate disadvantage pretty much from day 1. Almost everyone here knows that 15W, or even 100W, isn't really loud enough for bass in a band setting without PA help. Most of us know why; the Fletcher-Munson curve means the human ear is less sensitive to bass frequencies, and hi-fi sound systems gave listeners a taste of bass, to which they quickly became addicted, requiring live sound to match those expectations. Even Ampeg's massive 300W SVT-series "fridges" were barely enough to keep up in the 70s and early 80s., and arena rock bassists, much like guitarists, were daisy-chaining those as well. Bassists wouldn't gain the massive wattage weapons we have now in their relatively portable packages until the proliferation of the solid-state op-amp in the late 70s. This dramatically reduced the weight and space requirements and increased the durability of power amplifiers of a certain wattage. That at least meant fewer stacks, though the bass full-stack wouldn't begin to decline in popularity until well into the new millenium.
What we're seeing now is a return to the more appropriately-rated smaller combos of the 60s, both to reduce headroom and get back that classic power tube overdrive sound, and to reduce stage volume to save our own hearing and our audience's. That's good for bassists as well, as we only have to compete with 15 to 30-watt tube amps instead of 100W, making combos in the 200-500w range more than enough, especially with a little extra in the foldbacks. Not to mention that smaller, lower-power gear is much easier to load-in and much less taxing on the venue's power panel. Paying attention to hearing protection is encouraged much like using sunscreen; we have the technology, the consequences of not making use of it are well-known, so just do it.
