Bob Weir talks about Dead & Company Sphere Residency and hopes for the band’s return

Dead & Company; Jay Blakesberg (Band)

During Dead & Company’s current 30 shows at the Las Vegas Sphere, no one onstage is exercising their gift of speech. As is typical for the Grateful Dead offshoot, for three and a half hours the music speaks for itself – with additional nonverbal support from the world’s most advanced concert video design on the dome’s wraparound screen. Although it sounds like the musicians are enjoying their experience as much as the sold-out crowds do every weekend, the band members haven’t spoken about what it was like to perform at this revolutionary venue… until now. And as you might expect or hope, they’re all optimistic about playing at this special china shop.

Grateful Dead co-founder Bob Weir and Dead & Company co-frontman John Mayer both spoke with diversity a month into their nearly three-month collaboration to share how they feel about the unique combination of music and spectacular visual effects. Our conversation with Weir is below, followed shortly by a chat with Mayer. (We’ve already spoken to co-founder and drummer Mickey Hart; you can read the earlier interview here.)

Other musicians may be capitalizing on the rave reviews from critics and Deadheads for the residency, which was recently extended through August 10. But Weir made a point in our chat about how he thinks there’s still room for growth — and pretty rapid growth, at that — in the use of technology in their show. Does that mean Dead & Company, who have already completed a farewell tour, might not be done when this engagement ends? In our interview with Mayer, he said that hasn’t really been discussed, but Weir, for his part, sounds very optimistic, saying he “wouldn’t be surprised if we were invited back” — and that he’s up for it, especially if there’s room to push the audiovisual connection even further.

From both a box office and critical perspective, Dead & Company: Dear Forever – Live at Sphere was a smash hit. For its first weekend, May 16-18, the group reported a box office haul of $13,406,000, driven by 50,275 tickets sold in the first three nights. Overall, their camp said, the shows averaged about 16,000 attendees per night, pretty close to capacity, and brought in an average gross of about $4 million. Even a conservative runtime estimate would put those dates at well over $100 million. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that true fans will want to see as many shows as possible, with wildly different setlists each night — and a few different visuals alternating in and out, too — unlike U2’s first tour, which stuck closely to a standard script.

The following Q&A has been slightly condensed for length and clarity, and features Weir addressing some points of interest to fans, including whether it’s likely that recordings of the Sphere performance will be released, as has been the case with previous Dead & Company shows.

After the farewell tour, did you find that you would have considered any residency offer that came your way because you still love performing? Or was it the fact that it was Sphere and a completely new A/V experience that tipped the balance for you?

It was both, actually. I think we enjoyed playing on the last summer tour, and so that (a gig) was kind of in the air. And then Sphere and the storytelling you can do with it made it incredibly attractive.

Do you see the current Sphere residency as part of a continuation of the Dead’s story, as there have been important visual components throughout the decades? Or do you consider this a completely separate chapter?

Again, both. I mean, working from the stage at the Sphere is like opera. The opportunity to tell stories there really surpasses anything else. Every artist, no matter what kind, is first and foremost a storyteller. And you don’t get that anywhere else at the moment. The story that’s being told in the pictures is indirectly connected to the story we’re telling on the stage. And as far as I can tell, that’s pretty satisfying for the audience.

As we work with these folks, we’re going to try to connect more dynamically. I think we’re just scratching the surface here.

What do you think can still be done if you move forward from here?

The technology isn’t quite there yet to get the visuals (in a huge space) completely in sync with the music… That’s to do with the drums. They’re generally a little late and stuff. But there’s audio technology that keeps up with the music. And I think we’re going to try to adapt some of that audio technology to the visual technology.

If you go back 50, 60 years to the Acid Tests (Ken Kesey’s visionary events in San Francisco), when they had these overhead projectors and did light shows with clear glass plates and oils and all that stuff, they made the stuff dance to the beat of the music. And I want to see if we can do something like that. And on top of that now they have to upload everything pretty much before the show or they have to know what’s coming. I would like to see the arrangement become a lot looser and more interactive – and I think it will if we try it again.

Although this was spectacular for people, are you still thinking about possible improvements to make it even more spontaneous, with real-time changes and visual/creative decisions?

Yeah, I think that’s the next threshold to the next level of this experience. And then I think it goes on to something bigger and bigger.

It sounds like you’re glad you did it and that it’s paying off and rewarding for both you and the audience.

Yeah. I have to say, we had to work at it. The venue is seven and a half acres of hard, parabolic, reflective surface aimed directly at the stage, which means you get slapback onstage that’s just as loud as what’s happening onstage. So we have to play with in-ears, and we had to get used to it. These in-ears are pretty powerful earplugs, and you can’t hear anything around them – I mean, I’m deaf when I’m wearing them and they’re not plugged into anything. And then we have to try to keep the slapback away from our microphones, by any means possible. … And we did a pretty good job of that. It took a little while, but we thought it was worth the effort to make it work for the audience, because that’s what we’re here for.

Do you think you could do it again, for example come back next year?

Possibly. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were invited back and I would definitely make room for it.

When you guys are creating your setlists, do you spend a lot of time thinking about what songs might fit with a certain visual element that needs to be in the show?

Oh, believe me, there is! Yes.

Because it doesn’t always seem like they’re specifically connected. But in certain places, like the scene where the imagery of a western movie appears while the credits say “Bobby Weir as Ace,” there often seems to be a fitting choice.

Oh yeah, sure. But, you know, I can imagine having a color-coded list in front of me. When John (Mayer) sings the song, it’s kind of like what Jerry (Garcia) and I always did. While he was singing, I was obviously playing, but I was also busy thinking about what I was going to do next. I had this song to figure out what I was going to do next. And then when I was singing, he had this song to figure out what he was going to do next. I can imagine technology advancing to a level — and it’s advancing rapidly — so that the next time we have the opportunity to play there, we’ll be at a level where while John is singing a song, I can decide what I’m going to do next, make that selection, and I’ll have a list of color-coded songs and we might even have a list of background content scenarios that I can make a selection from. First, there is a list of songs color-coded, starting with the songs that will be next in rotation. This is pretty much how Jerry and I worked when we put the entire show together night after night…

So it sounds like you’re having to plan everything a bit better than usual at the moment so that the video team is prepared, but one can imagine that it would be more improvised in every way…

Now we’re getting the hang of it, getting to grips with the situation, and we can start thinking a little bit about combining technologies and things like that to get us to where I think we’re going. It’s going to take a lot of work, but I think we can make it to the next phase.

Some of the visuals are very specific to the band or its history, with symbols from the past, be it mascots or recreations of the past and venues you’ve played. Zooming out from Haight Ashbury into the cosmos at the beginning of the show and back at the end is a highlight for a lot of people. Is there anything you like best about the visuals?

Somehow I like being in space. I feel right at home there!

One The great thing about these shows is that you can close your eyes for the entire show and still get your money’s worth. If you keep your eyes open, you might get double or triple your money. But these are shows that people would still like to have audio recordings of, which is what they’ve come to expect from Dead & Company shows in the past…even though there’s no way to properly capture on video what really happens in Sphere.

Well, you know, I’ve always thought that the overall experience is the overall experience. And there’s a possibility that we could offer a show in VR, so with these glasses that you wear with headphones. We could do that, but I can’t imagine offering anything less. Because we’re kind of playing on the monitor screens that we have in front of us. We’re playing on what we can see, and we’ve all had plenty of opportunity to look at these backgrounds that are happening behind us and above us. We kind of know what we’re playing on, and we’re playing on it. The overall experience would be lacking without the background. So the only way is to offer it in these full formats.

It sounds like you’re really interested in the future in how technology can evolve for a return to Sphere. It seems like this has the potential to spoil you for anything more conventional? Could you also see yourself doing a more traditional residency? There’s been speculation about what the band might do to celebrate the Dead’s 60th anniversary.^th Anniversary.

We take it as it comes. Right now, all I can think about is what I’m doing. … You know, a residency could be fun – a different kind of residency – just to keep us fit. Because this band Is It’s fun to play with; there’s no getting around it. We’ll just see what happens.