Reckoning with the dead in the sphere

And yet. In the years that followed, the surviving members reunited in various constellations: The Dead, The Other Ones, and Furthur, to name a few. They utilized dozens of substitute guitarists, some of them Garcia impersonators, some not. But the absence of their reluctant leader and brightest light brought out differences both fresh and latent, and greed and selfishness tore apart their alliances. At various points, the members stopped talking to each other; Weir, the rhythm guitarist, and Phil Lesh, the bassist, engaged in a kind of cold duel over who would be the standard-bearer. In 2015, on the fiftieth anniversary of the band’s formation, jam impresario Peter Shapiro rounded up the remaining members for a series of stadium concerts, a supposedly final farewell called Fare Thee Well. But rather than sealing the mine shut, this extravagance opened a new vein. Weeks later, Weir announced a new band called Dead & Company, centered around Mayer, a guitar ace who has recently become obsessed with Garcia’s playing style and songwriting. Lesh is out.

Somehow this version, with its tongue-in-cheek nod to corporate structures, was the one that took off, the image that drew new listeners and sold out stadiums. For some it became the real thing, a simulacrum rather than a simulation. I went to see Dead & Co. a few times, at Citi Field or Madison Square Garden. They quickly acquired the name Dead and Slow, because of the slinky tempo insisted on by Weir, the supposed boss, or at least the top-tier rock star. I missed the muscle of the good stuff. Still, there were moments. The other players – Jeff Chimenti on keys, Oteil Burbridge on bass, and now Jay Lane with Hart on drums – are fine musicians. I got carried away occasionally. I didn’t want to be a spoilsport.

Mayer is obviously a great guitarist, smooth and nimble, an ace impersonator who also has his own panache. He’s intelligent and very eloquent about his passion for the music of the Grateful Dead. But his blues accents, his exaggerated guitar faces (all that grimacing and posturing), his designer watches, celebrity girlfriends and tennis shoes – it can come across as a bit silly. Nobody needs him to be a diabetic drug addict hunched over the fretboard, but the contrast between the fresh-faced show-off and the beatnik recusant whose Pumas he wants to imitate is stark in both attitude and style.

Many fans don’t seem to mind. Quite a few even love it. Dead & Co. have been around for nine years, played two hundred and fifty shows and sold nearly five million tickets. That includes their supposed farewell tour last summer, another false ending with inflated prices. This tried-and-true illusion of scarcity or finality boosted their average gross per night to $4.5 million. The Dead had come into fashion, perhaps bigger than ever—or broader, anyway. The influx of casual musicians rivaled that of the so-called touchheads in the post-coma era of the late eighties, after the success of the band’s only top-ten single, “Touch of Grey.” We’re everywhere, Deadheads like to say. That statement used to suggest infiltration and serendipity. Nowadays it implies saturation and perhaps even a kind of cultural fatigue.

By now, it’s hard to imagine anyone hasn’t heard of the Sphere. They may even know that we should really call it the Sphere, without the “the,” and that we’ve mostly chosen to ignore that. People like to say that James Dolan, the heir to Cablevision and owner of Madison Square Garden, spent $2.3 billion to build it, but technically it was a joint project between MSG and the Venetian that billionaire Sheldon Adelson sold to Apollo Global Management in 2022 before the Sphere was completed. In other words, while it may be Dolan’s pet project, it’s also a ripe manifestation of venture capital, a giant mushroom sprouting from the attention economy’s mushroom network. Sphere is now a separate publicly traded company, ticker symbol SPHR, whose shares have risen 11 percent in the past year. The goal is to create more Spheres. London has turned one down. South Korea is in the running, and Abu Dhabi seems likely.

The Sphere is connected to the Venetian by a climate-controlled passageway. From the outside, the building serves as a glowing, spherical billboard with 1.2 million LEDs, each containing four dozen diodes—basically an advertising space or electronic screen in a circle. Inside, it’s a venue with about 18,000 seats arranged under a giant dome that doubles as the world’s largest and highest-resolution LED screen. The sound system consists of about 160,000 speakers that allow engineers to direct discrete sounds to individual seats. The venue can also make those seats vibrate and produce smells—an odorama and orgasmatron in one. Dolan has said he was inspired by the Ray Bradbury short story “The Veldt,” in which a couple of snotty kids addicted to the realism of a man-made savanna on a virtual reality screen in their home end up throwing their parents to the virtual lions. One way to interpret this is that Dolan wants to ruin your shit. Another reason is that his father, Charles Dolan, may want to stay away.

Cartoon by Roz Chast

Last fall, U2 opened the Sphere and played forty shows, all largely the same in terms of setlist and visuals. The wows and “don’t you wish you were here”s made the rounds on social media. Next, Phish played four nights, each with its own setlist and corresponding visuals. More wows this time, as the ambitious pairings flirted conceptually and visually with something like art, making it difficult for the band to turn much of a profit. Dead & Co. came next: two dozen shows to start. Last month, despite somewhat lackluster sales, they announced half a dozen more. In all, ten lost weekends for the Deadheads in the desert, and more than a hundred million dollars in gross sales.

Mayer and Dead & Co. are both managed by Irving Azoff, a longtime industry stalwart and former CEO of Ticketmaster. (When Azoff’s clients, the Eagles, were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Don Henley said, “He may be Satan, but he’s our Satan.”) Azoff, who also manages U2, has a business partnership with Madison Square Garden. He got the Eagles to do their next Sphere tour after Dead & Co. It’s tempting to see Dead & Co. in their Sphere phase as a sophisticated Mayer-and-Azoff hybrid, and thus a perversion of the Grateful Dead’s long-standing (or long-stumbling) sideways approach to the music business. In fact, Azoff joined Dead operations in 1973, shortly before taking on the Eagles. He barely lasted more than a week. “He couldn’t stand our laid-back lifestyle,” Gail Hellund, who ran the band’s touring company, told the “Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast,” a cultural history podcast. “He was too LA for us. No harm, no foul. Just oil and water.”