John Mayer and Mickey Hart of Dead & Company talk about their big Strange Sphere trip – and the future of the band

I’ll start by telling you one of the first things I told John Mayer when we spoke on the phone for this story: I saw Dead and Company’s Sphere show in Las Vegas in mid-May, on the third night of the band’s first weekend of spring and summer appearances there. A few days later, I was back home in LA, walking my dog ​​down a set of concrete stairs carved into a steep hillside. Halfway up, I stopped and looked up and out at the distant hills across from the one I was standing on. In the afternoon sun, the hillside in the distance looked artificial and flat and seemed to be tilting away from me. I reached for a railing and felt a rush of vertigo—a special kind of vertigo, novel yet familiar, and after a second I realized where I had felt it before: in Vegas, during the Dead & Company Sphere show, where the all-encompassing wall of LED screens that lined the interior of the Sphere always did something to fool your stupid eyes and thus your brain, making you think you were in motion, like you were floating over a snow-capped mountain range at sunset, or sinking into the ocean, or watching the West Coast shrink as you ascend through the troposphere before jumping into psychedelic hyperspace. Now, back in the real world, I was looking at things I knew were real and questioning their veracity. I had a Ball Flashback.

When I tell all this to John Mayer—who served as an intermediary between Dead & Company and Treatment, the creative agency that produced the visuals for the Sphere shows—he doesn’t laugh at me. He knows exactly what I mean, and knows even better than I do what too much Sphere can do to the brain. “There was a time while we were doing this show,” he says, “when I was in the Sphere overnight for three, four days in a row.” Starving for perspective, he sought out a real view: “You really just have to look at something that’s really far away,” he says. Even he isn’t immune to the power of the world’s most immersive live entertainment venue. “I mean, we really hijack your senses,” Mayer says. “It’s sensory hijacking. And it’s a lot of fun to be behind that nonsense.”

August will mark nine years since Mayer joined the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann to play the Dead’s music under the name Dead & Company, raising eyebrows and irritation among those who knew him primarily through his pop radio hits. But his arrival coincided with a broader revival of the Deadhead scene in the public consciousness and helped make Dead & Company — featuring Oteil Burbridge on bass, Jeff Chimenti on keys and eventually Jay Lane of Primus and Weir’s Ratdog replacing Kreutzman on drums alongside Hart — the most commercially successful spinoff in post-Dead history. The band’s 2023 tour was the fifth-most lucrative rock tour of the year, trailing only Metallica, Depeche Mode, Elton John and Coldplay — 28 shows, grossing around $115 million, more than double that of any previous Dead & Company tour. It had also been billed as the band’s last tour, which it may well have been—but sometime that fall, Mayer recalls, talk of the Sphere turned to Dead & Co. after U2 completed their first solo tour, leading to the show they’ve been playing three nights a week since May, using all of the venue’s modern facilities to fully immerse guests in the Grateful Dead’s sonic and visual legacy.

It’s easy to be cynical when considering the Grateful Dead’s transformation from a band to a brand, a process that began around the time the first Jerry Garcia ties hit the shelves in the ’90s, and which has arguably reached some sort of zenith or endpoint of fear and hate out here in the desert, in an 80,000-square-foot globe next to the Venetian, where you can spill out of the show onto the casino floor with Because it costs a lot to win/Even more to lose still in your ears. But rather than exaggerate the irony here, let’s just note that using cutting-edge technology as both a means of mischief and sensory overload has been part of the Dead’s modus operandi since the Acid Tests, in which they played while various Merry Pranksters chased taped voices through strobe-lit rooms. In 1973, the Grateful Dead toured with a gigantic, state-of-the-art, totally impractical PA system called the Wall of Sound—over six hundred speakers tuned for maximum clarity and range, nearly 29,000 watts of power, separate quadruple channels for each string of Phil Lesh’s bass. Decades later, at the tour’s final concerts at Oracle Park in San Francisco last summer, squadrons of drones lit up the night sky, forming images of top hat-pulling skeletons and dancing bears.

The “Dead Forever” Sphere shows go far beyond that — they’re moving tributes to the Grateful Dead’s living legacy, a sentimental journey on a blockbuster scale, and also metaphysical theme park rides that use this multibillion-dollar venue’s remarkable mood-manipulation abilities to create trippy and emotive effects, especially during the “Drums/Space” portion of the evening, when the haptic seats vibrate your bones to the beat of Mickey Hart’s percussion. “It took me a while to get used to it,” Hart tells me in an interview a few days before I speak with Mayer. “You have to understand that this is an extraordinary robot and you’re in the middle of it… Once you get used to it, like with anything, you can really make some serious magic happen.”