How Dead & Company came to life again at the Las Vegas Sphere

About four hours before they’re due to appear under the giant wraparound video screen at the Sphere, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and John Mayer stroll into a backstage production office like three guys showing up – again – to blow 17,000 people away.

“Nice to meet you,” Mayer says with a grin and extends his hand. “John Mayer, Mayer Industries.”

As founding members of the Grateful Dead, guitarist Weir, 76, and percussionist Hart, 80, are jam-band greats; Mayer, 46, is the singer and guitarist known for pop hits such as “Gravity” and “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” Together they form the core of Dead & Company, who this afternoon are halfway through their 30-day summer residency at the Sphere, the state-of-the-art dome-shaped venue behind the Venetian Resort on the Las Vegas Strip.

Not that they count.

“Halfway? If you say so,” says Weir, sinking into the lotus position on a sofa next to his bandmates. Hart, his hands in his trademark white golf gloves, adds: “It’s just a habit for us. We always come here three days a week and play our stuff.”

John Mayer describes Dead & Company’s Sphere residency as “a journey through the metaphysical anthropology of the Grateful Dead.”

(Lively reporting)

A year ago, they seemed ready to break that habit: After playing more than 200 shows since 2015, when the band reunited after a public departure from the Grateful Dead, Dead & Company wrapped up what was billed as its final tour in July with three shows at Oracle Park in San Francisco, where the Grateful Dead formed in the mid-1960s and quickly became a fixture of the city’s Haight-Ashbury counterculture. (The other members of Dead & Company are bassist Oteil Burbridge, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and drummer Jay Lane, the latter of whom replaced Bill Kreutzmann, another Grateful Dead founder, after Kreutzmann leaves the band in 2023.)

But the prospect of Sphere’s visual splendor lured the group back to the stage.

The $2 billion venue, with its 15,000-square-foot screen said to have the highest resolution in the world, opened to great acclaim last fall with a stunning show by U2 that placed the veteran Irish band amid photorealistic images of the Las Vegas desert in the pre-neon era; Phish followed U2 to the Sphere in April, transforming the building’s domed surface into an underwater cave and the soapy interior of a car wash.

Mayer believes that a “new big league” of acts has established itself at the venue overnight, who are happy and able to exploit Sphere’s technical potential.

“I think what we all love is that there’s finally a race for live music again,” he says, dressed in tan cargo pants and a tight black T-shirt. “There’s the race for social media, the race for podcasts, the race for AI (artificial intelligence). But live music has remained essentially the same for so long.”

Mayer stresses that it is not ego that motivates the musicians to play Sphere – “Well, it is a bit ego,” he clarifies – but rather the drive “to delight and surprise people more than they expected with this big, blank canvas and this really big palette.”

Compared to the other offers Dead & Company received for engagements that did not require extensive travel, this was “a very tempting option,” according to Hart.

Dead & Company’s concert series, titled Dead Forever and running through Aug. 10, has been a clear box office success, grossing an average of $4 million per night, according to the band. In addition, nearly a third of concertgoers bought tickets for more than one date, according to the group — repeat purchases likely equate to heavy spending at Dead & Company’s pop-up merchandise store at the Venetian, where fans can buy T-shirts, hoodies and even a pair of handmade Belgian loafers featuring the band’s cheerful dancing bear logo. (The shoes cost $395.)

“Dead Forever” begins and ends with scenes set in the Dead’s hometown of Haight-Ashbury.

(Lively reporting)

More importantly, Dead Forever is an artistic triumph: a demonstration of the musicians’ deeply woven playing, given emotional narrative power thanks to the possibilities of space. The show opens with a stunning sequence – designed by Industrial Light & Magic and endlessly shared on TikTok – in which the audience seemingly blasts off from Haight-Ashbury into space; three hours later, we return to Earth after visiting some key locations and moments from Dead history, including Cornell University’s Barton Hall in 1977 and the Egyptian pyramids in 1978.

“We’re pushing the envelope here,” Weir says, munching on a handful of peanut butter-filled pretzels. The bearded guitarist compares Dead Forever’s storytelling to an opera; Mayer says the visual content, which he helped develop with London’s Treatment Studio, “has a little Disney ride in it.” Mayer came to the Dead relatively late, having heard the band’s “Althea” on Pandora; for him, this show represents “a journey through the metaphysical anthropology of the Grateful Dead, hosted by Dead & Company.”

What seems to fuel Mayer – 29 years after Dead mastermind Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack at age 53 – is his desire to bring the band’s music and iconography to younger listeners and people outside the traditional jam band ecosystem. And indeed, that seems to be happening in Vegas, as in the case of Tucker Halpern of dance-pop duo Sofi Tukker.

“Growing up, the Grateful Dead weren’t a big part of my life,” Halpern says. But as millennials with their own band roster, he and bandmate Sophia Hawley-Weld were so intrigued by Mayer’s presence in Dead & Company that they recently attended a Sphere performance. His verdict? “Amazing – a really beautiful journey.” An older hip-hop musician, Questlove of the Roots, offered similar praise for the band in an Instagram post last weekend, calling Dead Forever “a fucking astral performance.”

This kind of pop culture penetration is, of course, not unprecedented for the Dead: In 1987, the band scored its only top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Touch of Grey,” which MTV could barely ignore. (Last month, Vampire Weekend covered the song at the Hollywood Bowl.) The immersive audiovisual spectacle of the Sphere production is also not a new concept for the group, as Rolling Stone editor-in-chief David Browne points out.

“From the beginning, going to a Dead concert always felt like entering a closed world – a kind of country of your own,” says Browne, author of “So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead.” “The light show and the trippy album covers were an integral part of their overall aesthetic.”

But Dead Forever certainly takes the presentation to a new level of grandeur and precision. “I think part of us loves the idea of ​​Showtime – like ‘places, people,'” Mayer says, and nothing in the show demonstrates that better than the finale, when night after night, Dead & Company perfectly time the end of a song to the landing in Haight-Ashbury.

When asked how they do it, Mayer calls Weir a “time-aware genius,” although he offers a more practical explanation. “It comes from years of hearing that if you go over time, you’ll have to pay a $25,000 fine per minute,” he says, referring to the strict curfews enforced by the union’s stagehands. “We might be 20 minutes late getting in – but we’re never late getting out,” he adds with a laugh.

“I’m proud to be able to watch the union rep,” Weir says. “He thinks, ‘Oh man, these guys are really tough…’ But I can put a stop to him when the clock is ticking.”

Weir, Hart and Mayer agree that a major benefit of Dead & Company’s extended stay at the Sphere is that they don’t have to constantly get used to the idiosyncrasies of a new venue.

“If you think about it, every time we play somewhere, it’s an away game,” says Mayer. “This is the first time we’re the home team.” He laughs. “You can leave a jersey in the stadium and then wear it again instead of having someone send it to you.”

Could that comfort level entice the band to play the Sphere a second time? Mayer says there certainly won’t be any more dates this year. (On Sept. 20, the Eagles will begin a 16-date run that runs through mid-December.) But he adds, “I think the modularity of the show makes it future-proof.”

“It’s still a work in progress,” says Weir, who envisions a greater degree of interactivity between the musicians and the crew controlling the visual effects on Sphere’s screen. “Eventually the technology will be so advanced that the guys will be able to guess where we’re going and then be there for us with a little surprise.”

Mayer says: “It’s a little sad that every year brings more scope and dimensions – that the 12th band here will have colors that we don’t have. But I think this is the first time in a long time that we feel somehow honored to be part of something that is so high up in everyone’s cultural awareness.

“We all think: How cool is that?”