dead and company tour history

Dead & Company

For questions about ADA Seating at Sphere, visit: Accessibility Services | Sphere .

Cookie banner

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy . Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use , which became effective December 20, 2019.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies.

Filed under:

A Requiem for the Dead

Dead and Company—the most successful and longest-running post-Jerry configuration of Grateful Dead members—has purportedly given up the road. We took one last trip to Shakedown Street to make sense of what it all meant and what it means if they’re done.

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Twitter
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: A Requiem for the Dead

The Grateful Dead have died many times. Depending on whom you ask, their first death came only a few years after their 1965 formation, as the raunchy organ jams and all-night raves of their psychedelic days gave way to statelier songwriting and more sophisticated playing. The transition was punctuated by the 1973 death of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the harmonica player and vocalist whose ability to command a room and yelp out blues ad-libs for half an hour on “Turn on Your Lovelight” made him an intensely personable figure; at one point, he was so recognizable, the band’s label ran a Pigpen look-alike contest. But as the Grateful Dead’s exploratory ethos inevitably led them to new territory and better drugs, Pigpen was left behind. He avoided psychedelics, drank bottle after bottle of wine, and stopped touring a few months before his death. Though Jerry Garcia was already the band’s intellectual center, Pigpen had been its major draw and frontman, until he wasn’t. His final show, at the Hollywood Bowl in 1972, marked the last time a truly charismatic singer performed Grateful Dead music with any of the band’s original members.

Until October 29, 2015. That was when Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann took the stage at Times Union Center in Albany, New York, for the first gig with their new guitarist and co-vocalist: John Mayer. The surviving members of the Grateful Dead have reconfigured themselves several times since Garcia’s 1995 death, playing under a variety of names both together (the Other Ones, Furthur, the Dead) and solo (Phil Lesh and Friends, Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros., RatDog). Plenty of guitarists have been put in the unenviable position of stepping into Garcia’s role as the band’s primary musical force, to varying degrees of success. But with all due respect to Warren Haynes, there has never been anyone quite like Mayer involved with this music before.

The Dead and Company lineup didn’t make immediate musical sense in 2015 and was, quite frankly, very funny for people who didn’t care about Mayer or the Dead. Enlisting Mayer, with his bankable face and blandly virtuosic blues-scorching style, seemed like an extraordinarily obvious cash grab and an artistically suspect decision; it seemed equally impossible to imagine Mayer fans wooking out to the red-eyed reggae of “Estimated Prophet” and crusty Deadheads savoring slicked-back versions of old Pigpen songs.

But over the course of eight years and 235 shows, Dead and Company performed several miracles. They lasted longer than any post-Garcia configuration of Grateful Dead members—a genuine feat considering the level of animosity and manipulation among those surviving players—and consistently played to crowds that rivaled those the Dead drew in the heady gate-crashing days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they were the biggest touring act in the country. Those bigger crowds in turn rekindled the parking-lot scene that has been part of Dead culture since the late 1970s at a scale not seen since the days of Garcia. Though they fastidiously refused to expand it, Dead and Company developed a genuinely new way of performing and presenting what is almost certainly the greatest and most dynamic songbook any American rock band has ever produced.

But perhaps most important, they maintained and ultimately solidified the legacy of the Grateful Dead—not so much as a band but as the originators of a distinct form. Though it may seem unlikely when artists of their generation are selling off their catalogs for nine digits, no rock band of any era will be remembered as fondly as them. Most musicians understand their primary medium to be the studio recording, which makes sense—you can maintain control in the studio, and the songs are placed on a gallery wall and can be admired like paintings. They are, essentially, finished. But by understanding their music as something that should be made fresh night after night for new fans, year after year and decade after decade, the Grateful Dead suggested that their songs are never complete. There is no final version; there’s not even a definitive live version.

In 2023, even the most proficient Beatles tribute acts are working the college-bar circuit, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone daring to take up the mantle of the Lennon-McCartney catalog with any credibility once Sir Paul calls it quits. But in 100 years, there will still be bands who are able to tour the country playing Grateful Dead music in new and inventive ways, bringing the old corpses to life once again, and there will be crowds eager to hear them do it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. These are all solidified thoughts, intellectual end points, and even if they’re where we’ll end up, there’s no telling how we’ll get there.

Which is, as you’ve probably heard, the whole point. I set out to see as many Dead and Company shows as I could this summer, ultimately catching 10 concerts in four states, from the warm-up at Jazz Fest to the three-night finale in San Francisco. I wasn’t in search of the true meaning of America or after any of the other very literary reasons people often give for going on the road; we have more than enough writing from white people who are trying to figure out why they don’t feel at home here. I am a Deadhead. I sigh as I say so, for I see the paisley-patterned connotations that spill out of that word the moment I type it. I was 9 years old when Garcia died, and my natural taste runs between slippery jazz and blackened death metal. But the music of the Grateful Dead has a hold on me that I cannot explain. I wanted to figure out why I’m not the only one.

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival has run nearly every year since 1970, and it has almost always had terrible weather. There is really no good time to stage an outdoor festival in New Orleans, or at least not one that spans seven days of on-site performances over two weeks. For hours leading up to Dead and Company’s set on May 6, it rains hard—pelting, driving, tropical rain, the kind that obviates any rain gear—and, perversely for New Orleans at this time of year, it’s cold . I clutch my link of boudin and shiver, resigned to being physically miserable in a way that is at least novel, while my battle-hardened local friends and warm-blooded midwestern spouse laugh and place bets on what the band will open with. A shirtless guy in a crumbling cowboy hat wanders past selling enamel pins of the Steal Your Face skull and lightning bolt logo (a.k.a. the Stealie), the Terrapin Station turtles, and Garcia’s Wolf logo. I mention to him that I’d seen him at the Hollywood Bowl in the past and ask whether he still has any of his “Gayer for Mayer” pins. He shakes his head and tells me he’s out of “Queer for Weir,” too.

Then, finally, with very little fanfare, Dead and Company wander onto the stage. Drummer Jay Lane, a one-time member of Primus and frequent Weir collaborator, has replaced Bill Kreutzmann. Decked in an Ancient Aliens T-shirt, he takes his place behind the kit as Weir and Mayer play a few tentative sideways notes. They resolve into “Truckin’,” and the clouds part, and the rain stops, and the sun shines. I know how unlikely that sounds; all I can tell you is that it’s true.

“Truckin’” is the final song on 1970’s American Beauty , which is, alongside the same year’s Workingman’s Dead , the Grateful Dead’s high-water mark as a studio band. Both albums are filled with country tunes with deceptively complex chord changes, stacked harmonies that defy the individual singers’ occasionally pitchy individual performances, and a rustic charm that feels more attainable than, say, the baroque folk-pop of their friends in Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Every song on both albums feels like it could have been written in the 19th century.

Dead and Company play “Cumberland Blues” at Jazz Fest. They play it again in Phoenix a few weeks later, and again in Bristow, Virginia, and at Wrigley Field. They cannot stop playing “Cumberland Blues” on this tour. It’s fairly straightforward, at least for a Dead song: a two-stepping shuffle that moves a touch faster than the rhythm seems to be comfortable with. The music is a nice mirror of the narrator’s exhaustion after being kept up all hours of the night by his beloved Melinda, who seems not to respect the physical and emotional rigors of his life in the mine. The narrator pointedly does not want to dance—or whatever else Melinda’s trying to get him into. But the song doesn’t care, and throughout the summer, the band seems to side more and more with Melinda. Dead and Company long ago developed a reputation in the wider Deadhead community for their slackened tempo—Dead and Slow, they’re called—but all tour, they play the song at a blistering pace that they’ve never even tried before. Mayer reels off lines in the breaks, getting notes out like he’s bailing out a boat. By the time they get to San Francisco in mid-July, “Cumberland Blues” has transformed from a lovely bit of electric bluegrass into a country dervish, a spinning, hyper-rotating hurricane of a song. This early performance in New Orleans is the first indication that—whether because of the addition of Lane or the stakes of the tour itself—the band is finding new life in the material.

If you consider yourself a discerning music person, the kind who has to call themselves a “music person” instead of a “fan,” it’s easy to get into Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty . All you need is a general appreciation for sturdy songs and a willingness not to think too much about how much Marcus Mumford probably likes them. But to get into the band’s live tapes—and thus into the essence not only of the Grateful Dead but of Dead and Company, as well—is much more difficult. You have to listen to a lot of 1950s rock covers. You have to listen to a lot of George Jones songs sung by someone who isn’t George Jones. You have to be able to look at a track list, see a 12:57 version of “Dancing in the Streets,” and have faith that whatever’s on the other side of the first two and a half minutes will be worth hearing Weir sing a disco version of a soul song.

I came to the Dead as a music person. I was going to pop-up record sales and buying rare Brazilian vinyl. I had a granular understanding of the modal differences between East African and West African music; I could typically tell whether a song had been recorded in Mali. I was “not really interested in the guitar anymore.” Most important, I was listening to a lot of Herbie Hancock and a lot of Can. In the mid-1970s, the jazz heavyweight and the free-spirited German weirdos were both pursuing a form of funk music that rippled with grooves and dissolved into space. You could dance to it, but it could also catch you up the way driving through the mountains sometimes does: You keep moving, but your mind is suddenly still.

At the same historical moment, the Grateful Dead were in pursuit of the same kind of sound. There are versions of “Dancing in the Streets” and especially Weir’s “Playing in the Band” from the mid-’70s that pulse and shimmer, where all sense of the original melody and tone has been completely scraped away and the band is intently exploring the foundation on which it was built. Kreutzmann liked to say that his goal as a drummer wasn’t to keep time but to keep mood, and once you begin to tune in to the mood that’s being cultivated by any form of the Dead, their ability to find new ways of expressing it becomes astonishing. The jam that leads “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire on the Mountain” on the May 8, 1977, tape—probably the band’s most famous jam—is mind-boggling at a technical level; there are moments in which all five musicians seem to be playing both songs at once. But it’s no less admirable for the way it sustains a feeling of buoyancy, of pleasant surprise, of a seemingly unlimited number of happily beguiling opportunities around every corner.

You have enough moments like this, and you eventually find yourself through the looking glass. You become someone who appreciates how the zapping laser of Garcia’s guitar gooses Weir’s vocal in “Dancing in the Streets,” who dreams about cracking open a few cold ones and listening to “El Paso.” You might completely forget that the thing that got you into this music was the wild-eyed, experimental nature of it. When you sing along in full throat to “U.S. Blues” with tens of thousands of people who aren’t aware or don’t care that the original band was being ironic when it sang the “wave that flag” chorus, you’ve come a long way toward being cured of the need to use music as a way to differentiate yourself. The appeal becomes simple: It feels good to drink beers in the daytime and sing songs with your spouse and your friends and fall in love with a band. And then you watch them spend 15 minutes turning “Bird Song” inside out until it feels like tissue-paper-soft jazz, and you look around and go, My God, there are 40,000 people at Mayer’s experimental music concert .

L.A.! The Fabulous Forum! Where Magic and Kareem went back-to-back! Where Nicholson was always courtside! Where Harry Styles went on a run of 15 sold-out shows, as the only banner hanging from the rafters proclaims! Outside, half the city of Los Angeles is crammed into the narrow channel of Shakedown Street, the vendor market that runs through the parking lot and is as ubiquitous a sight at Dead shows as tie-dye. (It is, in fact, the source of much of that tie-dye.) And onstage, Mayer is making his guitar twinkle and hum; he’s going textural and pursuing blue moods. Yes, he’s ripping a few mondo solos and making the faces as he does so. You can only redeem so much of a man.

Dead and Company would not be playing to this many people this often if Mayer weren’t onstage. But his celebrity doesn’t solely account for the group’s swelling popularity. In 2016, the first full Dead and Company trek made $29.4 million, according to industry standard keeper Pollstar, good for only the 59th-highest-grossing tour worldwide. By 2021, they took in $50.2 million and finished fifth, one spot below the Eagles and two above Guns N’ Roses—even though they didn’t even leave the United States. Were Mayer’s name the driving force behind ticket sales, you’d expect them to have been higher at the outset, before the novelty of seeing a superstar slumming it with wooks had worn off.

Instead, his image allowed the band to more easily capitalize on the momentum created by the 2015 Fare Thee Well concerts, in which Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann performed for the last time with bassist Phil Lesh. Dead and Company entered the world as both a curiosity and an excuse to keep the party going, but the strong performances—and the response from aging Gen X Deadheads starved for the massive stakes of the Grateful Dead’s late ’80s and early ’90s run—instantly made them into something bigger.

When the band was put together in early 2015, Mayer was only a couple of years removed from the lowest days of his career. In 2010, he’d given an interview to Playboy in which he called his ex-girlfriend Jessica Simpson “crack cocaine,” used the n-word, and compared his penis to David Duke. (His heart, though? “Benetton.”) In 2011, he was swimming in his pool and heard the knotty, questioning, guarded opening riff of the Grateful Dead’s “Althea” on Pandora. As he tells it, he sprinted into the house sopping wet to find out what he was hearing.

“Althea” didn’t cure Mayer—the next year he’d give another infamous interview, this one to Rolling Stone , in which his claim to be able to hold his breath for four minutes and 17 seconds was probably the least noteworthy tidbit—but it did set him on a new path. In that same piece, Eric Clapton called Mayer a “bedroom” guitarist and said, “I wasn’t sure if John was aware of the power of playing with other people.” Perhaps aware he was supposed to be burnishing the younger player’s image, he added, “Though I think he is now.” The power of playing with other people is central to what makes the music of the Grateful Dead work. Garcia knew this intuitively. Though he possessed the skills to shred, he rarely did. His playing was rarely showy. Rather than draw attention to himself, he stoked the flames of what his bandmates were doing, hinting at directions they might take together or else allowing himself to soak in the mood they had collectively created. Every line seemed to end in a question mark; he didn’t make assertions, he made suggestions.

This is only part of the reason Garcia became an icon to many. Despite the Grateful Dead’s sunshine-daydream image in the popular mind, their music is deeply suffused with pain and confusion. Robert Hunter’s lyrics feint toward salvation without being able to offer it, and they’re deeply informed by the fact that each individual is ultimately responsible for navigating the fog of life. “If I knew the way, I would take you home,” goes the band’s defining statement, from “Ripple.” The scholar Brent Wood surveyed the band’s lyrics and discovered that about three-fourths of the songs Garcia sang are about suffering, and a full half of those songs are about death. Garcia played guitar in a way that perpetuated these feelings—the persistent reality of pain and the desire to find a little happiness anyway are both present in so much of what he did. With Dead and Company, Weir allows the songs to move more slowly, until the jams begin to take on an almost painterly quality. When it works, the jam becomes as much a part of the story as the lyrics, a sigh of emotion spontaneously exhaled by the six guys onstage.

It took Mayer a moment to understand how he fit into the music; witness him trying to play roadhouse blues in the twilit silence of a “Space” jam in 2015. But as he found his footing, and particularly as he developed his musical relationship with keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, his ability to meet the songs on their own terms deepened. “I’ve always said that if I’m doing my job right, I bring the crowd closer to the music they love while disappearing from the equation a little bit,” he wrote on Instagram a few days before the Forum shows. Indeed, it’s a minor miracle that his star power vanishes the moment he steps onstage, where he appears to be just some dude in an expensive-looking T-shirt and with very bad tattoos. While the jokes about 17-minute versions of “Your Body Is a Wonderland” never subside from some corners of the Dead world, by the time the 2023 tour arrived, Mayer was fully integrated into the cosmos. There have been “John Mayer Is Dead to Me” shirts on the lot for years. In San Francisco, I see one that says, simply and provocatively and sincerely, “He is my Jerry.”

Onstage at the Forum, he’s restrained and tasteful. He plays “Althea” as if he, too, is awed by the oracle at the song’s center, and by the oracle the song has been for him. It’s not hard to understand why. The titular character functions as a mirror for the narrator, telling him he’s been “honest to the point of recklessness” and “self-centered in the extreme.” He says he’s “lacking in some direction,” that “treachery” is “tearing me limb from limb.” “Ain’t nobody messing with you but you,” Althea tells him, and the truth cools his head.

The most commonly asked question on tour: “Where is Shakedown Street?” Named for the Dead’s disco-funk song, it’s ostensibly a tailgate, but that descriptor is wildly insufficient. The most common answer, also taken from the song: “You just gotta poke around.”

This is probably true in some places. In New York, at Citi Field, you do not have to poke around. Shakedown Street pokes you. It is impossible to miss, taking over a fenced-in parking lot under the elevated train tracks across the street from the stadium. Dozens of people are pushing through the narrow gate at all times, and instantly they’re surrounded by people with ice chests selling domestics, microbrews, White Claws, you name it for $5 a can. Grills hiss in the distance. Nitrous tanks hiss nearby. Balloons pop constantly. “Mushrooms, K, acid” is whispered loudly by dudes making conspicuous eye contact. A sign advertises BULK FEMINIZED SEEDS in bold type. There’s a booth selling Jerry rolls, which seem to be some kind of sandwich and not a drug. Everyone has their own version of grilled cheese: vegan cheese, gluten-free bread, but no sight of the guy from 2022 who promised “bacon in every motherfucking bite.” From every direction, tapes of old Dead shows—both Grateful Dead and Dead and Company—blast from portable stereos and car sound systems.

People started selling things in the parking lots at Grateful Dead shows as early as 1973, author Jesse Jarnow reports in Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America , around the same time they started following the band on tour. It makes sense: sell a few limp burritos, make enough money to get to the next show. By the 1980s, Shakedown became its own attraction, as its cheery lawlessness drew in crowds of college students anxious to party, runaways escaping the latchkey lifestyle, white kids with dreads claiming their parents still lived in Babylon, and genuine Deadheads, too. The psychologist Joseph Campbell, who lived next door to Weir, once took in the parking-lot scene in Oakland and declared it an “antidote for the atom bomb.” By 1989, it had expanded so much it made the Dead unwelcome in places they’d played for years, with riots and general mayhem leading the band to prohibit vending outside gigs. Did it work? Come on.

There is much to buy on Shakedown Street. Not just drugs, though definitely drugs. There are crystal sellers whose wares have gone dusty from years of exactly this, and those who are selling fragile $1,000 specimens that should probably not be out on a folding table with this many wasted people around. There are head-shop-quality patches and pins tacked to a corkboard. A guy calling himself Grateful Fred is selling metallic plaques of Dead iconography you can put on your trunk to make it look like Toyota is offering up a limited-edition Wookmobile; he has the hatchback door of a brand-new Volkswagen set up in his booth so that you can see how they look in situ.

But mostly there is versioning. In the same way that a dub producer takes the elements of a traditional reggae track and reframes it into something more wigged out, artists have been fucking with the iconography of the Grateful Dead and selling it back to Deadheads for decades. A pre-fame Keith Haring sold shirts on the lot in 1977, his characteristic line work already apparent in the doodles that fill the blank space in the Stealie. A guy calling himself New Springfield Boogie exclusively makes merch that references both the Dead and The Simpsons , and with the charisma of Lyle Lanley selling Springfield on the Monorail , he gleefully shares the names of his creations. Homer disappearing into the roses of the band’s Bertha skeleton is given the “St. Stephen”–referencing title “In and Out of the Garden He Goes.”

Anything worn onstage by Mayer gets a boost. In 2022, an official shirt designed by bootlegger Jeremy Dean with a dancing bear face and the word “California” in a straightforward script was sold out before the end of the first set at the first show of the tour. When I ask one vendor how many of his $80 sweatshirts (which have a BMW logo in the Stealie) he sold after John wore one in June, he demurs, telling me only, “A lot.” I ask another vendor whether he’s concerned the band will force him to stop selling his shirts, which violate the only enforced rule of vending by having the words “Dead and Company” on them. He laughs and tells me he’ll just text Mayer and have him sort it out.

This is commerce, plain and simple, and there are obvious points to be made about the co-opting of the counterculture and the frenzy of consumerism. Dead and Company themselves certainly aren’t shy about accruing capital. But in the moment, as the beers flow and the trips come on, it feels like a convincing illusion of everything Heads project onto the band: freedom, joy, bright abandon. Unlike at a sporting event, there is no sense of aggression because there is no opponent. Unlike at a mass church gathering, there is no sense of propriety or even reverence; the enthusiasm is ungated. At least until the sun goes down and the chemicals start to curdle, it is a bright, warm—druggy, paranoid—dream, the California ideal appearing like a mirage in the heart of New York City.

We spend two days at the Gorge, mostly sitting in a scrap of shade beneath what must be the only row of trees in all of eastern Washington, and the view never begins to seem real. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of the scenic natural amphitheater on the other side of the Cascades from Seattle and wondered what it’s like to see a show there. It is beyond picturesque. It is difficult—genuinely difficult—to take it all in. The stage is placed perfectly, right in a crook of the Columbia River, and for the first set of both nights, before the sun goes down, it is more or less impossible to pay attention to the band onstage. The rugged cliff faces and soft turns in the landscape are the only things around that look older and more weathered than Weir.

Other than the surprisingly robust cell service, there is nothing convenient about the Gorge. It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, equally remote from Seattle and Spokane. Getting in Thursday night takes three hours owing to increased security. The campsites, where thousands of Deadheads are posted up from Thursday night through Sunday morning, are a rugged mile or so trek from the entrance to the amphitheater itself. Even though the venue is nearly 40 years old, there are no permanent bathrooms.

The heat is so bad on Night 1, the band seems to check itself. They cut their tempo and ease their way through the songs, whether to discourage ecstatic dance in the crowd or to ensure they make it through the evening themselves. We are near the end of the road now, a week from the end of the tour, and everyone seems to be slightly distracted by that knowledge. Weed smoke clings to the ground as the sun pours into the amphitheater.

After the show, Shakedown stays open late. There are multiple bands playing in the campground, one of them working on a pacy jam that sounds like it’s on its way toward a Talking Heads song. In the morning, there are what appear to be Hare Krishnas playing a trance remix of chant music with live finger-cymbal accompaniment. I wander into Shakedown in search of iced coffee and find two kids in their 20s playing guitar, working their way through the Dead’s “Estimated Prophet” with no vocals, just wavering in the heat vision of one of Weir’s best songs. Someone is advertising a yoga retreat “for Deadheads ONLY” in Costa Rica. Another guy is hawking some kind of Dead-adjacent red wine despite the temperature. “What a long, strange trip it’s been for these grapes,” he cries. “But they’re here now, and so are you.”

So are we. “At this point, two and a half months in[to the tour], I’m exhausted,” Michael Koppinger Jr. tells me the next weekend in San Francisco. Koppinger is a vendor in his early 20s who went to his first show in Raleigh in 2018, was given LSD by a friendly beer salesperson before he even made it to Shakedown, and never looked back. “It blew my mind,” he says. “I was raised Catholic and in this strict upbringing and culture. If people did drugs, it was like, you were bad. So to just be in a space where you could do whatever and it was normalized, it kinda blew my shit.” He printed up his first shirt in 2021, with plans to sell a hundred or so over a weekend run, then come home. Instead, he pulled out of a plan to buy a house with his (now ex-)girlfriend, put everything he owned in his parents’ attic, and split. “I’ve been on the road pretty much since,” he tells me.

Besides the profound bodily exhaustion, the biggest struggle of being a touring Deadhead in 2023 is scraping together gas money. “Once you get to Shakedown, you can make things work,” Koppinger says. “You can get into the show, you can get fed, you can get a drink. The community takes care of itself. But getting show to show, spot to spot, it’s rough.” As they cross the country, Heads panhandle for gas money, pile into the backs of buses and sleep in piles, and do what it takes to get to the next show. “I don’t live in this amount of love and community in everyday life,” Koppinger says. “In 2023 America, alienated, atomized, no one does.”

It is easy to get caught up in this. Even as I roast away in Washington, I’m clinging to what remains of this tour, of the fiction that you can simply zone out of everyday life in the name of having a good time and bring the people you love with you. Nobody knows where this energy will go next summer, whether to jam upstarts Goose or to bluegrass hero Billy Strings or, as it did in ’95, back to Phish. What’s certain is that it won’t be destroyed, even if it transmutes. Even if it lies dormant.

Nobody believes that what happens on tour or at a Dead show is a truly sustainable lifestyle. Like the music itself, it’s ephemeral, being created and destroyed in the same moment. It takes up space in real life, but it exists outside it, in the carnivalesque. The trick, when it all finally ends, is to remember that and not get rolled up in the tent when the circus leaves town.

But first, we have to go to San Francisco.

There are many rumors. The obvious ones involve the last living members of the Grateful Dead who aren’t in Dead and Company: Lesh is going to sit in. Background vocalist Donna-Jean Godchaux will step in to sing. Kreutzmann will join in for “Drums” (Billy himself stokes the last one by tweeting, “You know what would be cool …” a week before the final show; he never elaborates). Bob Dylan toured with the Grateful Dead in 1987 and has been covering “Brokedown Palace” lately, plus he has a break in his tour. Neil Young is in the area and has a conspicuous hole in his itinerary, too. Some people shoot for the stars and insist Paul McCartney will come out for the twinned covers of Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” and “Hey Jude.”

In the end, none of this happens. Dead and Company set up in center field at Oracle Park and play six sets over three nights, about 10 hours of music, with no repeats. When they launch into “Bertha” to open Night 3, there is a prickling in the air. Bassist Oteil Burbridge’s wife has painted Garcia’s famous four-fingered handprint onto her husband’s face, and when the cameras focus on him during a cover of the Rascals’ “Good Lovin’,” the roar from the crowd is staggering. There have been so many big-time Dead shows in stadiums like this, and in the fresh daylight and cool early-evening San Francisco breeze, time collapses, and it feels like we’re inside each and every one of those shows; I’m fully conscious of the fact that for something to be timeless, it has to exit time, it has to die.

Weir was 16 when he joined the Grateful Dead. He grew up in Garcia’s shadow and never grew out of it. Garcia gained a kind of gravitas as he aged, even as heroin and diabetes ravaged his body and made him look 20 years older than he was. Weir courted silliness, wearing polo shirts tucked tidily into very small jean shorts. The Spinners, a religious movement that sprung up around the band and gained enough traction to warrant serious anthropological study, took as dogma what many fans felt: “Jerry Garcia is sacred and Bobby Weir is profane,” as Jarnow sums it up in Heads .

Another thing: “Bobby Weir makes me weep,” Jarnow tells me over Zoom one afternoon. He makes me weep, too. Somehow, in his old age, Weir has become a stately presence, a figure of poise. He carries with him the entire history of the counterculture, and he seems to feel its weight. When he sings Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” or Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried,” he inhabits the weariness of longing and guilt. There are Garcia songs that, thanks to age and wisdom or maybe just sheer repetition, Weir sings better than Jerry ever did: Witness him reel off the names of Billy Sunday and Jack the Ripper in “Ramble on Rose.” He sings with a far-off focus, as powerful and distant as a spaceship cruising through the cosmos. On Night 2 in San Francisco, he sings the postapocalyptic “Morning Dew” drenched in green light, his voice ragged and heartbroken as he surveys what’s left of the world after it ends.

Weir didn’t write the majority of the Grateful Dead’s best songs. “Ripple,” “Eyes of the World,” “Terrapin Station,” “Brokedown Palace,” “Sugaree,” “Althea”—they’re all Garcia’s. But over the 30 years they played together, Weir gained a better understanding of how those songs worked than anyone else possibly could. When he plays them, it’s hard to argue that they’re not in some way his.

The Grateful Dead keep dying. And regardless of whether Dead and Company are truly done right now, they will die one day, too. (Mayer set off a firestorm online by saying Dead and Company is “still a band—we just don’t know what the next show will be” a couple of days after the last show at Oracle Park; theories abound.) But written into the music is the notion that songs themselves don’t need their creators to live. This is hardly revolutionary in the world of jazz, where standards frequently outlive the people who wrote them, or in classical music, where most composers are incapable of performing their own works in the first place. But in rock ’n’ roll, where the cult of authenticity insists that meaning comes mostly in creation, rarely in interpretation, the music and ethos of the Dead are an anomaly. Dead and Company are far from the only group keeping this music alive, but Weir, convinced of the power of the songs as forms of expression and not simply vehicles for dancing or virtuosity or even experimentation, frames his band’s catalog with the dignity it deserves.

It is but one way of keeping the Dead alive. There are so many ways to express yourself, so many paths into and out of this music. Everyone has the right to desire their own expansion, to test their edges and see what else they might be able to contain. I see so many people on Dead tours who can’t possibly dress this way in their everyday lives. On tour, or at the one show they can afford to hit, or watching the livestream at home, or catching some local Dead band struggle through the “Slipknot!” changes, Deadheads enact the answer to a simple problem. The alienation we all feel is real and unavoidable. What if we learned to understand it as good?

Sadie Sartini Garner has written music criticism for Pitchfork , The A.V. Club , The Outline , and many other places. She lives in Long Beach, California, with her partner Rachelle.

The ‘Walk Hard’ School of Music Biopic Filmmaking

The nostalgic glow of the movie soundtrack, welcome to paradise: the oral history of green day’s ‘dookie’.

• Manage Account

Dead & Company Fading Away After Most Successful Tour in Spin-Off Band’s History

More than 840,000 fans saw the last lap of the spin-off jam band's final run.

By Gil Kaufman

Gil Kaufman

• Share this article on Facebook
• Share this article on Twitter
• Share this article on Flipboard
• Share this article on Pinit
• + additional share options added
• Share this article on Reddit
• Share this article on Linkedin
• Share this article on Whatsapp
• Share this article on Email
• Print this article
• Share this article on Comment
• Share this article on Tumblr

Taylor Swift Debuts 'Guilty as Sin?' Live on Guitar in Stockholm: 'One of My Favorite Songs' From…

See latest videos, charts and news

Dead & Co.

Trending on billboard.

• More than 130,000 tickets sold during the groups first three-show run at Folsom Field in Colorado, where Dead & Co. hold the record for most performances at the venue (13).
• The all-time record for shows played at Chicago’s venerable Wrigley Field (10), along with all-time paid attendance mark with 360,000 tickets sold. The group also has the record for single-show paid attendance for more than 40,000 for a 2017 gig.
• Most performances at New York’s Citi Field (11), including two sold-out shows this year to nearly 74,000.
• The all-time attendance record at Boston’s Fenway Park for most tickets sold in a single night, which was previously held by hometown heroes Aerosmith.
• The Final Tour found the band playing 112 unique songs; since their 2015 launch, Dead & Co. played 145 unique songs during 235 shows.
• Since 2015 the band has raised more than $13 million for nonprofits and environmental and social causes — including $4 million donated through charity auctions and online raffles. Among the beneficiaries were: Headcount, Reverb, National Parks Conservation Association, The Jerry Garcia Foundation, Heart And Armor Foundation, Gorilla Doctors, Seva.org, OXFAM, MusiCares, Surfrider Foundation, WhyHunger, iGiveTrees, Positive Legacy, Further Foundation, Conscious Alliance, Rainforest Action Network, Last Prisoner Project, HAPA, SPLC, and dozens of local and regional nonprofit groups.
• Working with Reverb since 2015, the band dedicated more than $1.6 million to greenhouse gas reductions and climate justice projects, avoided use of 125,000 single-use plastic bottles, neutralized 51,000 tonnes of CO2 and saw 100,000 environmental actions taken by fans.
• Registered more than 25,000 fans to vote.

With the final curtain appearing to close on the nearly 60-year road run by the Dead (and its various incarnations’) Weir, 75, has already announced a fall run of shows by his Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros featuring the Wolfpack group.

Get weekly rundowns straight to your inbox

Want to know what everyone in the music business is talking about?

Get in the know on.

Billboard is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Billboard Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

optional screen reader

Charts expand charts menu.

• Billboard Hot 100™
• Billboard 200™
• Hits Of The World™
• TikTok Billboard Top 50
• Song Breaker
• Year-End Charts
• Decade-End Charts

Music Expand music menu

• R&B/Hip-Hop

Videos Expand videos menu

Culture expand culture menu, media expand media menu, business expand business menu.

• Business News
• Record Labels
• View All Pro

Pro Tools Expand pro-tools menu

• Songwriters & Producers
• Artist Index
• Royalty Calculator
• Market Watch
• Industry Events Calendar

Billboard Español Expand billboard-espanol menu

• Cultura y Entretenimiento

Get Up Anthems by Tres Expand get-up-anthems-by-tres menu

Honda music expand honda-music menu.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

It was great while it lasted: Dead and Company has concluded final tour in California

The Grateful Dead's offshoot band, Dead and Company, concluded its final tour in California on Sunday. For fans and vendors who have been following the bands for decades, it's the end of an era.

Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Join our newsletter!

Dead & Company 2021 Tour Recap: Highlights, Stats, & Top Shows

Dead & Company , the Grateful Dead spinoff band featuring John Mayer (lead guitar/vocals), Oteil Burbridge (bass/vocals), and Jeff Chimenti (keyboards/vocals) alongside Grateful Dead alumni Bill Kreutzmann (drums), Mickey Hart (drums), and Bob Weir (rhythm guitar/vocals), recently completed their first tour since the COVID pandemic shut down the live music industry in March 2020.

The loosely-branded What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been tour was the longest in the band’s six-year history, lasting 31 shows split into three legs spanning from August 16th through Halloween . The shows continued the band’s established practice of playing two sets of material from the Grateful Dead’s repertoire, focusing heavily on original songs co-written by late guitarist/vocalist Jerry Garcia and the late lyricist Robert Hunter and Weir’s co-writes with the late John Barlow .

Because it was Dead & Company’s first tour since the pandemic arrived in early 2020, new protocols required that attendees were vaccinated or at least tested negative for COVID shortly before the event. However, early in the tour, there were enough no-shows by vaccinated-but-hesitant or unvaccinated ticketholders that people were actually giving top-priced tickets away on show days. By mid-October proof of vaccination became standard for ticketholders to gain entry while the number of no-shows lessened, with significant numbers of ticketless folks doing the one-finger shuffle outside all four Colorado shows and three of the four California shows.

Now that it’s over and we’ve more or less recovered, here’s a show-by-show recap, with our favorites listed at the end in the Top Shows section. We threw in some song statistics and a few other random details along the way too, so kick back, relax, and enjoy.

SUMMER TOUR, LEG 1 – AUGUST 16th – 28th

NORTH CAROLINA AND VIRGINIA

After 576 days without a Dead & Company show, the wait was finally over and the first show since January 2020 would finally happen, but not before one final setback from a thunderstorm that delayed the doors at the Coastal Credit Union Amphitheatre (aka Walnut Creek) and the start of the show. No matter. The band wordlessly took the stage to a deafening roar and kicked off a shortened six-song first set with the most meaningful version of “Touch Of Grey” in a long, long, long time.

The band was tight, rehearsed, and clearly happy to be back as well, as the second set’s pre-“Drums” ran eight songs, lasted over an hour, and included “Playing In The Band”, “Truckin’”, and the tour’s sole version of “Spoonful”. On the far side of “Space”, the band delivered the show’s highlight, a stunning debut of the blues dirge “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”, a yes-they-went-there moment if there ever was one, and the set ran so long that the venue’s curfew prevented an encore. Welcome. Back.

After a day off the tour resumed at the Jiffy Lube Amphitheatre in Bristow, VA outside Washington, D.C. After Mayer delivered strong versions of “Cold Rain & Snow”, “Mr. Charlie”, and “Dire Wolf” in the first set, he’d also get the nod to start the second with the Garcia/Hunter classic “Here Comes Sunshine”. This would be the first of several stellar versions of the song he’d deliver on the tour and take to a new level; in 2021 Mayer found his way to the heart of this song in the way that he’s previously done with “Althea”, “Deal”, and “Brown Eyed Women”. Not long after that, the first of only two uninterrupted versions of the classic pairing of “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire On The Mountain” on the entire tour would be another highlight.

NEW YORK AND PENNSYLVANIA

The tour’s third date was Dead & Company’s first post-lockdown show in a stadium, and seeing the band walk onstage at New York’s Citi Field made us feel like things were sort of getting back to normal. While the fact that the song had been overheard being played at soundcheck took the surprise factor away for some, the band opened the show with their debut of “Let The Good Times Roll”, a staple of Grateful Dead shows from 1988 onwards. Not only does this one fit the vibe like it always did, but the “everyone sing a verse” lyrics also allow monitors and PA levels to be adjusted as needed.

The second set kicked off with “Eyes Of The World” for the only time on the tour, and the “Drums” section would feature the debut of Voices Of The Rainforest , recordings sourced in Papua, New Guinea by Hart that included video footage to go along with them. The tour’s sole version of the elusive “Spanish Jam” followed “Space”, and aside from “Althea” and the encore of “The Weight”, the second set’s song list could have come from a Grateful Dead’s 1974 “Wall Of Sound” show.

We’ll talk more about the tour’s next four shows in Philadelphia, Bethel, Darien Lake, and Saratoga Springs in the Top Shows section at the end of the recap. And directly after them, the opening leg of the summer tour ended on a Saturday night at Hershey Stadium , which was the first night of Grateful Dead music at the venue since the OG band’s 1985 rain-soaked classic . Intentionally or not, Dead & Company’s show paid immediate homage to the peak of that 1985 night by starting with “The Music Never Stopped”, before deftly weaving Weir’s 90s-era Dead tune “Easy Answers” into it, a tricky tune that Dead & Company handle far more deftly than their predecessors. Later, the second set’s highlights came from another kaleidoscopic “Here Comes Sunshine” from Mayer, Weir’s second reading of “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”, and the tour’s sole performance of “Quinn The Eskimo” as the encore.

SUMMER TOUR, LEG 2 – SEPTEMBER 2nd — 18th

MASSACHUSETTS AND CONNECTICUT

These three New England shows clearly meant a little something extra to Wilton, CT native and Berklee College Of Music student John Mayer, who’d posted a photo of the Wilton exit on I-84 and also say as much on the day of the first show. The band would also take the opportunity to actively treat this trio of shows as a distinct group by starting and ending the three-show run (two nights at XFinity Centre   Amphitheatre  [aka Great Woods] in Mansfield, MA, and one at Hartford’s Xfinity Theatre ) by starting and finishing the run with the two halves of “Playing In The Band”, and the band would also split the tour’s first appearances of “Dark Star” over the two Great Woods shows as well. The aforementioned show-opening version of “Playing” combined seamlessly with “The Wheel” to last a combined 30 (!) minutes, while the second set kicked off with one of Mayer’s best versions of “Deal” on the tour, complete with him simultaneously fanning his guitar while repeatedly jumping up and down like a pogo stick.

After Friday’s Great Woods show (which we’ll talk more about in the Top Shows section at the end) and a day off on Saturday, the band made its way down I-84 to Hartford and picked right up where they’d left off, with a first set so stacked that the songs could have actually comprised a 1980 second set by the Grateful Dead if “Drums” and “Space” were added, and included “Shakedown Street”, “Samson & Delilah”, and “Franklin’s Tower”. The second set’s highlights came from the tour’s first versions of “St. Stephen”, “William Tell Bridge”, and especially “The Eleven”, and Hartford also scored the tour’s sole version of “Werewolves Of London” as the encore. All three nights of the New England run were strong individually, but collectively the shows wove themselves together into a distinct trio.

OHIO AND MICHIGAN

Next up was a drive west on I-80 to Ohio and the Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls just south of Cleveland. As the band took the stage Mayer quickly won the “best-dressed band member” award by sporting a black satin shirt that would have passed Studio 54 ’s dress code, and he’d also deliver the tour’s sole version of “Next Time You See Me” early in the show before a strong pairing of “Cassidy” and “Bird Song” closed the first set. The second set truly caught fire with the version of “Eyes Of The World” preceding “Drums”, and the show’s peak occurred via an absolutely gorgeous transition from the end of “Standing On The Moon” into the extended final verse of “Viola Lee Blues” along with a lengthy, standout version of “Not Fade Away” to close the set.

Three days later the next stop was DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston, MI (aka Pine Knob), whose first set featured a rare mid-set placement of “New Speedway Boogie” just before the tour’s first version of The Beatles ’ “Dear Prudence”. The second set’s highlight came early via Burbridge’s gorgeous vocal take on the Garcia/Hunter ballad “Comes A Time”, complete with an equally gorgeous closing solo by Mayer. If you were there you got lucky, because it was the only one on the tour.

Later highlights came from the “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider” pairing that led into “Drums”, and the relaxed-but-welcome tour premiere of “I Need A Miracle” following “Space”. The following day found the band moving fast down I-75 to the Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati for a show on Mickey Hart’s 78th birthday, but we’ll talk about that one in detail later, in the Top Shows section.

MISSOURI, INDIANA, AND ILLINOIS

The summer tour remained in the Midwest for its last week, with shows at the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre in St. Louis, MO (aka Riverport) and the Ruoff Home Mortgage Music Center in Noblesville, IN (aka Deer Creek) that we’ll go over in detail in the Top Shows section at the end. From there, the summer leg closed with a pair of weekend shows within the friendly confines of 107-year-old Wrigley Field in Chicago. However, before the first show on Friday night , Mother Nature dropped a thunderstorm that caused two delays and worked heavily against the band.

The first set started late, was marred by equipment issues, and was then cut short after four songs. It was followed by a second set whose rushed pre-“Drums” did at least contain the sole “Dancing In The Streets” of the tour, but fortunately, the closing run of songs after “Space” was much stronger, with “Morning Dew” as the night’s highlight. The “Ripple” encore made for a nice finish, but overall, this was a rare off-night.

This wasn’t lost on the band, who’d make it up for it the following night . The first set started with a trio of second-set songs (“Althea”, “Uncle John’s Band”, and “He’s Gone”) and also contained the tour’s sole version of “Little Red Rooster”. But even better was the sprawling, generous second set that ran nearly two hours and contained, in Deadhead shorthand, “China” > “Rider”, “Estimated” > “Eyes” and “Help” > “Slip” > “Frank”. Yes, all of those in the same set plus “Milestones” and “Days Between” too, and after a double encore of “Brokedown Palace” and “Touch Of Grey” the band headed home for a two-week break before the fall leg commenced.

SONG STATS AND FUN FACTS

MOST AND LEAST PLAYED SONGS

Over the course of 31 shows the band played 119 different songs, aside from the “Drums” and “Space” segments each night during second sets. There was actually a 13-way tie for first place in the “most played song” category, with the following songs getting eight airings each: “Dark Star”, “Althea”, “The Other One”, “Deal”, “Playing In The Band”, “Uncle John’s Band”, “China Cat Sunflower”, “I Know You Rider”, “Bertha”, “Scarlet Begonias”, “Fire On The Mountain”, “Not Fade Away”, and “Franklin’s Tower”.

Right behind all those there was a 7-way tie for second place, with the following songs getting seven plays each: “Help On The Way”, “Slipknot”, “Let The Good Times Roll”, “Casey Jones”, “Jack Straw”, “Shakedown Street”, “New Speedway Boogie”, and “They Love Each Other”. On the other end of the statistics, 23 songs were only played once, with 14 shows getting one of them, the Raleigh, Bethel, and St. Louis shows each getting two, and the Dallas show getting three.

2021 DEBUTS

Dead & Company only added three new songs to the repertoire in 2021, but they were all winners. The Reverend Gary Davis  blues dirge “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” debuted on the tour’s opening night ( Raleigh 8/16 ), and Sam Cooke ’s 1964 party anthem “Let The Good Times Roll” opened up the tour’s third show ( New York 8/20 ). Both these songs remained in regular rotation for the entire tour, but the version of The Rolling Stones ’ “The Last Time” would sadly be a one-off, making its sole appearance at Darien Lake on August 25th as a dedication to Stones drummer Charlie Watts , who had passed away the day before.

ALTHEA’S HOT SPACES

In 2019 “Terrapin Station” was the song whose location in Dead & Company shows would constantly bounce around, but in 2021 Mayer’s signature song “Althea” moved into this welcome role. Over its 8 appearances, it kicked off the second set twice ( Cuyahoga Falls 9/7 and Los Angeles 10/31 ) and appeared in the body of the second set’s pre-“Drums” twice ( Atlanta 10/12 and Phoenix 10/25 ), but it also opened a first set ( Chicago 9/18 ), led directly into “Drums” ( Hershey 8/28 ), came out of “Space” ( New York, 8/20 ), and served as the encore ( Red Rocks 10/19 ).

SCARLET > FIRE AND FRIENDS

Another thing Dead & Company setlist architect Matt Busch did to keep people guessing in 2021 was add one or more songs into the middle of the “Scarlet Begonias” > “Fire On The Mountain” pairing, one of Deadheads’ most beloved song combinations since March 1977. This pairing was played 8 times in 2021, all in second sets, but only 2 were “traditional” and flowed directly into one another (Bristow 8/18 and Los Angeles 10/31 ). During the other six airings, the following songs flowed between them: “Help On The Way” and “Slipknot” (Saratoga Springs 8/27), “Viola Lee Blues” ( Clarkston 9/7 ), “Deal” ( Chicago 9/17 ), “Uncle John’s Band” ( Charlotte 10/11 ), “Estimated Prophet” and “Eyes Of The World” ( Red Rocks 10/19 ), and “Touch Of Grey” ( Phoenix 10/25 ).

THE STORYTELLERS SPEAK

Another welcome change in 2021 was that the tour’s livestreams on Nugs.net now had hosts to fill the “Dead Air” before the first set and during intermission. They were familiar faces, too: Gary Lambert and David Gans , two longtime torchbearers of the Deadhead community who host Tales From The Golden Road , the weekly call-in show on Sirius XM’s Grateful Dead channel.

Not only was it fun to watch them recap sets and manufacture on-the-fly conversation to fill the final minutes before the band took the stage for the second set each night, they were also joined by guests of prominent stature from all eras of the Grateful Dead universe, and these are less than half of the names: GD family members ( Trixie Garcia ), OG GD extended family members ( Ken Babbs , Rosie McGee ), those who make official GD music releases happen ( David Lemieux , David Glasser , Mark Pinkus ), a podcast host ( Jesse Jarnow ), a Nugs founder ( Brad Serling ), and a musician or two ( Don Was , Branford Marsalis , Denise Parent , Jeff Mattson , and some random guy named John Mayer).

YOU SHOULD BE MADE TO WEAR EARPHONES

When Dead & Company took the stage in Darien Lake on August 25th , there was a surprising sight on stage right: John Mayer was wearing headphones during the show, though aside from that he played and sang normally. And as soon as it got to intermission, Dead Air host Gary Lambert texted Mayer to ask about them, and Mayer texted him right back so Gary could get the word out: the headphones were to protect his hearing against (further) tinnitus and hearing loss, but they also help him to hear the band more fully, as he has the band’s front-of-house engineer mix piped in, so he’s hearing the very same mix by front-of-house engineer Derek Featherstone that Deadheads do. Want a pair for yourself? Go here .

FALL TOUR – OCTOBER 11th — OCTOBER 31st

NORTH CAROLINA, GEORGIA, AND TEXAS

Originally, the fall leg of the tour was supposed to start with a pair of shows in Florida, in West Palm Beach on October 6th and Tampa on October 7th. However, on September 28th the band canceled these shows and issued refunds, citing “routing and logistics” as the reason and not elaborating further.

A week earlier the band had also added two dates at the 9,000-capacity Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. This was a surprising move for a band who draws over four times that number just up the road at Folsom Field in Boulder on a summer Saturday , but they’d pull this off by booking the shows on a Tuesday and Wednesday night in late October.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Tarheel State of North Carolina hosted their second kickoff show of the tour at PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte on October 11th. The opening “Let The Good Times Roll” was now clearly a band favorite, and it would be the only song of the night that wasn’t a Grateful Dead original. It was followed by an early-show surprise of “Cassidy” in the second slot, and the set’s highlight was the expansive “Bird Song” closer.

Related: Grateful Dead Studio Albums Ranked Worst To Best

The second set neatly incorporated half of the Grateful Dead’s classic 1970 Workingman’s Dead LP, starting with “Uncle John’s Band” between “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire On The Mountain” before “Drums”, and finishing with a post-“Space” segment of “New Speedway Boogie”, “Black Peter”, and “Casey Jones”. The following day the band traveled to Atlanta’s Cellairis Amphitheatre (aka Lakewood), which seems to have become a charmed venue for the band. Dead & Company’s two previous shows there in 2017 and 2019 were each among that year’s best, and since it happened again at Lakewood in 2021 we’ll talk about that one in more detail in the Top Shows section at the end.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Bobby Weir (@bobweir)

Well before Dead & Company arrived in Texas for a pair of shows in Dallas and Houston, the state created one of the year’s biggest political controversies by passing Senate Bill 8, a nefariously crafted abortion restriction bill that’s outrageous enough that it could be overturned by the most conservative Supreme Court in a century. Weir had already made his public pronouncement on the issue by posting photos of his and his wife’s attendance at the San Francisco edition of a national Women’s Rights march that took place on October 2nd, and the band’s first set at Dallas’ Dos Equis Pavilion would say much more.

After opening with the sole “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” of the tour, the rest of the set featured songs about beloved female characters in the Grateful Dead’s universe: “Bertha”, “Queen Jane Approximately” (the only one of the tour), “Brown Eyed Women”, “Peggy-O”, and “Sugaree”. After the dust settled from all that, the second set kicked off with the only “Deep Ellum Blues” of the tour as a friendly callout to the notorious Dallas nightlife district that spawned the song. Later on, the extended version of “The Other One” just before “Drums” would be the highlight of the show, and the band closed the night with one final, gentler political plea via their “Liberty” encore.

The band headed 210 miles south on I-45 the following day for a show at the Cynthia Woods Pavilion outside Houston, with the band competing against the Friday Night Lights of Texas high school football. Two of the first set’s big plays came from the hoped-for songs with local references (“El Paso” and “Jack Straw”), and the second set’s touchdowns came from yet another classic with a local reference (“Truckin’”), versions of “St. Stephen” and “The Eleven” whose jams took some slight darker turns, and one of the tour’s two versions of Miles Davis’ classic “Milestones”. Lastly, there was a classic sliver of sibling-style banter onstage after the “Black Muddy River” encore, an hour or so before Weir turned 74 and Mayer turned 44 on October 16th:

Burbridge: “An early ‘Happy Birthday’ to John and Bob!”

Hart: “The birthday boys…How cute.”

On paper, this was as good as things could get for Dead & Company and Deadheads in 2021, with two shows at the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, just west of Denver. But just before the first show started, as the temperature was dropping to a bone-chilling 34 degrees, there was a stunning announcement.

Drummer Bill Kreutzmann had contracted a non-Covid 19-related illness and would not play , and Wolf Bros and Ratdog drummer Jay Lane would fill in for him. And when we say stunning, we mean it: Kreutzmann himself couldn’t recall ever missing a show in his entire career, which is fair, because a look through Deadbase revealed he had missed only one, on 11/22/68 .

Rallying, defiant versions of “Not Fade Away” and “New Speedway Boogie” started the show and the “Eyes Of The World” in the second set would be the show’s powerful highlight, but at the conclusion of “Casey Jones”, the cold conditions and equipment issues forced Mickey Hart offstage for the rest of the night, leaving new guy Lane out there on his own for the closer and first-ever “Althea” encore. No pressure, man. It was a beautiful but cold setting and it was definitely a Dead & Company show, but the drummers’ circumstances made for an uncommon night onstage.

The second Red Rocks show on October 20th took place under a full moon, with slightly higher temperatures ranging from the low 50s into the 40s during the show. Lane would fill in for Kreutzmann for a second straight night, and the first set featured a nice run of 70s-era songs highlighted by “The Wheel” and “Black-Throated Wind”, while the 80s were represented by what was possibly the most relaxed version of “Hell In A Bucket” ever. And while the second set was solid throughout and highlighted by “Terrapin Station”, two quick moments after “Space” stood out: during the closing jam of “All Along The Watchtower” Lane unleashed a powerful blast of drumming that rippled right through the entire band, and then got in a second one with the same effect during the climax of “Standing On The Moon” two songs later.

While Lane has played with Weir for decades and was already familiar with a sizable chunk of the Grateful Dead’s catalog, these were breakthrough moments for him with Dead & Company, right after being airdropped into this madness. Two days later, the tour resumed just 25 miles down the road at Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre in Greenwood Village with another pair of shows , and Lane continued filling in for Kreutzmann at both of them. Lane’s surges would prove a good omen for the Fiddler’s Green run, and his new-guy energy would help those shows become two of the tour’s best. We’ll talk more about them in the Top Shows section at the end.

ARIZONA AND CALIFORNIA

The weather warmed up considerably once the band moved on from Colorado to Arizona, but even more importantly, Kreutzmann was back on his drummer’s throne for the Monday evening show at Phoenix’s Ak-Chin Pavilion . Not only were Kreutzmann and the band in fine form all evening, the setlist would make fans of the Grateful Dead’s “dirty 80’s” era very happy: aside from the encore, every song could have been from a 1984 Dead show. In particular, we loved Burbridge’s “China Doll” and the “Let It Grow” from the first set, and the second set trio of “Scarlet Begonias”, “Touch Of Grey”, and “Fire On The Mountain”, a sequence the Grateful Dead would only do twice, on July 3rd, 1984  and July 13th, 1984 .

Next up was a drive west on I-8 to the North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre in Chula Vista, CA, just outside San Diego. Local boy (and World’s Tallest Deadhead) Bill Walton turned up, and beaming visage and outstretched arms were consistently broadcast on the video screens to the delight of the crowd, while the first set’s highlights came from another great “Cumberland Blues” and the “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” closer. However, the Chula Vista show would be set apart by its second set song choices, which included five songs from the Grateful Dead’s 60’s era and a looser, slightly rawer vibe to go with them: “St. Stephen”, “The Eleven”, “New Speedway Boogie”, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”, and “Good Lovin”.

The tour concluded with a drive up I-5 for three sold-out shows at the iconic Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, with many folks taking advantage of Halloween weekend by dressing for the occasion on all three nights. (Skeletons were far and away the most common costume, followed by a respectable number of people dressed as The Dude from The Big Lebowski .)

Both sets on opening night were bookended by a Weir/Barlow classic: the first set started and finished with “Playing In The Band”, with highlights between them coming from “Deal”, “All Along The Watchtower”, and “High Time”. Not to be outdone, the second set kicked off with “Sugar Magnolia” and finished with its coda, “Sunshine Daydream”, with highlights in between coming from a dense “Slipknot!” and a lengthy “Estimated Prophet”. There was a somber note to this set, however, as right before the band started “Sugar Magnolia” Weir quickly said the song was “for Rob”. This rare onstage dedication was for Rob Lawson , Weir’s longtime driver and confidant who was in his final days and who would pass away on November 1st, the day after the tour ended.

Hollywood Bowl’s middle night on Saturday was rolling smoothly along after a first set highlighted by “It Hurts Me Too” and “Tennessee Jed”, and a second set that started with an agreeable run of “Jack Straw”, “Sugaree”, and the classic pairing of “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider”. However, before the band could start a fifth song Kreutzmann would leave the stage, and most of the band followed while Hart handled the “Drums” segment largely on his own. It turned out the band had prepared for this possibility and had kept Lane on hand, as he took Kreutzmann’s place for the remainder of the show, which had a heavier, more serious vibe during “Throwing Stones” and “Days Between” before the more upbeat, celebratory vibes of set closer “One More Saturday Night” and encore “U.S. Blues”.

The following morning on Halloween, Kreutzmann took a light tone on a social media post and apologized if he’d “spooked” anyone with his absence, while disclosing that he’d come back too soon from his illness and Lane would fill in for him one last time for that evening’s Halloween tour closer , and we’ll talk a little more about that one in the Top Shows section below.

TOP 8 SHOWS, PLUS 4 HONORABLE MENTIONS

The What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been tour lasted 31 shows and 77 days, and it more than lived up to its name, as you’ve read here and/or experienced firsthand. Over that time there were some shows that stood out from the others, and we kept track of them along the way. Since this Dead & Company tour was longer we expanded the customary Top 5 to a Top 8, and to 4 Honorable Mentions instead of the usual 3. So with a resounding Rhythm Devils drum roll and without further ado, here are 2021’s top Dead & Company shows, in chronological order.

TOP 8 SHOWS

August 21st – Philadelphia, PA

Just before the band took the stage for the fourth show of the tour, word came down that tonight’s show would have no intermission due to severe incoming storms and would instead consist of one solitary set that had to end by 10 p.m. But the Philly crowd took it all in stride and pushed the band the way they always have, and after a pair of rainbows formed over the stadium during the third song, “Jack Straw”, the band was off to the races for the rest of the night, with the pre-“Drums” highlights coming from Chimenti’s lengthy, fiery Hammond B3 organ solo in “Franklin’s Tower”, and a 35-minute journey through “Terrapin Station” and “The Other One”. However, the faster-tempo-than-usual “Morning Dew” that closed the set would not just be the peak of this show. Instead, Mayer’s closing solo ensured this song was the peak moment of the entire tour, and it will remain one of his signature moments with Dead & Company.

August 23rd – Bethel, NY

One of the trademarks of any band led by Bob Weir is that there’s an avoidance of nostalgia or simply recreating past glories. Weir’s focus is all about creating something new each night, so after a solid first set featuring four 80s-era Weir/Barlow classics, Weir stepped to his microphone at the beginning of the second set and delivered the biggest surprise of the tour.

Since the stage they were on that was adjacent to the site of the August 1969 Woodstock Music & Arts Festival and the Grateful Dead’s utterly disastrous five-song set there (thunderstorms caused life-threatening technical issues), Weir announced a “do-over” of that set, 52 years later. And to the crowd’s disbelief and joy, they’d run through “St. Stephen”, “Mama Tried”, “Dark Star”, “High Time” and “Turn On Your Lovelight”, and it would go a lot better this time. To finish the night off, “Ripple” would be the perfect encore at this proving ground of hippies with the best of intentions trying to make a huge rock festival work before anyone had truly figured out how exactly to do it.

August 27th – Saratoga Springs, NY

The 20-minute “Bird Song” that closed the first set of this show featured a jam with a heavy metal level of intensity, with David Gans and Gary Lambert later declaring it one of the best performances of the song by anyone in its 50-year history. The second set would stand up to it, too, with the front half featuring a sequence of “Scarlet Begonias”, “Help On The Way” and “Slipknot!” that recalled the Grateful Dead’s exploratory 1976 approach to each of these songs, and the show’s peak would be the definitive-D&C-version-so-far of “Cumberland Blues” out of “Space”, followed by Weir delivering the tour’s best version of “Days Between”. On its fifth try, the venerable Saratoga Performing Arts Center finally hosted a Dead & Company show that channeled the intensity of the Grateful Dead’s legendary 80s-era shows there.

September 11th – Cincinnati, OH

For the first time in Dead & Company’s six-year history, a show took place on a band member’s birthday, and the band would celebrate drummer Mickey Hart’s 78th trip around the sun by leading the crowd through a version of “Happy Birthday To You” before the second set, which was inspired and seamless. Highlights came from its opener of “The Other One” that would conclude over an hour later after journeys through “Uncle John’s Band”, the “Help On The Way” > “Slipknot!” > “Franklin’s Tower” trio and another top-notch “Cumberland Blues” coming out of “Space”. The first set stood out too, thanks to a well-chosen run of five early-70’s Grateful Dead originals: “Tennessee Jed”, “Here Comes Sunshine”, “Loose Lucy”, “Mr. Charlie”, and “Looks Like Rain”.

September 15th – Noblesville, IN

The venue we still call Deer Creek once again served as the location for a night of magical Grateful Dead music. The first set peaked with Weir’s dramatic reading of the tour’s sole version of Bob Dylan ’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, and the second set got off to an unconventional start with Mayer leading the band through a stand-alone version of “Sugaree”.

But from there, the band would head straight to 1969 and stay there for the rest of the set, and if you allow “Space” to be considered the equivalent to “Feedback”, they’d play the entire Live Dead  double album, slightly out of sequence and with the additions of “Drums” and “Casey Jones”. Once again, while it remains rare for Dead & Company to make clear and conscious nods to big, specific happenings from the Grateful Dead’s past, when it does happen the results tend to be pretty big as well.

October 12th – Atlanta, GA

For the third time in three Dead & Company shows at Lakewood, the show made our best-of-tour list. This one started with the best first set of the tour, which kicked off with 19 minutes of “Shakedown Street” and was later bolstered by the band’s then-and-there decision to try out the original, faster 1973 arrangement of “They Love Each Other” without ever having rehearsed it. It worked. But the second set eclipsed it, with an opener of “Playing In The Band” that segued into the first “Crazy Fingers” in two years.

After Mayer delivered his signature song “Althea”, the version of “China Cat Sunflower” > ”I Know You Rider” that followed lasted for an eye-popping 28 minutes, nearly three times the 10:35 duration of the Grateful Dead’s benchmark version from Europe ‘72 . Hart’s segment on The Beam at the conclusion of “Drums” was also the tour’s best, and with all of this it’s unsurprising that the band ran so late with their set that the gorgeous set-closing reprise of “Playing In The Band” would be the final number of the night. But by then, an encore wasn’t really necessary.

October 22nd – Denver, CO

After a first set that drew from six different eras of the Grateful Dead’s live repertoire, the second set kicked off with a stand-alone “Sugaree”. Once again it was a seemingly odd choice, just like it was in Deer Creek , but once again it would precede a continuous psychedelic blast that would last for the remainder of the set. This time, every song (including “Sugaree”) could have come from a Grateful Dead show from 1971, and the set’s centerpiece that was the highlight of the fall leg of the tour: a 45-minute excursion of “Dark Star” > “The Other One” > “Drums” > “Space” > “Dark Star” > “The Other One”.

Sets containing both of these open-ended classics were extremely rare after 1971 with the Grateful Dead, and it’s only happened a couple times before with Dead & Company, but this is the first instance we know of where either band played both songs and split them both in half in the same set. The band knew they’d nailed it all too, and they remained dialed-in for the “Wharf Rat” and “Sugar Magnolia” closers. Oh, and we almost forgot: Weir’s delivery of the “headlight” verse in “I Know You Rider” was the best one we can remember.

October 31st – Los Angeles, CA

Jay Lane had to sit in for Kreutzmann again on this night, but not for the first time; the band used the last night of the tour to stack the setlist and go for broke. The first set was highlighted by the opening “Samson & Delilah” and second-set-intensity versions of “Uncle John’s Band” and set-closer “Terrapin Station”. The second set closed out the tour with a list of favorites and stone-cold classics dished out with no-tomorrow energy, including opener “Althea”, a “Dark Star” > “El Paso” suite, and another strong “Eyes Of The World”. Following “Space”, the band dealt out the first uninterrupted “Scarlet Begonias” > “Fire On The Mountain” since the tour’s second show in Bristow back in August, and then follow it with a substantial “Morning Dew” to close the set. Enough classics for you? The only drawback was “Werewolves Of London” being cut from the encore because of the venue curfew, but by this point one could just blame it on the Dew and smile.

4 HONORABLE MENTIONS:

August 25th – Darien Lake, NY

This day started on a somber note for pretty much everyone who’s ever liked rock ‘n’ roll, as the sad news came from London that Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts had passed away the day before at the age of 80. The news wasn’t lost on the band, who debuted their version of the Stones’ classic “The Last Time” as the Grateful Dead’s Steal Your Face skull logo broadcast on the venue screens with the Rolling Stones’ tongue logo in place of the lightning bolt.

The overall vibe of the show also contained several nods to the time when the Rolling Stones were young men and the Grateful Dead were even younger: “Viola Lee Blues” and “Cold Rain and Snow” date back to the Dead’s earliest days when the Stones were a big influence, but they also didn’t shy away from playing “New Speedway Boogie”, the song that memorialized the one time the bands tried to play together, with disastrous results, at Altamont Speedway in December of 1969. All in all, it was the celebration of the backbeat of one of rock’s greatest bands while also acknowledging that same band’s dark and dangerous side. And, just being able to hear “Truckin’” in Buffalo again was a joyous little celebration all by itself. This show had the dark and the light in spades.

September 3rd – Mansfield, MA

Connecticut native and Berklee College of Music student John Mayer was excited and nostalgic about the trio of shows that took place in New England over Labor Day weekend (two at Great Woods in Massachusetts and one at Xfinity in Connecticut), and the second night of Great Woods would just barely outpace the other two in a strong weekend of shows. The first set featured no fewer than four songs with Mayer on lead vocals (“Cold Rain & Snow”, “Dire Wolf”, and “Sugaree” on his own, plus shared vocals with Weir on “Mississippi Half-Step”), followed by a second set that allowed numerous opportunities for Mayer to run wild as a player, including the big second set jam that started with “Truckin’” and ended over an hour later with “Morning Dew”. To wrap it up, Mayer would team up with Weir to belt out a perfectly-timed “U.S. Blues” encore to send everyone back out into the Massachusetts night.

September 13th – St. Louis, MO

The timing of this show ended up coinciding pretty closely with the announcement of the Grateful Dead’s Listen To The River box set, featuring seven complete shows played in St. Louis from 1971 to 1973. And setlist assembler Matt Busch made sure to take note of the location with “Big River” and “Black-Throated Wind” and their direct references to St. Louis making the first set, and St. Louis native Chuck Berry ’s signature song “Johnny B. Goode” would get its sole airing of the tour as the encore. In between, the second set had a decidedly late-1978 vibe to it, with a “Bertha” > “Good Lovin” opener, and a mid-set “Shakedown Street” before “Terrapin Station” begat “Drums”, with “Wharf Rat and “Sugar Magnolia” serving as the two post-“Space” set closers.

October 23rd – Denver, CO

Numerous shows on the tour were consistently strong from start to finish, but this final of the four shows in Colorado (and the fourth with Lane filling in for Kreutzmann) had that little something extra the whole way through that sets it apart. The first set nestled five classic 1970’s Garcia/Hunter songs (“Shakedown Street”, “Ship Of Fools”, “Brown-Eyed Women”, “Crazy Fingers”, and “Here Comes Sunshine”) in between two of the late Jerry Garcia’s most reliable Grateful Dead covers in “Iko Iko” and “Going Down The Road Feeling Bad”. Following that, the second set’s otherness came from the unusual turns in the jams in the opening “Truckin’” and the all-three-verse version of “Viola Lee Blues” that followed, with late-show highlights coming in the from of “Cumberland Blues” and a mesmerizing “Stella Blue”.

Dead & Company’s next shows take place from January 7th–10th and January 13th–16th, 2022 at the annual Playing In The Sand event in Cancun, Mexico. Get more information here .

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Dead & Company Detail Final Tour With 2023 Concert Dates

By Matthew Strauss

Dead & Company have revealed the details of the concerts that will comprise their final tour . The U.S. shows take place in May, June, and July 2023. Take a look at the band’s schedule below.

Dead & Company played their first shows in 2015. The lineup for the final tour includes Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, John Mayer, and Bob Weir (with Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti).

Read the 2017 feature “ The Grateful Dead: A Guide to Their Essential Live Songs .”

All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Dead & Company:

05-19 Inglewood, CA - Kia Forum 05-20 Inglewood, CA - Kia Forum 05-23 Phoenix, AZ - Ak-Chin Pavilion 05-26 Dallas, TX - Dos Equis Pavilion 05-28 Atlanta, GA - Lakewood Amphitheatre 05-30 Charlotte, NC - PNC Music Pavilion 06-01 Raleigh, NC - Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek 06-03 Bristow, VA - Jiffy Lube Live 06-05 Burgettstown, PA - The Pavilion at Star Lake 06-07 St. Louis, MO - Hollywood Casino Amphitheater 06-09 Chicago, IL - Wrigley Field 06-10 Chicago, IL - Wrigley Field 06-13 Cincinnati, OH - Riverbend Music Center 06-15 Philadelphia, PA - Citizen’s Bank Park 06-17 Saratoga Springs, NY - Saratoga Performing Arts Center 06-18 Saratoga Springs, NY - Saratoga Performing Arts Center 06-21 Queens, NY - Citi Field 06-22 Queens, NY - Citi Field 06-25 Boston, MA - Fenway Park 06-27 Noblesville, IN - Ruoff Music Center 07-01 Boulder, CO - Folsom Field 07-02 Boulder, CO - Folsom Field 07-03 Boulder, CO - Folsom Field 07-07 George, WA - The Gorge 07-08 George, WA - The Gorge 07-14 San Francisco, CA - Oracle Park 07-15 San Fransisco, CA - Oracle Park

By signing up you agree to our User Agreement (including the class action waiver and arbitration provisions ), our Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement and to receive marketing and account-related emails from Pitchfork. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Nina Corcoran

By Jazz Monroe

Dead & Company's Epic History, by the Numbers

Article contributed by solters.com | published on wednesday, july 19, 2023.

Dead & Company just wrapped up the 2023 FINAL TOUR with three sold-out concerts at Oracle Park in San Francisco in front of 120,000 fans. This was the most successful tour in the band’s eight-year history, drawing over 840,000 fans and grossing nearly $115 million.  The band performed 112 unique songs during the Final Tour.

Since the band’s 2015 debut, Dead & Company has completed ten tours, performing to more than 4 million fans across 235 shows.

Over 130,000 tickets were sold across three nights at Folsom Field on the Final Tour, marking the first time Dead & Company played three shows at the University of Colorado’s football stadium.  The band holds the record number of performances at the venue, with 13 shows. The previous record for most shows played at Folsom by a single artist was three, held by both the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones.

Dead & Company is the all-time leader in the number of shows played at the famed ballpark, home to the Chicago Cubs, with 10 performances across five tours (2017, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023), as well as the all-time leader in overall paid attendance with 360,000 tickets sold across these shows.

Additionally, they are the all-time leader for single-show paid attendance when they set the record in 2017 with more than 40,000 tickets sold.

The band holds the record number of performances at the venue, home to the New York Mets, with 11 shows. In 2023 Dead & Company returned to Citi Field to perform for almost 74,000 fans during two sold-out concerts.

Dead & Company returned to Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, in 2023, performing for 75,000 fans across both nights.  The band broke Fenway's all-time attendance record for the most tickets sold in a single night, previously held by Aerosmith.

The home of the Giants baseball team hosted the final three tour dates of the band’s career, with an audience of over 118,000 across three nights, drawing thousands of visitors to the Bay Area.

According to Destinations International’s Event Impact Calculator, there was a tremendous local economic impact that these three shows are estimated to have brought directly to San Francisco:

Total Estimated Direct Spend: $21.0M Total Estimated Economic Impact: $30.9M

During the Final Tour, the band performed 112 unique songs, including “drums/space” and the newly formed “Dark Star on the Big River Jam.” Since the band’s inception, they have performed 145 unique songs during their 235 shows.   MERCHANDISE

Final Tour merchandise sales have set records at virtually every tour stop, sometimes outpacing food and beverage per head, as was the case at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Since 2015, there have been nearly 1,000 unique designs created and made available to fans.   BENEFIT CONCERT AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY   Dead & Company continued the Grateful Dead’s storied legacy at Cornell University and its famed Barton Hall when the band performed an intimate benefit concert for nearly 5,000 fans on May 8, 2023, the same date and venue as the Grateful Dead’s highly acclaimed performance at Cornell in 1977.

Proceeds from the show, $3.1 million, are being donated to the Recording Academy’s MusiCares organization, which provides a safety net of critical health and welfare services to the music industry, and the Cornell 2030 Project, in which researchers combine science, scholarship, and innovation to develop climate-change solutions. Each non-profit will receive nearly $1.5 million to advance their respective missions.

CHARITABLE INITIATIVES

Since 2015, $13+ million has been raised to support nonprofits and environmental and social causes, with $4 million donated through charity auctions and online raffles.   Beneficiaries include Headcount, Reverb, National Parks Conservation Association, The Jerry Garcia Foundation, Heart And Armor Foundation, Gorilla Doctors, Seva.org, OXFAM, MusiCares, Surfrider Foundation, WhyHunger, iGiveTrees, Positive Legacy, Further Foundation, Conscious Alliance, Rainforest Action Network, Last Prisoner Project, HAPA, SPLC, and dozens of local and regional nonprofit groups.   Participation Row auctions, in partnership with nonpartisan and nonprofit voter registration organization HeadCount, surpassed $2,033,000 raised for charity during this year’s “Final Tour.” The tally includes $355,000 from the Mickey Hart fine art auctions held in NYC and over the three nights at Oracle Park.   The staggering total, which is more than the total funds raised from all previous tours combined ($1.97 million), makes the 2023 auction series the most successful such campaign in Dead & Company’s eight-year history and brings the grand total raised to $4,000,984 across all of the band’s tours since 2015.     The total raised during the July 16th Final Tour finale alone was more than $730,100, including $275,000 for the "tour guitar,” signed by the band and played on stage by Bob Weir on Saturday night and on several other stops of the tour; $238,000 for the San Francisco/Oracle Park guitar, commemorating the final shows of the Final tour; and $159,000 for four pieces of art by Mickey Hart.   All of the funds raised are split between HeadCount (organizer of the auction), REVERB (the tour's greening partner and co-producer, with HeadCount of the Participation Row activism village), and the "Dead Family NonProfits," a group of roughly 20 causes and organization selected by the band.

SUSTAINABILITY

Dead & Company and Activist Artist Management continue their work with longtime sustainability partner REVERB to reduce the tour's environmental footprint and engage fans to take action for people and the planet. Since 2015, the following environmental impact has been achieved:

    $1.6+ million dedicated to greenhouse gas reductions and climate justice projects.     125,000 single-use plastic bottles were avoided during the tours.     100,000 environmental actions taken by fans during the tours.     51,000 tonnes of CO2e neutralized.     Climate Projects Supported include Akumal Ecological Center, Colorado Grassland Conservation, Community Solar, Detroit Solar Street Lights, Mississippi Delta, Music Decarbonization Project, One Drop: Safe Water Access, Oceana: Ocean Conservation, South Dakota Wind Power, Teak Forest Reforestation.

VOTER REGISTRATION

In addition to raising funds, 25,000+ fans have registered to vote or taken additional actions with HeadCount, including checking voter registration status, signing up for local election alerts, and contacting local legislators to stand up for voter rights.   PLAYING IN THE SAND

More than $1 million has been raised by fans who flocked to the Mexican Caribbean to see the band performing 12 concerts across four Dead & Company all-inclusive concert vacation experiences. The funds were used to support local and national humanitarian, environmental, and social justice efforts, both in Mexico and in the U.S. In addition to three magical nights of Dead & Company shows on an intimate beach each year, Playing in the Sand offered a single-use plastic-free concert area, and all waste discarded throughout the resort was sorted during the event and diverted from landfill. These efforts have resulted in more responsible and sustainable event production while directly contributing to the fight against climate change. With 5,353 tons of CO2e neutralized.

• Dead & Company
• Folsom Field

LATEST ARTICLES

Be A Part Of The Grateful Web

Check us out on facebook.

Grateful Web

Progressive jam giants Umphrey's McGee‘s return to Las Vegas for the seventh installment of the massively popular UMBowl production was marked once again by a stand-out tour closing dual evening extravaganza where all stops were pulled out and the power given directly to the fans, for better or for worse.

On June 24, Round Records & ATO Records will release GarciaLive Volume Six: July 5, 1973 – Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders, the latest installment of the celebrated GarciaLive archival series. The three-CD set was recorded at the 200 capacity Lion’s Share club formerly located in the small town of San Anselmo, CA, just 20 miles north of San Francisco. The performance features Jerry Garcia performing with friend, mentor and legendary keyboardist/vocalist Merl Saunders. The duo is joined by drummer Bill Vitt and bassist John Kahn, who soon became a lifelong Garcia collaborator.

COPYRIGHT © 1995 - 2024 GRATEFUL WEB, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Dead and Company final tour: Where they'll be in 2023, including NYC and Philadelphia

It's time for one last trip.

Grateful Dead legacy act Dead and Company have confirmed the itinerary for their final tour, which launches with a two-night stand at the Forum in Los Angeles on Friday, May 19, and Saturday, May 20, 2023.

The 27-date tour will travel across the country and back again before wrapping up with performances on Friday, July 14, and Saturday, July 15, at Oracle Park in San Francisco.

Dead and Company returns to our region to play Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia on Thursday, June 15, and Citi Field in New York on Wednesday, June 21, and Thursday, June 22.

Presale fan registration is now open at deadandcompany.com . Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. local time on Friday, Oct. 14.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

Featuring Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead, with John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti, Dead and Company launched in 2015. The band announced on Sept. 23 that the 2023 outing would be its last.

Dead and Company: The Final Tour dates

May 19 and 20, 2023, Forum, Los Angeles

May 23, Ak-Chin Pavilion, Phoenix

May 26, Dos Equis Pavilion, Dallas

May 28, Lakewood Amphitheatre, Atlanta

May 30, PNC Music Pavilion, Charlotte, N.C.

June 1, Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek, Raleigh, N.C.

June 3, Jiffy Lube Live, Bristow, Va.

June 5, Pavilion at Star Lake, Burgettstown, Pa.

June 7, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, St. Louis

June 9 and 10, Wrigley Field, Chicago

June 13, Riverbend Music Center, Cincinnati

June 15, Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia

June 17 and 18, Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

June 21 and 22, Citi Field, New York

June 25, Fenway Park, Boston

June 27, Ruoff Music Center, Noblesville, Ind.

July 1 to 3, Folson Field, Boulder, Colo.

July 7 and 8, Gorge Amphitheatre, Gorge, Wash.

July 14 and 15, Oracle Park, San Francisco

Dead & Company Prove Las Vegas’ Sphere Isn’t Just for U2, but Them, Too, in Residency’s Astounding Opening Night: Concert Review 

By Chris Willman

Chris Willman

Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

• Producer Frank Marshall on Resurrecting a Lost Album by Jazz Greats Chet Baker and Jack Sheldon, 52 Years After It Was Recorded 6 hours ago
• Dead & Company at Sphere, Night 2: What Was the Same, What Was Different 1 day ago
• Dead & Company Prove Las Vegas’ Sphere Isn’t Just for U2, but Them, Too, in Residency’s Astounding Opening Night: Concert Review  2 days ago

Memo to anyone who “isn’t really into the Dead” but has been cajoled by a friend or loved one into attending an upcoming Dead & Company concert, as a plus-one: Your chances of enjoying the show just went up by approximately 10,000%.

Let’s not stop there, though. If you’re a faithful Deadhead with tickets for “Dead Forever — Live at Sphere ,” the Las Vegas residency that is taking place off the Strip over the next eight weekends, you already enjoy insurmountable odds of being fully invested in any show. But expect your already preordained ecstasy level to go up by 50, 70… ah, sure, let’s say 100%.

U2’s residency still holds an edge in terms of the degree of artistry employed for the big screen; the effects employed by Dead & Company are sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) a little cruder in the animation or less ambitious in the conceptualization. That doesn’t really matter. There are a couple of setpieces that feel like the dazzling equal of anything in U2’s show, and when other pieces go for something far simpler or goofier (like a giant rainbow with live images of Bob Weir , et al., underneath the arch), they’re still wholly effective.

All of this to say: If you were knocked out by what U2 accomplished in the fall and worried that some augmentation might be necessarily in order to effectively give Dead & Company’s setup a handicap… well, proceed with whatever microdosing you feel is warranted, but “Dear Forever” is a stone-cold-sober knockout.

Still, a few moments in Thursday’s show felt so signature that it’s hard to believe they would not be repeated in some form every night in the engagement. One of these arrived with the second number Thursday, “Mississippi Half-Step,” and maybe the fact that the visuals of San Francisco accompanied a song that evokes the South bodes well for the filmic accompaniment to be used on different songs over the engagement. Fans first saw a shot of quaint SF row homes — helpfully subtitled “Haight Ashbury,” for any newbies in this world — which then panned out over the neighborhood, the city, the west coast and finally the earth, with convincing enough photorealism that you could probably talk either a kid or a stoner into believing that it was the world’s most technically advanced drone shot. That journey, from the seat of the 1960s counterculture into the reaches of outer-space culture, reversed itself during the penultimate number, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which started its trip aloft in the cosmos and ended up knocking on 710 Ashbury St.’s door.

Another piece that feels most integral to the show, as first seen, is an epic-length animation of the Grateful Dead’s Steal Your Face skeleton, rising from the grave, doing a little jig and grinningly mounting a motorcycle to go journeying through a psychedelic landscape. (The audience probably would have been happy to watch that dude all night.)

A highlight that will almost certainly be a nightly feature, however else the setlist may experience total turnover, is the visual sequence that accompanies Mickey Hart’s traditional mid-act-2 “Drums”/”Space” percussion quasi-solo (now augmented by Jay Lane as the second drummer in place of the apparently now-retired Bill Kreutzmann). This section, in which the rest of the band takes six, lasted 16 minutes during Thursday’s show, and not a second of that was wasted visually, starting with a phalanx of hundreds of animated percussion instruments that made rare use of Sphere’s “ceiling” as well as every other square foot. (Drummers of the world may want to sell off spare parts of their kits just to buy some secondary-market tickets to come out and see this extravagant celebration of everything that was ever built to be struck.) Eventually all those instruments gave way to visuals that were more abstract — along with a few random shots of downhill LSD skiing — before landing firmly in the Milky Way. Speaking as someone who has prayed for a lot of drum solos to be over, it actually felt slightly anticlimactic when the full band returned to the stage.

If not much has been said yet about the band’s place in all this, that’s coming — first of all, through a mention of how ingeniously the big screen does (or quite often doesn’t) depict the players on stage. If you’re a truly veteran concertgoer, maybe you’ve experienced what feels like the tyranny of the overhead screens at major shows, where it feels like our attention is being forced away from the figures on stage to their LED avatars at every moment. “Dead Forever — Live at Sphere” achieves a healthy balance for this, similar to what went down at the U2 residency, but with just a lot more running time available for some operator to decide whether we should be looking at, say, John Mayer ‘s hands or face or none of the above at any given time or not. Each song’s design provided a different template for where to fit in shots of the musicians, of any, giving us just enough breaks from their grizzled faces that they became a welcome sight whenever they popped up as dexterous 50-foot giants again.

The designers and operators made smart use of split-screen effects, although there was never anything so basic as an actual, literal split screens, but other frameworks in which to place two opposing images. Sometimes the portrayals of the live band were really diffuse — like the moment during Hart’s epic “Drums” when hundreds of tiny images of his playing filled the vast expanse. On a very few occasions, the production just went with one huge widescreen image over the stage. This was particularly useful for catching and magnifying some of the interplay between band members, most of which took place between Mayer and fan-favorite keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, two guys who like to egg each other on with some mugging when their parts align. (OK, Mayer does most of the mugging, and Chimenti plays the beatific straight man… but it’s delightful when it’s captured as beautifully as it was Thursday.)

The six-piece band, as it now stands, can fairly be said to be on fire… but not too flammable, because things have to be paced over four hours. The photography on the overhead screens is necessarily more static a lot of the time than it was for U2, because when a song lasts 10 minutes or more, the visual for that needs to be something you can relax into, not a Zoo TV-style assault. We didn’t catch the recent single weekend Phish did at Sphere, and jam-band heads will no doubt be weighing in on the relative pacing of the visuals assembled for these two bands. What we do know is that just about every choice made for Dead & Company felt just right — not doing anything to detract from the jazz interplay of the band members at their expansive best, but hardly lazy about giving periodic wakeup calls to an audience that came to Sphere not just to lounge, but to thrill-seek.

And sometimes you need pure nostalgia and sentiment. The show’s end brought a montage of black-and-white photos of Dead band members and associated personalities, living or dead. And it was a sweet instance of using the highest tech humanly available to remind the audience that this is a gathering of family unlike virtually anything else in rock. There’s no mistaking that everyone on-stage and in the audience is getting on in years, and not taking any of this commingling for granted. Not a word was uttered from the stage during the four hours, so it’s not as if Bob Weir is going to step up and celebrate the occasion, when it’s understood by all anyway — this residency coming after what was billed as the close of the final Dead & Company tour last summer.

When a long, strange trip it’s been… and in the vast expanse of Sphere, now, what a long, tall and wide trip. If this has a chance of being a last stand, attending fans will go out happy, crying and overstimulated.

Dead & Company’s ‘Dead Forever – Live At Sphere’ 

Set list, opening night, May 17, 2024:

Feel Like a Stranger

Mississippi Half-Step

Me and My Uncle

Brown-Eyed Women

Cold Rain and Snow

Uncle John’s Band

Help on the Way

Franklin’s Tower

He’s Gone

Standing on the Moon

St. Stephen

Hell in a Bucket

Knockin’ in Heaven ‘s Door

Not Fade Away

“ Dead & Company – Dead Forever – Live at Sphere” dates: 

Thursday, May 16; Friday, May 17; Saturday, May 18 

Friday, May 24; Saturday, May 25; Sunday, May 26 

Thursday, May 30; Friday, May 31; Saturday, June 1 

Thursday, June 6; Friday, June 7; Saturday, June 8 

Thursday, June 13; Friday, June 14; Saturday, June 15 

Thursday, June 20; Friday, June 21; Saturday, June 22 

Thursday, July 4; Friday, July 5; Saturday, July 6 

Thursday, July 11; Friday, July 12; Saturday, July 13 

More From Our Brands

Celtics vs. pacers livestream: where to watch the first nba eastern conference finals game online, patek philippe leads geneva’s spring watch auctions to a frothy $125 million, no a’s in attendance: oakland trails a whopping 553 u.s. teams, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, unplanned csi: vegas series finale leaves fans with some cliffhangers — though a killer tease got edited out, verify it's you, please log in.

Dead & Company Light up Night Two of Dead Forever Sphere Residency

Photo Credit: Rich Fury

On Friday, May 17, Dead & Company kept on truckin’ in Las Vegas with the second night of its long-awaited 24-show Dead Forever residency at Sphere. After night one set the bar high with a staggering array of classic tracks and eye-popping visuals, night two kept on with the band’s biggest hits and fan favorites, set to a nostalgic panorama of memories from the Dead’s heyday. While some recycled imagery arrived as a surprise, new content pushed at the furthest capacities of the technologically advanced venue, just as the band delivered once-in-a-lifetime performances to cultivate a true highlight in Dead & Company’s history.

To kick off its second staging, Dead & Company let loose a ripping, funky rendition of “Samson and Delilah,” which saw the towering Sphere screens descend on the hallowed space of San Fransisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood, setting the scene of the band’s formation just as it had on night one. After a steadily grooving “Shakedown Street,” the band–featuring Bobby Weir, Mickey Hart, John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti and Jay Lane–merged into the upbeat Skull & Roses classic “Bertha,” as the band became staged against a vibrant plume of technicolor smoke. 

More night one imagery returned with “Crazy Fingers,” which brought on the same rainforest scene formerly seen with “Bird Song,” and the band’s beloved treatment of Johnny Cash’s “Big River,” which brought forth the same retro Western title cards that billed Weir as “Ace” the night before. For the exuberant “Good Lovin’,” the sphere screen became a tie-dye spiral, flushing with new cover and coiling off into infinity as the band moved into the set-closer “Deal,” which saw the return of the richly historical wall of Dead ticket stubs, posters, merch and other material remembrances that marked a definite highlight in night one.

The band returned to the stage with a slow burn on “China Cat Sunflower,” leaning into the essential track’s stripped-back, blues-funk undertones with a novel treatment. This essential cut cast the band against the iconic stealie emblem, glinting in silver and decorated with a billowing bouquet of roses. Next, as always, the band merged into “I Know You Rider,” bringing with it the most impressive new visual sequence of the show as the Sphere periphery panned to the edifice of the Winterland Arena, the long-lost Bay Area staple that served as a formative stage for the Dead, who famously performed at the venue’s final show. The story continued as Sphere cycled through two more classic settings, first showing Cornell University’s Barton Hall–the site of the band’s legendary Cornell 5/8/77 performance–then moving to simulations of The Fillmore and Morrison, Colo.’s Red Rocks Amphitheater, among others.

Dead & Co. kept the fire burning with “Estimated Prophet,” which brought the return of the virtual wall of sound that made headlines on night one. As the towering trademark melted away to a psychedelic slurry, the band tore into an advanced jam, bringing the energy to a peak as they invited Santana band drummer Karl Perazzo to the stage–the first guest in the series. Perazzo supported performances of “Cumberland Blues,” “The Other One” and finally “Drums,” for which Burbridge tapped in on Lane’s kit to deliver some heady polyrhythms. The set turned off to a far-out moment as Hart mounted up on The Beam, bringing the energy to a terse simmer fitting to springboard a bluesy “Space,” which in turn cleared the way for the relative rarity “Black Peter”

The energy erupted once more as Dead & Company moved on to “Althea,” a cornerstone of the catalog that notably sourced the first-ever duet between Weir and Mayer years before. This fan-favorite, set against the fantastically camp drips of a massive lava lamp, opened up an impressive medley, paying through “U.S. Blues” and a stunning “Mountain Dew” to bring the venue back to the famous facades of Haight Ashbury. After a revival of the TV broadcast from night one, the band finally closed out the show with a truly spectacular “Turn On Your Love Light.”

Dead and Company will return to the Sphere tonight to conclude the first weekend of its summer residency. For tickets and more information, visit deadandcompany.com .

Read on for the complete setlist from night two.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dead & Company (@deadandcompany)

Dead & Company Sphere – Las Vegas 5/18/24

Set I: Samson and Delilah, Shakedown Street > Bertha, Crazy Fingers, Big River, Good Lovin’, Deal Set II: China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider, Estimated Prophet, Cumberland Blues*, The Other One*, Drums* > Space, Black Peter, Althea > U.S. Blues > Morning Dew, Turn On Your Love Light

Notes: * w/ Karl Perazzo on percussion.

Newsletters

Marketplace.

March 2024 Relix Issue

Phish "Balloon" White T-Shirt by Danny Clinch

Daniel Donato's Cosmic Country - Reflector (Exclusive 2-LP Relix Red Variant)

RetroBlakesberg Volume One: The Film Archives

Rose & Bolt Logo Pin | Silver / Sparkle

Music Pro Ear Protection Set by EARPEACE

Floating Orbs - Throwback Tie-Dye T-Shirt

Mikaela Davis & Southern Star - The Relix Session (Limited Edition 2-LP Sunflower Splatter Vinyl)

Grateful Dead Rainbow Bears Woven Cotton Blanket

Taper's Section "Stack" T-Shirt

Futurebirds - Thanks Y'all (Exclusive 3-LP Relix Clear Violet Variant)

Love Lights | Crystal String Lights | Rose Quartz

They Sound Grate Crewneck Sweatshirt

Daily 7 news.

Dead & Company Commence Dead Forever Residency at The Sphere (A Photo Gallery + Recap)

U.S. House of Representatives Passes TICKET Act, Furthering Consumer Protections for Live Events

Jon Batiste to Join The Rolling Stones at Metlife Stadium

Allman Betts Band Kick Off First Tour in Three Years, Welcome New Drummer Alex Orbison

Jeremiah Fraites Maintains His Piano Roll

My Morning Jacket Unveil 4K Restoration of Acclaimed Concert Film ‘Okonokos’

Visions of The Dead: A Grateful Dead Art and Photography Exhibition to Coincide with Dead & Company’s Sphere Residency

You might also like

Dead & Company “Let The Good Times Roll” into Weekend One Closer at the Sphere

Steven Tyler Joins The Black Crowes in London

The Disco Biscuits Unveil BISCOLAND Phase Two Artist Lineup: Mark Farina, Cloudchord, Dizgo and More

DJ Logic Plots 42-Date National Tour, Starting with Dead & Company Aftershows

• Live at Relix

Shower your loved ones with  the  gift  of  music!

1 Year. 8 Issues. Only $24.95

• Heart's 'Sanctuary Zones'
• Steve Perry Hints at Touring
• 30 Greatest Duets
• Stones' 'Wild Horses' Tour Debut
• The Best 13th Albums
• Led Zeppelin Documentary

Here’s Why Dead and Company Are Done Touring

With Dead & Company having recently wrapped their final tour , the band’s manager, Irving Azoff, has revealed why the group decided to retire from the road.

“Touring is physically hard and nobody wants anybody to get really sick out there,” Azoff explained to Pollstar . “Billy (Kreutzmann) got really sick last year, and I think that freaked [fellow Dead & Company co-managers] Steve (Moir) and I and Bernie (Cahill) out.”

Kreutzmann, a founding member of the Grateful Dead , suffered in recent years through back and heart ailments, along with a bout of COVID-19. The health problems forced the drummer to miss a number of Dead & Company shows in 2021 and 2022. This year, he opted to sit out the band's 29-date farewell trek, leaving Bob Weir and Mickey Hart as the only remaining Grateful Dead members in Dead & Company.

“Mickey is a wonderful soul and a lovely guy and he can say, 'I can go forever,' and Bob would say the same thing,” Azoff noted, “but the rigors of 30-some nights with trucks and buses and airplanes and all the moving around, probably for both the quality of the music and the health/safety it was time to at least put an end to the touring.”

Dead & Company closed their farewell tour with three sold-out nights at San Francisco’s Oracle Park. Though the band is done with touring, members have left the door open for possible one-off performances.

“We never said we’ll never play again, but we’ll never tour again,” Hart admitted to ABC Audio . His thoughts were echoed by John Mayer, who wrote on social media : “Dead & Company is still a band – we just don’t know what the next show will be.”

Likewise, Azoff insinuated that Dead & Company have not played their last gig.

“These guys love each other and the music stands for itself,” the manager explained. “The touring parts are over, but there are still special events I’m sure will get offered to them, and you never say never. I’ve learned from managing the Eagles all these years that you never ask that question while the tour is going on. You’ve got to let them finish it, get some rest and get back to their lives and the future will bring what it brings.”

16 Classic Rock Legends Who Say They'll Never Retire

More from ultimate classic rock.

Dead & Company Venture Out to Space — And Their Past — at Dazzling Sphere Opener

By Ethan Millman

Ethan Millman

The long, strange trip just got a lot trippier.

Dead & Company opened their much-anticipated Sphere residency in Las Vegas on Thursday night, making good on the potential of the world’s most high-tech concert venue and delivering what has to be the most dazzling visual show in Grateful Dead history.

The group took the stage just past 7:30 p.m., opening with modest visuals — by Sphere standards, at least — for “Feel Like a Stranger,” as large live shots of Bob Weir and John Mayer were projected above the stage. It wasn’t the kind of over-the-top spectacle provided by, say, U2’s inaugural concert at the venue late last year , and the crowd’s reaction was relatively muted at first.

Outer space was a common theme throughout the show’s two acts, with the crowd going through wormholes and blots of color earlier in the night before touching down on new planets later on. After the wormhole, Dead & Company wound up in front of a tropical rainforest beside a waterfall as they played “Bird Song,” the Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter classic originally written in tribute to Janis Joplin. After the rainforest, the band found itself in an old Western flick in the desert for “Me and My Uncle,” with the “film” jokingly presented in “Sphere-O-Vision.”

Editor’s picks

Every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term, the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, the 50 worst decisions in movie history.

They’re calling the residency Dead Forever, and fittingly, it’s a show full of nods to the band’s rich history, with lots of throwback photos of Garcia and more. The band closed out its first set of the night by turning the venue into a box with walls that were completely covered in vintage Grateful Dead ticket stubs, backstage passes, and other photos.

Musically, the band sounds tight as ever. The harmonies were beautiful, and the groove stayed consistent. Mayer gave strong vocals and wailed on guitar solos throughout the night — with a particularly strong performance on “He’s Gone” — and Weir’s voice sounded crisp and clear. Mickey Hart took his customary “Drums” solo, playing alone onstage as a snare drum floated serenely behind him. Keyboardist Jeff Chimenti was particularly impressive on opening night, stealing the show when the band let him have the spotlight and blowing the crowd away with a solo during “Brown-Eyed Women.”

Keith Urban Will Take Over Fontainebleau Las Vegas for New 'High' Residency

Lovers & friends festival canceled at last minute due to expected 'dangerous weather', phish reach jam-band bliss at the sphere in las vegas.

Dead & Company went with their cover of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” as the penultimate song of the night, as the screen showed the venue rocketing at light speed across the universe through solar systems before stopping by Earth, then slowly making our way back to the Haight-Ashbury house. Aside from the song itself sounding gorgeous, it was particularly poignant hearing the track while actually gazing into the heavens.

After finishing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” there was an old audio clip of a news reporter describing the droves of Deadheads coming to the Dead’s shows and — in keeping with the Dead Forever theme — noting how the fans would “prefer the music never stop.” On that note, Dead & Company closed the night with another of their best-known covers, “Not Fade Away.”

Dead & Company Sphere Opening Set List, May 16, 2024

Stefanik loses it when fox news host reminds her she called trump a 'whack job', how kid rock went from america's favorite hard-partying rock star to a maga mouthpiece, taylor swift debuts ‘how did it end’ at final 2024 eras tour date in sweden, billie eilish would like to reintroduce herself.

“Uncle John’s Band” “Help on the Way” “Slipknot!” “Franklin’s Tower” “He’s Gone” “Drums” “Space” “Standing on the Moon” “St. Stephen” “Hell in a Bucket” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” “Not Fade Away”

How Kid Rock Went From America's Favorite Hard-Partying Rock Star to a MAGA Mouthpiece

• Devil With a Cause
• By David Peisner
• Swift in Sweden
• By Althea Legaspi

Sean Combs Claims 'Full Responsibility' for Cassie Assault in Video Apology: 'I Make No Excuses'

• 'i'm truly sorry'
• By Nancy Dillon and Cheyenne Roundtree

Cate Blanchett's Cannes Film 'Rumours' Named After Fleetwood Mac Album, Directors Confirm

• second hand news
• By Daniel Kreps

Charli XCX Isn't Holding Back

• By Hannah Ewens

Most Popular

'mad max' director says 'there's no excuse' for tom hardy and charlize theron's 'fury road' set feud: tom 'had to be coaxed out of his trailer', bill maher says he doesn't understand harrison butker's graduation speech criticism, dj akademiks says he'll take entire industry down if convicted in rape lawsuit, jennifer lopez & ben affleck's reported marital troubles stem from this difficult-to-navigate issue, you might also like, china box office: ‘the last frenzy’ returns to top spot as theatrical momentum slows, ‘the fall guy’ flops, bruce nordstrom, retail titan, ultimate ‘shoe dog,’ dead at 90, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, richard linklater on upcoming movie ‘nouvelle vague’: ‘it reminded me a lot about making my first film’, no a’s in attendance: oakland trails a whopping 553 u.s. teams.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Verify it's you

Please log in.

• Subscribe to Relix
• Radio Charts
• Livestream Guide

Current Issue Details

Buy Current Issue

Published: 2024/05/19

• Dead & Company “Let The Good Times Roll” into Weekend One Closer at the Sphere

Photo: Alive Coverage

Get in the groove and let the good times roll

We’re gonna stay here till we soothe our soul

If it takes all night long

Last night, Saturday, May 18, Dead & Company capped its first weekend of concerts as a part of its Sin City residency at the new technologically advanced venue known as the Sphere, in Las Vegas. During the event, the band continued to work through the Grateful Dead songbook, reprising classics and complimenting the delivery with fitting imagery, which took concert-goers on a visual journey from start to finish. 

A customary late-80s and early-90s concert starter for the Dead, the 21st-century off-shoot, Bobby Weir, Mickey Hart, John Mayer, Otiel Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti, and Jay Lane, reprised the Sam Cooke original, “Good Times”  as the first song of the Saturday’s stand. Like Google Maps, graphics of the Earth captured from space took over the screens, presenting a global topography that complemented the road dog anthem, “Truckin’.” The Howlin’ Wolf original and one of the earliest covers of the Grateful Dead’s archive, “Smokestack Lightning,” arrived ahead of the recognizable instrumental intro on “Sugaree,” helmed by Mayer.

After a selection from Jerry Garcia’s 1972 eponymous solo debut, the ensemble clicked into a pull From The Mars Hotel , singing, “Thank you, for a real good time,” on “Loose Lucy.” The on-screen graphics perfectly complement the ensuing number: a sunken ship featuring Dead adjacent iconographies like red roses surrounding a signature stealie on the sails and psychedelic compliments sprawling the ocean’s floor, underwater mushrooms included. To boot, they cascade through a pair of fan favorites, “Tennessee Jed” and “Casey Jones,” reprising the use of backstage passes, posters, and ticket stub imagery on the latter and taking it further with distorted coloration for an even trippier effect. 

Animated “Scarlet Begonias” rained from the ceiling to start off the second set, paired with sister tune, “Fire on the Mountain,” which got special treatment from Hart, who rapped on the original. Notably, the latter pull felt like a nod toward Mt. St. Helens’ historic May 18, 1980 eruption, an event which the original band paid tribute to during the third in a series of follow-up volcanic puffs on June 12, 1980, at Portland, Ore.’s Memorial Coliseum. A disco ball turned, producing beams of light as the band worked into “Eyes of the World,” blobs of illumination became mini-reproduced screens and eventually an animation that looked not unlike Pacman, with skulls, peace signs and other symbols dancing across the ceiling. 

Mountain imagery, similar to the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Range, appeared on screen as the band worked into “Lady With a Fan,” which was alluded to as a setlist inclusion via the night’s poster art (see below). As the number merged into “Terrapin,” the sky dissolved, revealing a pair of circular live shots focusing on band members with a Bertha skeleton separating the pair. Fittingly, the jam vehicle merged into the second set staple “Drums” and “Space” and eventually an emotive “Stella Blue.” Hypnotic swirling, almost liquified colorations emerged as the band ran through “The Wheel.”

As if riding a motorcycle, the Sphere audience cruised through “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” with Uncle Sam’s skeleton straddling the bike and steering the journey. More imagery of the cosmos engulfed the screens as the band landed on “Throwing Stones,” at one point unleashing a meteor shower and, at other times, a simple shot of the place we all call home . As done on nights one and two, an old news clip separated the second set from what would be the encore, a homage to the day of the week on “One More Saturday Night.” 

Scroll down to view last night’s setlist. Visit deadandcompany.com for tickets and more information on the band’s current residency.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dead & Company (@deadandcompany)

Dead & Company 

Sphere – Las Vegas 

May 18, 2024 

Set I: Good Times, Truckin, Smokestack Lightning, Sugaree, Loose Lucy, Ship of Fools, Tennessee Jed, Casey Jones

Set II: Scarlet Begonias > Fire on the Mountain, Eyes of the World > Terrapin Station > Drums > Space > Stella Blue, The Wheel, Going Down the Road Feeling Bad, Throwing Stones

[Old News Broadcast of the Grateful Dead], One More Saturday Night

Show No Comments

No Comments comments associated with this post

Note: It may take a moment for your post to appear

• Trey Anastasio Band Perform Debuts, Bust Out “Windora Bug” in Central New York
• Steven Tyler Joins The Black Crowes in London
• DJ Logic Plots 42-Date National Tour, Starting with Dead & Company Aftershows
• Allman Betts Band Kick Off First Tour in Three Years, Welcome New Drummer Alex Orbison
• U.S. House of Representatives Passes TICKET Act, Furthering Consumer Protections for Live Events
• Jon Batiste to Join The Rolling Stones at Metlife Stadium
• Visions of The Dead: A Grateful Dead Art and Photography Exhibition to Coincide with Dead & Company’s Sphere Residency

Most Popular

• Most Commented
• Brooklyn Bowl Las Vegas Reveals Dead & Co. Sphere After Parties Schedule: Melvin Seals & JGB, Dark Star Orchestra and More
• Trey Anastasio and Classic TAB Take on “Snowflakes in the Sand” for First Time
• Trey Anastasio and Classic TAB Bring Rarities, a Bust-out and Another Debut to Michigan
• The Rolling Stones Revisit “Wild Horses” in Seattle
• Dead & Company Commence Dead Forever Residency at The Sphere (A Photo Gallery + Recap)
• Old Crow Medicine Show Welcome Back Founding Member Christopher “Critter” Fuqua
• Warren Haynes Details Red Rocks Stand with Colorado Symphony
• Report: Dead & Company Cancel West Palm Beach and Tampa Shows
• Willie Nelson, Bob Weir and More to Participate in ‘Biden For President’ Livestream Fundraiser
• SiriusXM Announces Launch of Phish Radio, Jam On Moves to App and Online
• Eric Clapton Releases Politically-Charged “This Has Gotta Stop”
• Thousands of Music Fans Sign Petition to Bring Jam On Back to SiriusXM
• “You Should Fuckin’ Pay Attention”: Chris Robinson Gets Frustrated at Philadelphia Crowd During “Brothers of a Feather” Gig
• Nike Confirms Grateful Dead Sneaker Collaboration, Sets Release Date
• Zach Deputy Responds to His Attendance at DC Trump Rally
• Monthly Contributors

Music | Review: Dead & Company opens Sphere Las…

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Today's e-Edition

Things To Do

• Food & Drink
• Celebrities
• Pets & Animals
• Event Calendar

Music | Review: Dead & Company opens Sphere Las Vegas residency in epic fashion

Dead & company playing 24-show residency.

The 18,000-or-so fans in attendance certainly weren’t worrying about semantics or technicalities as they enjoyed hearing such longtime favorites as “Jack Straw,” “Bird Song” and “Brown-Eyed Women” during what turned out to be a relatively mellow — musically speaking — first set.

Following a half-hour break, the group turned up the heat in the second set with a powerful jam through the longtime musical partners “Help on the Way,” “Slipknot!” and “Franklin’s Tower,” with the latter third arguably being the musical highpoint of the overall show.

The graphics were downright intoxicating and, quite often, disorienting — as the eyes tried to make sense of what was pretty much nonstop sensory overload.

There were some points where I felt a bit dizzy, and even had a touch of motion sickness, as I tried in vain to take in everything that was happening across the towering video screens as the band continued through “He’s Gone,” “Standing on the Moon” and “St. Stephen.”

The downside of being bombarded with all these special effects — and, well, just the massive amount of light — is that it’s really easy to literally lose sight of the actual musicians. They become, visually speaking, afterthoughts to everything that is going on.

Yet, there were points where everything jelled so nicely, such as when the group returned once again to outer space for a poignant version of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and then closed the epic show with a triumphant run through Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”

The Sphere truly delivers a concert experience like none other. And there are very few, if any, bands that seem a better fit for what this venue can offer than Dead & Co.

Setlist:1. “Feel Like a Stranger”2. “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo”3. “Jack Straw”4. “Bird Song”5. “Me and My Uncle”6. “Brown-Eyed Women”7. “Cold Rain and Snow”Set 2:8. “Uncle John’s Band”9. “Help on the Way”10. “Slipknot!”11. “Franklin’s Tower”12. “He’s Gone”13. “Drums”14. “Space”15. “Standing on the Moon”16. “St. Stephen”17. “Hell in a Bucket”18. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”19. “Not Fade Away”

• Report an error
• Policies and Standards

More in Music

Music | Festival La Onda: Here are 8 great Latin music acts to catch at the big event

Saratoga native Vienna Teng opens Montalvo’s concert season

Music | Would Oakland really be Drake’s ‘last stop’? What a huge cultural moment says about the city’s hip-hop scene

Music | What was the biggest surprise of Dead & Company Night 2 at Sphere?