It’s a scorching 108 degrees in Sin City here on Saturday, 22 June, yet music fans are flocking to town for the sixth straight weekend to catch Dead & Company in their extended residency at the multi-dimensional marvel known simply as Sphere. Following U2 and Phish to become the third band to play the new venue, the Grateful Dead spinoff group has won widespread acclaim this summer for the creative blend of their trailblazing music with immersive visuals enabled by Sphere’s cutting-edge wraparound LED screens.
When PopMatters caught Dead & Company’s climactic finale at the San Francisco Giants’ Oracle Park last year to close out what was billed as “The Final Tour”, there was still a question of what’s next. “Dead & Company is still a band – we just don’t know what the next show will be,” guitarist John Mayer mused on Twitter after the tour’s conclusion. The baseball setting also led some to wonder whatever happened to guitarist Bob Weir’s project to write a musical about the life of legendary pitcher Satchel Paige. With Major League Baseball recently adding Negro League stats to the MLB record books and the Cleveland club in first place (the team Paige helped win the 1948 World Series in his long overdue “rookie” season), perhaps the time is ripe for Weir to bring the project to life for his next creative triumph.
As to Dead & Company, the opportunity to set up shop in Vegas to see what they could do with Sphere’s high-end capabilities turned out to be just the ticket to ride. “Sphere and the storytelling that you can do from that made it impossibly attractive,” Weir told Variety in a recent interview. “The storytelling facility there is really beyond about anything else. Every artist of any tribe is, first and foremost, a storyteller. And you can’t get this anywhere else right now.”
Many fans fondly recall catching the Grateful Dead at UNLV’s Silver Bowl when they made five consecutive visits to the college football stadium on the edge of town from 1991 to 1995 (the last five years of Jerry Garcia’s time on Earth as it turned out.) The 40,000-capacity stadium was filled for multi-show runs each year as the Silver Bowl’s festive vibe made it a fan-favorite tour stop despite the ever-sweltering heat. “Just go ahead and pass all the unconscious people up to the front up here”, Garcia joked during the Saturday show in 1995. “We collect ‘em,” Weir added.
The 1990s seem like a far more innocent time now since rising temperatures are no joke in 2024, with climate change causing longer, stronger heat waves each year and an increasing number of deadly wildfires across the West. Thus, Dead & Company have regularly warned fans to take caution, even though Sphere’s phenomenal air conditioning keeps things plenty cool during the shows. “It’s hot out there, Las Vegas! Stay hydrated!” the group tweeted on 22 June.
Indoor attractions for passing the time in the afternoon currently include the Dead Forever exhibit at the Venetian Hotel & Casino across the way from Sphere, where the Grateful Dead’s immense legacy is on display in Smithsonian-style fashion. Smithsonian magazine even had a recent story on a cosmic collaboration at Sphere between drummer Mickey Hart and astrophysicist Kimberly Arcand, who have worked together to bring multi-wavelength images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory into Dead & Company’s performances along with sounds inspired by images from the outer reaches of the universe.
Dead Forever also features Hart’s “Art at the Edge of Magic” gallery displaying his “vibrational expressionism” technique. Long specializing in the art of vibration, Hart utilizes loudspeakers to generate sounds that make paint dance across his chosen surfaces. “To me, it was just like music. It’s improvisational, only it’s in the visual domain,” Hart explained to Variety. The gallery features a handful of quotes that influenced Hart and the Dead, including a former President.
“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him,” John F. Kennedy once said. This quote would come to mind again later in the week when writer/economist Kyla Scanlon tweets, “My big takeaway from the Grateful Dead is that the entire thing was only possible because of affordable housing,” referencing how most of the band lived together in a house in San Francisco’s then very affordable Haight Ashbury neighborhood during their early artistic development in the mid-1960s.
There’s also a museum-quality photo gallery from longtime band photographer Jay Blakesberg, which functions as an anthropological review of the Grateful Dead’s vast impact on society and pop culture over the decades. The Dead Forever exhibit is additionally augmented by a full tour merch gift shop, a psychedelic bar and lounge with an interactive photo booth, and life-size dancing bear statues out front for further unique photo ops.
As the 19:30 showtime at Sphere nears, ticket holders can walk directly from the Venetian to the venue through an enclosed bridge that enables them to avoid having to venture outside into the scorching heat. Sphere’s state-of-the-art audio/visual technology is symbolized right inside the main entrance, where fans are greeted by a statue of Gort, the robot from outer space in 1951’s science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Billed as “an early yet impressive interpretation of how science would affect humanity in the future”, Gort also represents an ongoing warning. Few films from the mid-20th century still resonate like this one, with Gort and his ET cohort Klaatu warning humanity against the misuse of nuclear technology.
“Soon, one of your nations will apply atomic energy to spaceships, that will create a threat to the space and security of other planets. That, of course, we cannot tolerate… By threatening danger, your planet faces danger, very grave danger,” Klaatu warns his Earth host (also noting that they don’t have war where he comes from.) With multiple documented reports over the decades of UFOs appearing to monitor and even deactivate nuclear weapons in the USA, it seems that visitors, the likes of Gort and Klaatu, are still keeping close watch over Earth.
It’s thus a boon for humanity that Dead & Company are still rocking on to carry the torch for the 1960s counterculture revolution that called for a more peaceful society. The Grateful Dead were often mischaracterized as apolitical. Yet the group always stood for peace and harmony against the forces of old and evil that drive the greedy warmongering of the military-industrial complex, a nefarious agenda that President Dwight Eisenhower boldly warned the nation of in 1961.
When Dead & Company hit the stage with “New Minglewood Blues”, it’s with a standard yet enlarged video of band members. It’s a great opener for Vegas with cosmic cowboy Bobby Weir singing of how he was “born in a desert” and “raised in a lion’s den”. The show soars to the next level when one of the Dead’s signature 13-point bolts of lightning seems to split the Sphere in half. Bird’s eye imagery transports everyone to San Francisco, with the stage now appearing to be set up right out front of the Grateful Dead’s legendary former home at 710 Ashbury Street. When Dead & Company launches into the funky groove of “Shakedown Street”, it feels like everyone is outside watching the group perform a neighborhood street show as they did on occasion in the 1960s. The transportive effect is truly dazzling.
The dance party continues on “Bertha”, with another immersion that takes the audience into a garden of Eden of sorts. A heartfelt cover of Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” is a great selection to impart a gospel blues vibe, courtesy of High Priest Bobby Weir. “Jack Straw” gets back to rocking out, starting tentatively before building toward a hot jam with bassist Oteil Burbridge pushing the groove higher. The classic “Sugar Magnolia” caps off the relatively short but sweet first set with an animated trip, as the Dead’s iconic Uncle Sam skeleton character and a team of colorful dancing skeleton pals dance up a storm. As the group rocks on, Sam hops on a motorcycle and takes off down a golden road to a fantasy land with scenery, including dancing bears, flying eyeballs, and the classic Terrapin Station railroad stop.
The first set has been all killer, no filler, with six straight classic crowd-pleasers. The vibe is high during the set break before the second set takes off to an even higher dimension with deeper jams. “Uncle John’s Band” features Dead & Company members playing under an animated rainbow landscape, including a small cabin on a riverside where Jerry Garcia can be seen relaxing on the porch. The song’s spacey jam section goes deep, with Mayer ripping hot licks more like it’s 1974 than 2024, winning a big cheer. Keyboardist Jeff Chimenti adds some flashy piano as the group moves further into a jazzy groove space that reveals a unit playing at a very high level.
“St. Stephen” ups the ante as the seminal 1960s classic sends a charge through the audience, with the energy level surging as the group rocks out in front of old-school projected psychedelia. The rhythm section locks into the big groove, and Mayer digs in with fierce bluesy licks as the jam flows for a peak collective get-down that demonstrates just why this music is so enduring. Another heavy hitter follows with “Morning Dew”, as the group appears to perform the anti-nuke classic in outer space. Weir’s poignant vocal about nuclear war resonates in ever-zeitgeisty fashion, what with the Pentagon continuing to dump billions down the drain on “nuclear modernization” even as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warns about a historic level of danger.
Mayer continues an MVP performance as he shreds the outro section’s bluesy riffage in cathartic fashion for another big peak. It’s like four straight home runs when the opening notes of “Terrapin Station” ring out, one of the ultimate storyteller’s songs in music history as it is about the storyteller’s own journey. As the song progresses, dancing bears are joined by turtles and peace signs that all swirl into a dazzling psychedelic vortex. The “Drums” and “Space” segments feature compelling World Beat percussion from drummers Hart and Jay Lane, with some of those deep space images from NASA to generate a mesmerizing blend of galactic imagery and vibration.
One of the evening’s most electrifying moments awaits when Dead & Company move out of space into Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”. A tangible buzz of anticipation moves through the audience from the opening notes. The reaction comes from the mystical song’s esteemed and historic place in the rock ‘n’ roll counterculture, as well as the urgent delivery Weir has brought to the lyrics since the Dead debuted it in 1987. The song’s ominous vibe is always transcended by its sense of higher consciousness and awareness about the threats society faces, with the cyclical groove powering a scintillating jam as Mayer pours gas on the fire with his furious fretwork while multi-colored smoke clouds and psychedelia appear on the screens.
After sandwiching a hot jam on “Althea” between Garcia ballads “Stella Blue” and “Brokedown Palace”, Dead & Company brings the show home with their ever-anthemic take on “Not Fade Away”. The intro uses the Sphere screens to take the audience back to 710 Ashbury Street in the 1960s, with a narrator describing the band for the uninitiated: “In the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, stands a modest Victorian townhouse. It is the home of a young psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll band who call themselves the Grateful Dead…” A photo collage of the band members through the years appears as backdrop, while the audience claps out the classic beat. It’s a fitting way to cap off the show that concludes the first six weeks of the residency, with the group set to take a week off before resuming on the 4th of July.
Those who want to keep the dance party going find their way over to the Brooklyn Bowl, where Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country are set to play an aftershow party. A young gun guitarist with an old soul, Donato’s star has risen fast in recent years with his touring including several shows winning hearts and minds as a member of Phil Lesh & Friends. This included a 9 May show at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater that featured a transcendent “Eyes of the World” jam which Donato pushed into a higher dimension with his lead guitar skills. Seeing Donato rock out on his “Dance in the Desert” here in Vegas feels like a perfect vibe to cap off a special evening.
As to the creative triumph of Dead & Company’s Sphere residency, John Mayer turns out to be as instrumental with the visual programming as he is with the music by having served as the point man between the band and the production team. “This is sensory hijacking. And it’s very fun to be behind that mischief,” Mayer explained to GQ. “And there’s also another layer to the story. To me, I wanted a message of metaphysical hope and optimism. And the show is called ‘Dead Forever,’ and the end of the show [depicts] the beginning of the Grateful Dead. And there’s a very interdimensional optimism that somewhere, somehow, this is all just getting started, and we got to visit for just one second at the very end.”