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By all rights, the residency by Dead & Company at Sphere shouldn’t have seemed that historic. After all, they were the third band into the venue, following U2’s opening 40-show run, followed by Phish’s brief but sweet four-concert stop in Las Vegas, both of which received the appellation of “mind-blowing.” Creative ground had been broken, new bars had been set, and it’d been sufficiently established that no one would ever be tempted to call the venue “Dolan’s folly” again (if anyone had been brave enough to do so in the first place). A 30-night stand by the semi-retired offshoot of the Grateful Dead could well have seemed anticlimactic, given how quickly something that seems massively innovative at the start can come to just feel like the new normal.
So, when Dead & Co wrapped up that run Saturday night after two months, why did it seem like they had come to own the place? And how soon, everyone wanted to know, could they come back? What a short, stunning trip it’d been… albeit one that will likely have a long tail — for the band, for the venue and for the further understanding of what live entertainment can be.
The 30 shows operated at near-capacity from the May 16 opening night to the Aug. 10 closing, but let’s face it: Dead & Company cheated, by inviting repeat business. Please read into that statement all of the irony intended, because no asterisk need be put on a box-office triumph just because not every visit was a unique visit. Even if you came into the “Dead Forever” experience as a nominal fan and not a hardcore Deadhead, chances are, you didn’t feel completely sated seeing just one of these nearly four-hour shows. Devotees came in knowing, or at least strongly suspecting, that there would be no overlap between setlists from one night to the next. But what couldn’t have been necessarily predicted was that there would be some malleability in the visual content, too. If the ultra-big-screen visuals didn’t have as complete a nightly turnover, it still added to the overwhelming sense that each show was bespoke. And that creates a sense of excitement even for a ticketholder coming just for one show, who isn’t aware of what might have been different the night before or will be the next. You don’t have to look up setlist.fm or research what the video content changes are on Reddit to get in on that feeling that the thrill is on.
Dead & Company at Sphere, August 2024
Dead & Company at Sphere, August 2024
Even if the show did remain static from night to night, you’d still want to see it more than once, if only to experience the major digital-FX bookends that remained identical throughout all 30 shows. For the second number in the set, the “camera” would zoom out from a modern-day closeup of the Grateful Dead’s old haunts in the Haight Asbury district, up over San Francisco and through the clouds to, finally, an overhead view of earth. (Of course, at different points the show would go farther into outer space than that.) And the penultimate number would make the return trip, coming back from the cosmos to gently land in SF circa 1965, with the original Dead members as silhouettes jamming in a second-story window. As conceived by Mayer, the show’s creative director, with Treatment, the producer of the visuals, and executed by Industrial Light & Magic, these twin moments surely marked peak experiences in a lifetime of entertainment for most of the fans on-hand. The additional beauty of it was that, like any, um, trip, there were variables that counted for a lot — and so just how magnificent these visuals felt to you probably depended on where the songs the band chose songs to accompany them fit on the majestic-to-meh scale for you.
In a June Variety interview, Mayer said that new video content would be introduced even as late as the final two weekends of the residency — mostly to keep things fresh for repeat customers. Some of the visuals just weren’t ready for opening night, so there was that factor, too. But primarily, this rotation of elements in and out was purposeful. In a separate interview, Treatment Studio’s Sam Pattinson, who served as co-creative director, said, “Our brief was originally that we wanted to create between 30-40% extra content (beyond what would fit in a show in a given night), so we could mix it up all the time. .. I think we made about five and a half hours in the end. So we beat the 40% on the three-hour show. It’s a huge body of work, really.” Watching the residency’s final two nights this past Thursday and Friday, it was fascinating to look at what had been introduced since that first opening weekend, and also what was even different between the two evenings.
Dead & Company at Sphere, August 2024
Chris Willman/Variety
The final show had a moonscape come up — during Weir’s reading of “Standing on the Room,” so maybe that was a particularly tailored bit of content for that song — with an American flag and a briefcase with a Dead logo planted on the moon. Not one of the more elaborate renderings in the show, but a nice addition. Both nights had the faux-Western “Ace” sepia movie imagery for a cover of a classic country song (“El Paso” one night, “Big River” the next). The animated, skeletal Uncle Sam is always going to jump out of the graveyard and onto a motorbike — although now, unlike opening weekend, he jumps a ramp into the upper atmosphere and is joined by a deceased lady friend parachuting in from above. Differences were also apparent: A gorgeous trip to the Egyptian pyramids after dark made it in Friday, but not Saturday. Also present on the next-to-last night was a favorite of Mayer’s, a rain of rose petals that eventually envelops and darkens the whole dome. Saturday night had a sky-high montage of ticket stubs and backstage passes, familiar from opening weekend. Friday’s show had more spacier moments, like an assemblage of planets and suns passing by one another — very cosmologically incorrect, to the audience’s delight — and some Roger Dean-like psychedelic landscapes with trees growing out of floating rocks or dirtballs. A montage of venues the band has played in had some different locales featured from night to night. An impressive newer addition created a fake stadium for the band to play in — populated entirely by tens of thousands of dancing skeletons.
Dead & Company at Sphere, August 2024
Chris Willman/Variety
As always, just one segment of musical content remained the same, as it had for all 30 nights of the residency: Mickey Hart, joined by fellow drummer Jay Lane and bassist-turned-percussionist Oteil Burbridge, executing the instrumental, atonal “Drums” for more than nine minutes, followed by the equally trippy “Space” for eight. Normally, if you told someone that you were going to hear what kind of amounted to a 17-minute drum solo and that it was going to be the highlight of the show, that wouldn’t speak very well for the rest of the show. In this case, the full-band parts of the concert have no reason to be slighted if someone feels compelled to single out Hart’s section as primo. It’s what he does in making that section aurally riveting, of course — and what Treatment has done in making this one of the few parts of the show where you really need to look straight up, as well as around. But it also has to do with the haptics built into the seats. Watching the show one night from the floor, I was impressed by how much bass sound could be pumped out at a standing audience. But watching this segment from an assigned seat is like — no exaggeration — getting a deep-tissue massage. Nothing any of the older Deadheads in the audience could have slipped me could have possibly made me feel any more blissed-out.
What often doesn’t get talked about is how un-psychedelic the majority of the Dead’s music is, though. Even when Weir isn’t busting out a Marty Robbins or Johnny Cash oldie, much of a Dead & Company set fits squarely into the camp of Americana, to the point where at times you could mistake it for a vintage concert by the Band — if the Band also happened to be jazz heads given to flights of improvisation that stretched the typical song length out to 7-to-11 minutes. The biggest misconception in the long, strange history of the Dead is that if you’re into songs, this music is not for you. It is, and at Sphere, for newbies or reluctant converts, the visuals constitute a sort of sleight-of-hand effect, where you’re too distracted by the splendor to worry about what might feel meandering, if that might’ve been your linear inclination on a normal tour. Check your head, not your watch, etc.
Dead & Company at Sphere, August 2024
Chris Willman/Variety
But with or without visuals, it would be hard to imagine anyone hating this show unless they also happen to hate the electric guitar. Weir and Hart are the beating hearts of the show, but Mayer is a master of emotionally expressive fireworks. For these August shows, he so dedicated himself to the cause of recreating the late Jerry Garcia’s role in a Dead show that, in honor of Garcia missing a finger on his right hand, Mayer slammed the index finger of his left hand in a door, causing that digit to bear a huge bandage and go unused. All right, this “homage” probably was not a deliberate choice. (If it was, he probably would have picked a different finger to disable than the one he described in an Instagram post as “the team captain of my fretting hand.” Somehow, he retaught himself how to play guitar solos without that all-important finger, and if anything, he sounded more impressive — more soulful, even — with the handicap visibly evident on the big screens. After the intermission on the final night, he returned with a much tinier bandage on the finger and started using it again, maybe feeling that a mere half-show’s worth of pressure would not reinjure it too badly. But it was clear that Mayer and Garcia could share a motto: Nine Is Enough.
There was not much pomp and ceremony to Saturday being the last show of the residency… and possibly the last of Dead & Company’s career, if only to the extent that any show can be the last of a band’s career. Since the Dead don’t speak, as a rule, the only sign that this was any different than any other night was a group huddle, and the rare addition of a song not on the evening’s printed-out setlist — “Ripple,” which, for whatever reason, caused the fellow next to me to break out into the kind of tearful paroxysms of joy rarely seen outside of a Pentecostal service. (That’s the fun thing about being a less Dead-icated fan, at one of these shows; you can still experience, by osmosis, the surprise and delight being felt by people who have spent a lot more years than you bearing this obsession.) And then the giant fake-steel doors that normally close at the end of each performance stayed open, for a one-time-only appearance of full credits for the residency. (The screen being what it is, these names were much larger and more legible than they are when the Darren Aronofsky film “Postcards From Earth” also posts its end credits on a single Sphere screen.)
Members of Dead & Company embrace at end of Sphere residency
Chris Willman/Variety
There was little sense of sadness in the crowd, or at least less so than when Dead & Company called a cessation to touring at the end of a final outing in 2023. To a person, probably, they all believed the band would be back for a second residency next year. In practical terms, that’s easier for them than it would be for, say, U2, which has new albums and the continued threat of international touring to deal with. And there’s no mistaking that the enormous payday would have something to do with a reprise, with merch sales alone believed to be in the six figures every night.
Encouragement on that front has come from the band itself, with many fans pointing to the interview Weir did with Variety in June, where he said he “wouldn’t be surprised if we get invited back” (no shit) “and I would certainly make room for that.” Additionally, Weir indicated he was already dreaming up ways to make the visuals of the overall show more spontaneous: “I’d love to see the arrangement get much looser and much more interactive — and I think it will, if we take another swing at it.” That swing feels like a given, until we’re told otherwise.
Dead & Company at Sphere, August 2024
Chris Willman/Variety
The checks waiting to be cut might be irresistible, but there are even better reasons than that for the Dead to rise in 2025. It will be an anniversary, and #Dead65 is a hashtag waiting to happen for a collective that has not shied away from birthdays in the past. But mostly it’s something to look forward as the rejoining of areal community in a world that needs them more than ever — and most especially with Mayer, still a wunderkind at a boyish 46, and Weir and Hart, wunder-elders of 76 and 80, respectively, being on-stage symbols of how people from different generations and genres can jam. Throw in the fact that Weir swears “we’re just scratching the surface” on how to use the technology for something improvisational — which is to say, something deeply human — and “Dead Forever II” feels like a necessity.
(If they want to book the sequel for a cooler couple of months, though, no one would complain. Because even Uncle Sam’s bones were breaking a sweat.)
Dead & Company at Sphere, August 2024
Chris Willman/Variety
