Dead & Company perform at Sphere in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Thursday, May 16, 2024.
Alive Coverage
Toward the end of their opening-night concert at Las Vegas’ Sphere, Dead & Company performed “Hell in a Bucket” backed by a floor-to-roof technicolor video that included so many of the visual touchstones we’ve come to associate with Grateful Dead: There was a skeleton riding a motorcycle with his long gray hair blowing in the wind. There were roses blanketing a hillside. There were dancing bears poking their colorful heads out along the road. There was a soaring turtle with a lightning bolt on his belly. And they were all surrounded by a psychedelic scene of cotton-candy clouds, bubblegum-pink windmills and flying eyeballs.
But this eye-popping visual wasn’t par for the course on Thursday night (May 16). The Grateful Dead spin-off group – made up of Dead founding members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart alongside John Mayer and the band’s longtime collaborators Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti and Jay Lane — put music center-stage while sparingly (and effectively) deploying Sphere’s bombastic bag of tricks.
Just as often as a lightning storm or a galaxy of stars lit up the massive screen, a static-but-decorative frame would display a straightforward video of the musicians performing a 20-minute-plus jam session of one song. Those concert videos were much larger than any jumbotron at a typical arena, given the Sphere’s 240-foot-tall display, but it was an example of Dead & Company sticking to the live strategy that served their parent band for decades, with an extra dose of spectacle that felt like an organic extension, not a stretch.
Those technical spectacles, while very much a product of 2024, were often in the service of a history lesson about the band’s origins. As the third band to break in the Sphere – following a six-month stint from U2 that wrapped in March and a four-concert mini-residency from Phish last month – Dead & Co. molded the striking venue in their image on Thursday night, finding ways to give fans a modern show while embracing where they’re from.
Below, find Billboard’s five best moments from opening night of Dead & Company’s 24-date Sphere residency.
The History
Image Credit: Alive Coverage The first visual stunner of the night was when the scaffolding on the screen split in two (in a lightning-bolt configuration, no less) to reveal a Victorian house in the San Francisco neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury, where Grateful Dead was formed in the mid-’60s. As Dead & Co. played the jangly “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo,” the camera view got wider and wider, transforming from cars driving in front of the house to the full city grid of San Fran to the Golden Gate Bridge to amid the clouds to floating above Earth itself. While the visual transported the venue to outer space, the scene was originally grounded in the very place where it all began for the rock band. And we would return to that very same house once again ahead of the final song of the night, taking a reverse course from the cosmos back to the Bay Area.
The Give & Take
At many points through the night, it was clear just how long these guys have been playing together. Weir and Hart have nearly 60 years under their belts as a unit, of course, but even Dead & Company are coming up on a decade of performing together, starting with their 2015 formation. And with the musicians’ famously improvisational style, there is so much unspoken collaboration that happens every night onstage that requires visual cues to keep from going off the rails. It also leads to some great reactive moments, where you can see in real-time the bandmates musically responding to something they hear. Our favorite example on opening night was during “Standing On the Moon,” when Weir unleashed his most powerful vocal of the night, loudly growling, “I’d rather be with you!” Mayer responded by bringing that same power to his guitar strum, answering Weir’s visceral wail with a brash hard-rock chord.
The Whimsy
The band’s commitment to the music is very serious, but it wouldn’t be a Dead show without some fun too. One of the major differences between how U2 used the Sphere screen and how Dead & Co. used it was the amount of silly, colorful animations deployed on Thursday night. During “Uncle John’s Band” – which was also the sing-along moment of the night – the backdrop started out as a blank paint-by-numbers drawing before progressively filling in every color of the rainbow (including a literal rainbow arching above the band). The most adorable part of the scene? To the far left and right, there were dancing turtles playing a tambourine and a banjo, respectively, in reference to the turtles on the cover of the band’s 1977 album Terrapin Station. It was hard to look away from the cute cartoons.
The Fans
Image Credit: Rich Fury/Sphere Entertainment The dedication of Deadheads knows no bounds, and their energy was an integral part of Thursday’s show. To wrap up the night’s final song “Not Fade Away,” the video of the band onscreen pulled into a wide shot to show the rows of fans on the floor surrounding the stage, repeating the poignant last line en masse: “You know my love will not fade away.” It was fitting that one of the final images of the night would include the superfans who have kept this long, strange trip going for nearly six decades.
In honor of those fans, Vibee created the Dead Forever Experience at the Sphere-adjacent Venetian Resort. It will be open Wednesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., throughout the residency and includes Grateful Dead photography from 1965 until the death of founding member Jerry Garcia in 1995; a Participation Row Pop-Up that gives fans a chance to support various nonprofit groups; a vintage Volkswagen bus alongside the new electric model; the guitars that Weir and Mayer are playing at the Sphere each night on display; and an exhibit of Hart’s “vibrational expressionist” art, which he creates through his drumming. In the photo display, there’s a picture of the famous Haight-Ashbury house referenced in the opening and closing of the Sphere show, as well as a 1:4 scale model of the band’s famous “Wall of Sound” speaker display that was built for the Dead’s 1974 concerts, which is also referenced in the residency (see the photo above).
The End?
In audio of an old news broadcast that plays during the final Haight-Ashbury scene, the reporter says of the Dead’s faithful fans: “These free-spirited showgoers would prefer the music never stop.” Just last year, Dead & Company embarked on what was billed as their “final tour,” which wrapped up in their home base of San Francisco, and while fans have now been gifted this 24-date residency, it remains to be seen what the future might hold for the band beyond that. The final stretch of songs – “Hell In a Bucket,” Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “Not Fade Away” – all address mortality in some way, though we can’t know if that’s in reference to the band or its aging members (Hart is 80; Weir is 76), or the fact that death already rocked the band when Garcia died. One thing is clear: No matter what happens after the Sphere residency, this fanbase won’t ever let the music stop.
Night 1 Setlist
SET 1
Feel Like a Stranger
Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo
Jack Straw
Bird Song
Me and My Uncle
Brown-Eyed Women
Cold Rain and SnowSET 2
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 AwayUpcoming Sphere Residency Dates
May 17
May 18
May 24
May 25
May 26
May 30
May 31
June 1
June 6
June 7
June 8
June 13
June 14
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June 20
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