Dead & Company is dead, long live Dead & Company. In January 2024, the largest iteration of a post-Jerry Grateful Dead lineup announced that, starting in May, they were getting the band back together for a two-month residency at Sphere in Las Vegas (the venue dropped the the, Sean Parker–style). Despite the obscene prices, demand was rabid enough to quickly justify extending their stay through mid-July, then mid-August—no doubt happy news for Sphere owner and alleged serial abuser James Dolan, who’d been watching his state-of-the-art venue hemorrhage cash since it opened its doors for a U2 residency in September 2023.
That year marked the final tour for D&C and set a high watermark for the band itself: this was the best they had played since their 2015 start by a considerable margin. Dead & Company struggled to find their groove in their nascent years, but by last summer, something had clicked. Maybe it was the urgency of a last official tour, maybe swapping OG GD drummer Bill Kreutzmann for a spritely Jay Lane helped beat the Dead & Slow rap that had haunted D&C since their first show. But the band was playing to win.
My girlfriend Sarah (partner? What do you call a straight, unmarried couple in their thirties?) and I made it to five stops on that run: two hometown nights in Chicago and a trip out to San Francisco for what we feared might be the band’s final three shows. Five concerts is excessive or amateur depending on your affection for the Grateful Dead songbook, but it proved a fitting number for the Blood Jump household. We danced and sang and cried with local friends, with friends from out of state, with new friends made at setbreak, and, somehow, next to Andy Cohen for one night. It was a fitting goodbye for so many, for those who logged hundreds of shows in the Garcia days and for those whom Dead & Company offered the only shot at seeing a Dead show at the scale of Grateful Dead’s peak touring powers.
Hundreds of eulogies have poured in since the final tour, via platforms that range from Instagram captions to one-horse rags to The Paris Review. We would miss Dead & Company, but at least we’d had a proper goodbye. So, when Dead & Co announced that they’d be reuniting for a summer-long residency at Sphere, it was enough to raise a few kief-crusted eyebrows.
Still, Sarah and I were celebrating our tenth anniversary on what happened to be the third weekend of the residency, and it felt like a good enough excuse to justify the costs of a trip out to Vegas. We purchased tickets for a three-night weekend and solemnly acknowledged our privilege to our cats (they felt this was performative). We’d already said goodbye to a band that meant so much to us; this would be our encore.
5/30/24
We are nervous. I often get wound up before a concert, to the degree one might think I was the one performing. Still, today feels different. The vibes are high enough to prevent any meltdowns, but it’s clear Sphere’s reputation had gotten to our heads. A normal concert can be overwhelming on the wrong day, and while my psychedelic days are largely behind me, adding a 160,000 square-foot screen to a notoriously mind-bending show seemed like it might be a lot. We are quiet on the boiling walk from dinner to the venue. A giant stealie spins across the Exosphere and reminds us that we’re here by choice. The staff brisk us in; they are lovely and remain so throughout the weekend.
Our short time in Vegas has made the city seem like Disney World for Reaganites, and Sphere’s lobby runs with the theme. The décor is somewhere between Epcot in the 90s and the set of a Hulu drama about a tech scandal; neon lights give the curved walls a light-green hue and metallic circles hang in orbits from the ceiling. We’re disappointed to see the robot concierges that typically greet crowds are turned off for the weekend—they’re sleeping behind curtains like parakeets who need to shut up during a Zoom call. We buy a couple of $19 beers and find our seats in the 200 level.
Before the show, Sphere’s interior screens are lit dimly with what looks like backstage scaffolding. Our seat neighbors debate whether or not it’s a projection, and the man behind me declares loudly that he does not want the band to play “Terrapin Station” (too boring) between anecdotes of his investment strategies (considerably less boring). This will be a theme for our weekend at Sphere. The dozen Dead & Company shows we’d attended previously had all carried something of an outlaw nature; hordes of unwashed wooks would litter the lots with their fingers in the air for a free ticket, and the number of dirty dreads inside the venue would typically prove their luck. Sphere marks the first time the venue is as much of a draw as the band itself, and for every tried-and-true Deadhead we’d pass inside, there would be two well-moneyed tourists who bought tickets just to see what the fuss was about. The lights go down, the band takes the stage.
We had fastidiously avoided following the setlists of the first two weekends of Dead & Company’s residency, and we’re pleasantly surprised when they open the night with “Iko Iko.” The sound is crisp, clean, and much too quiet—the ratio of crowd chatter to music will not skew right for the rest of the weekend. Still, the band is playing with a pace and enthusiasm that prove they’d picked up where they’d left off last summer. The visuals start modestly to ease us in: traditional projections of the band over the preshow scaffolding, a winking tease to Sphere’s massive scale. Song two sees things heat up. The band noodles a lick from “Dark Star,” and the scaffolding parts ways to reveal what a title card will confirm is 710 Haight Street, the San Francisco home of a good number of Grateful Dead members during the band’s formative years. The crowd is ecstatic. The screen is big and bright enough to give the impression that you’re actually outdoors, and the money and heart palpitations we spent on our trip here suddenly seem worth it. The band launches into a well-timed “Eyes of the World,” and as a 76-year-old Bob Weir starts his verse, we’re pulled above the skyline, then above the clouds, then into outer space. The animation is at a scale to induce a physical sensation of soaring through the air. It is blissful, and so is the music.
Videos for the rest of the evening would split the difference between the Dead’s myriad iconography and more traditional (though no less impressive) fare you’d throw on the TV between vape pulls. A spiral of dancing bears stream around John Mayer during “Bertha.” A portal spits us out into Egypt to see the band projected on pyramids as they play Garcia’s “Loser.” One of the more inspired decisions sees the band’s names projected as credits over a Cinemascope rendering of the wild west for “El Paso,” a song Sarah had been chasing since her first show. But the pièce de resistance comes during D&C’s cover of “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad.” Uncle Sam’s skeleton rises from the grave and hops on a motorcycle to ride through a land of PS3 psychedelia, past bears and roses and skulls and, inexplicably, enough bare feet to break Tarantino into a cold sweat. It is as strange and silly and endearing as anything in the Dead’s catalogue.
The band plays “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” as we descend back from space to Earth, again triggering the feeling that one is really floating. We land back in Haight Ashbury, and a canned recording of an old radio story on the Grateful Dead plays before the final song. It’s enough to get the crowd rabid. The band launches into “Fire on the Mountain,” and images of Bill Walton, the famed Deadhead and Celtic all-star who passed earlier in the week, fill the mammoth screen. I am far from a basketball fan, but I’ve shared enough concerts with the guy to get emotional. Mickey Hart raps the verses of “Fire.” We spill out of the venue and into a wall of dry heat. We are exhausted but hungry to return tomorrow night.
5/31/24
We are on the floor. At a “normal” Dead & Co show, we typically try to get as close to the band as is feasible, but house center seemed like it may have been the best spot to soak in the Sphere experience (I will not say exSphereience). We’d had a great time the night before, but, as we discussed over $30 mojitos by our hotel’s pool that morning, it felt a bit like Dead & Company: The Ride. An assigned seat and 4DX-friendly visuals had comprised the most theme park–adjacent Grateful Dead night in our faux-hippie career. Our minds had been sufficiently blown, but we’d missed the mischief-laden magic of general admission.
Sphere’s floor can hold 1,000 attendees, but you wouldn’t know it from standing there. It is both as close as we’ve been to a Dead & Company stage and the most room we’ve enjoyed in the pit. Cocktail servers snake through the crowd to take drink orders throughout the full 3.5–hour show; our shoes remain unscuffed. Even down here, the crowd is considerably more manicured than what we’d learned to expect from the Dead, though the vibes have improved. A college kid asks for a lighter during set one (I don’t have one, but he happily accepts a toke from my pen). I regret groaning at a frat bro when he steps in front of our view—he is apologetic to a fault and chats with us generously during setbreak. He tells us that last night’s setlist was written by the late Bill Walton; he is friendly but almost certainly blackout drunk, and we don’t put too much credence in his intel. A twentysomething’s pupils betray his psychedelic appetite, and he spends much of the show laying on the ground. The crowd is just as chatty as the night before, but the sound is a bit better. We’re not quite home, but we’re close.
Anyone who routinely ponies up for weekend-long jam band runs will, at some point, be tasked with explaining to normal people that no two shows are alike. This remains true for Dead & Company’s Sphere residency—the band even guarantees as much on their website. Sphere visuals, though, are decidedly exempt from that promise. Night 2’s show opens as the night before: The band’s images are projected over animated scaffolding as they play a smooth and funky “Shakedown Street,” and the display spills us onto Haight Street for “Jack Straw.” We think this makes sense; it isn’t realistic for most people to attend more than one night of this sort of show, and the bookends that take the audience up into and back down from space feel essential enough to warrant a permanent fixture. But it’s hard not to feel a bit disappointed when we discover that many of the other videos are recycled, too.
We’re again transported to a square room made of vintage Grateful Dead flyers (tonight, during “Don’t Ease Me In”), we again see Bob and John croon under a coloring-book rainbow (“Uncle John’s Band”). I try to remind myself to focus on the band during the visuals we’d seen the night before—this is, after all, the closest we’ve ever been to them—but the cartoonishly large screen pulls my attention upward time and time again.
The new animations we do see are impressive enough to soften the blow of a handful of repeats. We are taken over a lake and plunged deep under water, where we eventually meet a sunken ship spackled with mushrooms and Dead ephemera (“Row Jimmy”). Sphere shimmers with animations of the northern lights during “Terrapin Station,” and I send a prayer to the hemp gods that the finance bro from last night spills beer on himself. The most impressive new addition comes during “I Know You Rider,” when the band pulls the audience through a tour of some of Grateful Dead’s more iconic venues: we see Fillmore West, Madison Square Garden, Barton Hall. It’s almost eerie how well Sphere can transform its own shape; the animation of Cornell’s famous field house seems to flatten the dome to a third of its size.
We can’t put our finger on why, but we notice our favorite songs of the run have been the ones we don’t typically get excited for outside Sphere. Tonight, we’re brought back down to earth via “Black Muddy River,” a tender cut from In the Dark that I often skip but gets me swaying with a sappy heart tonight. The college kid has found a lighter, and we share a joint as the band closes things out with a scorching “Casey Jones.” Dolan can waffle on his policy toward bong-rippers until he’s blue in the face—Sphere sails heady under tie-dye flags.
6/1/24
You can find the title of this issue of Blood Jump on t-shirts (official and bootlegged), on pins and hats and key chains, in tweets and blog posts and comments on Reddit. The Dead’s greatest extramusical feat may have been to convince the masses that the biggest band in hippiedom is not a capitalist pursuit. More than a handful of fans were miffed when Dead & Co. announced their Sphere residency, and likely for good reason: the “final tour” was their best-selling yet, drawing enough fans from across the world to have a Swiftian impact on the local economies of several of their stops. Traveling for concerts is a luxury, one that many can’t afford to repeat year after year.
Still, the accusations that the residency is little more than a cash grab feel myopic, if not incorrect. Grateful Dead knowingly employed some of the most effective iconography in rock and roll history; they toured football stadiums long past what Jerry Garcia’s health would allow; Garcia lent his own name to lines of ice cream and ties. For better or worse, grabbing cash has always been part of it.
We start our last Dead Day at The Venetian’s Official Dead Forever ExperienceTM, an elevated gift shop that is somehow a bit less repulsive than it sounds. We forgo this year’s Shakedown, the open-air bootleg and sundries market that’s been a parking-lot staple of Dead-adjacent shows since before I was alive. Vegas’s summer heat has forced Shakedown indoors—in a conference hall at The Tuscany—and we decide that fluorescent lights and dingy carpets might suck some of the fun out of the occasion. (An overdue #metoo moment for some of the scene’s more popular creators will validate our decision a few weeks later.)
The Venetian exhibit does a fine job of approximating the Dead community we’ve largely missed throughout the weekend and gives a look at a handful of GD artifacts that are often benign but occasionally interesting. There is to-scale model of the wall of sound, a photo gallery, a handful of instruments, an installation of taper cassettes from Grateful Dead shows. We wait in line to get a picture with a dancing bear mascot who does not return from his bathroom break. The whole thing holds our attention for about twenty minutes, and we exit through the gift shop.
We’re back in Sphere’s 200 level—this time at stage right—and we’re treated to the best sound of the weekend. Sphere uses a bespoke spatial audio system that’s nearly as well publicized as its visual tech, and we’re surprised to find it so inconsistent over our three visits. We’re grateful that tonight’s sound cuts the mustard: The band is playing the best they have all weekend, and the setlist matches their energy. We enter space to a high-tempo “The Music Never Stopped,” which launches us into “They Love Each Other,” a contender for my favorite Dead song and one that’s accompanied by a rainforest animation as breathtaking as anything we see that weekend. “Saint of Circumstance” burns the house down and features a disco ball graphic that doubles down on Sphere’s capacity to play with one’s sense of space. The band rips through “Sugaree,” through “St. Stephen” and “Cumberland Blues,” and, to our surprise, performs a phenomenal cover of “Dear Prudence.” I always cry during “Brokedown Palace,” but tonight’s hits me especially hard, and I hope that our seat neighbors are more focused on the video of our descent down to earth than on the grown man sobbing to a classic rock song next to them.
Ask a hundred different Grateful Dead fans what they think about “Drums and Space” and you’ll hear a hundred different answers. It’s been a feature of Dead shows since the late 70’s and has since become the only segment you’re guaranteed to hear at one of their concerts. I likely don’t have to explain this, but “Drums and Space” is a set-two installment that begins as a percussion jam and slowly unravels into an ambient soundscape—think a boardwalk drum circle that features a sit-in from Tim Hecker. “Drums and Space” can be hypnotic, intoxicating, something that lulls you into a primal sense of rhythm and purpose; for many, it’s a chance to run to the bathroom.
Which, at Sphere, is a mistake. “Drums and Space” is the only portion of Dead & Company’s residency that takes advantage of Sphere’s haptic seating, and it does it well. Each kick-drum beat sends a wave through the audience, in what Mickey Hart describes as—I’m so sorry—vibratory stimuli “from tip to toe.” At 80, Hart is the oldest member of the band, and after Bill Kreutzmann’s 2023 departure, “Drums and Space” is his show to lead. He's joined by guests throughout the weekend—Jay Lane and bassist Otiel Burbridge on some nights, percussionist Zakir Hussain on another—but the segment is purely Hart’s brainchild, a psychedelic micro-orchestra that gets the last laugh over “Drums and Space” deniers. It’s hard to insist with a straight face that Sphere wholly defeats its own novelty, but for Hart, this iteration of “Drums and Space” feels like the culmination of a life’s work: his music is endlessly curious and exploratory, and Sphere is the venue to match the scale of his vision.
The band concludes the weekend with “One More Saturday Night,” a typical punctuation mark for a Saturday show. It’s a fitting end for our last moments of the residency—which, I should mention, has been dubbed Dead Forever. In San Francisco, we trudged out of Oracle Park with weepy eyes, mourning a band we’d likely never see again. Tonight, that feels less certain. Grateful Dead died with Jerry Garcia, but their music has endeared further and with more strength than any other cover act could claim. The music never stops.
Sample Draws
I’m a mark for Yorgos Lanthimos, but I adored Kinds of Kindness, his new triptych that tries to make sense of the scales that balance cruelty and devotion. The full cast is fantastic, and I say that as a Qualley skeptic.
I recently finished Miranda July’s All Fours, a book that somehow feels like her most straightforward work and an entirely new abstraction. She’s a pervert in the highest-praise sense of the word, and her provocations are as delightful as they are insightful.
Spike Lee is a shameful blind spot for me—I’ve seen only six or so of his movies—but I recently fell in love with Mo’ Better Blues. It is a percussive, blood-rich movie, one that I’m shocked doesn’t rank higher in his filmography.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again soon for the next issue.