In May, I came across an ad in the subway promoting the months-long residency at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, of Dead & Company, the current permutation of the Grateful Dead, featuring two surviving members, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, and the pop star John Mayer. The ad read, in a brassy “Star Wars” font, “Dead Forever.” I remembered what David Letterman said years ago when he saw a billboard in Times Square for the musical “Cats”: “ ‘Cats: Now and Forever’—is that a threat?”
And yet, a month later, I found myself on the way to Las Vegas, where the band was a dozen shows into thirty at that glimmering new Sno Ball of a hall just off the Strip. Half the seats on the flight seemed to be occupied by fellow-Deadheads, identifiable, as ever, by the hieroglyphs. I had checked no luggage, but I carried some personal baggage. It had been forty years, almost to the day, since I’d caught my first Grateful Dead show. The week of my flight, an elderly evangelist in a sun hat had stopped me in Central Park and asked, “Young man, what makes you happy?” I paused, then exclaimed, “Jerry Garcia!”
Hardly a day goes by where I don’t cue up an old show, questing for moments of transcendence amid the swill. (The Dead could be great, as Garcia, the front man, once remarked, “for seconds on end.”) Despite broadening taste, periodic bouts of embarrassment, and decades of personal growth and/or decay, my fascination with the music has somehow only deepened. Still, I am an ornery kind of Deadhead, argumentative about eras and keyboardists and sound regimes, cynical about the scene, and uneasy about most of the music that the surviving members have made, in various guises, since Garcia’s death, in 1995. It has almost always left me lukewarm, and yet I have kept going to gigs, large and small, in clubs and arenas, at beaches and bowling alleys, in search of that elusive ecstatic thrill. There is a sense, too, that each swing through town could be the boys’ last. Forever, as they say, is a long time.
The Dead, in their original incarnation, died a few times, or at least nodded off. In 1974, burdened by the high cost of their state-of-the-art sound system and a cocaine-addled touring operation, they performed a series of so-called retirement shows at the Winterland Ballroom, in San Francisco. But the following year they began working up new material and played a handful of Bay Area gigs, and by 1976 they were back on tour. Ten years and some drugs, cigarettes, and hot dogs later, Garcia fell into a diabetic coma, and the music stopped again; for a while, it looked like it might not come back. In 1992, there was another rash of cancellations, as Garcia, not for the first or last time, tried to kick his addiction to opiates. In 1995, he had a fatal heart attack at a rehab facility. Without Garcia, the Grateful Dead ceased to exist.
And yet. In the years that followed, the surviving members reassembled in a variety of configurations: the Dead, the Other Ones, and Furthur, to name a few. They cycled through dozens of replacement guitarists, some of them Garcia imitators, some not. But the absence of their grudging leader and brightest light exposed differences both fresh and latent, and greed and ego frayed their alliances. At various points, members stopped talking to one another; Weir, the rhythm guitarist, and Phil Lesh, the bass player, carried on a kind of cold duel over who’d be the standard-bearer. In 2015, on the fiftieth anniversary of the band’s formation, the jam impresario Peter Shapiro wrangled the remaining members into a series of stadium concerts, a supposedly final goodbye called Fare Thee Well. But, instead of sealing the mine, this extravaganza opened a new vein. Weeks later, Weir announced a new outfit, called Dead & Company, with Mayer—a guitar ace who’d recently become obsessed with Garcia’s playing style and songcraft—in the hot spot. Exit Lesh.
Somehow, this iteration, with its winking nod to corporate underpinnings, was the one that went big, the facsimile that pulled in new listeners and sold out stadiums. It became, for some, the real thing, a simulacrum instead of a simulation. I went to see Dead & Co. a few times. Citi Field, Madison Square Garden. They quickly acquired the name Dead and Slow, because of the creeping tempo that Weir, the putative boss, or at least the senior rock star, insisted on. I missed the brawn of the good stuff. Still, there were moments. The other players—Jeff Chimenti, on keys; Oteil Burbridge, on bass; and now Jay Lane, with Hart, on drums—are excellent musicians. I occasionally allowed myself to be carried away. I didn’t want to be a buzzkill.
Mayer is obviously a wicked guitar player, supple and slick, an ace as a mimic who also has his own panache. He’s bright, and very articulate about his passion for the music of the Grateful Dead. But his blues inflections, his fulsome guitar faces (all that mugging and preening), his designer watches, celebrity girlfriends, and tennis shoes—it can come off a bit twerpy. No one needs him to be a diabetic drug addict, humped over the fretboard, but the contrast is stark, as much in attitude as in style, between the fresh-faced showboat and the beatnik recusant whose Pumas he aims to fill.
Many fans don’t seem to mind. Quite a few even love it. Dead & Co. have been at it for nine years, playing two hundred and fifty gigs and selling close to five million tickets. This includes their supposed farewell tour, last summer, another false end with inflated prices. That old reliable illusion of scarcity, or finality, bumped up their average nightly gross to $4.5 million. The Dead had become fashionable, perhaps bigger than ever—or broader, anyway. The influx of casuals rivalled that of the so-called Touchheads, in the post-coma late-eighties era, following the success of the band’s lone Top Ten single, “Touch of Grey.” We are everywhere, Deadheads like to say. The declaration used to suggest infiltration and serendipity. These days, it implies saturation and perhaps even a kind of cultural fatigue.
By now, it’s hard to imagine that anyone hasn’t heard about the Sphere. You may even know that we’re supposed to call it Sphere, without the “the,” and that we have mostly decided to ignore this. People like to say that James Dolan, the Cablevision heir and the owner of Madison Square Garden, spent $2.3 billion to build it, but it was technically a joint project of M.S.G. and the Venetian, which the billionaire Sheldon Adelson sold to Apollo Global Management in 2022, before the Sphere was complete. In other words, though it may be Dolan’s pet project, it is also a ripe manifestation of risk capital, a giant mushroom sprouting out of the fungal network of the attention economy. Sphere is now a separate public company, ticker SPHR, whose stock is up eleven per cent in the past year. The aim is to seed more Spheres. London nixed one. South Korea is in play, and Abu Dhabi seems likely.
The Sphere is connected to the Venetian by an air-conditioned passageway. Outside, the building serves as an incandescent orbic billboard, with 1.2 million L.E.D.s, each containing four dozen diodes. Ad space, basically, or an electronic canvas in the round. Inside, it’s a performance venue, with about eighteen thousand seats arrayed under a vast dome that doubles as the world’s largest and highest-resolution L.E.D. screen. The sound system features some hundred and sixty thousand speakers, which allow engineers to direct discrete sounds at individual seats. The venue can also vibrate those seats and produce smells—an Odorama and an Orgasmatron in one. Dolan has said that he drew inspiration from the Ray Bradbury short story “The Veldt,” in which some snotty children, addicted to the verisimilitude of a faux savanna on a virtual-reality screen in their home, wind up feeding their parents to the virtual lions. One way of interpreting this is that Dolan wants to fuck your shit up. Another is that Charles Dolan, his father, might want to stay away.
Last fall, U2 inaugurated the Sphere, playing forty shows, all largely the same in terms of set list and visuals. The wows and the don’t-you-wish-you-were-heres made the rounds on social media. Next, Phish did four nights, each with a distinct set list and corresponding graphics. Wowier wows, this time, as the ambitious pairings flirted, conceptually and visually, with something like art, and made it hard for the band to clear much of a profit. Dead & Co. came next: two dozen shows to start. Last month, despite sales being a bit soft, they announced a half-dozen more. Ten lost weekends in all for the Deadheads in the desert, and a gross of more than a hundred million dollars.
Mayer and Dead & Co. are both co-managed by Irving Azoff, a longtime industry heavy and a former C.E.O. of Ticketmaster. (When Azoff’s clients the Eagles were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Don Henley said, “He may be Satan, but he’s our Satan.”) Azoff, who also manages U2, has a business partnership with Madison Square Garden. He’s got the Eagles doing the next Sphere stint, after Dead & Co. It’s tempting to think of Dead & Co. in their Sphere phase as a slick Mayer-and-Azoff concoction, and therefore a perversion of the Grateful Dead’s long-standing (or long-stumbling) fail-sideways approach to the music business. As it happens, in 1973, Azoff, just before taking on the Eagles, joined the Dead operation. He lasted little more than a week. “He couldn’t stand our laid-back life style,” Gail Hellund, who ran the band’s travel business, told the “Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast,” a cultural-history podcast. “He was too L.A. for us. No harm, no foul. Just oil and water.”
In May, I participated in a conversation, onstage at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, with the Canadian novelist Ray Robertson, who had published a book called “All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows.” We did our jibber-jabber and then took questions. An audience member asked, “What would Jerry Garcia have thought of the Sphere?” Robertson guessed that he’d have hated it. The cash grab, the corporate cheese: anathema to art. I said that, putting aside my general objection to any W.W.J.D. speculation, I wasn’t so sure. Garcia loved technology, movies, computers, television, graphic design. He made visual art and was an early adopter of MacPaint. And the Dead had, from their inception, regularly performed in multimedia environments. As the house band at the Acid Tests, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ LSD happenings, in the mid-sixties, the Dead would play coherent songs or incoherent noise, or nothing at all, while the light shows and other sonic and psychedelic craziness prevailed. Light shows became a mainstay, from the liquid-light oozings in the San Francisco ballrooms to the cutting-edge stage arrays of the band’s longtime lighting engineer, Candace Brightman, in arenas and stadiums. The Dead had also been sound-technology pioneers. So you’d imagine that Garcia would relish the opportunity to play inside what Mickey Hart described to me, in a recent Zoom call, as “the belly of a robot, a very smart robot.” (Hart, as it happens, designed the sound sixteen years ago for the ersatz volcano at the Mirage casino, which is now slated for demolition. On gig days he sometimes dropped by, in disguise, to savor its last eruptions.)
In the late nineties, the band pursued the notion of a permanent expo not unlike the Sphere, called Terrapin Station, with a theatre-in-the-round and holographic representations of the musicians; it was ultimately abandoned. Still, Garcia had long talked up the idea of a semi-permanent residency someplace, an opportunity to mitigate the rigors of the road. Thirty straight gigs in one hall: he’d dig that, especially if there were ice cream.
My first time in Las Vegas was in the summer of 1986. I was seventeen. I went West ostensibly to look at California colleges and to work on a ranch near Reno. I say “ostensibly” because the actual intention was to catch up with the Grateful Dead in Ventura, and follow them up to Mountain View—five shows in the group’s homeland of California.
I flew to Las Vegas, and two friends, who’d driven from the East Coast, picked me up at the airport. After a couple of hours of wandering the casino floor at the Golden Nugget, we set out at around midnight for the coast. We’d all read and admired “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” We had no ether or mescaline, but we had beer and some seedy brown weed and a romantic sense of ourselves as renegades crossing the desert at night.
Somewhere around Barstow, the hunger took hold, and we pulled into a Denny’s. The counterman asked where we were headed. To Ventura to see the Grateful Dead, we told him.
“Didn’t you hear?” he said. “Jerry Garcia is in a coma.” He had collapsed a few days after a concert in Washington, D.C.
It was dawn, foggy and gray, when we rolled into the parking lot at the Ventura County Fairgrounds. A few dozen bedraggled and forlorn Deadheads were maintaining a vigil. The shows were cancelled. Later that summer, I saw my first Dead cover band.
This time, I arrived in Las Vegas on a Thursday night. My phone told me that the day was the hottest ever recorded on planet Earth. In Vegas, the temp had reached a hundred and four. I got to the Venetian just as the weekend’s first show at the Sphere was emptying out—I had tickets for Friday and Saturday—and thousands of intoxicated enthusiasts were spilling into the ludicrous bong and bustle of the casino floor. I headed upstream, to get a sense of this particular fishery. Generally speaking, it was not a young crowd, or a particularly crunchy one. I saw more canes than dreadlocks. The people skewed middle-aged and heavyset, sporting an infinite array of merch, predominantly store-bought and Sphere-specific, as opposed to the D.I.Y. parking-lot goods of yore. But there were young people, too—converts, families. The crowd, overwhelmingly white, was evidently prosperous, no surprise when you consider the cost of the travel, lodging (presumably no one was pitching a tent on the Strip), and tickets, whose face value, given the fees and so-called dynamic pricing, runs from two hundred dollars to seven hundred dollars. People seemed more weary and dazed than elated, as though overwhelmed by the sensory experience, the scale of the place, and the distance of the walk along the endless faux-palatial hallways that passed from the Sphere back to the Venetian. At one point, I stopped on a stair, as on a mid-stream boulder, and filmed the procession on my phone. A few people waved; one gave me the finger.
At a bar off the casino floor, I sat down next to a guy about my age who was having a B.L.T. and red wine. He introduced himself as “John from Boston,” though he now lived in Southern California, working as an executive at a company that cleans up environmentally contaminated sites. His first Dead show was at the Boston Garden, in 1980. Ah, yes. I knew the tape. “There’s that great ‘Caution’ meltdown after ‘He’s Gone,’ ” I said. John didn’t recall. He’d gone to see Dead & Co. a few times, too, in various stadiums. He’d paid two hundred and seventy dollars for a seat in the top deck of the Sphere but had moved around to test the sound and had settled into a spot in the wheelchair section. “It was fucking amazing,” he said. “I smoked some weed and had a couple of actual mushrooms.”
His wingman, Matty K., sixty-nine, who had retired after selling a health-care tech business, was out on the floor playing video poker. They’d met years ago, at a bar in California while watching the Patriots on TV, two Massholes in sunny exile. Matty’s first Dead show was Boston Garden, 1973. He carried a laminate of the ticket stub in his wallet, and had flashed it in the bathroom that night, as a kind of urinal V.I.P. card; the guys ahead of him escorted him to the front of the line.
He’d attended upward of a hundred more Dead shows before Garcia died, and yet, he said, “this show at the Sphere was the best show I have ever seen. I was dead sober, not even a beer. It holds up to any Dead show ever.” This was blasphemy, especially from a guy who’d been there for what I considered glory days. But I’d come across the Mayer mania before, and perhaps the Sphere had powers of persuasion I’d not yet encountered.
Prior to my trip, I had imagined Vegas chaos, Fear and Loathing in Middle Age. I had grafted the savage decadence of yesteryear onto the designer-high generation, and worried about Ketamine zombies and fentanyl contaminations. A guy from Philly told me that his friend had a number you could call and within twenty minutes someone would deliver, in a black garbage bag, a tank of nitrous oxide to your hotel lobby. He and some friends had killed a cannister in their room the night before. But he didn’t have the number. In fact, chaos was elusive in this era of perfectly calibrated doses. Chocolates, capsules, mints, seltzers, cookies, cartridges: everything infused with something, save for the B.L.T. on white toast. People were chatty, or weary, or occasionally stumbly, but, to my great relief, I saw no one tumbling down the steep stairs or off any balcony edges, and, perhaps to my disappointment, no one dancing naked atop a bank of slot machines.
At Bar Luca, open to the casino floor, Mike, a life-sciences consultant in Winston-Salem, fed hundred-dollar bills into a video blackjack machine. His wife, Stephanie, who coördinated commercial repossessions, talked about their travels to see Dead cover bands—at the Jam in the Sand, the Dark Star Jubilee—and adjacent acts, like the jamgrass guitar whiz Billy Strings. (Strings decided two years ago to stop covering Dead songs. “Too many pigs on the teet,” he wrote.) I know people my age who every winter spend a week on the Jam Cruise, in the Caribbean, bouncing from gig to gig in sparkly costumes, on various powders and pills, and others who, after Covid came along, retired and dedicated themselves to following jam bands—a life of leisure and low taxes, golf and Goose.
The Sphere program wasn’t just a concert. It was a show, in the Vegas sense, with a concept, a narrative, and a retrospective intention. It called attention to itself. It wasn’t the Dead, or even an adulteration of the Dead, so much as a presentation about the Dead, confusingly featuring a couple of its survivors. It brought to mind a Civil War reënactment with a few Vicksburg veterans thrown in for authenticity. Or “Beatlemania,” featuring Ringo. There were other big shows in town, and some Dead & Co. visitors were hitting those, too: a Beatles tribute with Cirque du Soleil (but no Ringo); Adele, live at Caesars. A woman named Gina, from Guadalajara, found herself at a bar at the Venetian among the Dead crowd, after seeing the Adele show alone. She was an executive at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which had reserved the Sphere for a corporate conference that week. HPE had hired Dead & Co. to play a private set. Gina wasn’t very happy about this: “We could have had Imagine Dragons.”
More broadly, the residency served as a pretext for a pop-up exposition called the Dead Forever Experience. It was a Disneyfied immersion in the band as brand—an unabashed Margaritavilling of the Garciaverse. The centerpiece, at the Venetian, was the band’s vast and shiny merchandise emporium and, one floor up a curved staircase, an exhibition, a mashup of museum and fair. There may be no artists in popular music with a more abundant iconography. Skeletons, skulls, roses, turtles, bears, trains, poker hands, and lightning bolts, plus a near-infinite array of Jerrys, Garcia in all his guises, including the synecdoche of the missing right middle finger: all of it fodder for shop and shrine.
I stopped by the Experience late in the morning. The ground-floor bazaar was bustling. Katie, an attendant at one of the shops, was fine-tuning a display of twenty-five-dollar Dead & Co. coffee mugs. She reckoned that the shop was doing about two hundred thousand dollars in sales a day. “This is nicer than the U2 crowd,” she said. “Tickets are cheaper, so people are happier. And spending more on merch.” She pointed out a couple of guys carrying fancy-looking poster tubes: “Those are professionals, snapping up posters to resell on eBay.” (To foil this behavior, the band had decreed that you could buy only five posters at a time.)
Upstairs, the reliquary attitude was a respite. One wall featured, behind plexiglass, a collection of bootleg cassettes belonging to the band’s official archivist, David Lemieux. Next to that was a miniature replica, built by a luthier in Connecticut, of the Wall of Sound speaker array, from fifty summers ago, out of which issued a playlist presumably assembled from Lemieux’s hissy tapes. Attendees stood in front of it, clutching their poster tubes.
In one corner, visitors were queued up to meet Steve Parish, the loquacious and combative longtime roadie known as Big Steve, who hosts his own talk shows on Sirius XM and YouTube. (In “Long Strange Trip,” Amir Bar-Lev’s 2017 six-part Grateful Dead documentary, Parish is the one who, recalling the old question of who was in charge, says, in his stoner growl, “The situation is the boss.”) He was hawking a line of Jerry Garcia Wellness CBD gummies founded by Garcia’s youngest daughter, Keelin, and a New York businessman named Bobby Brahms. (“I’m a former search-engine guy,” Brahms told me. “We did it before Google.”) Brahms said, of Dead & Co., “It’s like going home to your mom’s house, but there are new sheets.”
There was a gallery of Mickey Hart’s paintings, swirls of color applied to dynamic surfaces, and a full wall displaying a collage of Dead & Co. audience pictures shot by the house photographer Jay Blakesberg and his mentee Chloe Weir, Bob’s daughter. Here and there were snaps of some prominent fans: Andy Cohen, the Bravo executive; Matty Matheson, who plays the handyman on “The Bear”; Bill Walton, the basketball star and perhaps the Dead’s most conspicuous mascot, who had died a few weeks before. Not pictured: Martha Stewart and Flavor Flav, who had posted a photo of themselves together at a show the previous week. He wore the merch; she did not.
Nearby was the entrance to “An American Beauty,” an exhibition of some hundred Jerry-era photographs, curated by Blakesberg and his daughter. He was shooting the Sphere gigs, and every weekend he hung around his exhibit leading makeshift tours. It presented, chronologically, a sunny and sanguine view of the band’s career. I watched as he started talking to a stranger about a picture he’d turned up of Neal Cassady, the Merry Prankster, in red leather boots. (When Blakesberg first discovered it, he said, “I started crying.”) Before long, more than fifty curious visitors were following him through the show as he gave his spiel.
Blakesberg, sixty-two and originally from New Jersey, has long curly hair and wore a purple (as in haze) T-shirt with “Owsley” printed on the front—a tribute to Owsley Stanley, the LSD chemist who served as the band’s early soundman and financier. “You know how I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be?” he said, as he talked about the old days on tour. “Because I’m still fucking here! And I’m still shooting you weirdos to this day.” I met a few of those weirdos, whose earlier, more menacing selves appeared in the exhibit. In the days when I was a kid going to Dead shows, they were the kinds of hard dudes who scared the crap out of me. Russell Levine, sixty-five, bald with a paunch and a camera bag, had attended six hundred and seven Dead shows, starting in 1976, and claims that he didn’t pay for a single one of them. By 1982, he was in charge of the band’s nightly post-gig hospitality suite back at the hotel: “What happened was, I was a pot dealer, but one night they ran out of beer. Bobby [Weir] told me, ‘Never again.’ He gave me Jerry Garcia’s American Express card: ‘Make sure we never run out.’ There was some jealousy on the crew, because I had full access and wasn’t a roadie. We’d sneak the tapers’ gear in, and they’d give us coke, which we’d share with the band.”
By 1992, he was a full-on crackhead. “It wasn’t Holiday Inns anymore,” he said. “We were staying at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, and suddenly I started crying. I realized I was the loneliest guy in the world. All that cocaine and alcohol, it rewired my brain. When the crowd chanted ‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry,’ I thought it was ‘Russell, Russell, Russell.’ ” He quit the Dead, got sober, and now works helping get people into detox in Florida.
His friend R.L., a year younger, wearing a madras Ralph Lauren button-down, white shorts, readers, and a still-devilish pair of eyebrows, was from Hell’s Kitchen and had been a coke dealer. He used to hang out with the Westies, the old Manhattan gang, who were scarier even than the hardest of the tour hardos. “We used to think Jay might be F.B.I., taking all those pictures,” R.L. said. He reckoned that his show count was north of seven hundred. A third accomplice, named Ignatz, stringy and tall, in a Harley-Davidson Budapest T-shirt, walked up, and the war stories gathered heft. Their Forever Experience was not so much Mom’s house with new sheets as a combat zone covered with fresh sod.
Other fans got out while the getting was good, made a life, and now have come back to what might be worth holding on to. Lee Ranaldo, a founder of Sonic Youth, the noise-rock band that some might consider to be the anti-Dead, gets together every year or so with three high-school buddies, fellow-Deadheads. This year, they convened in Las Vegas, with Dead & Co. as the impetus. In the summer of 1974, Ranaldo had driven across the country in a VW bus and caught the Dead in California. “We passed briefly through Vegas, but back then it didn’t hold much interest to us, and we just kept on going,” he told me. It had been more than a dozen years since his last trip to Vegas, and he found it freshly horrible, some of its vestigial seedy charm now replaced by upscale shops and airless malls. The four friends had attended the Fare Thee Well show in Chicago, but Ranaldo hadn’t yet seen Dead & Co. Mayer, from a distance, didn’t strike him as a fitting replacement. “It seems, from what little I know, like a disconnect,” Ranaldo said.
They stayed at the Luxor. They had a car and hiked in the desert. They went to a Sphere show, on a Friday in early June, which was the first one to sell out. “It’s a strange mix of authentic and ersatz,” Ranaldo said. “That sense of, Is it real or is it Memorex?” About Mayer, he said, “There aren’t too many guitarists who could play the more technical stuff. But he doesn’t have any of the soul Jerry had.” He was taken by Weir: “He was the most interesting person on the stage. He was the only one, maybe except Mickey, not playing a role. The whole thing is in amber at this point, and yet these guys are keeping the songbook alive.”
Two days after the show, Ranaldo and his friends went to check out a Trump rally in a lot off the Strip. It was punishingly hot. Trump talked about sharks and snakes. They were moderately relieved to see no one in attendance wearing a Dead T-shirt.
After I wrote a story in these pages a dozen years ago about the Dead and their legacy, a friend of mine, a fellow-lunatic who’d had some past business dealings with the band, advised me to never again write about or involve myself with the group in any professional way. Better not to mix work and pleasure. But the tractor beam drew me in. I’ve returned to the subject repeatedly, writing liner notes, appearing on podcasts and radio shows, submitting essays to anthologies. My remarks onscreen in “Long Strange Trip” bring me more attention, out in the world, than anything else I’ve done. “You’re that guy!” Hey, now. Maybe that guy needs to move on. I suppose I am one of the legions of longtime buffs remade as content creators who are now, in one way or another, profitably engaged in the business of the Grateful Dead. Musicians aren’t the only ones on the teat.
There’s some regulatory capture. The Dead were a putatively leaderless organization, but politics pertained, and now deference to the talent, and to management, casts a pall. No one wants to risk his spot. The money and the status are too dear. One hears squalid tales of sudden ghostings, insiders abruptly forced into exile. It’s sometimes hard to determine who is more ruthless, the industry bosses or the self-centered rock stars—or, as the gossip often has it, their wives. You have to really love the music not to grow disheartened by it all. And the music gets harder to love, or to defend, when it becomes “pretty much just nostalgia,” as Trey Anastasio, the Phish guitarist nine years removed from his own stint as a fake Jerry in the not-quite-Dead, said in Rolling Stone recently. It might be that the old hands’ excitement over this particular iteration of the thing has as much to do, consciously or not, with commerce as with taste. It’s telling that the two guys who smile least onstage are the original members, and I mean that as a compliment to them. The projection of contentment, by Mayer and the others, can feel performative, self-satisfied, like the arrival onscreen of an ensemble television cast in the first episode of a seventh season.
The Sphere aspires to be a colossus of oblivion, a cutting-edge incarnation of our desire to be amused to death—a brick-and-mortar manifestation of a virtual-reality headset, built to help us achieve “total entertainment forever,” as the Father John Misty song goes. Fattened up and blissed out, floating through virtual space, like the mother-ship émigrés in “Wall-E,” we jam our senses with sounds and visions, to the point of obliteration. Fifty years ago, the philosopher Robert Nozick presented a thought experiment called the Experience Machine. Imagine that you could plug into a device that would stimulate a pleasure response in your brain, delivering the illusion of whatever you deemed most enjoyable for the rest of your life, or longer. Would anyone choose to unplug? I was looking forward to being the guinea pig.
My wingman was a real-estate finance guy who lives in Denver, an old friend with a punk-rock bias, who, despite his contention that the Dead ceased to be interesting in 1971, has never stopped going to concerts. An hour before showtime, we shuffled along the carpeted corridor from the Venetian, spilled out into the heat for a few minutes, then ducked into the orb. The exuberance of the thousands, as they rode escalators into an ambient, crepuscular glow in the Sphere’s cavernous ecto-chamber, was contagious, though the scale of the place felt a little like an affront to the gods. “Reminds me of ‘The Towering Inferno,’ ” my wingman said. We rode to the very top, to take in the enormity from above; the pitch of the stands reminded me of the precipitous upper deck in the old Yankee Stadium—step lightly. Soon we had our seats, our twenty-five-dollar craft beers, and, in spite of our skepticism, that familiar thrum of expectancy. The band went on at seven-thirty-five, right on time, like a puck drop.
The show on the big screen begins with what appears to be the exposed skeleton of the structure itself pulling apart, the seam taking the shape of a lightning bolt, which gives way to an image of 710 Ashbury Street, the Dead’s earliest home, in the Haight district of San Francisco. The vantage then rises above the city and the bay, and then out of the atmosphere and into space—a vision of the heavens that outdoes even the splendor conjured, in planetariums of old, by the double-ended Zeiss Mark VI projector. Nearly every element of the visual presentation—which has a very vague narrative arc, conceived mainly by Mayer, with contributions from Industrial Light & Magic—has appeared on social media. But, unlike the bootlegged audience recordings of bygone concerts, which often capture the spirit of the thing, the phone-cam snippets of this luminous rondure, dwarfing the flea-circus ensemble of the band beneath, fail to capture its empyreal scale and wonder. It’s downright beautiful, even between sets, when it exudes a Creamsicle glow, like a foggy twilight on Mars.
All that iconography: it’s fodder, too, for the Sphere spectacle. Much of it is cheesy, such as an infinite-seeming gyre of dancing bears, a nightmare for us dancing-bear doubters, but some of the cheese is salvaged by cheek: a skeleton rising from a grave to ride a chopper through a trippy landscape. “When I think of the Grateful Dead canon, I almost think of the visual, aesthetic canon as much as I think of the music,” Mayer told Variety. (He also used the term “lookbook.”) You see, but may wish you didn’t, a lot of closeups, at ludicrous scale, of the band members performing. Some things are better heard than seen. (It might get even scarier when the Eagles roll into town.) The musicians were dressed for the cameras in muted blacks and grays. You get the color from the Sphere.
The songs unfurl. Certain numbers go with certain visuals, and so in many ways, unlike anything the Dead have done before, the visuals determine the set, as well as the length of each particular song, a stricture that would be routine for most bands but which for the Dead is almost unthinkable. Still, they hit their marks. It’s all tightly choreographed, but the music still feels alive, improvised, viney. A not-unpropulsive jam scored a vista of the desert at night, a gesture toward the group’s 1978 trip to Egypt: a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree view of the Great Pyramids under a lunar eclipse, bats winging in the shadows of the Sphinx. Then, to the delight of the Mayerheads, a wanky “Sugaree,” under a shower of scarlet begonias. “What a showoff,” a guy behind me said.
“Keep showing off,” another responded.
In the vernacular, talking at concerts is known as “chomping.” To go by my own recent experience, there are more chompers than ever, and more people complaining about them.
Night one, set two: Behind me, two young women, thirtyish, were talking, not quietly, about a recent wedding. I noticed it most during the more delicate songs—“China Doll,” “Terrapin Station,” “Dear Prudence.” They kept it up during the Mickey Hart segment known as “Drums”-“Space,” which was arguably the most mesmerizing stretch of the night, owing to the brawn of the subwoofers, the haptic vibrations in the seats, the primal percussive fury, and the spinning fractal kaleidoscopes on the giant screen. It was during “Drums” that I learned a few things from my neighbors about sandals. Near the end of the show, during the quietest part of “Morning Dew,” the Bonnie Dobson post-nuclear-apocalypse folk song that was Garcia’s most formidable showstopper, the two talkers sketched out their summer plans. Who were these barbarians?
“I guess it doesn’t matter anyway,” Weir was singing, with his goofy phrasing and without the Garcia gravitas. Still, it did matter. The guy sitting next to me turned toward the talkers and gently asked them if they’d keep it down. I turned halfway around, too, and made a dad gesture, a tamping down of the air with my palm.
“We can’t hear you!” one of them shouted.
“We’re trying to enjoy the show!” the other said.
“What are you, the concert police?”
“This isn’t the opera, dude!”
For the rest of the set, as our vantage descended from space back down to Earth, the Bay Area, and 710 Ashbury, they hissed insults at the backs of our heads. I could feel their scorn scorching my bald spot, like the equatorial sun. Vibe: not good.
The next night, the offenders were drunken dudes: different register and subject matter—golf, blackjack, the scene at the pool at the Wynn—but just as hard to tune out or counteract. Was it the dome’s ambient twilight? Or the clean, near-perfect sound, which provided enough sonic white space for conversation?
If chomping is an epidemic, is there a lab-leak hypothesis? Might it be the edibles? Or have manners slipped? One thinks of the people watching videos in public on their screens with the sound turned up. Everyone is listening when they shouldn’t be, and not listening when they should.
“How was it?” The holdouts in my cohort wanted the crusty bastard’s verdict, as they eyed the surprisingly uncluttered Ticketmaster seat maps of the final weekends of the Sphere run. Amazing, I said. The Sphere is a cutting-edge concert hall, a marvel of engineering and technology, a visual and auditory feast. It was like nothing I’d ever seen, a new frontier of live entertainment, and there were moments on both nights where some combination of sound and screen made me want to call everyone I knew, even those with no affection for anything Dead, and say what my editor had said to me: “Go!” I didn’t say that, as the second night wore on, the fascination abated, and I got used to the big screen. Focussing on the music itself, I thought of that lady in the park asking me what made me happy. Nothing lasts forever.
Still, who could begrudge the carnival atmosphere of the casino, the abundant good cheer and extra oxygen and stale cigarette smoke? With other attendees, my friend and I wondered about which acts might be able both to fill the space and put the whizbang to ambitious use. Tool, Metallica, Beyoncé—the list was short. At 3 a.m., next door at the Wynn, we came across LeBron James at a card table, in sunglasses and a ballcap. My friend tried to take a stool, but security brushed him away. “He was playing War!” my friend said.
My flight the next morning was again full of enthusiasts, whose collective exuberance had given way to exhaustion. Hard to know who’d lost thousands at craps or knocked off a cannister of laughing gas. Costs sunk, experiences had. Our flight soon took us over the Grand Canyon—the real thing, not a simulacrum—and not a single passenger opened a window shade to catch a glimpse of it, or of New York City, hours later, as we descended at sunset. ♦
