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Dead & Company Announce Final Tour: See the Full List of Dates

The 2023 tour kicks off on May 19 at Los Angeles' Kia Forum.

By Rania Aniftos

Rania Aniftos

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Dead & Company ‘s upcoming summer tour will be their final run.

John Mayer , who has been part of the the modern incarnation of the  Grateful Dead  since it was created in 2015, shared the band statement to his Instagram on Friday (Sept. 23). “As we put the finishing touches on booking venues, and understanding that word travels fast, we wanted to be the first to let you know that Dead & Company will be hitting the road next summer for what will be our final tour,” he wrote alongside the rose-adorned promotional tour poster for the upcoming summer stint. “Stay tuned for a full list of dates for what will surely be an exciting, celebratory, and heartfelt last run of shows.”

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The band revealed the full list of tour dates on Thursday (Oct. 6), beginning on May 19, 2023, in Los Angeles at the Kia Forum and stretching through July 15, when the tour ends in San Francisco at Oracle Park.

See below, and check out ticket and pre-sale information here.

05/19 – Los Angeles, CA @ Kia Forum 05/20 – Los Angeles, CA @ Kia Forum 05/23 – Phoenix, AZ @ Ak-Chin Pavilion 05/26 – Dallas, TX @ Dos Equis Pavilion 05/28 – Atlanta, GA @ Lakewood Amphitheatre 05/30 – Charlotte, NC @ PNC Music Pavilion 06/01 – Raleigh, NC @ Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek 06/03 – Bristow, VA @ Jiffy Lube Live 06/05 – Burgettstown, PA @ The Pavilion at Star Lake 06/07 – St. Louis, MO @ Hollywood Casino Amphitheater 06/09 – Chicago, IL @ Wrigley Field 06/10 – Chicago, IL @ Wrigley Field 06/13 – Cincinnati, OH @ Riverbend Music Center 06/15 – Philadelphia, PA @ Citizen’s Bank Park 06/17 – Saratoga Springs, NY @ Saratoga Performing Arts Center 06/18 – Saratoga Springs, NY @ Saratoga Performing Arts Center 06/21 – New York, NY @ Citi Field 06/22 – New York, NY @ Citi Field 06/25 – Boston, MA @ Fenway Park 06/27 – Noblesville, IN @ Ruoff Music Center 07/01 – Boulder, CO @ Folsom Field 07/02 – Boulder, CO @ Folsom Field 07/03 – Boulder, CO @ Folsom Field 07/07 – George, WA @ The Gorge 07/08 – George, WA @ The Gorge 07/14 – San Francisco, CA @ Oracle Park 07/15 – San Francisco, CA @ Oracle Park

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Dead & Company - The Final Tour

Tickets On Sale Starting Friday, October 14th at 10AM Local.

DEAD & COMPANY is launching its 2023 summer tour on Friday, May 19th and Saturday, May 20th in Los Angeles at the Kia Forum with dates running through Friday, July 14th and Saturday, July 15th when the tour ends in San Francisco at Oracle Park.  The band - Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, John Mayer, and Bob Weir, with Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti – will perform two sets of music drawing from the Grateful Dead’s historic catalog of songs. Tickets go on sale to the general public beginning Friday, October 14th @ 10 AM local venue time through deadandcompany.com . 

The highly-anticipated 2023 summer tour, produced by Live Nation, will be the band’s final tour since forming in 2015. Highlights include the tour-opening back-to-back concerts at the KIA FORUM in Los Angeles (Friday, May 19th & Saturday, May 20th), as well as doubleheaders at WRIGLEY FIELD in Chicago (Friday, June 9th & Saturday, June 10th); SARATOGA PERFORMING ARTS CENTER in Saratoga Springs, NY (Saturday, June 17th & Sunday, June 18th); CITI FIELD in NYC (Wednesday, June 21st & Thursday, June 22nd); and THE GORGE in George, WA (Friday, July 7th & Saturday, July 8th); an epic return to FENWAY PARK in Boston, MA (Sunday, June 25th); the band’s first-ever three-night stand at FOLSOM FIELD in Boulder, CO (Saturday, July 1st, Sunday, July 2nd, & Monday, July 3rd); and the tour finale - a two-night debut at ORACLE PARK in San Francisco (Friday, July 14th & Saturday, July 15th). A full listing of the 2023 tour dates can be found below.

To ensure that tickets get directly into the hands of fans, advance presale registration is now available HERE powered by Seated. The Artist Presale begins Wednesday, October 12th at noon local venue time and runs through Thursday, October 13th at 10 PM local venue time. Advance registration does not guarantee tickets. Supplies are limited. 

Guests who prefer an enhanced experience for this memorable Dead & Company tour can purchase a variety of VIP and Travel Packages. Packages include seamless venue access, early GA entry, pre-show lounge with food and a cash bar, exclusive merchandise, or travel packages for multi-night runs in various cities. Packages from 100X Hospitality will go on sale October 12th at noon local venue time. For full details, click HERE .

Dead & Company and Activist will continue their work with longtime sustainability partner REVERB to reduce the summer tour’s environmental footprint and engage fans to take action for people and the planet. More details at REVERB.org .

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It was great while it lasted: Dead and Company has concluded final tour in California

The Grateful Dead's offshoot band, Dead and Company, concluded its final tour in California on Sunday. For fans and vendors who have been following the bands for decades, it's the end of an era.

ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:

The Grateful Dead's offshoot band, Dead and Company, played its final shows in San Francisco over the weekend. It's the end of an era for fans like Colorado Public Radio's Vic Vela, who have been following the Dead's music for decades. It's also a big change for vendors and merchants who travel with the band and thrived on a scene called Shakedown.

VIC VELA, BYLINE: When the pandemic shutdowns were lifted and live concerts returned, Tony Seigh did something downright crazy. He left a career at Tesla to sell Grateful Dead bumper stickers in parking lots. But if you're a Deadhead, you totally get it.

TONY SEIGH: It almost was like for, like, two years, when you're thinking, like, oh my gosh; it's the end of the world; we're all going to die - like, we better go on tour with the Grateful Dead before it's over, you know?

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNCLE JOHN'S BAND")

DEAD AND COMPANY: (Singing) Well, the first days are the hardest days. Don't you worry anymore.

VELA: Dead and Company has been the most successful Grateful Dead spinoff since Jerry Garcia died almost three decades ago. Now that the band is calling it quits, a lot of folks whose livelihoods literally depend on Dead shows are wondering what's going to happen to a place called Shakedown.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHAKEDOWN STREET")

GRATEFUL DEAD: (Singing) Nothing shaking on Shakedown Street.

VELA: Named after the Grateful Dead song "Shakedown Street," the epic traveling emporium of merchandise, music and madness is simply known as the Shakedown lot.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I got marigolds.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

VELA: It's a little bit farmers market, a little bit county fair, a little bit "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." It's where a fan can buy a Grateful Dead hoodie, a grilled cheese sandwich and, yes, even LSD. With this band's demise, vendors on Shakedown have some anxiety over what's next for the music they love and their own bank accounts. Seigh says a significant chunk of his income is from selling merchandise on Dead tours.

SEIGH: I don't know - maybe, like, half.

VELA: That's a lot.

SEIGH: Oh yeah, yeah. Oh no, it's a total gamble. But, you know, it takes a lot to win, but even more to lose.

VELA: Coleus Langer of Los Angeles sells clothing on Shakedown. He says losing that customer base is going to hurt.

COLEUS LANGER: It definitely makes me very sad because there's no other place like a Grateful Dead Shakedown lot. You know, as far as vending and just meeting people and networking and hanging, you know, there's just - it's such a special place.

VELA: Nowadays, a lot of vendors sell their goods online, so their incomes aren't totally dependent on Dead shows. But for many, there's nothing like that personal connection with other Deadheads. Stephen McMennamy is the owner of Grateful Fred, a company named after his dog. He sells metal stickers with Dead imagery.

STEPHEN MCMENNAMY: It's very different when you're standing across from somebody and they have tears in their eyes talking about how much this thing meant to them because it was the name of a pet or a loved one or a grandmother or something like that.

VELA: Some vendors say they'll continue to sell outside Phish shows or other jam bands where there's a lot of crossover appeal. And here's the thing. A lot of folks on Shakedown firmly believe there'll be a new Grateful Dead offshoot to follow post-Dead and Company. After all, there's been several versions of the Dead over the last couple decades. So the hope is that the music of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir will continue to thrive alongside fresh faces, or in the words of the Grateful Dead, the music never stops. For NPR News, I'm Vic Vela in San Francisco.

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How to Buy Dead and Company Tickets for the Supergroup’s Final Tour

By Anna Tingley

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Deadheads, listen up. Tickets are finally available for Dead and Co.’s final tour, which kicks off next summer.

The supergroup — consisting of former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, along with John Mayer — announced earlier this year that this summer’s tour would be the group’s farewell outing.  

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There had been prior speculation that the band would be hanging it up after this past summer’s tour but turns out the rumors were off by a year, meaning fans have one more chance to see the rock group perform live.

The U.S jaunt kicks off with two nights at Los Angeles’s Kia Forum May 19-20 and will wrap up for an honorary two-night stand at San Francisco’s Oracle Theater on July 14-15. Nineteen other cities are also on the lineup include Chicago, New York City and Boulder, among others.

Tickets for Dead & Co.’s Final Tour are available to purchase on Live Nation’s website, starting today. Check out the full list of tour dates and buy tickets below:

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Dead & Company Detail Final Tour With 2023 Concert Dates

By Matthew Strauss

Dead & Company have revealed the details of the concerts that will comprise their final tour . The U.S. shows take place in May, June, and July 2023. Take a look at the band’s schedule below.

Dead & Company played their first shows in 2015. The lineup for the final tour includes Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, John Mayer, and Bob Weir (with Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti).

Read the 2017 feature “ The Grateful Dead: A Guide to Their Essential Live Songs .”

All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Dead & Company:

05-19 Inglewood, CA - Kia Forum 05-20 Inglewood, CA - Kia Forum 05-23 Phoenix, AZ - Ak-Chin Pavilion 05-26 Dallas, TX - Dos Equis Pavilion 05-28 Atlanta, GA - Lakewood Amphitheatre 05-30 Charlotte, NC - PNC Music Pavilion 06-01 Raleigh, NC - Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek 06-03 Bristow, VA - Jiffy Lube Live 06-05 Burgettstown, PA - The Pavilion at Star Lake 06-07 St. Louis, MO - Hollywood Casino Amphitheater 06-09 Chicago, IL - Wrigley Field 06-10 Chicago, IL - Wrigley Field 06-13 Cincinnati, OH - Riverbend Music Center 06-15 Philadelphia, PA - Citizen’s Bank Park 06-17 Saratoga Springs, NY - Saratoga Performing Arts Center 06-18 Saratoga Springs, NY - Saratoga Performing Arts Center 06-21 Queens, NY - Citi Field 06-22 Queens, NY - Citi Field 06-25 Boston, MA - Fenway Park 06-27 Noblesville, IN - Ruoff Music Center 07-01 Boulder, CO - Folsom Field 07-02 Boulder, CO - Folsom Field 07-03 Boulder, CO - Folsom Field 07-07 George, WA - The Gorge 07-08 George, WA - The Gorge 07-14 San Francisco, CA - Oracle Park 07-15 San Fransisco, CA - Oracle Park

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A Requiem for the Dead

Dead and Company—the most successful and longest-running post-Jerry configuration of Grateful Dead members—has purportedly given up the road. We took one last trip to Shakedown Street to make sense of what it all meant and what it means if they’re done.

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The Grateful Dead have died many times. Depending on whom you ask, their first death came only a few years after their 1965 formation, as the raunchy organ jams and all-night raves of their psychedelic days gave way to statelier songwriting and more sophisticated playing. The transition was punctuated by the 1973 death of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the harmonica player and vocalist whose ability to command a room and yelp out blues ad-libs for half an hour on “Turn on Your Lovelight” made him an intensely personable figure; at one point, he was so recognizable, the band’s label ran a Pigpen look-alike contest. But as the Grateful Dead’s exploratory ethos inevitably led them to new territory and better drugs, Pigpen was left behind. He avoided psychedelics, drank bottle after bottle of wine, and stopped touring a few months before his death. Though Jerry Garcia was already the band’s intellectual center, Pigpen had been its major draw and frontman, until he wasn’t. His final show, at the Hollywood Bowl in 1972, marked the last time a truly charismatic singer performed Grateful Dead music with any of the band’s original members.

Until October 29, 2015. That was when Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann took the stage at Times Union Center in Albany, New York, for the first gig with their new guitarist and co-vocalist: John Mayer. The surviving members of the Grateful Dead have reconfigured themselves several times since Garcia’s 1995 death, playing under a variety of names both together (the Other Ones, Furthur, the Dead) and solo (Phil Lesh and Friends, Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros., RatDog). Plenty of guitarists have been put in the unenviable position of stepping into Garcia’s role as the band’s primary musical force, to varying degrees of success. But with all due respect to Warren Haynes, there has never been anyone quite like Mayer involved with this music before.

The Dead and Company lineup didn’t make immediate musical sense in 2015 and was, quite frankly, very funny for people who didn’t care about Mayer or the Dead. Enlisting Mayer, with his bankable face and blandly virtuosic blues-scorching style, seemed like an extraordinarily obvious cash grab and an artistically suspect decision; it seemed equally impossible to imagine Mayer fans wooking out to the red-eyed reggae of “Estimated Prophet” and crusty Deadheads savoring slicked-back versions of old Pigpen songs.

But over the course of eight years and 235 shows, Dead and Company performed several miracles. They lasted longer than any post-Garcia configuration of Grateful Dead members—a genuine feat considering the level of animosity and manipulation among those surviving players—and consistently played to crowds that rivaled those the Dead drew in the heady gate-crashing days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they were the biggest touring act in the country. Those bigger crowds in turn rekindled the parking-lot scene that has been part of Dead culture since the late 1970s at a scale not seen since the days of Garcia. Though they fastidiously refused to expand it, Dead and Company developed a genuinely new way of performing and presenting what is almost certainly the greatest and most dynamic songbook any American rock band has ever produced.

But perhaps most important, they maintained and ultimately solidified the legacy of the Grateful Dead—not so much as a band but as the originators of a distinct form. Though it may seem unlikely when artists of their generation are selling off their catalogs for nine digits, no rock band of any era will be remembered as fondly as them. Most musicians understand their primary medium to be the studio recording, which makes sense—you can maintain control in the studio, and the songs are placed on a gallery wall and can be admired like paintings. They are, essentially, finished. But by understanding their music as something that should be made fresh night after night for new fans, year after year and decade after decade, the Grateful Dead suggested that their songs are never complete. There is no final version; there’s not even a definitive live version.

In 2023, even the most proficient Beatles tribute acts are working the college-bar circuit, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone daring to take up the mantle of the Lennon-McCartney catalog with any credibility once Sir Paul calls it quits. But in 100 years, there will still be bands who are able to tour the country playing Grateful Dead music in new and inventive ways, bringing the old corpses to life once again, and there will be crowds eager to hear them do it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. These are all solidified thoughts, intellectual end points, and even if they’re where we’ll end up, there’s no telling how we’ll get there.

Which is, as you’ve probably heard, the whole point. I set out to see as many Dead and Company shows as I could this summer, ultimately catching 10 concerts in four states, from the warm-up at Jazz Fest to the three-night finale in San Francisco. I wasn’t in search of the true meaning of America or after any of the other very literary reasons people often give for going on the road; we have more than enough writing from white people who are trying to figure out why they don’t feel at home here. I am a Deadhead. I sigh as I say so, for I see the paisley-patterned connotations that spill out of that word the moment I type it. I was 9 years old when Garcia died, and my natural taste runs between slippery jazz and blackened death metal. But the music of the Grateful Dead has a hold on me that I cannot explain. I wanted to figure out why I’m not the only one.

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival has run nearly every year since 1970, and it has almost always had terrible weather. There is really no good time to stage an outdoor festival in New Orleans, or at least not one that spans seven days of on-site performances over two weeks. For hours leading up to Dead and Company’s set on May 6, it rains hard—pelting, driving, tropical rain, the kind that obviates any rain gear—and, perversely for New Orleans at this time of year, it’s cold . I clutch my link of boudin and shiver, resigned to being physically miserable in a way that is at least novel, while my battle-hardened local friends and warm-blooded midwestern spouse laugh and place bets on what the band will open with. A shirtless guy in a crumbling cowboy hat wanders past selling enamel pins of the Steal Your Face skull and lightning bolt logo (a.k.a. the Stealie), the Terrapin Station turtles, and Garcia’s Wolf logo. I mention to him that I’d seen him at the Hollywood Bowl in the past and ask whether he still has any of his “Gayer for Mayer” pins. He shakes his head and tells me he’s out of “Queer for Weir,” too.

Then, finally, with very little fanfare, Dead and Company wander onto the stage. Drummer Jay Lane, a one-time member of Primus and frequent Weir collaborator, has replaced Bill Kreutzmann. Decked in an Ancient Aliens T-shirt, he takes his place behind the kit as Weir and Mayer play a few tentative sideways notes. They resolve into “Truckin’,” and the clouds part, and the rain stops, and the sun shines. I know how unlikely that sounds; all I can tell you is that it’s true.

“Truckin’” is the final song on 1970’s American Beauty , which is, alongside the same year’s Workingman’s Dead , the Grateful Dead’s high-water mark as a studio band. Both albums are filled with country tunes with deceptively complex chord changes, stacked harmonies that defy the individual singers’ occasionally pitchy individual performances, and a rustic charm that feels more attainable than, say, the baroque folk-pop of their friends in Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Every song on both albums feels like it could have been written in the 19th century.

Dead and Company play “Cumberland Blues” at Jazz Fest. They play it again in Phoenix a few weeks later, and again in Bristow, Virginia, and at Wrigley Field. They cannot stop playing “Cumberland Blues” on this tour. It’s fairly straightforward, at least for a Dead song: a two-stepping shuffle that moves a touch faster than the rhythm seems to be comfortable with. The music is a nice mirror of the narrator’s exhaustion after being kept up all hours of the night by his beloved Melinda, who seems not to respect the physical and emotional rigors of his life in the mine. The narrator pointedly does not want to dance—or whatever else Melinda’s trying to get him into. But the song doesn’t care, and throughout the summer, the band seems to side more and more with Melinda. Dead and Company long ago developed a reputation in the wider Deadhead community for their slackened tempo—Dead and Slow, they’re called—but all tour, they play the song at a blistering pace that they’ve never even tried before. Mayer reels off lines in the breaks, getting notes out like he’s bailing out a boat. By the time they get to San Francisco in mid-July, “Cumberland Blues” has transformed from a lovely bit of electric bluegrass into a country dervish, a spinning, hyper-rotating hurricane of a song. This early performance in New Orleans is the first indication that—whether because of the addition of Lane or the stakes of the tour itself—the band is finding new life in the material.

If you consider yourself a discerning music person, the kind who has to call themselves a “music person” instead of a “fan,” it’s easy to get into Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty . All you need is a general appreciation for sturdy songs and a willingness not to think too much about how much Marcus Mumford probably likes them. But to get into the band’s live tapes—and thus into the essence not only of the Grateful Dead but of Dead and Company, as well—is much more difficult. You have to listen to a lot of 1950s rock covers. You have to listen to a lot of George Jones songs sung by someone who isn’t George Jones. You have to be able to look at a track list, see a 12:57 version of “Dancing in the Streets,” and have faith that whatever’s on the other side of the first two and a half minutes will be worth hearing Weir sing a disco version of a soul song.

I came to the Dead as a music person. I was going to pop-up record sales and buying rare Brazilian vinyl. I had a granular understanding of the modal differences between East African and West African music; I could typically tell whether a song had been recorded in Mali. I was “not really interested in the guitar anymore.” Most important, I was listening to a lot of Herbie Hancock and a lot of Can. In the mid-1970s, the jazz heavyweight and the free-spirited German weirdos were both pursuing a form of funk music that rippled with grooves and dissolved into space. You could dance to it, but it could also catch you up the way driving through the mountains sometimes does: You keep moving, but your mind is suddenly still.

At the same historical moment, the Grateful Dead were in pursuit of the same kind of sound. There are versions of “Dancing in the Streets” and especially Weir’s “Playing in the Band” from the mid-’70s that pulse and shimmer, where all sense of the original melody and tone has been completely scraped away and the band is intently exploring the foundation on which it was built. Kreutzmann liked to say that his goal as a drummer wasn’t to keep time but to keep mood, and once you begin to tune in to the mood that’s being cultivated by any form of the Dead, their ability to find new ways of expressing it becomes astonishing. The jam that leads “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire on the Mountain” on the May 8, 1977, tape—probably the band’s most famous jam—is mind-boggling at a technical level; there are moments in which all five musicians seem to be playing both songs at once. But it’s no less admirable for the way it sustains a feeling of buoyancy, of pleasant surprise, of a seemingly unlimited number of happily beguiling opportunities around every corner.

You have enough moments like this, and you eventually find yourself through the looking glass. You become someone who appreciates how the zapping laser of Garcia’s guitar gooses Weir’s vocal in “Dancing in the Streets,” who dreams about cracking open a few cold ones and listening to “El Paso.” You might completely forget that the thing that got you into this music was the wild-eyed, experimental nature of it. When you sing along in full throat to “U.S. Blues” with tens of thousands of people who aren’t aware or don’t care that the original band was being ironic when it sang the “wave that flag” chorus, you’ve come a long way toward being cured of the need to use music as a way to differentiate yourself. The appeal becomes simple: It feels good to drink beers in the daytime and sing songs with your spouse and your friends and fall in love with a band. And then you watch them spend 15 minutes turning “Bird Song” inside out until it feels like tissue-paper-soft jazz, and you look around and go, My God, there are 40,000 people at Mayer’s experimental music concert .

L.A.! The Fabulous Forum! Where Magic and Kareem went back-to-back! Where Nicholson was always courtside! Where Harry Styles went on a run of 15 sold-out shows, as the only banner hanging from the rafters proclaims! Outside, half the city of Los Angeles is crammed into the narrow channel of Shakedown Street, the vendor market that runs through the parking lot and is as ubiquitous a sight at Dead shows as tie-dye. (It is, in fact, the source of much of that tie-dye.) And onstage, Mayer is making his guitar twinkle and hum; he’s going textural and pursuing blue moods. Yes, he’s ripping a few mondo solos and making the faces as he does so. You can only redeem so much of a man.

Dead and Company would not be playing to this many people this often if Mayer weren’t onstage. But his celebrity doesn’t solely account for the group’s swelling popularity. In 2016, the first full Dead and Company trek made $29.4 million, according to industry standard keeper Pollstar, good for only the 59th-highest-grossing tour worldwide. By 2021, they took in $50.2 million and finished fifth, one spot below the Eagles and two above Guns N’ Roses—even though they didn’t even leave the United States. Were Mayer’s name the driving force behind ticket sales, you’d expect them to have been higher at the outset, before the novelty of seeing a superstar slumming it with wooks had worn off.

Instead, his image allowed the band to more easily capitalize on the momentum created by the 2015 Fare Thee Well concerts, in which Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann performed for the last time with bassist Phil Lesh. Dead and Company entered the world as both a curiosity and an excuse to keep the party going, but the strong performances—and the response from aging Gen X Deadheads starved for the massive stakes of the Grateful Dead’s late ’80s and early ’90s run—instantly made them into something bigger.

When the band was put together in early 2015, Mayer was only a couple of years removed from the lowest days of his career. In 2010, he’d given an interview to Playboy in which he called his ex-girlfriend Jessica Simpson “crack cocaine,” used the n-word, and compared his penis to David Duke. (His heart, though? “Benetton.”) In 2011, he was swimming in his pool and heard the knotty, questioning, guarded opening riff of the Grateful Dead’s “Althea” on Pandora. As he tells it, he sprinted into the house sopping wet to find out what he was hearing.

“Althea” didn’t cure Mayer—the next year he’d give another infamous interview, this one to Rolling Stone , in which his claim to be able to hold his breath for four minutes and 17 seconds was probably the least noteworthy tidbit—but it did set him on a new path. In that same piece, Eric Clapton called Mayer a “bedroom” guitarist and said, “I wasn’t sure if John was aware of the power of playing with other people.” Perhaps aware he was supposed to be burnishing the younger player’s image, he added, “Though I think he is now.” The power of playing with other people is central to what makes the music of the Grateful Dead work. Garcia knew this intuitively. Though he possessed the skills to shred, he rarely did. His playing was rarely showy. Rather than draw attention to himself, he stoked the flames of what his bandmates were doing, hinting at directions they might take together or else allowing himself to soak in the mood they had collectively created. Every line seemed to end in a question mark; he didn’t make assertions, he made suggestions.

This is only part of the reason Garcia became an icon to many. Despite the Grateful Dead’s sunshine-daydream image in the popular mind, their music is deeply suffused with pain and confusion. Robert Hunter’s lyrics feint toward salvation without being able to offer it, and they’re deeply informed by the fact that each individual is ultimately responsible for navigating the fog of life. “If I knew the way, I would take you home,” goes the band’s defining statement, from “Ripple.” The scholar Brent Wood surveyed the band’s lyrics and discovered that about three-fourths of the songs Garcia sang are about suffering, and a full half of those songs are about death. Garcia played guitar in a way that perpetuated these feelings—the persistent reality of pain and the desire to find a little happiness anyway are both present in so much of what he did. With Dead and Company, Weir allows the songs to move more slowly, until the jams begin to take on an almost painterly quality. When it works, the jam becomes as much a part of the story as the lyrics, a sigh of emotion spontaneously exhaled by the six guys onstage.

It took Mayer a moment to understand how he fit into the music; witness him trying to play roadhouse blues in the twilit silence of a “Space” jam in 2015. But as he found his footing, and particularly as he developed his musical relationship with keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, his ability to meet the songs on their own terms deepened. “I’ve always said that if I’m doing my job right, I bring the crowd closer to the music they love while disappearing from the equation a little bit,” he wrote on Instagram a few days before the Forum shows. Indeed, it’s a minor miracle that his star power vanishes the moment he steps onstage, where he appears to be just some dude in an expensive-looking T-shirt and with very bad tattoos. While the jokes about 17-minute versions of “Your Body Is a Wonderland” never subside from some corners of the Dead world, by the time the 2023 tour arrived, Mayer was fully integrated into the cosmos. There have been “John Mayer Is Dead to Me” shirts on the lot for years. In San Francisco, I see one that says, simply and provocatively and sincerely, “He is my Jerry.”

Onstage at the Forum, he’s restrained and tasteful. He plays “Althea” as if he, too, is awed by the oracle at the song’s center, and by the oracle the song has been for him. It’s not hard to understand why. The titular character functions as a mirror for the narrator, telling him he’s been “honest to the point of recklessness” and “self-centered in the extreme.” He says he’s “lacking in some direction,” that “treachery” is “tearing me limb from limb.” “Ain’t nobody messing with you but you,” Althea tells him, and the truth cools his head.

The most commonly asked question on tour: “Where is Shakedown Street?” Named for the Dead’s disco-funk song, it’s ostensibly a tailgate, but that descriptor is wildly insufficient. The most common answer, also taken from the song: “You just gotta poke around.”

This is probably true in some places. In New York, at Citi Field, you do not have to poke around. Shakedown Street pokes you. It is impossible to miss, taking over a fenced-in parking lot under the elevated train tracks across the street from the stadium. Dozens of people are pushing through the narrow gate at all times, and instantly they’re surrounded by people with ice chests selling domestics, microbrews, White Claws, you name it for $5 a can. Grills hiss in the distance. Nitrous tanks hiss nearby. Balloons pop constantly. “Mushrooms, K, acid” is whispered loudly by dudes making conspicuous eye contact. A sign advertises BULK FEMINIZED SEEDS in bold type. There’s a booth selling Jerry rolls, which seem to be some kind of sandwich and not a drug. Everyone has their own version of grilled cheese: vegan cheese, gluten-free bread, but no sight of the guy from 2022 who promised “bacon in every motherfucking bite.” From every direction, tapes of old Dead shows—both Grateful Dead and Dead and Company—blast from portable stereos and car sound systems.

People started selling things in the parking lots at Grateful Dead shows as early as 1973, author Jesse Jarnow reports in Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America , around the same time they started following the band on tour. It makes sense: sell a few limp burritos, make enough money to get to the next show. By the 1980s, Shakedown became its own attraction, as its cheery lawlessness drew in crowds of college students anxious to party, runaways escaping the latchkey lifestyle, white kids with dreads claiming their parents still lived in Babylon, and genuine Deadheads, too. The psychologist Joseph Campbell, who lived next door to Weir, once took in the parking-lot scene in Oakland and declared it an “antidote for the atom bomb.” By 1989, it had expanded so much it made the Dead unwelcome in places they’d played for years, with riots and general mayhem leading the band to prohibit vending outside gigs. Did it work? Come on.

There is much to buy on Shakedown Street. Not just drugs, though definitely drugs. There are crystal sellers whose wares have gone dusty from years of exactly this, and those who are selling fragile $1,000 specimens that should probably not be out on a folding table with this many wasted people around. There are head-shop-quality patches and pins tacked to a corkboard. A guy calling himself Grateful Fred is selling metallic plaques of Dead iconography you can put on your trunk to make it look like Toyota is offering up a limited-edition Wookmobile; he has the hatchback door of a brand-new Volkswagen set up in his booth so that you can see how they look in situ.

But mostly there is versioning. In the same way that a dub producer takes the elements of a traditional reggae track and reframes it into something more wigged out, artists have been fucking with the iconography of the Grateful Dead and selling it back to Deadheads for decades. A pre-fame Keith Haring sold shirts on the lot in 1977, his characteristic line work already apparent in the doodles that fill the blank space in the Stealie. A guy calling himself New Springfield Boogie exclusively makes merch that references both the Dead and The Simpsons , and with the charisma of Lyle Lanley selling Springfield on the Monorail , he gleefully shares the names of his creations. Homer disappearing into the roses of the band’s Bertha skeleton is given the “St. Stephen”–referencing title “In and Out of the Garden He Goes.”

Anything worn onstage by Mayer gets a boost. In 2022, an official shirt designed by bootlegger Jeremy Dean with a dancing bear face and the word “California” in a straightforward script was sold out before the end of the first set at the first show of the tour. When I ask one vendor how many of his $80 sweatshirts (which have a BMW logo in the Stealie) he sold after John wore one in June, he demurs, telling me only, “A lot.” I ask another vendor whether he’s concerned the band will force him to stop selling his shirts, which violate the only enforced rule of vending by having the words “Dead and Company” on them. He laughs and tells me he’ll just text Mayer and have him sort it out.

This is commerce, plain and simple, and there are obvious points to be made about the co-opting of the counterculture and the frenzy of consumerism. Dead and Company themselves certainly aren’t shy about accruing capital. But in the moment, as the beers flow and the trips come on, it feels like a convincing illusion of everything Heads project onto the band: freedom, joy, bright abandon. Unlike at a sporting event, there is no sense of aggression because there is no opponent. Unlike at a mass church gathering, there is no sense of propriety or even reverence; the enthusiasm is ungated. At least until the sun goes down and the chemicals start to curdle, it is a bright, warm—druggy, paranoid—dream, the California ideal appearing like a mirage in the heart of New York City.

We spend two days at the Gorge, mostly sitting in a scrap of shade beneath what must be the only row of trees in all of eastern Washington, and the view never begins to seem real. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of the scenic natural amphitheater on the other side of the Cascades from Seattle and wondered what it’s like to see a show there. It is beyond picturesque. It is difficult—genuinely difficult—to take it all in. The stage is placed perfectly, right in a crook of the Columbia River, and for the first set of both nights, before the sun goes down, it is more or less impossible to pay attention to the band onstage. The rugged cliff faces and soft turns in the landscape are the only things around that look older and more weathered than Weir.

Other than the surprisingly robust cell service, there is nothing convenient about the Gorge. It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, equally remote from Seattle and Spokane. Getting in Thursday night takes three hours owing to increased security. The campsites, where thousands of Deadheads are posted up from Thursday night through Sunday morning, are a rugged mile or so trek from the entrance to the amphitheater itself. Even though the venue is nearly 40 years old, there are no permanent bathrooms.

The heat is so bad on Night 1, the band seems to check itself. They cut their tempo and ease their way through the songs, whether to discourage ecstatic dance in the crowd or to ensure they make it through the evening themselves. We are near the end of the road now, a week from the end of the tour, and everyone seems to be slightly distracted by that knowledge. Weed smoke clings to the ground as the sun pours into the amphitheater.

After the show, Shakedown stays open late. There are multiple bands playing in the campground, one of them working on a pacy jam that sounds like it’s on its way toward a Talking Heads song. In the morning, there are what appear to be Hare Krishnas playing a trance remix of chant music with live finger-cymbal accompaniment. I wander into Shakedown in search of iced coffee and find two kids in their 20s playing guitar, working their way through the Dead’s “Estimated Prophet” with no vocals, just wavering in the heat vision of one of Weir’s best songs. Someone is advertising a yoga retreat “for Deadheads ONLY” in Costa Rica. Another guy is hawking some kind of Dead-adjacent red wine despite the temperature. “What a long, strange trip it’s been for these grapes,” he cries. “But they’re here now, and so are you.”

So are we. “At this point, two and a half months in[to the tour], I’m exhausted,” Michael Koppinger Jr. tells me the next weekend in San Francisco. Koppinger is a vendor in his early 20s who went to his first show in Raleigh in 2018, was given LSD by a friendly beer salesperson before he even made it to Shakedown, and never looked back. “It blew my mind,” he says. “I was raised Catholic and in this strict upbringing and culture. If people did drugs, it was like, you were bad. So to just be in a space where you could do whatever and it was normalized, it kinda blew my shit.” He printed up his first shirt in 2021, with plans to sell a hundred or so over a weekend run, then come home. Instead, he pulled out of a plan to buy a house with his (now ex-)girlfriend, put everything he owned in his parents’ attic, and split. “I’ve been on the road pretty much since,” he tells me.

Besides the profound bodily exhaustion, the biggest struggle of being a touring Deadhead in 2023 is scraping together gas money. “Once you get to Shakedown, you can make things work,” Koppinger says. “You can get into the show, you can get fed, you can get a drink. The community takes care of itself. But getting show to show, spot to spot, it’s rough.” As they cross the country, Heads panhandle for gas money, pile into the backs of buses and sleep in piles, and do what it takes to get to the next show. “I don’t live in this amount of love and community in everyday life,” Koppinger says. “In 2023 America, alienated, atomized, no one does.”

It is easy to get caught up in this. Even as I roast away in Washington, I’m clinging to what remains of this tour, of the fiction that you can simply zone out of everyday life in the name of having a good time and bring the people you love with you. Nobody knows where this energy will go next summer, whether to jam upstarts Goose or to bluegrass hero Billy Strings or, as it did in ’95, back to Phish. What’s certain is that it won’t be destroyed, even if it transmutes. Even if it lies dormant.

Nobody believes that what happens on tour or at a Dead show is a truly sustainable lifestyle. Like the music itself, it’s ephemeral, being created and destroyed in the same moment. It takes up space in real life, but it exists outside it, in the carnivalesque. The trick, when it all finally ends, is to remember that and not get rolled up in the tent when the circus leaves town.

But first, we have to go to San Francisco.

There are many rumors. The obvious ones involve the last living members of the Grateful Dead who aren’t in Dead and Company: Lesh is going to sit in. Background vocalist Donna-Jean Godchaux will step in to sing. Kreutzmann will join in for “Drums” (Billy himself stokes the last one by tweeting, “You know what would be cool …” a week before the final show; he never elaborates). Bob Dylan toured with the Grateful Dead in 1987 and has been covering “Brokedown Palace” lately, plus he has a break in his tour. Neil Young is in the area and has a conspicuous hole in his itinerary, too. Some people shoot for the stars and insist Paul McCartney will come out for the twinned covers of Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” and “Hey Jude.”

In the end, none of this happens. Dead and Company set up in center field at Oracle Park and play six sets over three nights, about 10 hours of music, with no repeats. When they launch into “Bertha” to open Night 3, there is a prickling in the air. Bassist Oteil Burbridge’s wife has painted Garcia’s famous four-fingered handprint onto her husband’s face, and when the cameras focus on him during a cover of the Rascals’ “Good Lovin’,” the roar from the crowd is staggering. There have been so many big-time Dead shows in stadiums like this, and in the fresh daylight and cool early-evening San Francisco breeze, time collapses, and it feels like we’re inside each and every one of those shows; I’m fully conscious of the fact that for something to be timeless, it has to exit time, it has to die.

Weir was 16 when he joined the Grateful Dead. He grew up in Garcia’s shadow and never grew out of it. Garcia gained a kind of gravitas as he aged, even as heroin and diabetes ravaged his body and made him look 20 years older than he was. Weir courted silliness, wearing polo shirts tucked tidily into very small jean shorts. The Spinners, a religious movement that sprung up around the band and gained enough traction to warrant serious anthropological study, took as dogma what many fans felt: “Jerry Garcia is sacred and Bobby Weir is profane,” as Jarnow sums it up in Heads .

Another thing: “Bobby Weir makes me weep,” Jarnow tells me over Zoom one afternoon. He makes me weep, too. Somehow, in his old age, Weir has become a stately presence, a figure of poise. He carries with him the entire history of the counterculture, and he seems to feel its weight. When he sings Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” or Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried,” he inhabits the weariness of longing and guilt. There are Garcia songs that, thanks to age and wisdom or maybe just sheer repetition, Weir sings better than Jerry ever did: Witness him reel off the names of Billy Sunday and Jack the Ripper in “Ramble on Rose.” He sings with a far-off focus, as powerful and distant as a spaceship cruising through the cosmos. On Night 2 in San Francisco, he sings the postapocalyptic “Morning Dew” drenched in green light, his voice ragged and heartbroken as he surveys what’s left of the world after it ends.

Weir didn’t write the majority of the Grateful Dead’s best songs. “Ripple,” “Eyes of the World,” “Terrapin Station,” “Brokedown Palace,” “Sugaree,” “Althea”—they’re all Garcia’s. But over the 30 years they played together, Weir gained a better understanding of how those songs worked than anyone else possibly could. When he plays them, it’s hard to argue that they’re not in some way his.

The Grateful Dead keep dying. And regardless of whether Dead and Company are truly done right now, they will die one day, too. (Mayer set off a firestorm online by saying Dead and Company is “still a band—we just don’t know what the next show will be” a couple of days after the last show at Oracle Park; theories abound.) But written into the music is the notion that songs themselves don’t need their creators to live. This is hardly revolutionary in the world of jazz, where standards frequently outlive the people who wrote them, or in classical music, where most composers are incapable of performing their own works in the first place. But in rock ’n’ roll, where the cult of authenticity insists that meaning comes mostly in creation, rarely in interpretation, the music and ethos of the Dead are an anomaly. Dead and Company are far from the only group keeping this music alive, but Weir, convinced of the power of the songs as forms of expression and not simply vehicles for dancing or virtuosity or even experimentation, frames his band’s catalog with the dignity it deserves.

It is but one way of keeping the Dead alive. There are so many ways to express yourself, so many paths into and out of this music. Everyone has the right to desire their own expansion, to test their edges and see what else they might be able to contain. I see so many people on Dead tours who can’t possibly dress this way in their everyday lives. On tour, or at the one show they can afford to hit, or watching the livestream at home, or catching some local Dead band struggle through the “Slipknot!” changes, Deadheads enact the answer to a simple problem. The alienation we all feel is real and unavoidable. What if we learned to understand it as good?

Sadie Sartini Garner has written music criticism for Pitchfork , The A.V. Club , The Outline , and many other places. She lives in Long Beach, California, with her partner Rachelle.

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Dead & Company 2021 Tour Recap: Highlights, Stats, & Top Shows

Dead & Company , the Grateful Dead spinoff band featuring John Mayer (lead guitar/vocals), Oteil Burbridge (bass/vocals), and Jeff Chimenti (keyboards/vocals) alongside Grateful Dead alumni Bill Kreutzmann (drums), Mickey Hart (drums), and Bob Weir (rhythm guitar/vocals), recently completed their first tour since the COVID pandemic shut down the live music industry in March 2020.

The loosely-branded What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been tour was the longest in the band’s six-year history, lasting 31 shows split into three legs spanning from August 16th through Halloween . The shows continued the band’s established practice of playing two sets of material from the Grateful Dead’s repertoire, focusing heavily on original songs co-written by late guitarist/vocalist Jerry Garcia and the late lyricist Robert Hunter and Weir’s co-writes with the late John Barlow .

Because it was Dead & Company’s first tour since the pandemic arrived in early 2020, new protocols required that attendees were vaccinated or at least tested negative for COVID shortly before the event. However, early in the tour, there were enough no-shows by vaccinated-but-hesitant or unvaccinated ticketholders that people were actually giving top-priced tickets away on show days. By mid-October proof of vaccination became standard for ticketholders to gain entry while the number of no-shows lessened, with significant numbers of ticketless folks doing the one-finger shuffle outside all four Colorado shows and three of the four California shows.

Now that it’s over and we’ve more or less recovered, here’s a show-by-show recap, with our favorites listed at the end in the Top Shows section. We threw in some song statistics and a few other random details along the way too, so kick back, relax, and enjoy.

SUMMER TOUR, LEG 1 – AUGUST 16th – 28th

NORTH CAROLINA AND VIRGINIA

After 576 days without a Dead & Company show, the wait was finally over and the first show since January 2020 would finally happen, but not before one final setback from a thunderstorm that delayed the doors at the Coastal Credit Union Amphitheatre (aka Walnut Creek) and the start of the show. No matter. The band wordlessly took the stage to a deafening roar and kicked off a shortened six-song first set with the most meaningful version of “Touch Of Grey” in a long, long, long time.

The band was tight, rehearsed, and clearly happy to be back as well, as the second set’s pre-“Drums” ran eight songs, lasted over an hour, and included “Playing In The Band”, “Truckin’”, and the tour’s sole version of “Spoonful”. On the far side of “Space”, the band delivered the show’s highlight, a stunning debut of the blues dirge “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”, a yes-they-went-there moment if there ever was one, and the set ran so long that the venue’s curfew prevented an encore. Welcome. Back.

After a day off the tour resumed at the Jiffy Lube Amphitheatre in Bristow, VA outside Washington, D.C. After Mayer delivered strong versions of “Cold Rain & Snow”, “Mr. Charlie”, and “Dire Wolf” in the first set, he’d also get the nod to start the second with the Garcia/Hunter classic “Here Comes Sunshine”. This would be the first of several stellar versions of the song he’d deliver on the tour and take to a new level; in 2021 Mayer found his way to the heart of this song in the way that he’s previously done with “Althea”, “Deal”, and “Brown Eyed Women”. Not long after that, the first of only two uninterrupted versions of the classic pairing of “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire On The Mountain” on the entire tour would be another highlight.

NEW YORK AND PENNSYLVANIA

The tour’s third date was Dead & Company’s first post-lockdown show in a stadium, and seeing the band walk onstage at New York’s Citi Field made us feel like things were sort of getting back to normal. While the fact that the song had been overheard being played at soundcheck took the surprise factor away for some, the band opened the show with their debut of “Let The Good Times Roll”, a staple of Grateful Dead shows from 1988 onwards. Not only does this one fit the vibe like it always did, but the “everyone sing a verse” lyrics also allow monitors and PA levels to be adjusted as needed.

The second set kicked off with “Eyes Of The World” for the only time on the tour, and the “Drums” section would feature the debut of Voices Of The Rainforest , recordings sourced in Papua, New Guinea by Hart that included video footage to go along with them. The tour’s sole version of the elusive “Spanish Jam” followed “Space”, and aside from “Althea” and the encore of “The Weight”, the second set’s song list could have come from a Grateful Dead’s 1974 “Wall Of Sound” show.

We’ll talk more about the tour’s next four shows in Philadelphia, Bethel, Darien Lake, and Saratoga Springs in the Top Shows section at the end of the recap. And directly after them, the opening leg of the summer tour ended on a Saturday night at Hershey Stadium , which was the first night of Grateful Dead music at the venue since the OG band’s 1985 rain-soaked classic . Intentionally or not, Dead & Company’s show paid immediate homage to the peak of that 1985 night by starting with “The Music Never Stopped”, before deftly weaving Weir’s 90s-era Dead tune “Easy Answers” into it, a tricky tune that Dead & Company handle far more deftly than their predecessors. Later, the second set’s highlights came from another kaleidoscopic “Here Comes Sunshine” from Mayer, Weir’s second reading of “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”, and the tour’s sole performance of “Quinn The Eskimo” as the encore.

SUMMER TOUR, LEG 2 – SEPTEMBER 2nd — 18th

MASSACHUSETTS AND CONNECTICUT

These three New England shows clearly meant a little something extra to Wilton, CT native and Berklee College Of Music student John Mayer, who’d posted a photo of the Wilton exit on I-84 and also say as much on the day of the first show. The band would also take the opportunity to actively treat this trio of shows as a distinct group by starting and ending the three-show run (two nights at XFinity Centre   Amphitheatre  [aka Great Woods] in Mansfield, MA, and one at Hartford’s Xfinity Theatre ) by starting and finishing the run with the two halves of “Playing In The Band”, and the band would also split the tour’s first appearances of “Dark Star” over the two Great Woods shows as well. The aforementioned show-opening version of “Playing” combined seamlessly with “The Wheel” to last a combined 30 (!) minutes, while the second set kicked off with one of Mayer’s best versions of “Deal” on the tour, complete with him simultaneously fanning his guitar while repeatedly jumping up and down like a pogo stick.

After Friday’s Great Woods show (which we’ll talk more about in the Top Shows section at the end) and a day off on Saturday, the band made its way down I-84 to Hartford and picked right up where they’d left off, with a first set so stacked that the songs could have actually comprised a 1980 second set by the Grateful Dead if “Drums” and “Space” were added, and included “Shakedown Street”, “Samson & Delilah”, and “Franklin’s Tower”. The second set’s highlights came from the tour’s first versions of “St. Stephen”, “William Tell Bridge”, and especially “The Eleven”, and Hartford also scored the tour’s sole version of “Werewolves Of London” as the encore. All three nights of the New England run were strong individually, but collectively the shows wove themselves together into a distinct trio.

OHIO AND MICHIGAN

Next up was a drive west on I-80 to Ohio and the Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls just south of Cleveland. As the band took the stage Mayer quickly won the “best-dressed band member” award by sporting a black satin shirt that would have passed Studio 54 ’s dress code, and he’d also deliver the tour’s sole version of “Next Time You See Me” early in the show before a strong pairing of “Cassidy” and “Bird Song” closed the first set. The second set truly caught fire with the version of “Eyes Of The World” preceding “Drums”, and the show’s peak occurred via an absolutely gorgeous transition from the end of “Standing On The Moon” into the extended final verse of “Viola Lee Blues” along with a lengthy, standout version of “Not Fade Away” to close the set.

Three days later the next stop was DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston, MI (aka Pine Knob), whose first set featured a rare mid-set placement of “New Speedway Boogie” just before the tour’s first version of The Beatles ’ “Dear Prudence”. The second set’s highlight came early via Burbridge’s gorgeous vocal take on the Garcia/Hunter ballad “Comes A Time”, complete with an equally gorgeous closing solo by Mayer. If you were there you got lucky, because it was the only one on the tour.

Later highlights came from the “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider” pairing that led into “Drums”, and the relaxed-but-welcome tour premiere of “I Need A Miracle” following “Space”. The following day found the band moving fast down I-75 to the Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati for a show on Mickey Hart’s 78th birthday, but we’ll talk about that one in detail later, in the Top Shows section.

MISSOURI, INDIANA, AND ILLINOIS

The summer tour remained in the Midwest for its last week, with shows at the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre in St. Louis, MO (aka Riverport) and the Ruoff Home Mortgage Music Center in Noblesville, IN (aka Deer Creek) that we’ll go over in detail in the Top Shows section at the end. From there, the summer leg closed with a pair of weekend shows within the friendly confines of 107-year-old Wrigley Field in Chicago. However, before the first show on Friday night , Mother Nature dropped a thunderstorm that caused two delays and worked heavily against the band.

The first set started late, was marred by equipment issues, and was then cut short after four songs. It was followed by a second set whose rushed pre-“Drums” did at least contain the sole “Dancing In The Streets” of the tour, but fortunately, the closing run of songs after “Space” was much stronger, with “Morning Dew” as the night’s highlight. The “Ripple” encore made for a nice finish, but overall, this was a rare off-night.

This wasn’t lost on the band, who’d make it up for it the following night . The first set started with a trio of second-set songs (“Althea”, “Uncle John’s Band”, and “He’s Gone”) and also contained the tour’s sole version of “Little Red Rooster”. But even better was the sprawling, generous second set that ran nearly two hours and contained, in Deadhead shorthand, “China” > “Rider”, “Estimated” > “Eyes” and “Help” > “Slip” > “Frank”. Yes, all of those in the same set plus “Milestones” and “Days Between” too, and after a double encore of “Brokedown Palace” and “Touch Of Grey” the band headed home for a two-week break before the fall leg commenced.

SONG STATS AND FUN FACTS

MOST AND LEAST PLAYED SONGS

Over the course of 31 shows the band played 119 different songs, aside from the “Drums” and “Space” segments each night during second sets. There was actually a 13-way tie for first place in the “most played song” category, with the following songs getting eight airings each: “Dark Star”, “Althea”, “The Other One”, “Deal”, “Playing In The Band”, “Uncle John’s Band”, “China Cat Sunflower”, “I Know You Rider”, “Bertha”, “Scarlet Begonias”, “Fire On The Mountain”, “Not Fade Away”, and “Franklin’s Tower”.

Right behind all those there was a 7-way tie for second place, with the following songs getting seven plays each: “Help On The Way”, “Slipknot”, “Let The Good Times Roll”, “Casey Jones”, “Jack Straw”, “Shakedown Street”, “New Speedway Boogie”, and “They Love Each Other”. On the other end of the statistics, 23 songs were only played once, with 14 shows getting one of them, the Raleigh, Bethel, and St. Louis shows each getting two, and the Dallas show getting three.

2021 DEBUTS

Dead & Company only added three new songs to the repertoire in 2021, but they were all winners. The Reverend Gary Davis  blues dirge “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” debuted on the tour’s opening night ( Raleigh 8/16 ), and Sam Cooke ’s 1964 party anthem “Let The Good Times Roll” opened up the tour’s third show ( New York 8/20 ). Both these songs remained in regular rotation for the entire tour, but the version of The Rolling Stones ’ “The Last Time” would sadly be a one-off, making its sole appearance at Darien Lake on August 25th as a dedication to Stones drummer Charlie Watts , who had passed away the day before.

ALTHEA’S HOT SPACES

In 2019 “Terrapin Station” was the song whose location in Dead & Company shows would constantly bounce around, but in 2021 Mayer’s signature song “Althea” moved into this welcome role. Over its 8 appearances, it kicked off the second set twice ( Cuyahoga Falls 9/7 and Los Angeles 10/31 ) and appeared in the body of the second set’s pre-“Drums” twice ( Atlanta 10/12 and Phoenix 10/25 ), but it also opened a first set ( Chicago 9/18 ), led directly into “Drums” ( Hershey 8/28 ), came out of “Space” ( New York, 8/20 ), and served as the encore ( Red Rocks 10/19 ).

SCARLET > FIRE AND FRIENDS

Another thing Dead & Company setlist architect Matt Busch did to keep people guessing in 2021 was add one or more songs into the middle of the “Scarlet Begonias” > “Fire On The Mountain” pairing, one of Deadheads’ most beloved song combinations since March 1977. This pairing was played 8 times in 2021, all in second sets, but only 2 were “traditional” and flowed directly into one another (Bristow 8/18 and Los Angeles 10/31 ). During the other six airings, the following songs flowed between them: “Help On The Way” and “Slipknot” (Saratoga Springs 8/27), “Viola Lee Blues” ( Clarkston 9/7 ), “Deal” ( Chicago 9/17 ), “Uncle John’s Band” ( Charlotte 10/11 ), “Estimated Prophet” and “Eyes Of The World” ( Red Rocks 10/19 ), and “Touch Of Grey” ( Phoenix 10/25 ).

THE STORYTELLERS SPEAK

Another welcome change in 2021 was that the tour’s livestreams on Nugs.net now had hosts to fill the “Dead Air” before the first set and during intermission. They were familiar faces, too: Gary Lambert and David Gans , two longtime torchbearers of the Deadhead community who host Tales From The Golden Road , the weekly call-in show on Sirius XM’s Grateful Dead channel.

Not only was it fun to watch them recap sets and manufacture on-the-fly conversation to fill the final minutes before the band took the stage for the second set each night, they were also joined by guests of prominent stature from all eras of the Grateful Dead universe, and these are less than half of the names: GD family members ( Trixie Garcia ), OG GD extended family members ( Ken Babbs , Rosie McGee ), those who make official GD music releases happen ( David Lemieux , David Glasser , Mark Pinkus ), a podcast host ( Jesse Jarnow ), a Nugs founder ( Brad Serling ), and a musician or two ( Don Was , Branford Marsalis , Denise Parent , Jeff Mattson , and some random guy named John Mayer).

YOU SHOULD BE MADE TO WEAR EARPHONES

When Dead & Company took the stage in Darien Lake on August 25th , there was a surprising sight on stage right: John Mayer was wearing headphones during the show, though aside from that he played and sang normally. And as soon as it got to intermission, Dead Air host Gary Lambert texted Mayer to ask about them, and Mayer texted him right back so Gary could get the word out: the headphones were to protect his hearing against (further) tinnitus and hearing loss, but they also help him to hear the band more fully, as he has the band’s front-of-house engineer mix piped in, so he’s hearing the very same mix by front-of-house engineer Derek Featherstone that Deadheads do. Want a pair for yourself? Go here .

FALL TOUR – OCTOBER 11th — OCTOBER 31st

NORTH CAROLINA, GEORGIA, AND TEXAS

Originally, the fall leg of the tour was supposed to start with a pair of shows in Florida, in West Palm Beach on October 6th and Tampa on October 7th. However, on September 28th the band canceled these shows and issued refunds, citing “routing and logistics” as the reason and not elaborating further.

A week earlier the band had also added two dates at the 9,000-capacity Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. This was a surprising move for a band who draws over four times that number just up the road at Folsom Field in Boulder on a summer Saturday , but they’d pull this off by booking the shows on a Tuesday and Wednesday night in late October.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Tarheel State of North Carolina hosted their second kickoff show of the tour at PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte on October 11th. The opening “Let The Good Times Roll” was now clearly a band favorite, and it would be the only song of the night that wasn’t a Grateful Dead original. It was followed by an early-show surprise of “Cassidy” in the second slot, and the set’s highlight was the expansive “Bird Song” closer.

Related: Grateful Dead Studio Albums Ranked Worst To Best

The second set neatly incorporated half of the Grateful Dead’s classic 1970 Workingman’s Dead LP, starting with “Uncle John’s Band” between “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire On The Mountain” before “Drums”, and finishing with a post-“Space” segment of “New Speedway Boogie”, “Black Peter”, and “Casey Jones”. The following day the band traveled to Atlanta’s Cellairis Amphitheatre (aka Lakewood), which seems to have become a charmed venue for the band. Dead & Company’s two previous shows there in 2017 and 2019 were each among that year’s best, and since it happened again at Lakewood in 2021 we’ll talk about that one in more detail in the Top Shows section at the end.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Bobby Weir (@bobweir)

Well before Dead & Company arrived in Texas for a pair of shows in Dallas and Houston, the state created one of the year’s biggest political controversies by passing Senate Bill 8, a nefariously crafted abortion restriction bill that’s outrageous enough that it could be overturned by the most conservative Supreme Court in a century. Weir had already made his public pronouncement on the issue by posting photos of his and his wife’s attendance at the San Francisco edition of a national Women’s Rights march that took place on October 2nd, and the band’s first set at Dallas’ Dos Equis Pavilion would say much more.

After opening with the sole “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” of the tour, the rest of the set featured songs about beloved female characters in the Grateful Dead’s universe: “Bertha”, “Queen Jane Approximately” (the only one of the tour), “Brown Eyed Women”, “Peggy-O”, and “Sugaree”. After the dust settled from all that, the second set kicked off with the only “Deep Ellum Blues” of the tour as a friendly callout to the notorious Dallas nightlife district that spawned the song. Later on, the extended version of “The Other One” just before “Drums” would be the highlight of the show, and the band closed the night with one final, gentler political plea via their “Liberty” encore.

The band headed 210 miles south on I-45 the following day for a show at the Cynthia Woods Pavilion outside Houston, with the band competing against the Friday Night Lights of Texas high school football. Two of the first set’s big plays came from the hoped-for songs with local references (“El Paso” and “Jack Straw”), and the second set’s touchdowns came from yet another classic with a local reference (“Truckin’”), versions of “St. Stephen” and “The Eleven” whose jams took some slight darker turns, and one of the tour’s two versions of Miles Davis’ classic “Milestones”. Lastly, there was a classic sliver of sibling-style banter onstage after the “Black Muddy River” encore, an hour or so before Weir turned 74 and Mayer turned 44 on October 16th:

Burbridge: “An early ‘Happy Birthday’ to John and Bob!”

Hart: “The birthday boys…How cute.”

On paper, this was as good as things could get for Dead & Company and Deadheads in 2021, with two shows at the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, just west of Denver. But just before the first show started, as the temperature was dropping to a bone-chilling 34 degrees, there was a stunning announcement.

Drummer Bill Kreutzmann had contracted a non-Covid 19-related illness and would not play , and Wolf Bros and Ratdog drummer Jay Lane would fill in for him. And when we say stunning, we mean it: Kreutzmann himself couldn’t recall ever missing a show in his entire career, which is fair, because a look through Deadbase revealed he had missed only one, on 11/22/68 .

Rallying, defiant versions of “Not Fade Away” and “New Speedway Boogie” started the show and the “Eyes Of The World” in the second set would be the show’s powerful highlight, but at the conclusion of “Casey Jones”, the cold conditions and equipment issues forced Mickey Hart offstage for the rest of the night, leaving new guy Lane out there on his own for the closer and first-ever “Althea” encore. No pressure, man. It was a beautiful but cold setting and it was definitely a Dead & Company show, but the drummers’ circumstances made for an uncommon night onstage.

The second Red Rocks show on October 20th took place under a full moon, with slightly higher temperatures ranging from the low 50s into the 40s during the show. Lane would fill in for Kreutzmann for a second straight night, and the first set featured a nice run of 70s-era songs highlighted by “The Wheel” and “Black-Throated Wind”, while the 80s were represented by what was possibly the most relaxed version of “Hell In A Bucket” ever. And while the second set was solid throughout and highlighted by “Terrapin Station”, two quick moments after “Space” stood out: during the closing jam of “All Along The Watchtower” Lane unleashed a powerful blast of drumming that rippled right through the entire band, and then got in a second one with the same effect during the climax of “Standing On The Moon” two songs later.

While Lane has played with Weir for decades and was already familiar with a sizable chunk of the Grateful Dead’s catalog, these were breakthrough moments for him with Dead & Company, right after being airdropped into this madness. Two days later, the tour resumed just 25 miles down the road at Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre in Greenwood Village with another pair of shows , and Lane continued filling in for Kreutzmann at both of them. Lane’s surges would prove a good omen for the Fiddler’s Green run, and his new-guy energy would help those shows become two of the tour’s best. We’ll talk more about them in the Top Shows section at the end.

ARIZONA AND CALIFORNIA

The weather warmed up considerably once the band moved on from Colorado to Arizona, but even more importantly, Kreutzmann was back on his drummer’s throne for the Monday evening show at Phoenix’s Ak-Chin Pavilion . Not only were Kreutzmann and the band in fine form all evening, the setlist would make fans of the Grateful Dead’s “dirty 80’s” era very happy: aside from the encore, every song could have been from a 1984 Dead show. In particular, we loved Burbridge’s “China Doll” and the “Let It Grow” from the first set, and the second set trio of “Scarlet Begonias”, “Touch Of Grey”, and “Fire On The Mountain”, a sequence the Grateful Dead would only do twice, on July 3rd, 1984  and July 13th, 1984 .

Next up was a drive west on I-8 to the North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre in Chula Vista, CA, just outside San Diego. Local boy (and World’s Tallest Deadhead) Bill Walton turned up, and beaming visage and outstretched arms were consistently broadcast on the video screens to the delight of the crowd, while the first set’s highlights came from another great “Cumberland Blues” and the “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” closer. However, the Chula Vista show would be set apart by its second set song choices, which included five songs from the Grateful Dead’s 60’s era and a looser, slightly rawer vibe to go with them: “St. Stephen”, “The Eleven”, “New Speedway Boogie”, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”, and “Good Lovin”.

The tour concluded with a drive up I-5 for three sold-out shows at the iconic Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, with many folks taking advantage of Halloween weekend by dressing for the occasion on all three nights. (Skeletons were far and away the most common costume, followed by a respectable number of people dressed as The Dude from The Big Lebowski .)

Both sets on opening night were bookended by a Weir/Barlow classic: the first set started and finished with “Playing In The Band”, with highlights between them coming from “Deal”, “All Along The Watchtower”, and “High Time”. Not to be outdone, the second set kicked off with “Sugar Magnolia” and finished with its coda, “Sunshine Daydream”, with highlights in between coming from a dense “Slipknot!” and a lengthy “Estimated Prophet”. There was a somber note to this set, however, as right before the band started “Sugar Magnolia” Weir quickly said the song was “for Rob”. This rare onstage dedication was for Rob Lawson , Weir’s longtime driver and confidant who was in his final days and who would pass away on November 1st, the day after the tour ended.

Hollywood Bowl’s middle night on Saturday was rolling smoothly along after a first set highlighted by “It Hurts Me Too” and “Tennessee Jed”, and a second set that started with an agreeable run of “Jack Straw”, “Sugaree”, and the classic pairing of “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider”. However, before the band could start a fifth song Kreutzmann would leave the stage, and most of the band followed while Hart handled the “Drums” segment largely on his own. It turned out the band had prepared for this possibility and had kept Lane on hand, as he took Kreutzmann’s place for the remainder of the show, which had a heavier, more serious vibe during “Throwing Stones” and “Days Between” before the more upbeat, celebratory vibes of set closer “One More Saturday Night” and encore “U.S. Blues”.

The following morning on Halloween, Kreutzmann took a light tone on a social media post and apologized if he’d “spooked” anyone with his absence, while disclosing that he’d come back too soon from his illness and Lane would fill in for him one last time for that evening’s Halloween tour closer , and we’ll talk a little more about that one in the Top Shows section below.

TOP 8 SHOWS, PLUS 4 HONORABLE MENTIONS

The What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been tour lasted 31 shows and 77 days, and it more than lived up to its name, as you’ve read here and/or experienced firsthand. Over that time there were some shows that stood out from the others, and we kept track of them along the way. Since this Dead & Company tour was longer we expanded the customary Top 5 to a Top 8, and to 4 Honorable Mentions instead of the usual 3. So with a resounding Rhythm Devils drum roll and without further ado, here are 2021’s top Dead & Company shows, in chronological order.

TOP 8 SHOWS

August 21st – Philadelphia, PA

Just before the band took the stage for the fourth show of the tour, word came down that tonight’s show would have no intermission due to severe incoming storms and would instead consist of one solitary set that had to end by 10 p.m. But the Philly crowd took it all in stride and pushed the band the way they always have, and after a pair of rainbows formed over the stadium during the third song, “Jack Straw”, the band was off to the races for the rest of the night, with the pre-“Drums” highlights coming from Chimenti’s lengthy, fiery Hammond B3 organ solo in “Franklin’s Tower”, and a 35-minute journey through “Terrapin Station” and “The Other One”. However, the faster-tempo-than-usual “Morning Dew” that closed the set would not just be the peak of this show. Instead, Mayer’s closing solo ensured this song was the peak moment of the entire tour, and it will remain one of his signature moments with Dead & Company.

August 23rd – Bethel, NY

One of the trademarks of any band led by Bob Weir is that there’s an avoidance of nostalgia or simply recreating past glories. Weir’s focus is all about creating something new each night, so after a solid first set featuring four 80s-era Weir/Barlow classics, Weir stepped to his microphone at the beginning of the second set and delivered the biggest surprise of the tour.

Since the stage they were on that was adjacent to the site of the August 1969 Woodstock Music & Arts Festival and the Grateful Dead’s utterly disastrous five-song set there (thunderstorms caused life-threatening technical issues), Weir announced a “do-over” of that set, 52 years later. And to the crowd’s disbelief and joy, they’d run through “St. Stephen”, “Mama Tried”, “Dark Star”, “High Time” and “Turn On Your Lovelight”, and it would go a lot better this time. To finish the night off, “Ripple” would be the perfect encore at this proving ground of hippies with the best of intentions trying to make a huge rock festival work before anyone had truly figured out how exactly to do it.

August 27th – Saratoga Springs, NY

The 20-minute “Bird Song” that closed the first set of this show featured a jam with a heavy metal level of intensity, with David Gans and Gary Lambert later declaring it one of the best performances of the song by anyone in its 50-year history. The second set would stand up to it, too, with the front half featuring a sequence of “Scarlet Begonias”, “Help On The Way” and “Slipknot!” that recalled the Grateful Dead’s exploratory 1976 approach to each of these songs, and the show’s peak would be the definitive-D&C-version-so-far of “Cumberland Blues” out of “Space”, followed by Weir delivering the tour’s best version of “Days Between”. On its fifth try, the venerable Saratoga Performing Arts Center finally hosted a Dead & Company show that channeled the intensity of the Grateful Dead’s legendary 80s-era shows there.

September 11th – Cincinnati, OH

For the first time in Dead & Company’s six-year history, a show took place on a band member’s birthday, and the band would celebrate drummer Mickey Hart’s 78th trip around the sun by leading the crowd through a version of “Happy Birthday To You” before the second set, which was inspired and seamless. Highlights came from its opener of “The Other One” that would conclude over an hour later after journeys through “Uncle John’s Band”, the “Help On The Way” > “Slipknot!” > “Franklin’s Tower” trio and another top-notch “Cumberland Blues” coming out of “Space”. The first set stood out too, thanks to a well-chosen run of five early-70’s Grateful Dead originals: “Tennessee Jed”, “Here Comes Sunshine”, “Loose Lucy”, “Mr. Charlie”, and “Looks Like Rain”.

September 15th – Noblesville, IN

The venue we still call Deer Creek once again served as the location for a night of magical Grateful Dead music. The first set peaked with Weir’s dramatic reading of the tour’s sole version of Bob Dylan ’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, and the second set got off to an unconventional start with Mayer leading the band through a stand-alone version of “Sugaree”.

But from there, the band would head straight to 1969 and stay there for the rest of the set, and if you allow “Space” to be considered the equivalent to “Feedback”, they’d play the entire Live Dead  double album, slightly out of sequence and with the additions of “Drums” and “Casey Jones”. Once again, while it remains rare for Dead & Company to make clear and conscious nods to big, specific happenings from the Grateful Dead’s past, when it does happen the results tend to be pretty big as well.

October 12th – Atlanta, GA

For the third time in three Dead & Company shows at Lakewood, the show made our best-of-tour list. This one started with the best first set of the tour, which kicked off with 19 minutes of “Shakedown Street” and was later bolstered by the band’s then-and-there decision to try out the original, faster 1973 arrangement of “They Love Each Other” without ever having rehearsed it. It worked. But the second set eclipsed it, with an opener of “Playing In The Band” that segued into the first “Crazy Fingers” in two years.

After Mayer delivered his signature song “Althea”, the version of “China Cat Sunflower” > ”I Know You Rider” that followed lasted for an eye-popping 28 minutes, nearly three times the 10:35 duration of the Grateful Dead’s benchmark version from Europe ‘72 . Hart’s segment on The Beam at the conclusion of “Drums” was also the tour’s best, and with all of this it’s unsurprising that the band ran so late with their set that the gorgeous set-closing reprise of “Playing In The Band” would be the final number of the night. But by then, an encore wasn’t really necessary.

October 22nd – Denver, CO

After a first set that drew from six different eras of the Grateful Dead’s live repertoire, the second set kicked off with a stand-alone “Sugaree”. Once again it was a seemingly odd choice, just like it was in Deer Creek , but once again it would precede a continuous psychedelic blast that would last for the remainder of the set. This time, every song (including “Sugaree”) could have come from a Grateful Dead show from 1971, and the set’s centerpiece that was the highlight of the fall leg of the tour: a 45-minute excursion of “Dark Star” > “The Other One” > “Drums” > “Space” > “Dark Star” > “The Other One”.

Sets containing both of these open-ended classics were extremely rare after 1971 with the Grateful Dead, and it’s only happened a couple times before with Dead & Company, but this is the first instance we know of where either band played both songs and split them both in half in the same set. The band knew they’d nailed it all too, and they remained dialed-in for the “Wharf Rat” and “Sugar Magnolia” closers. Oh, and we almost forgot: Weir’s delivery of the “headlight” verse in “I Know You Rider” was the best one we can remember.

October 31st – Los Angeles, CA

Jay Lane had to sit in for Kreutzmann again on this night, but not for the first time; the band used the last night of the tour to stack the setlist and go for broke. The first set was highlighted by the opening “Samson & Delilah” and second-set-intensity versions of “Uncle John’s Band” and set-closer “Terrapin Station”. The second set closed out the tour with a list of favorites and stone-cold classics dished out with no-tomorrow energy, including opener “Althea”, a “Dark Star” > “El Paso” suite, and another strong “Eyes Of The World”. Following “Space”, the band dealt out the first uninterrupted “Scarlet Begonias” > “Fire On The Mountain” since the tour’s second show in Bristow back in August, and then follow it with a substantial “Morning Dew” to close the set. Enough classics for you? The only drawback was “Werewolves Of London” being cut from the encore because of the venue curfew, but by this point one could just blame it on the Dew and smile.

4 HONORABLE MENTIONS:

August 25th – Darien Lake, NY

This day started on a somber note for pretty much everyone who’s ever liked rock ‘n’ roll, as the sad news came from London that Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts had passed away the day before at the age of 80. The news wasn’t lost on the band, who debuted their version of the Stones’ classic “The Last Time” as the Grateful Dead’s Steal Your Face skull logo broadcast on the venue screens with the Rolling Stones’ tongue logo in place of the lightning bolt.

The overall vibe of the show also contained several nods to the time when the Rolling Stones were young men and the Grateful Dead were even younger: “Viola Lee Blues” and “Cold Rain and Snow” date back to the Dead’s earliest days when the Stones were a big influence, but they also didn’t shy away from playing “New Speedway Boogie”, the song that memorialized the one time the bands tried to play together, with disastrous results, at Altamont Speedway in December of 1969. All in all, it was the celebration of the backbeat of one of rock’s greatest bands while also acknowledging that same band’s dark and dangerous side. And, just being able to hear “Truckin’” in Buffalo again was a joyous little celebration all by itself. This show had the dark and the light in spades.

September 3rd – Mansfield, MA

Connecticut native and Berklee College of Music student John Mayer was excited and nostalgic about the trio of shows that took place in New England over Labor Day weekend (two at Great Woods in Massachusetts and one at Xfinity in Connecticut), and the second night of Great Woods would just barely outpace the other two in a strong weekend of shows. The first set featured no fewer than four songs with Mayer on lead vocals (“Cold Rain & Snow”, “Dire Wolf”, and “Sugaree” on his own, plus shared vocals with Weir on “Mississippi Half-Step”), followed by a second set that allowed numerous opportunities for Mayer to run wild as a player, including the big second set jam that started with “Truckin’” and ended over an hour later with “Morning Dew”. To wrap it up, Mayer would team up with Weir to belt out a perfectly-timed “U.S. Blues” encore to send everyone back out into the Massachusetts night.

September 13th – St. Louis, MO

The timing of this show ended up coinciding pretty closely with the announcement of the Grateful Dead’s Listen To The River box set, featuring seven complete shows played in St. Louis from 1971 to 1973. And setlist assembler Matt Busch made sure to take note of the location with “Big River” and “Black-Throated Wind” and their direct references to St. Louis making the first set, and St. Louis native Chuck Berry ’s signature song “Johnny B. Goode” would get its sole airing of the tour as the encore. In between, the second set had a decidedly late-1978 vibe to it, with a “Bertha” > “Good Lovin” opener, and a mid-set “Shakedown Street” before “Terrapin Station” begat “Drums”, with “Wharf Rat and “Sugar Magnolia” serving as the two post-“Space” set closers.

October 23rd – Denver, CO

Numerous shows on the tour were consistently strong from start to finish, but this final of the four shows in Colorado (and the fourth with Lane filling in for Kreutzmann) had that little something extra the whole way through that sets it apart. The first set nestled five classic 1970’s Garcia/Hunter songs (“Shakedown Street”, “Ship Of Fools”, “Brown-Eyed Women”, “Crazy Fingers”, and “Here Comes Sunshine”) in between two of the late Jerry Garcia’s most reliable Grateful Dead covers in “Iko Iko” and “Going Down The Road Feeling Bad”. Following that, the second set’s otherness came from the unusual turns in the jams in the opening “Truckin’” and the all-three-verse version of “Viola Lee Blues” that followed, with late-show highlights coming in the from of “Cumberland Blues” and a mesmerizing “Stella Blue”.

Dead & Company’s next shows take place from January 7th–10th and January 13th–16th, 2022 at the annual Playing In The Sand event in Cancun, Mexico. Get more information here .

Dead & Company 2021 Tour

Tickets on Sale Friday, May 21 @ Noon Local Time

Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, John Mayer, and Bob Weir, with Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti –  is thrilled to announce its 2021 tour, kicking off August 16 th in Raleigh, North Carolina, and running through Halloween, with a three-night stand at the iconic Hollywood Bowl on October 29 th , 30 th , & 31 st .

The 31-date tour also includes a night in New York at Citi Field (August 20 th ), two nights in Boston (September 2 nd & 3 rd ), two nights at Wrigley Field in Chicago (September 17 th & 18 th ), and two nights in Denver (October 22 nd & 23 rd ), among others. A full listing of these 2021 tour dates can be found below.

Tickets will go on sale to the general public beginning Friday, May 21 @   Noon  local venue time through  Ticketmaster .

To ensure fans get tickets in their hands directly, Fan Registration is now available  HERE  until Sunday, May 16 th @ 10PM PDT, through Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program. The Verified Fan Presale begins Wednesday, May 19 th @ 10 AM local through Thursday, May 20 @ 10 PM local venue time. Supplies are limited.  

Dead & Company is excited to announce that they will continue their work with longtime sustainability partner REVERB. This summer the band has committed to a comprehensive carbon offset program via Reverb’s unCHANGEit Climate Campaign, covering all projected emissions from this year’s tour – including fan travel to and from shows. These Dead & Company tour offsets will immediately fund important projects around the world and here at home that directly fight climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

Dead & Company will once again offer a variety of enhanced experience packages that range in amenities from Loose Lucy’s Lounge access and early venue entry to branded lawn chairs and limited-edition screen-printed posters, paired with premium concert tickets. Travel Packages that bundle concert tickets with local accommodations will also be available. All enhanced offerings and travel packages go on sale May 19 th  at 10AM local venue time. For full details, visit HERE .

Check  deadandcompany.com  for complete tour information. 

Dead & Company 2021 Tour:

Dead & Company  was formed in 2015 when the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Bob Weir joined forces with artist and musician John Mayer, Allman Brothers’ bassist Oteil Burbridge, and Fare Thee Well and RatDog keyboardist Jeff Chimenti.  The result was one of the most successful touring bands of the decade.  Since its formation, the band has completed six tours, playing to 3.4 million fans, and has become a record-breaking stadium act. Having toured consistently since its 2015 debut, the band has grossed $255.5 million and sold 2.8 million tickets across 149 reported shows.

Dead & Co. has headlined iconic stadiums across the country including Folsom Field, Autzen Stadium, Citi Field, Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium. Additionally, the band broke Wrigley Field’s all-time concert attendance record.

In between tours, Dead & Company hosts its annual “Playing in the Sand” all-inclusive Caribbean concert vacation in Mexico and features three nights of Dead & Company playing on an intimate beach. Due to overwhelming fan demand, a second weekend was added to 2022’s Playing in the Sand. Both weekends have sold out.

About Live Nation Entertainment

Live Nation Entertainment (NYSE: LYV) is the world’s leading live entertainment company comprised of global market leaders: Ticketmaster, Live Nation Concerts, and Live Nation Sponsorship. For additional information, visit  www.livenationentertainment.com .

For a high res band photo and tour artwork, click HERE .

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For Dead & Company, Scoop Marketing

Larry Solters, Anna Loynes, [email protected]

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Dead and Company 2021 tour: The 13 best performances from a long, strange trip

What a run.

Dead and Company wrapped up its year on the road with the final show of a three-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on Sunday, Oct. 31, and in the wake of the tour there is plenty to unpack.

This was undoubtedly the wildest outing yet for the Grateful Dead legacy act. The band braved the elements — playing on through a downpour in Philadelphia and rolling with a rain delay in Chicago — and played on as a non-COVID-19 illness forced drummer Bill Kreutzmann to miss October shows in Colorado and California.

But Dead music has always been about the present, living and playing in the moment — and as this band continued its search for the sound, they discovered plenty of wonders out there on the road.

From mid-August through the end of October, Dead and Company — the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir on guitar and vocals with drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, joined by singer/guitarist John Mayer, singer/bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboard player Jeff Chimenti — crossed the country to deliver 31 shows, each in the neighborhood of four hours and drawing on a decades-deep catalogue of American classics. 

Delights were to be found at every turn. Let's look back, in chronological order, on 13 highlights of the tour, one for every point on the Grateful Dead's signature lightning bolt logo:

Just as no two Dead shows are ever the same, no two lists of high spots will be the same, either. But we're all enjoying the ride.

1. "New Speedway Boogie," Aug. 16, Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek in Raleigh, North Carolina

A pair of Grateful Dead classics, "Touch of Grey" and "New Speedway Boogie," became anthems of perseverance for many during the hard days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And while this tour-opening show began with the defiant "we will get by" chorus of "Touch of Grey," it was the gritty blues of "New Speedway Boogie" that hit the hardest, delivered with ever-enduring world weariness by Weir with sharp blues guitar leads directly from Mayer's wheelhouse. 

2. "Eyes of the World," Aug. 20, Citi Field, New York City

The band opened the second set of its triumphant New York City return with a luxurious and exploratory 18-minute "Eyes of the World," Mayer and Chimenti's complementary leads intertwined in a sublime cosmic dance as Weir, Burbridge, Hart and Kreutzmann served as the sturdiest of terra firma — all before Burbridge unleashed his own sparkling bass solo that reverberated throughout the whole stadium.

3. "Morning Dew," Aug. 21, Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia

Some of Dead and Company's finest moments occur when Weir and Mayer join forces to wrap their arms around songs that were showcases for Grateful Dead singer and guitarist Jerry Garcia, and there was no finer example of this tandem in action this year than on the Philadelphia rendering of the apocalyptic folk-rock odyssey "Morning Dew."

With Weir's weathered and passionate lead vocal matched by Mayer's meteor shower guitar work, the band found every last drop of ancient and timeless soul in the song and delivered it to the Philadelphia faithful. 

4. "High Time," Aug. 23, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, Bethel, New York

When Dead and Company returned to the site of the landmark 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Bethel, New York, the second set began with a replication of the Grateful Dead’s five-song set at that generation-defining festival.

After a 21-minute pass through the potent and bold rock 'n' roll incantation of "St. Stephen," a sturdy Weir-led reading of Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried" and a nearly-22-minute trip through the jazz rock masterpiece "Dark Star," a touchdown on solid ground was found with a rich and tender reading of the ballad "High Time."

One of Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter's most vulnerable compositions, the song served as a brilliant showcase for Burbridge's captivating vocals and a prime example of how he's found a niche in Dead and Company shows singing Garcia ballads.

For the love of Jorma:  Jorma Kaukonen, back on tour, brings joy and the blues to NJ. See photos, his setlist

5. "El Paso," Sept. 2, Xfinity Center, Mansfield, Massachusetts

Weir has always been a cowboy at heart, and for decades he has shown a particular affinity for the work of country singer Marty Robbins, covering his material or taking influence for originals such a "Mexicali Blues."

A Robbins classic long favored by Weir, "El Paso" returned to the stage in Mansfield, Massachusetts, in particularly weathered and poignant form with a rich patina. It arrived after the space dust had settled from a potent "Dark Star," complemented by rollicking saloon piano from Chimenti.

6. "St. Stephen," "William Tell Bridge" and "The Eleven," Sept. 5, Xfinity Theatre, Hartford, Connecticut

Mayer and Weir found themselves in lock-step with the rhythm section on one of the Dead's earliest multi-part suites, the grand procession of "St. Stephen" followed by the less-frequently-played "William Tell Bridge" and the tricky pop majesty of "The Eleven." 

With so many things in the world being thrown into disarray, hearing this old wonder in fine form was incredibly heartening.  "This is the season of what now"  indeed.

7. "Friend of the Devil," Sept. 10, DTE Energy Music Theatre, Clarkston, Michigan

"Friend of the Devil," an all-time country rock classic, continues to enchant listeners more than 50 years after it made its debut on the Dead's "American Beauty" album, and this rendition was a lush and lovely reminder of why it's one of the band's most-beloved songs.

8. "Looks Like Rain," Sept. 11, Riverbend Music Center, Cincinnati

This was a perfect pairing of song and occasion. At a time when the emotions of many were raw — due to factors including the pandemic and the fact that this show fell on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — Weir guided the band through "Looks Like Rain," one of his and lyricist John Perry Barlow's most mournful songs.

It's a song of love and loss, lovingly captured on this night flush with tenderness and grace. 

9. "Drums," "Space" and "Milestones," Sept. 18, Wrigley Field, Chicago

The "Drums" and "Space" improvisational sections in the middle of the second set are opportunities for pure invention on each night. And a grand delight of the Dead and Company experience for many has become the occasional appearance of the Miles Davis composition "Milestones," as the entire band returns to the stage for the evening's home stretch.

While "Milestones" was stately and respectable in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in August, by the time the band made its return to Wrigley Field in Chicago it had become inescapably propulsive: Chimenti anchoring a driving rhythm as Mayer and Burbridge played brilliant figures around the foundation.

'Deep magic': Allman Brothers family conjures NYC wonders on MSG, Fillmore East sets

10. "It Must Have Been the Roses," Oct. 11, PNC Music Pavilion, Charlotte, North Carolina

Since the 2015 formation of Dead and Company, Mayer has fully immersed himself in this collection of music, to the point where he is capturing it with confidence and playfulness to a wonderful degree.

Mayer's command of the material most often materializes in the form for fire-slinging powerhouse performances, such as Oct. 30 Hollywood Bowl performance of "Sugaree." But he's also an incredible balladeer, evidenced by his lovingly soulful performance of the relative rarity "It Must Have Been the Roses."

It was terrifically delicate, and the fact that it was followed by the blues rocker "Mr. Charlie" shows exactly why Mayer was the right man for this job.

11. "Queen Jane Approximately," Oct. 14, Dos Equis Pavilion, Dallas

The writings of Bob Dylan have often occupied a place of honor in the Dead universe, and that tradition continued this tour. There was Weir's sagely reading of the grand surrealist epic "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" on Sept. 15 at the Ruoff Music Center in Deer Creek, Indiana, and a reggae-infused "All Along the Watchtower" on Oct. 29 at the Hollywood Bowl.

The band's strongest Dylan moment arrived Oct. 14, when the "Highway 61 Revisited" gem "Queen Jane Approximately" returned to the repertoire for the first time in more than three years in joyous, loving form. The song came amid the first set of the band's Texas return, a block of songs that started with a cover of the calypso classic "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)," followed by six songs named after women.

12. "Sugar Magnolia," Oct. 22, Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre, Greenwood Village, Colorado

With Kreutzmann sidelined due to medical issues for the band's four Colorado shows (and eventually the tour-closing Halloween night engagement at the Hollywood Bowl), RatDog and Bob Weir and the Wolf Bros. drummer Jay Lane stepped up to hold down the beat.

One of Lane's peak moments was the second set of the band's first show at the Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre in Colorado. After nimbly navigating the spacier corners of the repertoire — "Dark Star," "The Other One," "Drums" and "Space" — then the haunting ballad "Wharf Rat," Lane commandingly picked up the pace so band and audience alike could bask in the sonic sunshine daydreams of the Weir rocker "Sugar Magnolia."

13. "Playing in the Band," Oct. 29, Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles

This Weir-led odyssey is certainly one of Dead and Company's most-played numbers, but after all of these years it it still capable of transcendence.

Launching the band's tour-ending three-night run at the Hollywood Bowl with an extended introduction, this performance of the song felt utterly luxurious. Here they were, beginning their last stand of the year, soaking it all in and still finding spaces to explore. Burbridge's bass work was vivid, Weir's command of it all was steady and the band was all in for whatever happened next.

Dead and Company's 2021 shows can be streamed in audio and video formats via Nugs.net. The band's next scheduled dates are Jan. 7 to 10, 2022, and Jan. 13 to 16 for its sold-out Playing in the Sand gatherings in Mexico.

Alex Biese has been writing about art, entertainment, culture and news on a local and national level for more than 15 years.

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Las Vegas Sphere: Ultimate guide to seats, prices and how to see Dead Forever in 2024

Competing for attention in Las Vegas with neon signs, billboards and mega-resorts that resemble European palaces and Egyptian pyramids is no easy feat.

But an eight-month-old orb with a talent for shapeshifting is stealing a little of their thunder.

Sphere at The Venetian Resort , an entertainment venue that opened September 2023 just off the Las Vegas Strip , has garnered much attention since its debut for its immersive audio-visual experiences.

See the 366-foot-tall venue from the outside at night and it captivates people for its ability to project images from its exterior shell (also called the Exosphere) containing 580,000 square feet of LED lights, whether it's the Earth, the surface of Mars, a blinking eye, or an emoji. It developed a reputation for causing traffic gridlock since the projections began last year during the Fourth of July.

Inside, the venue's 160,000-square-foot display with 16K by 16K resolution displays immersive visuals, backed by the world's largest beamforming audio system, according to The Venetian .

If you're planning a trip to Las Vegas, check our guides on the best ways to get there from Phoenix , free things to do , which hotels offer free parking , and how to check for bedbugs in hotels .

If you can't get to Vegas just yet, the newly opened Caesars Republic Scottsdale hotel and upcoming VAI Resort in Glendale offer the luxury of Vegas in the Valley, though neither has a casino.

Here's everything to know about the Las Vegas Sphere.

What is the Sphere in Las Vegas?

Described on its website as "a next-generation entertainment medium that is redefining the future of live entertainment," Sphere is an immersive venue that uses haptics (seats that can move and vibrate), atmospheric simulations and visual effects to "transport audiences to places real and imagined."

The Sphere Experience, the main attraction inside the Sphere, is a two-part attraction. The first part, guided by a humanoid robot called Aura, includes a 360-degree avatar capture and a 50-foot-high holographic installation.

The second part is a viewing of an immersive film called "Postcard From Earth" by director Darren Aronofsky on Sphere's largest, highest-definition screen. "Postcard From Earth" is described as part nature documentary, part science fiction movie.

Sphere has also hosted concerts, with U2 inaugurating it with a 40-show residency that launched on Sept. 29, 2023. Sporting events are coming as well: UFC President Dana White said in February that he booked Sphere for UFC 306, scheduled for Sept. 14, 2024.

Where is the Sphere in Las Vegas?

Sphere is at the intersection of Sands Avenue and Koval Lane, just off the Las Vegas Strip and about 1 mile east of The Venetian.

Its address is 255 Sands Ave., Las Vegas.

Who owns the Sphere in Las Vegas?

Sphere is owned by Sphere Entertainment Co., which was spun off from Madison Square Garden Entertainment in April 2023.

Can you go inside the Vegas Sphere?

Yes, but it will cost you. Every guest must have a ticket for a show to enter the Sphere.

How many people does the Sphere hold? 

Sphere can seat 17,500 people and has a standing room capacity of 20,000, according to The Venetian .

Do the seats move in the Sphere? 

Of the Sphere's 17,500 seats, 10,000 of them are described as "haptic seats," or seats that are capable of moving and vibrating.

Where are the bad seats in the Sphere? 

Any seats with an overhang of upper levels will obstruct the view of the stage and/or screen.

USA Today's 10Best suggests avoiding certain seats in the far right and far left sections in the 100 level, where rows 30 and higher are completely obstructed by the overhang.

The 200, 300 and 400 levels offer the best seats.

How long does the Sphere Experience last? 

The Sphere Experience lasts just under two hours, with 60 minutes for the interactive experiences and 50 minutes for the "Postcard From Earth" film.

How long will U2 be at the Sphere?

U2 played the final show of its U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere residency on March 2, 2024.

Who is performing at the Sphere in 2024? 

After U2's residency ended, the jam band Phish became the second music act to play Sphere. Their four-show residency ran April 18-21.

Members of Dead & Company, a spinoff of the Grateful Dead featuring former members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart along with singer and guitarist John Mayer, will perform a 24-show Sphere residency called Dead Forever. The residency, which runs from May 16 to July 13, will begin a year after their final tour made a stop in Phoenix .

How much does it cost to go to Sphere Vegas?

It depends on the show and what day you plan to visit.

The Sphere Experience starts at $79 per person during the week and $99 per person on weekends.

Tickets for Dead & Company's Dead Forever residency start at $145 per person.

Is the Sphere worth going to?

Sphere has attracted an assortment of highly positive and highly negative reviews from travelers.

It has a user rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars on Google. One user, Phillipe Beaumier , called Sphere "a once in a lifetime experience" and described the immersive audio and visual as "so incredible, you feel like you are part of the travel!"

Tripadvisor users gave Sphere more mixed reviews, with an overall rating of 3 out of 5 stars. Most of its bad reviews were critical of the message of the "Postcard From Earth" film in the Sphere Experience.

A one-star review from a Tripadvisor user named Kathryn W. expressed disappointment with the Sphere Experience's humanoid robots and how "a couple of robots that are comparable to (Amazon's virtual assistant) Alexa can't answer a question." Kathryn added that the moving seats "could be mistaken for someone kicking the back of your chair."

Michael Salerno is an award-winning journalist who’s covered travel and tourism since 2014. His work as The Arizona Republic’s consumer travel reporter aims to help readers navigate the stresses of traveling and get the best value for their money on their vacations. He can be reached at  [email protected] . Follow him on X, formerly Twitter:  @salerno_phx .

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NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Music fans devastated to miss out on Glastonbury 2024 line-up after ticket resale sells out

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Many people hoping to still be in with a chance of going to Glastonbury 2024 have been left sorely disappointed as the resale tickets sold out in just 22 minutes .

This morning, the musical festival offered people a final chance to go to this year’s event, which boasts a stellar line-up including Shania Twain , Coldplay , Cyndi Lauper , SZA , Avril Lavigne , Janelle Monáe and many more.

The first batch tickets, which have been sold exclusively through the ticketing company See Tickets, were released for the general admission sale on November 19 last year, which sold out in an hour.

Five months later, the resale has taken place – and it took just over 20 minutes for all of those to go too.

In a post shared on X at 9.22am – 22 minutes after the sale began at 9am – the official account for Glastonbury wrote: ‘The tickets in this morning’s resale have now all been sold. Our thanks to everyone who bought one, and sorry to those who missed out.’

The X account for See Tickets also added: ‘A limited amount of returned campervan tickets, Worthy View and Sticklinch accommodation for @Glastonbury 2024 will go on sale to ticket holders at 11am.’

The tickets in this morning’s resale have now all been sold. Our thanks to everyone who bought one, and sorry to those who missed out. — Glastonbury Festival (@glastonbury) April 21, 2024

A limited amount of returned campervan tickets, Worthy View and Sticklinch accommodation for @Glastonbury 2024 will go on sale to ticket holders at 11am. — See Tickets (@seetickets) April 21, 2024

While some people were able to get their hands on coveted tickets, others weren’t so fortunate, expressing their upset over their disappointment on social media.

One unsuccessful hopeful called Adam wrote: ‘4 attempts unsuccessful, love it.’

‘Oh well go again next year,’ added Robbo, while Lisa simply commented with a row of sobbing emojis.

‘Never want to go anyway,’ Simon quipped with crying emojis, as Brooke added: ‘Wanted to go so bad! Never had any luck. Only went as a kid with Mam and dad, every year! Fingers crossed get them one year!

‘To go with my old hippy dad and my kids would be a dream come true! New memories to cherish for years to come.’

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While the tickets are all now well and truly sold out, some peope might be hoping that they could still go to Glastonbury by signing up for volunteering role.

So is that possible?

Can I sign up for Glastonbury volunteering?

There are various ways that people can volunteer at Glastonbury, including through Oxfam and via Festaff.

Oxfam has a team of 2,000 people volunteering at the festival, carrying out roles such as monitoring festivalgoers at the gates, helping at the Oxfam festival shop and campaigning with the public.

With Festaff, people volunteering as stewards with the organisation have to work three eight-hour shifts between the Wednesday and Sunday.

On the website for WaterAid , it says that applications for volunteering at Glastonbury are now closed.

On Oxfam ’s website, it still gives the option for people to register their interest to be volunteers, which will also sign you up to the charity’s mailing list.

Meanwhile, Festaff states on its website: ‘All those who worked two camping events wiht us in 2023 will be invited to apply for Glastonbury 2024 – all have been sent an email.

‘We will not be accepting any other applications or further announcements until these are all dealt with. We hope to have these processed by the end of February.

‘You must select a sister event to partner your Glastonbury 2024 application – camping events only – Not BST or APE.’

More to follow.

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Thousands ‘fuming’ after tickets cancelled for Co-op Live arena show in Manchester

Rick Astley sang for staff, VIPs and press in test event at UK’s biggest indoor arena ahead of opening

Thousands of people due to attend the first event at the UK’s biggest indoor arena had their tickets cancelled at the last minute on Saturday.

Rick Astley took to the stage at the new 23,500-capacity Co-op Live arena, which opens officially on Tuesday, to perform to 11,000 arena workers, VIPs and press at a free test event.

However, it is thought as many as 4,000 tickets were cancelled, some just one hour before the show, leaving people “fuming”.

One gig-goer, Byron Edwards, posted on X: “Invitational tickets to the test event tonight cancelled just 90 minutes before doors open. What kind of shit show is this?”

Alison Stafford-Bentley said: “Thanks for cancelling tickets for tonight less than an hour before event is due to start. Absolutely fuming.”

Other teething problems included long queues for food, rows of seats not being ready and problems moving the crowds around the venue.

A Co-op Live spokesperson said: “We’re busy putting the finishing touches on Co-op Live, and we are looking forward to Co-op Live becoming the pre-eminent arena in the UK upon opening.

“As a part of the opening process, we are in the midst of an extensive protocol of testing critical procedures. To enable us to test the spaces effectively, we have made the difficult decision to reduce overall capacity for today’s test event. We apologise to affected guests and look forward to welcoming them to the Black Keys.”

Sited on the Etihad Campus next to the Manchester City football ground, the £365m venue will officially open on Tuesday with two shows by the comedian Peter Kay, for which there are still tickets available.

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Take That, the Killers, Eric Clapton, Barry Manilow and Olivia Rodrigo are all due to perform in the coming weeks, with plans to hold the MTV Europe music awards there in November.

Construction began in 2021 on the new venue, which is financed by the City Football Group – owned by the billionaire Emirati royal Sheikh Mansour – and the US sports and commercial real estate giant Oak View Group.

Harry Styles, who grew up 30 miles away, has a minor stake and advised on aspects of the design, which features four stacked black boxes with a similarly black interior.

The arena was welcomed by Manchester council, its leader, Bev Craig, saying the venue would “deliver a huge boost for our local economy and result in significant commercial and wider benefits for the city”.

However, questions were raised over whether there was a need for another large-scale music venue just two miles from the 21,000-capacity Manchester AO arena.

The two venues came to blows during the planning process, when the AO arena objected numerous times to Co-op Live proposals, including to what it described as a “simply unlawful” licensing application that would allow the new arena to serve alcohol until 2am at weekends and 24/7 on 25 occasions every year.

Co-op Live’s lawyers argued it was a “ludicrous and disingenuous” objection, at the meeting at Manchester town hall in February.

Co-op Live also faced criticism from the Music Venue Trust (MVT) for its potential impact on live music in Manchester. The venue had previously “declined” to sign up to a £1-per-ticket levy that funds the MVT’s “pipeline investment fund” for grassroots venues.

The MVT recently warned of the crisis facing grassroots music and arts venues, telling the Guardian “the whole ecosystem is collapsing” .

• Rick Astley
• Greater Manchester
• North of England
• Sheikh Mansour
• Manchester City

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Dickey Betts, Allman Brothers Band co-founder and legendary guitarist, dies at 80

Updated on: April 18, 2024 / 8:38 PM EDT / AP

Guitar legend Dickey Betts, who co-founded the Allman Brothers Band and wrote their biggest hit, "Ramblin' Man," has died. He was 80.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Famer died at his home in Osprey, Florida, David Spero, Betts' manager of 20 years, confirmed. Betts had been battling cancer for more than a year and had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Spero said.

"He was surrounded by his whole family and he passed peacefully. They didn't think he was in any pain," Spero said by phone.

Betts shared lead guitar duties with Duane Allman in the original Allman Brothers Band to help give the group its distinctive sound and create a new genre — Southern rock. Acts ranging from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Kid Rock were influenced by the Allmans' music, which combined the blues, country, R&B and jazz with '60s rock.

Founded in 1969, the Allmans were a pioneering jam band, trampling the traditional notion of three-minute pop songs by performing lengthy compositions in concert and on record. The band was also notable as a biracial group from the Deep South.

Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident in 1971, and founding member Berry Oakley was killed in a motorcycle crash a year later. That left Betts and Allman's younger brother Gregg as the band's leaders, but they frequently clashed, and substance abuse caused further dysfunction. The band broke up at least twice before reforming, and has had more than a dozen lineups.

The Allman Brothers Band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and earned a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 2012. Betts left the group for good in 2000, and also played solo and with his own band Great Southern, which included his son, guitarist Duane Betts.

Forrest Richard Betts was born Dec. 12, 1943, and was raised in the Bradenton, Florida, area, near the highway 41 he sang about in "Ramblin' Man." His family had lived in area since the mid-19th century.

Betts grew up listening to country, bluegrass and Western swing, and played the ukulele and banjo before focusing on the electric guitar because it impressed girls. At 16 he left home for his first road trip, joining the circus to play in a band.

He returned home, and with bassist Oakley joined a group that became the Jacksonville, Florida-based band Second Coming. One night in 1969 Betts and Oakley jammed with Duane Allman, already a successful session musician, and his younger brother, and together they formed the Allman Brothers Band.

The group moved to Macon, Georgia, and released a self-titled debut album in 1969. A year later came the album "Idlewild South," highlighted by Betts' instrumental composition "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," which soon became a concert staple.

The 1971 double album "At Fillmore East," now considered among the greatest live albums of the classic rock era, was the Allmans' commercial breakthrough and cemented their performing reputation by showcasing the unique guitar interplay between Allman and Betts. Their styles contrasted, with Allman playing bluesy slide guitar, while Betts' solos and singing tugged the band toward country. When layered in harmony, their playing was especially distinctive.

The group also had two drummers — "Jaimoe" Johanson, who is Black, and Butch Trucks.

Duane Allman died four days after "Fillmore" was certified as a gold record, but the band carried on and crowds continued to grow. The 1973 album "Brothers and Sisters" rose to No. 1 on the charts and featured "Ramblin' Man," with Betts singing the lead and bringing twang to the Top 40. The song reached No. 2 on the singles charts and was kept out of the No. 1 spot by "Half Breed" by Cher, who later married Gregg Allman.

The soaring sound of Betts' guitar on "Ramblin' Man" reverberated in neighborhood bars around the country for decades, and the song underscored his knack for melodic hooks. "Ramblin' Man" was the Allmans' only Top Ten hit, but Betts' catchy 7½-minute instrumental composition "Jessica," recorded in 1972, became an FM radio staple.

Betts also wrote or co-wrote some of the band's other best-loved songs, including "Blue Sky" and "Southbound." In later years the group remained a successful touring act with Betts and Warren Haynes on guitar. Gregg Allman and Butch Trucks died in 2017.

After leaving the Allmans for good, Betts continued to play with his own group and lived in the Bradenton area with his wife, Donna.

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Dead & Company’s “ final tour ” wasn’t the end of the road for the Grateful Dead offshoot, as the John Mayer -featuring band has confirmed they’ll reconvene this spring for a lengthy residency at Las Vegas ’ Sphere.

The group — featuring Dead legends Bob Weir and Mickey Hart alongside Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, and drummer Jay Lane — previously announced their final tour in 2023, culminating with a pair of hometown gigs in San Francisco.

However, toward the end of 2023, Dead and Company were rumored to be ending their brief retirement to take over for U2 — and following Phish’s four-night visit — at the cutting-edge Las Vegas venue. After weeks of speculation, the band teased — and Rolling Stone confirmed — their plans with a social media teaser Wednesday, showing the Grateful Dead’s classic “Steal Your Face” logo projected on the massive Sphere.

pic.twitter.com/O4uXsuGxEt — Dead & Company (@deadandcompany) January 31, 2024

The many presales for tickets begins Monday, February 1, with a general on-sale date of Friday, February 5.

Semantically speaking, Dead and Company didn’t lie about last year’s jaunt being their “final tour” since they’re technically going to be “residing” instead of “touring,” as they explained in the teaser.

“In 2023, Dead & Company played their final tour,” the band said. “But there are other ways to make sure the music never stops.”

Dead & Company added, a nod to the venue, “It’s gonna be a ball.”

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Thursday, May 16; Friday, May 17; Saturday, May 18 Friday, May 24; Saturday, May 25; Sunday, May 26 Thursday, May 30; Friday, May 31; Saturday, June 1 Thursday, June 6; Friday, June 7; Saturday, June 8 Thursday, June 13; Friday, June 14; Saturday, June 15 Thursday, June 20; Friday, June 21; Saturday, June 22 Thursday, July 4; Friday, July 5; Saturday, July 6 Thursday, July 11; Friday, July 12; Saturday, July 13

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‘Two Idiot Girls’ Podcast Host Drew Afualo Sets Dates For ‘The Loud Tour’ To Continue “Terrorizing Awful Men”

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Drew Afualo and her Two Idiot Girls podcast co-host, Deison Afualo, are embarking on a summer comedy tour. The Loud Tour will travel across the U.S. and make stops in 21 cities, supporting her first book, Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve .

“We are coming to 21 cities, across the country (bc I heard how mad u were we didn’t last time ALRIGHT!!!! JEEZ!!! lmaooooo) & i genuinely cannot wait to meet & hug every single one of you,” Afualo said in an Instagram post announcing the tour.

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Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve is her first book and is set to drop on July 30, the day her tour starts in NYC.

Afualo’s comedy tour is just the latest effort in the digital media creator’s “agenda,” saying on Instagram, “I promised yall a hot girl summer fueled by terrorizing awful men with this book, and this tour is gonna help push that agenda. IKDFR LMFAOOOOO SEE YALL THERE!!!”

The Loud Tour Dates

• July 30 — New York, NY • July 31 — Boston, MA • August 1 — Philadelphia, PA • August 2 — Washington D.C. • August 3 — Columbus, OH • August 4 — Chicago, IL • August 6 — Nashville, TN • August 7 — Atlanta, GA • August 8 — Orlando, FL • August 9 — Ft. Lauderdale, FL • August 10 — Clearwater, FL • August 13 — Houston, TX • August 14 — Austin, TX • August 15 — Dallas, TX • August 17 — Denver, CO • August 18 — Salt Lake City, UT • August 20 — Seattle, WA • August 21 — Portland, OR • August 23 — San Jose, CA • August 24 — Los Angeles, CA • August 25 — Phoenix, AZ

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