Dead & Company kicks off 2nd Sphere residency in Las Vegas

Dead & Co open run with nearly 4-hour show

By Jim Harrington

Mercury News

The musical journey really took off on Thursday — just like it did for the Grateful Dead itself some 60 years ago — against the backdrop of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Yet, the scene created on stage wasn’t the band’s exact origin location on the Peninsula (Palo Alto and Menlo Park, to be exact) or the first place the band played under the name of the Grateful Dead (that would be San Jose), but rather the spot that it’s most commonly associated with — the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

The musicians worked in front of a towering graphic of 710 Ashbury St. — the house where the Dead once famously lived. But then the viewpoint began to slowly and steadily change, as we were rocketed off into the sky, peering down at all of San Francisco, then the whole of the Bay Area and, eventually, leaving Earth’s orbit entirely and setting off into space.

It was a massively impactful way to kick off Dead & Company’s 18-show run at the Sphere, marking the Grateful Dead offshoot’s second annual residency at the much-buzzed-about Las Vegas venue.

It was the same way that the group — consisting of former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir (guitar and vocals) and Mickey Hart (drums) as well as John Mayer (guitar and vocals), Oteil Burbridge (bass), Jeff Chimenti (keyboards) and Jay Lane (drums) — kicked off their shows during their first run at the nearly 18,000-capacity, $2.3 billion venue in 2024. Indeed, the segment now appears to be Dead & Co.’s signature for the Sphere and I’d expect it to keep showing up as long as the band keeps playing there — which, judging by ticket demand, could be for many years to come.

Much of the rest of the graphic effects, shown in sparkling clarity on the mammoth 16-K wraparound LED screens that run from floor to ceiling in the 366-feet-tall building, were new or different from what I saw when I attended two shows early in last year’s residency. There were a couple holdovers, but the experience — in general — felt fresh.

In other words, if you saw the Dead & Co. gigs at the Sphere in 2024 then you still should think very seriously about catching these shows again this year. Of course, I’m no doubt preaching to the choir, given that many Deadheads (or whatever Dead & Co. followers call themselves) probably have purchased tickets for multiple weekends as the group continues its stand through mid-May.

Thursday’s Night 1 turned out to be kind of a sleepy affair for Dead & Co., as the band just sort of glided its way through most of the songs and kept things relatively mellow. Some of that had to do with the setlist, as the group loaded up on less-rocking material, but it also went beyond just that.

Basically everything about this show — from the arrangements to the micro-jams to the solos — felt a bit tentative, like the Dead & Co. guys were easing into the run, testing the water and dusting off the cobwebs during what will likely (hopefully?) be remembered as just a rather lukewarm start to an otherwise smoking-hot Sphere run.

The group kicked off its 3-1/2-hour plus show (including the standard intermission, of course) with the Dead cover favorite “Gimmie Some Lovin’, which reportedly marked the first time that Dead & Company had performed this Spencer Davis Group favorite. It was a pretty straightforward opener and the party wouldn’t really get started until the big graphics kicked in with the Haight-Ashbury segment, which was set to a soundtrack of “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo.”

The graphics continued to take centerstage as the show progressed, with the group’s famed Dancing Bears mascots making their first (of many) appearances during “Bertha.” The bears started out in rather sizable form, but then began to shrink ever smaller, while multiplying in number beyond what could be easily counted, until they became like pixels that were used to form jumbo images of the musicians on the backing screen. Neat trick, indeed.

One of the best graphics from 2024 reappeared during “Brown-Eyed Women,” as vintage posters/tickets/handbills for Grateful Dead shows — Dec 30, 1983, at the San Francisco Civic; April 27-28, 1991, at the Silver Bowl in Las Vegas (with Santana opening); June 4, 1995, at Shoreline Amphitheatre at Mountain View, etc. — blanketed the massive screen behind the band.

The first set was relatively short — clocking in at right around an hour — but Dead & Co. would return from an intermission with a more generous second helping that ran some two hours. Unfortunately, the music didn’t improve much at the start of the nightcap as they limped through a rather unimpressive “Feel Like a Stranger” and then offered up what certainly has to rank among the least interesting renditions of “Scarlet Begonias” on record.

Things started to improve with “Fire on the Mountain,” which featured vocals from Weir, Mayer, Burbridge and Hart, and which led nicely into the always-epic “Terrapin Station.”

The song of the night was the slow-burning “Standing on the Moon,” the sole track from the Grateful Dead’s final studio album — 1989’s “Built to Last” — that deserves to be included in a list of the band’s overall best songs. Weir put his all into the tune on this night, showing a depth of emotion and, even more so, sensitivity in his vocals that we rarely see from him on the live stage.

After a topnotch take on the traditional “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” featuring some really cool graphics with the Dead’s iconic Uncle Sam figure riding a motorcycle, we found ourselves once again in outer space, looking down at the planet Earth, as the band latched onto a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Then we began our steady descent, with our home planet growing ever bigger before us on the screens.

First, we were able to make out the shape of North America, then the U.S., then California and, finally, the Bay Area itself. But we kept right on going, circling in on San Francisco and Golden Gate Park, descending ever closer until we landed right back where we started — Haight-Ashbury.

We’d then hear the voice of Phil Lesh — the legendary bassist for the Grateful Dead who died in October at the age of 84 — and see a silhouette of him playing his instrument in an upstairs window of the band’s old home of 710 Ashbury.

We had come full circle, in dramatic fashion, and all that was left to do was for the band to send us home in glorious fashion with a strong closer of the anthem “Touch of Grey,” punctuated with an exclamation point through the repeated lyrical refrain of “We will survive.”

It came across like a mission statement, one that continues to be driven home 60 years after the Grateful Dead’s long strange trip began in 1965.

Dead & Company March 20, 2025 setlist:

Set 1

1. “Gimme Some Lovin’”

2. “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo”

3. “Bertha”

4. “New Speedway Boogie”

5. “Brown-Eyed Women”

6. “Good Lovin’”

7. “Don’t Ease Me In”

Set 2:

8. “Feel Like a Stranger”

9. “Scarlet Begonias”

10. “Fire on the Mountain”

11. “Terrapin Station”

12. “Drums”

13. “Space”

14. “Standing on the Moon”

15. “Althea”

16. “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad”

17. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”

18. “Touch of Grey”