Reckoning with the Dead at the Sphere (2024)

And yet. In the years that followed, the surviving members reassembled in a variety of configurations: the Dead, the Other Ones, and Furthur, to name a few. They cycled through dozens of replacement guitarists, some of them Garcia imitators, some not. But the absence of their grudging leader and brightest light exposed differences both fresh and latent, and greed and ego frayed their alliances. At various points, members stopped talking to one another; Weir, the rhythm guitarist, and Phil Lesh, the bass player, carried on a kind of cold duel over who’d be the standard-bearer. In 2015, on the fiftieth anniversary of the band’s formation, the jam impresario Peter Shapiro wrangled the remaining members into a series of stadium concerts, a supposedly final goodbye called Fare Thee Well. But, instead of sealing the mine, this extravaganza opened a new vein. Weeks later, Weir announced a new outfit, called Dead & Company, with Mayer—a guitar ace who’d recently become obsessed with Garcia’s playing style and songcraft—in the hot spot. Exit Lesh.

Somehow, this iteration, with its winking nod to corporate underpinnings, was the one that went big, the facsimile that pulled in new listeners and sold out stadiums. It became, for some, the real thing, a simulacrum instead of a simulation. I went to see Dead & Co. a few times. Citi Field, Madison Square Garden. They quickly acquired the name Dead and Slow, because of the creeping tempo that Weir, the putative boss, or at least the senior rock star, insisted on. I missed the brawn of the good stuff. Still, there were moments. The other players—Jeff Chimenti, on keys; Oteil Burbridge, on bass; and now Jay Lane, with Hart, on drums—are excellent musicians. I occasionally allowed myself to be carried away. I didn’t want to be a buzzkill.

Mayer is obviously a wicked guitar player, supple and slick, an ace as a mimic who also has his own panache. He’s bright, and very articulate about his passion for the music of the Grateful Dead. But his blues inflections, his fulsome guitar faces (all that mugging and preening), his designer watches, celebrity girlfriends, and tennis shoes—it can come off a bit twerpy. No one needs him to be a diabetic drug addict, humped over the fretboard, but the contrast is stark, as much in attitude as in style, between the fresh-faced showboat and the beatnik recusant whose Pumas he aims to fill.

Many fans don’t seem to mind. Quite a few even love it. Dead & Co. have been at it for nine years, playing two hundred and fifty gigs and selling close to five million tickets. This includes their supposed farewell tour, last summer, another false end with inflated prices. That old reliable illusion of scarcity, or finality, bumped up their average nightly gross to $4.5 million. The Dead had become fashionable, perhaps bigger than ever—or broader, anyway. The influx of casuals rivalled that of the so-called Touchheads, in the post-coma late-eighties era, following the success of the band’s lone Top Ten single, “Touch of Grey.” We are everywhere, Deadheads like to say. The declaration used to suggest infiltration and serendipity. These days, it implies saturation and perhaps even a kind of cultural fatigue.

By now, it’s hard to imagine that anyone hasn’t heard about the Sphere. You may even know that we’re supposed to call it Sphere, without the “the,” and that we have mostly decided to ignore this. People like to say that James Dolan, the Cablevision heir and the owner of Madison Square Garden, spent $2.3 billion to build it, but it was technically a joint project of M.S.G. and the Venetian, which the billionaire Sheldon Adelson sold to Apollo Global Management in 2022, before the Sphere was complete. In other words, though it may be Dolan’s pet project, it is also a ripe manifestation of risk capital, a giant mushroom sprouting out of the fungal network of the attention economy. Sphere is now a separate public company, ticker SPHR, whose stock is up eleven per cent in the past year. The aim is to seed more Spheres. London nixed one. South Korea is in play, and Abu Dhabi seems likely.

The Sphere is connected to the Venetian by an air-conditioned passageway. Outside, the building serves as an incandescent orbic billboard, with 1.2 million L.E.D.s, each containing four dozen diodes. Ad space, basically, or an electronic canvas in the round. Inside, it’s a performance venue, with about eighteen thousand seats arrayed under a vast dome that doubles as the world’s largest and highest-resolution L.E.D. screen. The sound system features some hundred and sixty thousand speakers, which allow engineers to direct discrete sounds at individual seats. The venue can also vibrate those seats and produce smells—an Odorama and an org*smatron in one. Dolan has said that he drew inspiration from the Ray Bradbury short story “The Veldt,” in which some snotty children, addicted to the verisimilitude of a faux savanna on a virtual-reality screen in their home, wind up feeding their parents to the virtual lions. One way of interpreting this is that Dolan wants to f*ck your sh*t up. Another is that Charles Dolan, his father, might want to stay away.

Last fall, U2 inaugurated the Sphere, playing forty shows, all largely the same in terms of set list and visuals. The wows and the don’t-you-wish-you-were-heres made the rounds on social media. Next, Phish did four nights, each with a distinct set list and corresponding graphics. Wowier wows, this time, as the ambitious pairings flirted, conceptually and visually, with something like art, and made it hard for the band to clear much of a profit. Dead & Co. came next: two dozen shows to start. Last month, despite sales being a bit soft, they announced a half-dozen more. Ten lost weekends in all for the Deadheads in the desert, and a gross of more than a hundred million dollars.

Mayer and Dead & Co. are both co-managed by Irving Azoff, a longtime industry heavy and a former C.E.O. of Ticketmaster. (When Azoff’s clients the Eagles were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Don Henley said, “He may be Satan, but he’s our Satan.”) Azoff, who also manages U2, has a business partnership with Madison Square Garden. He’s got the Eagles doing the next Sphere stint, after Dead & Co. It’s tempting to think of Dead & Co. in their Sphere phase as a slick Mayer-and-Azoff concoction, and therefore a perversion of the Grateful Dead’s long-standing (or long-stumbling) fail-sideways approach to the music business. As it happens, in 1973, Azoff, just before taking on the Eagles, joined the Dead operation. He lasted little more than a week. “He couldn’t stand our laid-back life style,” Gail Hellund, who ran the band’s travel business, told the “Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast,” a cultural-history podcast. “He was too L.A. for us. No harm, no foul. Just oil and water.”