Dead & Company are headed back to Sphere in Las Vegas next year to celebrate the Grateful Dead spinoff band’s 10-year anniversary. The 18-show run kicks off March 20, and wraps up May 17. Ticket pre-sales begin December 10. Prices start at $145, and scale up significantly from there.
A press release notes these will be Dead & Company’s “only Sphere shows in 2025,” hinting at the possibility of more concerts elsewhere. The group wrapped up a farewell tour on July 16, 2023, at Oracle Park in San Francisco, California, but indicated they were open to residencies and special events in the future.
Earlier this year, Dead and Company became the third band to play Sphere following a 40-show residency by U2 and a quick run of four shows by Phish. Dead fans from all across the planet flocked to Las Vegas to see them, turning the town into an unlikely hippie Mecca throughout the summer.
“The crowd hit a collective note of rapture and awe when the band launched into ‘Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo,’ from 1973’s Wake of the Flood,” read a review of opening night by Rolling Stone‘s Ethan Millman. “The Sphere displayed a retractable metal gate opening as the song started — first revealing the famed Grateful Dead house in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, then taking us to the stratosphere, as we appeared to soar higher and higher above the city until reaching the cosmos. The launch into orbit gave the sensation that the entire venue was tilting from left to right.”
Dead & Company launched in late 2015, just months after the surviving members of the Grateful Dead celebrated the band’s 50th anniversary with a series of Fare Thee Well concerts where they were joined by Trey Anastasio. John Mayer, a relative Dead novice at the time, took on the difficult role of fronting Dead & Company alongside guitarist Bob Weir, drummers Micky Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, bassist Oteil Burbridge, and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti. Kreutzmann left the group in 2023 and was replaced by drummer Jay Lane.
Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh never guested with Dead & Company and last played with his former bandmates at Fare Thee Well in 2015. In a recent CBS interview, Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann said that Lesh was in talks to join them for a celebration of the band’s 60th anniversary next year before he died in October. “We were gonna see where it goes, but we were just gonna play the four of us,” Weir said. “Now there’s only three of us … and that’s different.”
The Grateful Dead will receive the Kennedy Center Honors later this month at a ceremony in Washington, DC. Lesh, Weir, and Kreutzmann will be at the event, and there are still plans for some sort of 60th anniversary celebration next year. “We’d have to have other musicians join us,” Kreutzmann said. “And we have some favorite musicians, you know?”
If a 60th anniversary Dead celebration does take place, it’s likely to happen after Dead & Company wraps up their Sphere residency. Here are the dates for that.
March 20, 2025
March 21
March 22
March 27
March 28
March 29
April 17
April 18
April 19
April 24
April 25
April 26
May 9
May 10
May 11
May 15
May 16
May 17
Leave a Comment