Marcia and I had been planning a quick visit over to Las Vegas this past weekend to see Katelin and John, ostensibly to mark my upcoming birthday. On Wednesday night, John called us and let me know what my present was going to be: tickets for the four of us to the see second night of Dead & Company‘s 24-show residency at The Sphere, Sin City’s latest mega-entertainment attraction. We had been to The Sphere once already to see Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard From Earth, and it was technically awesome, so we were eager to see how the venue would work with live music, especially featuring a band with as deep a history and as strong a song catalog as this one.

To cut right to the chase and to not bury the lede, let me say right up front: the show was utterly brilliant, truly demonstrating the capabilities of a new venue that truly lives up to the hype surrounding it. There were similarities to prior Grateful Dead-related shows I’ve seen (my live history with the group goes back to the final months of the Keith and Donna era; first show was 01/11/79, Nassau Coliseum), but the merger of musical and visual elements made possible by The Sphere’s nearly 360° screens and a spectacular state-of-the-art sound system raised the fully-immersive elements of the concert experience to a whole new level.

The sound was truly extraordinary throughout: pristine, precise, well-mixed, but without thunderous volume, which was a nice thing for us old folks after a nearly four-hour show ran its course, and none of us were suffering any acute tinnitus. The visuals matched the promise of the music, with the expected sort of lava lamp and space travel images (at macro-scale) being cool enough, but the virtual trips to Haight-Ashbury, and Cornell’s Barton Hall, and a Wall of Sound-era show were truly moving and giggle-inducing. (As well as vertigo-inducing, at times). I wasn’t quite sure what sort of audience would turn out for a Dead-related show at an expensive Las Vegas venue, but I am happy to report that the tribe emerged and represented in all of their funky glory, with plentiful noodle-dancing both in the General Admission floor area and in the precipitous heights of the venue’s towering seating area. The biggest change from a normal Dead-related show, I think, was that the Las Vegas strip is not conducive to the normal Shakedown Street parking lot scene (some stores near The Sphere did host vendors, if you really needed some Dead tchotchkes), which meant that the 18,000 or so punters were mostly in their seats when the first set started, not in the lot, and most of them stayed there throughout the two sets and intermission that followed.

If you’re not up on your Grateful Dead history, the current incarnation of Dead & Company features stalwarts Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, joined by John Mayer (a solo star in his own right, essentially standing in for Jerry Garcia), Jay Lane (drums), Oteil Burbridge (bass), and Jeff Chimenti (keys). Chimenti has worked with Weir and played in every post-Dead outing since Garcia’s death, Burbridge is a veteran of the Allman Brothers Band and the Aquarium Rescue Unit, and Lane has also worked with Weir in solo settings and in prior Dead-related projects (along with Primus). They’re tight together when they need to be, and they swing wild and free when that approach feels right, and they delivered both types of goodness in droves on Friday night.

Looking at various online chatter sites before the show, there was some concern that the freewheeling nature of the Dead’s shows would be constrained by the visual and technical elements of the room, but that worry has quickly been alleviated by the fact that over the first three nights of the residency, the only piece that was played more than once was the “Drums > Space” sequence. And, honestly, that’s a good thing, because The Sphere made that occasionally-wifty improvisational outing into a titanic experience, in large part because all of the seats in the room have vibrating haptic elements, so that you felt the drums in every part of your body if you were smart enough to take a load off as Hart, Lane, Burbridge and guest Karl Perazzo (Santana) beat us senseless with their myriad percussive elements, atop which Hart delivered the expected ooo-wow soundscapes with his trademark The Beam. For the setlist nerds, here’s what else we got:

Set One:

• “Samson and Delilah”
• “Shakedown Street” >
• “Bertha”
• “Crazy Fingers”
• “Big River”
• “Good Lovin'”
• “Deal”

Set Two:

• “China Cat Sunflower” >
• “I Know You Rider”
• “Estimated Prophet”
• “Cumberland Blues” >
• “The Other One” >
• “Drums” >
• “Space”
• “Black Peter”
• “Althea” >
• “U.S. Blues” >
• “Morning Dew”
• “Turn On Your Love Light”

There was no encore, per se, as the walk off/walk on ritual was replaced with a cool historical collage of Dead imagery between “Dew” and “Love Light.” The show started at 7:35 PM and ended at 11:35 PM, so a solid four hours of entertainment; even the intermission was fun, as the screens projected various lyrics without context (trivia time!), as well as a countdown clock, that considerately alerted us when there was 4:20 remaining until the second set began, to wide guffaws, and contact high times.

I enjoyed everything about the show, but the sequence from “Cumberland” through “Dew” marked high-point after high-point for me, with Chimenti and Mayer taking some truly exceptional solo turns, and Weir being in fine, gruff, forceful voice throughout. He’s a fascinating guitar player, too, often discussed as paling in the shadow of Garcia and/or the various string-benders who have stood in Jerry’s spot over the past ~30 years, but he’s really an original on his instrument, both in terms of the textures and sounds he spins into the mix, his uncanny rhythmic sense, and in his deft ability to steer the proceedings with his axe. Great stuff, all around. I also need to point out how good the vocals sounded, with Weir, Mayer, Chimenti, and Burbridge singing great together, clearly able to hear and harmonize with each other in ways that have often eluded the Dead and its successors over the decades.

Probably my biggest takeaway from the night was that it highlighted the ways in which the Dead were visionary about their shows, though often before the technology existed to bring their visions to coherent and/or affordable fruition. The sound system at The Sphere is, essentially, a functional and sophisticated version of their massive Wall of Sound from 1974, the animations took the desperately expensive and marginally successful cartoons from The Grateful Dead Movie to their most extreme manifestations, and the more impressionistic visuals captured the early ballroom-era “liquid light” vibe and made it majestic and transcendent.

I can’t recommend the Dead > Sphere concert experience highly enough, should you have the opportunity to see it. Truly mind-blowing, in the best possible sense of that phrase, and an utterly wonderful birthday present, for which I am most grateful. While pictures on your computer will never do it justice, I did snap away at times, and compiled the best bits into a photo album, which you can see in full by clicking on the Wall of Sound scene below.

Just don’t call him WALLY . . .