Dead & Company opened their residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere last night with an epic visual feast that drew on 60 years of history.
The band – who are made up of Grateful Dead‘s Bob Weir and Mickey Hart alongside John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti and Jay Lane – announced the run of shows at the venue in February, teasing it with a video of Grateful Dead’s ‘Steal Your Face’ logo being projected onto the outer sphere of the cutting-edge new arena.
The opening night of the run took place yesterday (May 16), with three shows a week now scheduled up until the residency ends on July 13.
In a set that ran through 19 tracks and over three hours, the band made use of the state-of-the-art technology in the venue to project familiar imagery and characters from the Grateful Dead’s history onto the giant LED screens, including the skull and roses and the dancing bears.
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In front of the 240-foot screens, the band rounded out the show with an extended jam of the Dead’s ‘Hell in a Bucket’, followed by covers of Bob Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ and ‘Not Fade Away’, made famous by The Rolling Stones.
Check out fan-captured footage of the show’s spectacular visuals below:
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Dead & Company played:
‘Feel Like a Stranger’
‘Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo’
‘Jack Straw’
‘Bird Song’
‘Me and My Uncle’
‘Brown-Eyed Women’
‘Cold Rain and Snow’
‘Uncle John’s Band’
‘Help On the Way’
‘Slipknot!’
‘Franklin’s Tower’
‘He’s Gone’
‘Drums’
‘Space’
‘Standing On the Moon’
‘St. Stephen’
‘Hell In a Bucket’
‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’
‘Not Fade Away’
Kreutzman has said of the shows: “Historically, it was always a psychedelic circus when the Grateful Dead pulled into Las Vegas. There’s a pulsing beneath those neon lights that Mickey and I tapped into while Jerry led us on a wild carpet ride over the Aladdin Theater in the 1980s and down into the bowl of the Sam Boyd Stadium for 14 memorable nights in the 1990s.
“The Grateful Dead were always about transformative experiences and so now, as our legacy evolves and as we continue to shape-shift into several different forms at once, it’s great that that part of the tradition continues, with Dead & Company taking up residence in a transformative venue. To all those who make it there, have a blast, my friends.”