John Mayer and Mickey Hart of Dead & Company Talk About Their Big, Strange Sphere Trip—and the Future of the Band

Rich Fury/Courtesy of Dead & Company

I’ll start by telling you one of the first things I told John Mayer when we spoke by phone for this story: I saw Dead & Company’s Sphere show in Las Vegas in mid-May, on the third night of the first weekend of the band’s spring-summer residency there. A few days after that, I was back home in LA, walking my dog down a concrete staircase cut into a steep hillside. Halfway down, I stopped and looked up and out at the far-off hills opposite the one I was standing on. In the afternoon sun the hillside in the distance looked fake and flat, and seemed to be tilting away from me. I reached for a railing, feeling a twinge of vertigo—a specific kind of vertigo, novel yet familiar, and after a second I realized where I’d felt it before: in Vegas, during the Dead & Company Sphere show, where the all-encompassing wall of LED screens lining the Sphere’s interior is always doing something to fool your dumb eyes and therefore your brain, making you think you’re in motion, like you're soaring over a snowy mountain range at sunset or sinking beneath the ocean or watching the West Coast shrink as you ascend through the troposphere before jumping into psychedelic hyperspace. Now, back in the real world, I was looking at things I knew to be real and questioning their veracity. I was having a Sphere flashback.

When I say all this to John Mayer—who served as the conduit between Dead & Company and Treatment, the creative agency that produced the visuals for the Sphere shows—he doesn’t laugh at me. He knows exactly what I mean, knows even better than I do what too much Sphere can do to your brain. “There was a period of time, while we were making this show,” he says, “where I was in the Sphere overnight for three, four days in a row.” Starved for perspective, he’d go in search of a real view: “You really just have to look at something that’s truly off in the distance,” he says. Even he's not immune to the power of the world's most immersive live-entertainment venue. “I mean, we’re really hijacking your senses," Mayer says. "This is sensory hijacking. And it’s very fun to be behind that mischief.”

In August it’ll be nine years since Mayer joined forces with Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann of the Grateful Dead to play the Dead’s music under the Dead & Company name, raising eyebrows and hackles among those who knew him chiefly by his pop-radio hits. But his arrival coincided with a broader resurgence of Deadhead-dom in the popular consciousness, and helped grow Dead & Company—with Oteil Burbridge on bass, Jeff Chimenti on keys, and, eventually, Jay Lane, of Primus and Weir’s Ratdog, taking over for Kreutzmann on drums alongside Hart—into the most commercially vital spinoff in post-Dead history. The band’s 2023 tour was the year’s fifth-most-lucrative rock outing, behind only Metallica, Depeche Mode, Elton John, and Coldplay—28 shows, gross revenue around $115 million, more than double the take of any previous Dead & Company tour. It was also billed as the band’s final tour, which it may well have been—but sometime in the fall, as Mayer remembers it, chatter about the Sphere turned into a conversation about Dead & Co. following U2’s inaugural run with a residency of their own, which led to the show they’ve been doing three nights a week since May, leveraging everything state-of-the-art about the venue to fully engulf guests in the sonic and visual legacy of the Grateful Dead.

It’s easy to be cynical about the Grateful Dead’s latter-day transformation from a band into a brand, a process that began around the time the first Jerry Garcia neckties hit shelves in the ’90s and has arguably reached some kind of zenith or fear-and-loathing endpoint out here in the desert, inside an 875,000-square-foot globe adjacent to the Venetian, where you can spill out of the show and onto the casino floor with Since it costs a lot to win/Even more to lose still ringing in your ears. But rather than overplaying the attendant ironies here, we’ll just note that the embrace of cutting-edge technology as both a delivery system for mischief and a means to sensory overload has been a part of the Dead’s M.O. since the Acid Tests, where they played while various Merry Pranksters bounced tape-looped voices around strobe-lit rooms. By 1973 the Grateful Dead were touring with a mammoth, bleeding-edge, and wildly impractical PA system known as the Wall of Sound—600-plus speakers tuned for maximum clarity and reach, nearly 29,000 watts of power, separate quad channels for each string on Phil Lesh’s bass. Decades later, at the tour-closing Oracle Park dates last summer in San Francisco, squadrons of drones lit up the night sky, forming images of top-hat-doffing skeletons and dancing bears.

The “Dead Forever” Sphere shows are a leap far beyond all that—they’re moving tributes to the living legacy of the Grateful Dead, a sentimental journey blown up to blockbuster scale, and also metaphysical theme-park rides that leverage this multibillion-dollar venue’s remarkable vibe-manipulating capabilities to trippy and visceral effect, particularly during the “Drums/Space” portion of the evening, when the haptic seats vibrate your bones in time with Mickey Hart’s percussion. “It took a while to get used to it,” Hart tells me in an interview a few days before I speak to Mayer. “You have to understand this is an extraordinary robot and you're in the belly of it…. Once you get used to it, like anything, you can really make some serious magic happen.”

During “Drums/Space” Hart plays an instrument called the Beam, a massive low-frequency generator whose earliest incarnation—developed for use when Hart and Kreutzmann recorded a drum score for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—was an actual 8-foot aluminum C-beam strung with bass piano strings and wired for amplification. “Sometimes I’ll go to 16, 17 cycles, which is really low, lower than anything in the band,” Hart says. “Most people have never heard that. And then it’s coming right up your perineum, and it’s just filling you with that kind of energy—the serpent power, we would call it in yoga. That vibratory stimuli. So, tip to toe, it's a beautiful feeling. I go right to that place before sound turns into feeling, where you can't hear it. That's my sandbox, that's where I play. And that really moves people.”

It’s harder to be cynical when you think about it in these terms: Mickey Hart, at 80, has been given the keys to a giant robot and the means to bombard an audience’s root chakra with pure serpent power, and this is happening in Vegas, as casino entertainment. At 80, Hart is learning to play the room, sonically and physically and psychically. New tricks in old age. It’s that way for everyone. Working with the visuals, Mayer says, changes the way the band approaches its nightly set list: “I think we're probably working on each show up until about four o'clock in the afternoon. So it's the very living, breathing thing and nobody is on autopilot, which is actually kind of fun. Everyone's fully engaged all the time.”

“I mean, it’s Vegas,” Mayer says. “It’s a Vegas show. And it's actually incredible how Bob and Mickey have risen to the challenge of almost overnight rethinking the way that they play and having these cues inside of the show, and having these moments that are kind of fantastical elements on top of the music.

“The backstage of the Sphere is more like the backstage of The Tonight Show than it is the backstage of a rock and roll thing. It's like, ‘Okay, we have a meeting in Derek's office at four o'clock.’ It's very regimented, but underneath all of it, we all feel like, Oh my God, I can't believe we get to do this."

I spoke with Mayer by phone last week, before he headed back to Vegas. The following conversation has been edited and condensed. (Also, technically, the venue's handlers prefer it be called Sphere, not “the Sphere,” but just saying “Sphere” sounds weird. Mayer says “the Sphere,” so we’re saying the “the” too.)

GQ: Whenever I’ve tried to describe the experience of this show to people, I find myself reaching back to reference points from childhood. I’ve been telling people it feels the way the planetarium used to feel when you were a kid. Or like the old Mission to Mars ride at Disneyland. Or Star Tours.

John Mayer: It's all in there. A lot of the show is based on Star Tours.

Really?

Yep. I'll go back to the early ’80s at these festivals and midways where they had the space shuttle that you got into and it was on hydraulics. And you would take off and it would just basically move 15 degrees left, right up, down, but you would feel like you were taking off from Earth. So somewhere in the back of your brain, your childlike self still remembers that, and I think the show is just tickling that, the whole time.

But, yes—it's funny you mention Star Tours because the show, as a narrative, is based on that. When it came time to think about what's the most we can make out of our time on that stage in the Sphere, the idea was obviously right in front of everyone—the long, strange trip. But what if the Sphere was our vehicle, not just a venue, and everything happening on the screen was our heads-up display? What if we were moving and that was our windshield? So the story really is that we're on a ship the whole time.

The takeoff and the landing [sequence of the show] was actually done by ILM, which is very exciting, that Industrial Light & Magic did that. So that was always cooking separately. It just made a lot of sense to have this bracketed takeoff and landing, and everything that happens in the middle is a different stop along the way, instead of just different video pieces. They're actually different stops in the adventure.

And I think what makes people want to go back is that because it's a ride, you want to take the ride again. You don't want to just see the show again, you want to go on the ride again. There's this moment where the entire crowd bonds all at once because they're all on the same ship, taking off to the same place. And it's almost really magnifying what's always been there inside of a crowd in the first place. But now you're all on the same road trip together.

I mean that's what I like so much about Titanic. I love Titanic. One of the reasons people kept watching that movie so many times is because the ship actually leaves. So the audience is actually getting on the ship with the characters. And there's just something really powerful about taking the ride. That was, to me, making the most of the venue, was creating the sense of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 7:35, we leave the station and we plant back down at 11:00 or 11:15, but in between there, you're gone. And we're all gone together.

The other obvious metaphor here is that it’s a simulation of the psychedelic experience, that sense of traveling without moving. You start in one place and then after this hallucinatory cosmic odyssey you’re deposited right where you came in.

Yes, yes. And there's also another layer to the story. To me, I wanted a message of metaphysical hope and optimism. And the show is called “Dead Forever,” and the end of the show [depicts] the beginning of the Grateful Dead. And there's a very interdimensional optimism that somewhere, somehow, this is all just getting started, and we got to visit for just one second at the very end.

So let’s go back to the very beginning. When did the idea of doing a show like this first come up?

I remember the idea being there, probably, [at the] end of last year. I think I was on tour, the solo tour—probably November-ish, I think was where the conversation got real. And then it was up in the air as to whether we'd get the slot. And we got the slot, which was sort of dependent on the promise that this could be done with the budget we had, which was smaller than the budget that preceded our show at the Sphere, and in a period of time that was very, very condensed. And I looked at it and I said, I think we can do it. I think this is not a Hail Mary play, I think this is doable.

And so we all started talking, meaning Bob, Mickey, me, and a couple other people involved in this production started banging around ideas. And I went off in a corner and kind of put together a treatment for the name of the show and the narrative of the show, and I pitched it. I mean, there's no other way to say it. I mean, I really very semi-nervously pitched it to Bob and Mickey, and they really liked it. Here's the greatest thing about it, man; I'm telling you, I'm not making this up—trust is the greatest asset in my life, creatively. I'll never lose gratitude for it. And I think that Bob and Mickey trusted me not to go off and dream up stuff all by myself but take their notes. So we had a bunch of conversations, sometimes for hours. What do you want to see? What are the things you remember? Where are the places you want to go?

And I asked them if I could be the one to organize those things on their behalf, in constant contact with them, but just go back and forth myself with Treatment, which is the production studio [that produced the visuals for “Dead Forever.”] And they were really, really good to me. They said, "Okay, we believe you can do this." And I took that as something I could not fail them on. And so I became what I call surgically obsessed. If you're obsessed correctly, that's how projects happen. And it became my life for four or five months. And part of the reason it made sense for me to do a lot of the heavy lifting was because I lived just over the hill from the Sphere Studios in Burbank, which is—I think it's a one-third scale replica of the Sphere where you can demo [Sphere content].

So I made it a part of my life to go look at content, make notes. And every time I saw another piece of content and had another feeling about it, I just became more of the conscientious pack leader of this idea, and making sure that it did right by Bob and Mickey and it did right by the fans. A lot of people coming to this show knew the music before I knew the music. That's a hell of a lot of pressure to get a story right, that does justice to their dreams of what this could be. And from that point, everything got broken out into these blocks. Where are the places we can go? What are the pieces? And they really start as very rough animatics. If you see how cartoons are made, they start with sketches, they're storyboards. And you get excited to see storyboards. And then you get even more excited to see a rough animatic, which sometimes would look like it was made on a PS3. It looks like Minecraft. But you go, Well, this looks better than it did last week when it was just an image.

Bob came and watched the very first rough showing of content probably back in February, right after the Super Bowl. And it was great because he would look at something, for instance [the “Dead Forever” segment recreating the Dead’s 1978 performance at the foot of the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt], and it would unlock all these memories. He was very effusively explaining what he remembers from Egypt, and we added it into the show. He remembers bats were flying everywhere, so there's bats [in the Sphere segment], and the Bedouins who would come on horseback to listen to the music, they're in there. So the more the show could be a living, breathing embodiment of Bob's memories and Mickey's memories—that was just like, I couldn't write fast enough, the stuff that he was mentioning. Then you have to keep rendering these things and designing them even further and further and further.

And at a certain point, probably back in March, it ended up on a Meta Quest headset. So [Sphere Entertainment] have their own proprietary software where you put the VR headset on and you're in the Sphere, and you're demoing the content in VR. So I traveled with a VR headset and I’d get new downloads, and I would just keep giving notes.

And every time I saw another revision, it just got more and more exciting. And then it started to get to the point when we would see stuff that was pretty close to the real thing at Sphere Studios in Burbank. I started having incredibly exciting involuntary reactions—screaming and standing up and putting my hands in the air. Which is funny because I see other people do it now, and I did it too. There's just certain things you see where you stand up and you go, yes, and you put your hands over your head and you're just enthralled by it.

There were also, at the same time, a number of things that I saw that made me want to throw up. I donated my stomach to science for a few months. A lot of people are light-sensitive or sensitive to movement. There were some things that I think some people would've really loved and other people would have left the building if it had stuck. I really got to learn how the Sphere works, and got into its mind a little bit. There's certain motions—if you turn on a certain axis, it's fine. Other axes you turn on, it's like, "Nope, uh-uh." And it was very interesting to test my equilibrium. I think it was the first time I'd ever been nauseous but not anxious because I knew what was going on. It was the most utilitarian nausea I've ever had. It was like, "Yeah, I'm nauseous, but I am almost just testing this on my own stomach."

That was another thing too—getting the show to be exciting, but not to the point where, neurologically, you would rather leave. There are some people I know could take even more, but you kind of have to average it out. There were a couple things we smoothed the edges on—a couple moments where you come to the edge of whether you think you can handle it, but the trust with the show is that you're going to be fine. We're taking care of you, we got you. Someone someday will be in there and their whole MO is going to make people think they're upside down, and that will be very easy to do, and maybe if you're 17 years old, that would be cool.

The thing that was interesting about opening night was that the crowd's excitement and their reactions had us overly excited too. Because the first time we lifted off, people were screaming. And you still have to perform. You still have to play that tune, even if that tune is being drowned out by people yelling with excitement. We [had to] learn how to play irrespective of what's happening in terms of the reaction.

One thing I love about it is that the visuals really embrace all of the Dead's kind of iconography, even the parts that might seem a little sort of kitschy or tied to a particular era. You're not trying to impose a cool modern aesthetic on everything. I've seen people complain about the dancing bears; I couldn't disagree more. I loved it when the bears showed up.

Is it the bears themselves or the manner in which the bears are presented?

You know that some people dislike the bears, right? I've come around, over the years, on the bears. But there's a prejudice against the bears.

Well, it sounds to me like this is a bit of the Ewok argument. It's like there's an Ewok aspect to the bears.

It’s a good comparison.

I also am a Return of the Jedi guy. I love the Ewoks. I wouldn't have known the difference because I was too young. I think probably, if you remember the Dead from 1972, the bears might not be representative of your experience. But could you imagine them not being in the show? What an oversight that would be.

No, exactly. You’re not running away from the Day-Glo of it all. Parts of the show made me think of the spiral skeleton T-shirt design, which was omnipresent Deadhead fashion when I was growing up. There’s something really powerful about using this technology to bring to life that very specific visual language the Dead have always had.

I mean, it's funny you mentioned it's not overly futuristic. That was one of the main focuses of this whole production. Everything to me is binaries, a whole bunch of different spectrums, and you gotta move the slider between both ends of the spectrum the right way, up and down all across the line. And the one that was the most important was futuristic versus familiar. If you go too far into futuristic, the Sphere becomes a natural science museum. If you go too far into intergalactic space travel, you can go to 2001: A Space Odyssey. But if you don't respect that we are in a state of the art environment in 2024, then you end up in something that's kind of stodgy and a little too VW bug for the moment. And that was the main binary for me. I was calling [the two poles] 2001 and “Monster Mash.”

And I think somewhere between those two things, you can go too far and you get one or the other. You don't want to be the worst parts of futuristic, or the now sort of most picked-over part of nostalgia. But there's all these binaries, right? Familiar versus unexpected. Old versus new. Motion versus placid, for a moment. The same way that you have songs on a set list that are high energy and then you have to come down and play a ballad—same thing, visually. I'd gotten a few too many headaches looking at a bunch of content back to back that was moving and it was like, "Oh, this has to breathe."

So if we're going to move a lot in one song, we've got to [then] give people's brains a break and just watch the band play. So there's all of these different contours happening, which explains why [making the set list] is time-consuming, because you have to have both of these contours moving at the same time and they have to agree with each other. So the music goes up and down, but the content has to go up and down as well, so that your brain isn't constantly shouting, “What's happening?” every 10 seconds. You have to give your brain a break.

And I think it works really well. I think that every night's been a different journey and sometimes we have to change the music a little bit to fit that. There's only a couple places in the show where we have to think about timing. That part's been fun as well. How do you change the music just a little bit to fit the timing of the story? And again, credit to Bob and Mickey, who took that challenge on day one and haven't missed a beat. The thing about musicians is their animal brain for timing is better than anyone. So Bob, knowing how to change the length or to change the sequence of something or the length of something in a song, four minutes before it comes to the end of the song, knowing that that's going to plant us in the right place at the end of that song—only musicians have that part of their brain and Bob is so good at it. He's so good at it.

Right. Being able to finish the sentence in the amount of time that you have to finish it, almost.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, musicians—if you think about it, Grateful Dead and myself as well, have been going up against curfews where if you go a minute over, you’re charged a fee. And you just pick up the knack for how to make that last chord ring out before they pull the plug on you or charge you a bunch of money and you then piss [the venue] off because they're not going to get their 25 grand because you made it seem like you were going to play forever, and then you figured out how to land on your feet right under the line. Musicians are actually freakishly good at that.

Yeah. I feel like I saw you do it at Citi Field last year. You guys got to the end of “Black Muddy River” and then the second you finished the lights came on.

Yeah. I've never gone over. I really haven’t—I don't think I've ever been charged. I don't think I've ever been charged. I just hit it to the minute. And it's just that much more of a fun dance we do with the show. I mean, it's this duet, right? There's the band and then there's the Sphere, and we are duetting every night.

This is why Mickey Hart calls it a giant robot.

Yes. We are duetting with this technology. And the other slider too, the other binary, is how much is [the show] music with visuals and [how much is] visuals scored by music, and how does that change throughout the show? I think it flips back and forth. And hopefully it flips back and forth in the right measure, so there's certain moments where you feel as if the music is scoring what you’re watching, and then there's other moments you feel like you're listening to music and there's some visuals along with it.

I mean the fact that the screen is as vast as it is means you can't actually catch everything all in one show because there's so much happening in different directions. I did think about people's necks, by the way. We moved a lot of things that were down in front of people. This could have been a neck-breaker, this show.

What was it like spending all those nights inside the Sphere as the deadline got closer?

I must have started going there at the end of April, flying into Vegas. But the challenge was that they show this movie Postcard From Earth all day, and I think the last showing is at 10 o'clock or something. So we couldn't get in there until 11:30 p.m. So I would fly to Vegas and start working at about 11:30 or midnight and go to 4:00 in the morning and then sleep in Vegas and wake up and fly back to LA. But towards maybe five, six days before the show itself, we were there a bunch of hours, empty Sphere, lights out, watching content. And we'd be there a really long time. And the first two weeks were tough because I would've been up all night Wednesday night, so I was pulling all-nighters.

I'm not tiny-violining. Getting on a plane at 9:30 at night to go to Vegas, to go straight to the Sphere and look at this show that people are going to see in a week, for the first time, was amazing. And sometimes you can show yourself how much you love something by how much you're willing to go without sleep for it. It's kind of a way of proving to yourself that you love something. So credit to Treatment, who were there much longer than I was, and they were running on such little sleep, up to the beginning of the show and beyond. And it was that way from January until May 15th. And beyond. Even still, we're coming up with some new content for the August shows to make sure that we keep this percolating as much as we can.

So August is coming, and then in September the Eagles are coming. There is an endpoint on Dead & Company’s Sphere run, which followed a tour that was billed as the final tour. What happens next?

The endpoint is the last show listed on Ticketmaster right now. There are no more shows getting added in August. That's a very good question and a very kind one to ask me, because the answer is the shows that are up and announced, that's it. That's it for at least this year. And the only reason I'm saying that is because I'm sensitive to calling things “the last.” So I don't know—but [August] would be the last time this year, for sure.

But it also seems like you guys are going to do this in some form forever. The last tour was billed as a farewell tour, but I’ve also heard Bob say he wants this to go on even after he’s not here anymore. So is there no end in sight?

I can tell you this, and I'm not being coy—the show is designed to be modular. We can go anywhere at any time in between taking off from Earth and setting back down. And that openness is exciting. I'm excited by—what's the word? Future-proof? The show is future-proof. We can go any number of different ways. I would be honored to make it a part of a stop along the way in the future in certain periods of time, I don't know, years or what. But the thing about being in this band and the Grateful Dead universe at large is you just don't know what tomorrow's going to bring. Just don't know.

I don't think I've ever spoken to anyone and known something that was happening in the future and gave a little wink and went, I don't know. I truly do not know if we’ll come back. Last I heard, bands could only play once at the Sphere. Then I heard chatter of that no longer being a rule. That's the most I know. But I'll tell you this: If someone asked me to do more, I would absolutely do more. But if we did that, it wouldn't be this year.

Right. You’ve still got a solo career to think about.

I'd like to make another record at some point. [Laughs.] That would be fun. But all that record-making energy—I don't want people to think I'm not making records because I don't want to work. Basically, all the energy I learned how to compile based on making records, I've just been putting behind other things. This Sphere show took as much energy as making a record would make or would take. You come home every night, okay, got to take a break, rest your mind, go to bed. Wake up, listen to the mixes again, [or in this case] look at the content again, or look at that email. I just really love putting months together to make great things. Very soon I will put the months together to make another album. But I think it's fair to say I'm having too much fun playing around on side quests right now to lament not having a record.

Originally Appeared on GQ