Don't Tell Me This Town Ain't Got No Heart; Or, Sphere and Loathing
Dead and Co and Authenticity at the Sphere
Sailing my way through a rolling sea of tie-dye, I exited the walkway corralling attendees from the Venetian Resort and stepped outside into the blasting heat of the Mojave. I had left behind the empty, glazed stares of the slot machine players some time ago; now, I was surrounded by pupils dilated from decidedly more chemical causes. As my own pupils shrank and adjusted to the bright blaze of the sun overhead, I gazed up in awe at the newest Great Wonder of the modern world: the Sphere.
Dead and Company, the supergroup consisting of surviving members of the Grateful Dead Bob Weir, Mickey Hart (and formerly Bill Kreutzmann), joined by Oteil Burbridge, Jay Lane, Jeff Chimenti, and John Mayer, was well into their residency at the new arena, which opened in late 2023.
I was there to experience the spectacle for myself with my twin sister, my parents, and two of our best friends. We had seen the glow of the monolithic building emanating over the Strip for a couple of nights, but this was the first time we had witnessed it up close.
Presently, a rainbow of color was swirling across the exterior of the structure. A grinning skull split by a lightning bolt into two hemispheres of red and blue, one of the Grateful Dead’s signature pieces of iconography, spun slowly around the 366-foot height of the Sphere. Up close, supporting the 1.23 million LED bulbs that compose the exterior of the building, a latticework of black metal bars formed an imposing superstructure around the ten-thousand-ton concrete ball.
Along with the Sphere and the scorching Sun, a third orb, the half-full Moon, hung in the sky, visibly wavering in the near-hundred-degree heat despite it being almost seven o’clock at night.
This marked my first time outdoors in many hours. They do their best to keep you indoors in Las Vegas—whether that’s to protect visitors from the brutal conditions of the desert or to bolster the financial interests of the casinos, I will leave as an exercise to the reader.
In my circle of ski bums, climbing dirtbags, and Cowboy corporates, the Grateful Dead is the most influential band of the last century. Their music, coupled with their cultural aesthetic, has left its mark everywhere: stickers on snowboards, emblems emblazoned on every article of clothing imaginable, covers cached in live albums from bands across the musical spectrum. Much ink has been spilled by writers more talented than myself trying to capture in words what makes their blend of bluegrass, blues, and improvisational rock so special—more in fact, than I care to compete with—so I will just leave it at this: I am a fan.
I’m not alone: more than 840,000 Deadheads attended Dead and Company shows during last summer’s (inaccurately-named) The Final Tour, which grossed more than $115 million. Dead and Company, and the various incarnations of the Grateful Dead, have been touring on-and-off since 1965, and an entire economy of hangers-on has developed around the band.
Shakedown Street, the name for the parking lot of food vendors, apparel-makers, and knick-knack peddlers that follow the Dead around the country, represents both the spiritual and physical embodiment of this communal economy. Drawing its name from the eponymous song and album released by the band in 1978, Shakedown Street is the mobile home of Deadhead culture and the engine for the most dedicated Deadheads to support their attendance at the shows.
When I’d seen Dead and Company at jam-band fest Lockn’, or when they played in Boulder at Folsom Field last summer, Shakedown Street was a vast swath of outdoor tents overflowing with tie-die, food vendors with suspicious sanitation, and innumerable iterations of tchotchkes festooned with Steely heads, roses, skeletons, song lyrics, and psychedelic designs. Shakedown Street has its shady corners; plenty of drugs were available with the right look or line of questioning, and the constant hiss and pop of the Nitrous Mafia filling up balloons and harking whippets—“ice-cold fatties, straight out the tank!”—mixed with wandering melodies emanating from dozens of speakers. But overall, Shakedown Street did feel like some vestige of the hippie culture preserved from a bygone era.
In Vegas, though, things were slightly different. Too hot to be outside, we heard vendors had organized a pseudo-Shakedown Street in a nearby casino. Following instructions found online, we arrived at the Tuscany Suites and Casino, wandered past flashing slot machines and low-limit blackjack tables, and found ourselves in… a conference center.
A large carpeted room housed the merch tables usually seen in grassy fields and parking lots. In talking with the vendors, I still uncovered immense amounts of care and thoughtfulness put into their art and merch. One woman spent ten minutes describing to my mom the symbolism of each component of a t-shirt print she had made, somehow involving the different phases of the moon of each show and subtle references to the historiography of the Dead (of course, my mom bought it). But things felt a little off.
Nothin' shakin' on shakedown street, used to be the heart of town
Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart, you just gotta poke around
The opulent hypercapitalism of Las Vegas juxtaposed against the supposed hippie culture of the Dead felt disconcerting, especially made so salient by the stale atmosphere of the carpeted conference room area. What were we doing here? Was this really the Grateful Dead? This contradiction has existed for a long time; the yuppies and rich kids cosplaying as hippies for a weekend, and the vendors selling the goods to supply the fantasy, have surely drawn the ire of diehard Deadheads since Deadheads became a thing. But in Vegas I felt this inauthenticity stand out like the glow of the Sphere on the Vegas skyline.
I’d venture the average net worth of the audience in the Sphere was well north of a million dollars. Tickets sold for hundreds of dollars each, reaching higher on the resale market. The show opens and closes with imagery of the beginnings of the band in a quaint house in Haight-Asbury narrated by radio recordings describing the humble hippies causing a stir in San Fran—how far the band has come from those basement Acid Tests!
During the show, although flying bat-eyes and other Gonzo imagery swirled above us on the screen of the sphere, everything felt decidedly NOT Gonzo. Being herded by stewards through the grand marble halls of the Venetian, I felt like one of many tie-dyed cows being led to the slaughterhouse. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1970 that to see the Grateful Dead, he’d beat his way into the show with a tire iron if necessary. That was in 1970. But if he were still with us, would he have beaten his way into the shows at the Sphere?
If I’m being completely honest with you, I doubt he would have been there—I think Thompson would have hated the falsity of the Final Tour moniker, along with the previous “final” tours of the previous iterations of the Grateful Dead’s associated acts. I imagine he would call Dead and Company a glorified retirement party.
But even in the soulless, carpeted floors of the conference center hosting Shakedown Street, the stale and corporate setting that spawned these questions of authenticity in the first place, I could still feel the aura of awe aroused by the Dead’s music. The conversations floating through the air alongside the melodies of the band moved even cynical, physicalist me to feel a certain spirituality in the room.
The audience may have been full of yuppies (myself and mine almost certainly belonging in this bucket), and the setting painfully commercialized, but the fans were all drawn to this strange, horrible, magnificent oasis in the desert by a common love: the music. The spectacle of the Sphere was certainly part of the draw—galaxies and stars and nebulae twinkling over your head, the haptic seats, spinning roses and grinning skeletons and dancing bears—but ultimately, most people were there for the ineffable melodies of the musicians onstage.
That magic is what has made the Grateful Dead into the greatest touring act of all time. That magic is what drove most of the people that I spoke to at the show to have already attended multiple shows, and to already have tickets for more in the future. That magic is what put tears in the eyes of audience members as the band struck the opening chords to “Good Lovin’” as the show began.
This level of dedication to the music, and the culture, of the Dead is an expression of authentic love and devotion—an almost religious air radiates from the band, especially when anyone references “Jerry”. An altered state of consciousness hangs over the Dead and their shows. The spirituality is hard to separate from the drugs—but maybe it shouldn’t be.
Ultimately, none of these musings matter; these shows will keep selling out as long as they book them. Fans will keep following the band as long as there are still members willing and able to tour, and maybe even beyond that. In 2016, Bob Weir described a vision he had about the band:
We were playing…and suddenly I was viewing this from about 20 feet behind my head, and I looked over at John from that point of view and it was 20 years later and John was almost fully gray. I looked over at Oteil and his hair was white. I looked over to my left and Jeff’s hair was all gray.” And when he looked to where he, Hart and Kreutzmann would be, “it was new guys, younger guys holding forth, doing a great job…playing with fire and aplomb… It changed my whole view of what it is that we’re up to.
As of now, Dead and Company have not announced any more shows after the band ends their run at the Sphere this summer. In an interview last week, though, John Mayer stated he would “absolutely do more.” Mayer noted “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.”
One thing worth remembering, though, as highlighted by the Sphere itself, in gigantic, glowing, glorious letters that night: “You can’t kill what’s already Dead.”
You inspired me to buy tickets for the August 10th show. Please ask your dad if I can wear his Evel Knievel outfit. 😂
"Being herded by stewards through the grand marble halls of the Venetian, I felt like one of many tie-dyed cows being led to the slaughterhouse." - Loved this.