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It was great while it lasted: Dead and Company has concluded final tour in California

The Grateful Dead's offshoot band, Dead and Company, concluded its final tour in California on Sunday. For fans and vendors who have been following the bands for decades, it's the end of an era.

ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:

The Grateful Dead's offshoot band, Dead and Company, played its final shows in San Francisco over the weekend. It's the end of an era for fans like Colorado Public Radio's Vic Vela, who have been following the Dead's music for decades. It's also a big change for vendors and merchants who travel with the band and thrived on a scene called Shakedown.

VIC VELA, BYLINE: When the pandemic shutdowns were lifted and live concerts returned, Tony Seigh did something downright crazy. He left a career at Tesla to sell Grateful Dead bumper stickers in parking lots. But if you're a Deadhead, you totally get it.

TONY SEIGH: It almost was like for, like, two years, when you're thinking, like, oh my gosh; it's the end of the world; we're all going to die - like, we better go on tour with the Grateful Dead before it's over, you know?

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNCLE JOHN'S BAND")

DEAD AND COMPANY: (Singing) Well, the first days are the hardest days. Don't you worry anymore.

VELA: Dead and Company has been the most successful Grateful Dead spinoff since Jerry Garcia died almost three decades ago. Now that the band is calling it quits, a lot of folks whose livelihoods literally depend on Dead shows are wondering what's going to happen to a place called Shakedown.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHAKEDOWN STREET")

GRATEFUL DEAD: (Singing) Nothing shaking on Shakedown Street.

VELA: Named after the Grateful Dead song "Shakedown Street," the epic traveling emporium of merchandise, music and madness is simply known as the Shakedown lot.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I got marigolds.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

VELA: It's a little bit farmers market, a little bit county fair, a little bit "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." It's where a fan can buy a Grateful Dead hoodie, a grilled cheese sandwich and, yes, even LSD. With this band's demise, vendors on Shakedown have some anxiety over what's next for the music they love and their own bank accounts. Seigh says a significant chunk of his income is from selling merchandise on Dead tours.

SEIGH: I don't know - maybe, like, half.

VELA: That's a lot.

SEIGH: Oh yeah, yeah. Oh no, it's a total gamble. But, you know, it takes a lot to win, but even more to lose.

VELA: Coleus Langer of Los Angeles sells clothing on Shakedown. He says losing that customer base is going to hurt.

COLEUS LANGER: It definitely makes me very sad because there's no other place like a Grateful Dead Shakedown lot. You know, as far as vending and just meeting people and networking and hanging, you know, there's just - it's such a special place.

VELA: Nowadays, a lot of vendors sell their goods online, so their incomes aren't totally dependent on Dead shows. But for many, there's nothing like that personal connection with other Deadheads. Stephen McMennamy is the owner of Grateful Fred, a company named after his dog. He sells metal stickers with Dead imagery.

STEPHEN MCMENNAMY: It's very different when you're standing across from somebody and they have tears in their eyes talking about how much this thing meant to them because it was the name of a pet or a loved one or a grandmother or something like that.

VELA: Some vendors say they'll continue to sell outside Phish shows or other jam bands where there's a lot of crossover appeal. And here's the thing. A lot of folks on Shakedown firmly believe there'll be a new Grateful Dead offshoot to follow post-Dead and Company. After all, there's been several versions of the Dead over the last couple decades. So the hope is that the music of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir will continue to thrive alongside fresh faces, or in the words of the Grateful Dead, the music never stops. For NPR News, I'm Vic Vela in San Francisco.

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Dead & Company Announce Final Tour: See the Full List of Dates

The 2023 tour kicks off on May 19 at Los Angeles' Kia Forum.

By Rania Aniftos

Rania Aniftos

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Dead & Company ‘s upcoming summer tour will be their final run.

John Mayer , who has been part of the the modern incarnation of the  Grateful Dead  since it was created in 2015, shared the band statement to his Instagram on Friday (Sept. 23). “As we put the finishing touches on booking venues, and understanding that word travels fast, we wanted to be the first to let you know that Dead & Company will be hitting the road next summer for what will be our final tour,” he wrote alongside the rose-adorned promotional tour poster for the upcoming summer stint. “Stay tuned for a full list of dates for what will surely be an exciting, celebratory, and heartfelt last run of shows.”

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View this post on Instagram A post shared by John Mayer 💎 (@johnmayer)

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The band revealed the full list of tour dates on Thursday (Oct. 6), beginning on May 19, 2023, in Los Angeles at the Kia Forum and stretching through July 15, when the tour ends in San Francisco at Oracle Park.

See below, and check out ticket and pre-sale information here.

05/19 – Los Angeles, CA @ Kia Forum 05/20 – Los Angeles, CA @ Kia Forum 05/23 – Phoenix, AZ @ Ak-Chin Pavilion 05/26 – Dallas, TX @ Dos Equis Pavilion 05/28 – Atlanta, GA @ Lakewood Amphitheatre 05/30 – Charlotte, NC @ PNC Music Pavilion 06/01 – Raleigh, NC @ Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek 06/03 – Bristow, VA @ Jiffy Lube Live 06/05 – Burgettstown, PA @ The Pavilion at Star Lake 06/07 – St. Louis, MO @ Hollywood Casino Amphitheater 06/09 – Chicago, IL @ Wrigley Field 06/10 – Chicago, IL @ Wrigley Field 06/13 – Cincinnati, OH @ Riverbend Music Center 06/15 – Philadelphia, PA @ Citizen’s Bank Park 06/17 – Saratoga Springs, NY @ Saratoga Performing Arts Center 06/18 – Saratoga Springs, NY @ Saratoga Performing Arts Center 06/21 – New York, NY @ Citi Field 06/22 – New York, NY @ Citi Field 06/25 – Boston, MA @ Fenway Park 06/27 – Noblesville, IN @ Ruoff Music Center 07/01 – Boulder, CO @ Folsom Field 07/02 – Boulder, CO @ Folsom Field 07/03 – Boulder, CO @ Folsom Field 07/07 – George, WA @ The Gorge 07/08 – George, WA @ The Gorge 07/14 – San Francisco, CA @ Oracle Park 07/15 – San Francisco, CA @ Oracle Park

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Dead and Company Announce Final Tour

By Ethan Millman

Ethan Millman

Dead and Company are officially gearing up for its final tour.

John Mayer posted a tour poster on his Instagram page that read “The Final Tour: Dead & Co. Summer 2023” and noted the group would have details on tour dates soon.

“As we put the finishing touches on booking venues, and understanding that word travels fast, we wanted to be the first to let you know that Dead & Company will be hitting the road next summer for what will be our final tour,” Mayer wrote. “Stay tuned for a full list of dates for what will surely be an exciting, celebratory, and heartfelt last run of shows. With love and appreciation, Dead & Company.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by John Mayer 💎 (@johnmayer)

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Dead and Company started in 2015 with three of the band’s original members: Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann, along with Mayer, Oteil Burbridge, and Jeff Chimenti. The band has been one of the more prolific live acts since their formation, playing each summer (minus 2020 during the pandemic). More recently, though, there’s been some lineup shakeups over some health issues surrounding Kreutzmann. He had to pull out of the later-canceled Playing in the Sand shows in Mexico over concerns related to his heart. Then, during the summer 2022 shows a few months ago, as Variety noted , he missed several dates over a back issue, then a positive Covid test.

Mayer, for his part, had praised the Dead for years before Dead and Company started. As he told  Rolling Stone  in 2013: “This free expressive sort of spirit — I listen and I want to find a mix of that openness. I kind of want to go to [a show like a Dead] show, if it still existed,” Mayer said at the time. “But I wish that there were tunes that I was more familiar with. I wish that I could be the singer. I wish I could have harmonies.”

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Saying Goodbye to the Dead. (Again.)

Jerry Garcia died in 1995. The band bade fans farewell in 2015. This weekend, Dead & Company will close out its Final Tour. Why can’t we stop quitting one of rock’s beloved acts?

By Marc Tracy

Photographs by Peter Fisher

The first time Albie Cullen said goodbye to the Grateful Dead was on Aug. 9, 1995.

A co-worker told Cullen, an attorney for a Boston-area music label, that Jerry Garcia, the Dead’s iconic lead guitarist, had died that day. Cullen had attended dozens of shows. He reveled in the Dead’s improvisational spirit, the way no two performances were alike: “When you saw the Stones a dozen times,” he explained recently, “it was pretty much the same show.”

Despite the Garcia news, Cullen kept his plans to see RatDog, a side project of Garcia’s bandmate Bob Weir, play a concert in Hampton Beach, N.H., that evening. Weir, a rhythm guitarist, told the crowd that Garcia — who at 53 suffered a fatal heart attack at a drug rehab facility — “proved that great music can make sad times better.” During an encore of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Cullen, 59, recalled, “There was not a dry eye.”

“Everybody kind of knew that was the end,” he added.

The Grateful Dead had replaced departed members before, but this was different. With his rootsy tenor, Santa-gone-gray beard and unmistakable plucking, Garcia had defined a touring juggernaut and its vibrant subculture, which had become synonymous with the ’60s. The band’s four surviving original members agreed they would never use the name “Grateful Dead” without Garcia.

But the Dead did not die. The next year, several members participated in a tour. They maintained side projects that mainly played Dead songs. Different permutations toured together — as the Other Ones, as Furthur, as the adjective-less the Dead.

Finally, in 2015, the band staged another goodbye, playing five shows with Phish’s Trey Anastasio on lead guitar. The mini tour was called Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead .

That adieu, too, did not take. That fall, Weir and the Dead’s original drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, assembled a new act, Dead & Company, with the keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, the bassist Oteil Burbridge and the lead guitarist John Mayer (yes, that John Mayer).

A funny thing happened as this new band wound its way across the United States: The Dead became a cultural touchstone again. Dead & Company attracted a new crop of younger fans, as did tribute bands like Joe Russo’s Almost Dead . Last August, the Dead had its largest week of record sales in 35 years, according to its publisher; in February, it won its first Grammy. Between 2012 and 2022, U.S. streams of Dead songs increased at nearly double the rate of the Rolling Stones, according to the tracking service Luminate.

The Dead had found its moment again.

“This could sound wildly corny, but I don’t care: The community of the Dead is a necessary community in a year like 2023,” said Bethany Cosentino, 36, of the indie rock band Best Coast . She became a fan just a few years ago thanks to her “Gen X boyfriend.”

“There’s a real ethos of joy to be in a room with a bunch of people who are just connecting to music in their own way but having this communal, collective experience,” she added.

Cullen said the Deadheads have taken note: “I joke with my friends — they’re bigger now than they ever were.”

Now there is yet another farewell. After more than 200 shows, Dead & Company has sold out stadiums across the country with its so-called Final Tour. The run concludes this weekend with three shows at Oracle Park in San Francisco, the city where the Grateful Dead formed nearly 60 years ago.

“It’s a part of the life cycle. In life, there’s death,” Hart said in a video interview. “But it all depends on what you call death. Because there’s life after death — in music, anyway.”

Bands led by Weir, the original Dead bassist Phil Lesh and Kreutzmann (who was replaced for this tour by Jay Lane) all have concerts scheduled in the next couple of months. Hart allowed for the possibility of a future for Dead & Company, while confirming this was its last tour.

“The music’s never going to go anywhere — and one of the brilliant things about the music is there are thousands of concerts we all have access to,” said Andy Cohen, the Bravo host and executive producer who has been a Dead fan since high school. “But the communal feeling of all of us being at Citi Field together and enjoying two banger shows,” he added, “that’s something I don’t envision we’re going to get again.”

We are, it seems, always saying goodbye to the Grateful Dead. But Weir and Mayer warned fans not to expect a eulogy.

“I think everyone’s had enough loss in their life to go to San Francisco and have this be funereal,” Mayer said.

“I’m dead-set against that happening,” Weir added. “I’ll be stir-fried if I’m going to let that happen.”

Mayer continued: “If I had my wish, it would be for people to say goodbye to Dead & Company without the pain of goodbye.”

THE PROMOTER PETER SHAPIRO , who owns the jam band redoubts Brooklyn Bowl and the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., and promoted the Fare Thee Well shows, observed that the true volume of people who would pay to see the Grateful Dead — a band that stopped touring the year before Ticketmaster sold its first ticket over the Internet — wasn’t revealed until 2015, when Dead fans broke the site’s record for most buyers in a queue.

Ticket sales for the five concerts that year — two at Levi’s Stadium near San Francisco and three at Chicago’s Soldier Field — brought in $40 million. Nearly 71,000 people attended each Chicago show; many more viewed theatrical and pay-per-view simulcasts.

“Fare Thee Well was supposed to be an ending,” Shapiro said, “and it was a new beginning.”

Mayer was secreted away during the Chicago shows, already a planned addition. He had met Weir and Hart through Don Was, the producer and record executive. Mayer gushed to them about the Dead’s music, which he came to well after his formative listening years; he compared it in a recent interview to “cilantro, if all I’ve been eating is meat and potatoes.”

Hart had been only glancingly familiar with Mayer’s music, but knew he was an excellent guitarist. “On our stage, he’s not a pop star or anything like that,” Hart said. “He has so much respect for the Grateful Dead — I have much respect for him for that. He treated the music like his own.”

While some purists grumbled at Mayer’s inclusion (as, indeed, some grumbled about the Fare Thee Well shows), most fans “made a decision,” said Dennis McNally, a former Grateful Dead spokesman and biographer, “that they were not in love with ‘the band’ — the people — they were in love with the music, and that it was to some extent a matter of taste regarding who was playing it. That it was its own genre, almost like jazz or blues.”

While many classic rock artists spawned cover acts, a website dedicated to Grateful Dead tribute bands has more than 600 groups in its database, 100 to 150 of which, its proprietors estimate, are active.

Some Dead tribute acts are straightforward and quite popular, like Dark Star Orchestra, which recreates specific Dead concerts by set list. Others employ the Dead’s music as a jumping-off point. There is a jazz band and an Afrobeat one. Brown Eyed Women is all female. Warlocks of Tokyo sing in Japanese .

The electronic artist LP Giobbi, a Millennial daughter of Deadheads, uses sonic loops and stems over house beats to create what she calls Dead House. “I am blown away by how many ravers I meet who are also Deadheads,” said the artist, who played at after-parties following many concerts on this Dead & Company tour.

The uniqueness of each Dead performance is crucial to the music’s lasting appeal. Al Franken, the author, former senator and longtime fan who once opened for the band, recently caught up with friends who had seen Dead & Company outside St. Louis. “I asked what they played, and I was striking out. ‘Did they do “China Cat Sunflower”?’ ‘No.’ This is a big, big body of music. You can go to four nights in a row and basically not hear the same tune. And they play things differently all the time.”

The Dead’s eclectic songbook comes out of rock, folk, blues, country and bluegrass; its lyrics, many by Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow, tend to be ambiguous yet buoyant (“strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand,” “wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world,” “what a long strange trip it’s been”).

“The thing about this music is it doesn’t take place at home — no one’s home. People are trying to get home,” Mayer said.

“There’s something about the fantasy of transience for people who don’t necessarily have it in their lives, like myself,” he added. “The fantasy of the perpetual searcher, the person with the knapsack who can sleep on couch after couch. Most people who go to Dead concerts don’t necessarily live that life, but aspire to spiritually have this devil-may-care attitude.”

Trey Pierce, 20, began discovering the Dead in middle school via CD boxed sets, DVDs and the Internet Archive, which hosts free tapers’ recordings of Grateful Dead shows. Now he is a die-hard who drove for hours from St. Lawrence University in northern New York to see Phil Lesh and Friends perform in March outside New York City.

“That’s what’s gotten me through much of my life,” he said. “Any weird stuff I’ve had going on, challenges I’ve had, it’s been relating to those lyrics and Jerry” — who died eight years before Pierce was born — “belting into my soul.”

IN A PARKING LOT across from Citi Field in Queens before the second of two Dead & Company shows last month, car stereos blasted recordings of live Dead as the subway clacked over the elevated lines. Vendors hawked T-shirts, jewelry, fresh cooked food and less licit fare. Erin Cadigan, who specified that she had seen 72 Dead shows “with Jerry,” performed tarot readings on a licensed, Grateful Dead-themed tarot deck she created with a partner.

The tour has tended to be well reviewed by fans. “Closest thing to the original I’ve seen,” Cullen wrote in a text message after leaving Fenway Park in Boston last month. “Ironically it’s ending just as they seemed to have figured it out.”

Mariah Napoli, 45, a self-described “second-generation” Deadhead, said she had seen on this tour “a lot more people crying the last two songs than you usually do.”

She added, “I’ve been doing it so long, I don’t see myself stopping until they’re all dead. At that point, it’ll be time for me to hunker down and start to grow older.”

Why do we keep saying goodbye to the Grateful Dead … then welcome them back, and then do it again?

“The Buddhists believe that knowing every minute you’re going to die is what makes life so precious,” said Elena Lister, a New York-based psychiatrist and grief specialist. “If you know you’re going to lose something of any sort, you treasure it all the more while you have it. If you deny it, you miss that opportunity.”

Dustin Grella, 52, a professor of animation at Queens College, has a more dramatic Dead story than most. In the spring and summer of 1995 he was following the Grateful Dead on what would turn out to be its last tour. But he missed the final two concerts at Soldier Field after he sustained an injury to his spinal cord when a porch collapsed at a campground outside a show near St. Louis.

“When you’re experiencing that kind of trauma,” Grella said of the recovery period, “you want just to go back to normal. For me, that was being a touring Deadhead.”

In 2015, he saw in the Fare Thee Well shows in Chicago a chance for closure — “my opportunity,” he said, “to make peace with the Dead.”

But that did not mean he would miss another occasion to say goodbye. For Dead & Company’s final tour, Grella and a friend bought a used Kentucky school bus, attached panels to both sides and covered them in chalkboard paint. Grella, who uses a wheelchair, parked the bus in the lot, put chalk out and encouraged passers-by to add their own designs. He had begun the spontaneous artwork by etching a lyric from “Scarlet Begonias”: “Once in a while you get shown the light/In the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

Marc Tracy is a reporter on the Culture desk. More about Marc Tracy

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Dead & Company Detail Final Tour With 2023 Concert Dates

By Matthew Strauss

Dead & Company have revealed the details of the concerts that will comprise their final tour . The U.S. shows take place in May, June, and July 2023. Take a look at the band’s schedule below.

Dead & Company played their first shows in 2015. The lineup for the final tour includes Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, John Mayer, and Bob Weir (with Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti).

Read the 2017 feature “ The Grateful Dead: A Guide to Their Essential Live Songs .”

All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Dead & Company:

05-19 Inglewood, CA - Kia Forum 05-20 Inglewood, CA - Kia Forum 05-23 Phoenix, AZ - Ak-Chin Pavilion 05-26 Dallas, TX - Dos Equis Pavilion 05-28 Atlanta, GA - Lakewood Amphitheatre 05-30 Charlotte, NC - PNC Music Pavilion 06-01 Raleigh, NC - Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek 06-03 Bristow, VA - Jiffy Lube Live 06-05 Burgettstown, PA - The Pavilion at Star Lake 06-07 St. Louis, MO - Hollywood Casino Amphitheater 06-09 Chicago, IL - Wrigley Field 06-10 Chicago, IL - Wrigley Field 06-13 Cincinnati, OH - Riverbend Music Center 06-15 Philadelphia, PA - Citizen’s Bank Park 06-17 Saratoga Springs, NY - Saratoga Performing Arts Center 06-18 Saratoga Springs, NY - Saratoga Performing Arts Center 06-21 Queens, NY - Citi Field 06-22 Queens, NY - Citi Field 06-25 Boston, MA - Fenway Park 06-27 Noblesville, IN - Ruoff Music Center 07-01 Boulder, CO - Folsom Field 07-02 Boulder, CO - Folsom Field 07-03 Boulder, CO - Folsom Field 07-07 George, WA - The Gorge 07-08 George, WA - The Gorge 07-14 San Francisco, CA - Oracle Park 07-15 San Fransisco, CA - Oracle Park

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Dead & Company announce The Final Tour

Stadium-filling Grateful Dead offshoots Dead & Company will set out on The Final Tour across the US next summer for 27 brain-expanding shows

Dead & Company, the band formed in 2015 by former Grateful Dead men Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Bob Weir, have announced details of The Final Tour. The run of 27 US shows will kick off at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles on May 19, 2023, and climax with a pair of shows at Oracle Park in San Francisco in mid-July. Full dates below.

The line-up for The Final Tour will see Hart, Kreutzmann and Weir joined by regular cohorts John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge (Allman Brothers) and Jeff Chimenti (Fare Thee Well and RatDog). At each show the band will perform two sets of Grateful Dead songs. Tickets go on sale from the Dead & Company website at 10am local time on October 10, and fans can pre-register for seats now.  

Dead & Company: The Final Tour

May 19: Los Angeles Kia Forum, CA May 20: Los Angeles Kia Forum, CA May 23: Phoenix Ak-Chin Pavilion, AZ May 26: Dallas Dos Equis Pavilion, TX May 28: Atlanta Lakewood Amphitheatre, GA May 30: Charlotte PNC Music Pavilion, NC Jun 01: Raleigh Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek, NC Jun 03: Bristow Jiffy Lube Live, VA Jun 05: Burgettstown The Pavilion at Star Lake, PA Jun 07: St. Louis Hollywood Casino Amphitheater, MO Jun 09: Chicago Wrigley Field, IL Jun 10: Chicago Wrigley Field, IL Jun 13: Cincinnati, Riverbend Music Center, OH Jun 15: Philadelphia, Citizen's Bank Park, PA Jun 17: Saratoga Springs Saratoga Performing Arts Center, NY Jun 18: Saratoga Springs Saratoga Performing Arts Center, NY Jun 21: New York Citi Field, NY Jun 22: New York Citi Field, NY Jun 24: Boston Fenway Park, NY Jun 25: Boston Fenway Park, NY Jun 27: Noblesville Ruoff Music Center, IN Jul 01: Boulder Folsom Field, CO Jul 02: Boulder Folsom Field, CO Jul 03: Boulder Folsom Field, CO Jul 07: George The Gorge, WA Jul 08: George The Gorge, WA Jul 14: San Francisco Oracle Park, CA Jul 15: San Francisco Oracle Park, CA Jul 16: San Francisco Oracle Park, CA

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Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 38 years in music industry, online for 25. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.  

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Dead & Company – The Final Tour

Launches Friday, May 19 th  & Saturday, May 20 th in Los Angeles at The Kia Forum

Through  friday, july 14 th  & saturday, july 15 th in san francisco at oracle park, seated presale fan registration open now  here, tickets on sale friday, october 14 th  @ 10 am local time.

DEAD & COMPANY  is launching its   2023 summer tour on Friday, May 19 th  and Saturday, May 20 th  in Los Angeles at the Kia Forum with dates running through Friday, July 14 th  and Saturday, July 15 th  when the tour ends in San Francisco at Oracle Park.  The band  – Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, John Mayer,  and  Bob Weir,  with  Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti –  will perform two sets of music drawing from the Grateful Dead’s historic catalog of songs. Tickets go on sale to the general public beginning  Friday, October 14 th   @  10 AM  local venue time through  deadandcompany.com . A full listing of tour dates can be found below.

The highly-anticipated 2023 summer tour, produced by Live Nation, will be the band’s final tour since forming in 2015. Highlights include the tour-opening back-to-back concerts at the  KIA FORUM  in Los Angeles (Friday, May 19 th  & Saturday, May 20 th ), as well as doubleheaders at  WRIGLEY FIELD  in Chicago (Friday, June 9 th  & Saturday, June 10 th );  SARATOGA PERFORMING ARTS CENTER  in Saratoga Springs, NY (Saturday, June 17 th  & Sunday, June 18 th );  CITI FIELD  in NYC (Wednesday, June 21 st  & Thursday, June 22 nd ); and  THE GORGE  in George, WA (Friday, July 7 th  & Saturday, July 8 th ); an epic return to  FENWAY PARK  in Boston, MA (Sunday, June 25 th ); the band’s first-ever three-night stand at  FOLSOM FIELD  in Boulder, CO (Saturday, July 1 st , Sunday, July 2 nd , & Monday, July 3 rd ); and the tour finale – a two-night debut at  ORACLE PARK  in San Francisco (Friday, July 14 th  & Saturday, July 15 th ). A full listing of the 2023 tour dates can be found below.

To ensure that tickets get directly into the hands of fans, advance presale registration is now available  HERE powered by Seated. The Artist Presale begins Wednesday, October 12 th  at noon local venue time and runs through Thursday, October 13 th  at 10 PM local venue time. Advance registration does not guarantee tickets. Supplies are limited. 

Guests who prefer an enhanced experience for this memorable Dead & Company tour can purchase a variety of VIP and Travel Packages. Packages include seamless venue access, early GA entry, pre-show lounge with food and a cash bar, exclusive merchandise, or travel packages for multi-night runs in various cities. Packages from 100X Hospitality will go on sale October 12 th  at noon local venue time. For full details, click  HERE .

Dead & Company and Activist will continue their work with longtime sustainability partner REVERB to reduce the summer tour’s environmental footprint and engage fans to take action for people and the planet. More details at  REVERB.org .

Dead & Company  was formed in 2015 when the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Bob Weir joined forces with artist and musician John Mayer, Allman Brothers’ bassist Oteil Burbridge, and Fare Thee Well and RatDog keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, and quickly became one of the most successful touring bands year over year. Since its formation, the band has completed seven tours and became a record-breaking stadium act when it set Wrigley Field’s all-time concert attendance for a single concert, which still holds to this day. Having toured consistently since its 2015 debut, the band has held 164 concerts, performed 143 unique songs and has played to nearly four million fans.

Dead & Company has headlined iconic stadiums across the country including Fenway Park, Citi Field, Gillette Stadium, Folsom Field, Dodger Stadium, Wrigley Field, and Autzen Stadium, as well as multiple night-stands at Madison Square Garden, the Forum, Hollywood Bowl, and Shoreline Amphitheatre. Between tours, Dead & Company hosts its annual “Playing in the Sand,” an all-inclusive concert vacation that features multiple nights of Dead & Company on an intimate beach in Mexico.

Across all tours at the band’s legendary Participation Row, the Dead & Company community has taken more than 100,000 actions in support of various local non-profits and national social impact organizations and causes including voter registration with HeadCount and environmental actions with REVERB. Since 2015, efforts on tour have eliminated the use of 100,000 single-use plastic water bottles at shows and raised funds to support climate justice and carbon reduction projects which prevented 33,700 tonnes of CO2e from entering the atmosphere, the equivalent of 83.5 million miles driven by gas-powered cars. Throughout the seven tours the total raised directly from the band as well as fan auctions and other efforts is now over $3 million, providing direct support to HeadCount, REVERB and the Dead Family non-profit organizations, as well as the non-profit ocean conservation organization Oceana and MusiCares among others. 

About Live Nation Entertainment

Live Nation Entertainment (NYSE: LYV) is the world’s leading live entertainment company comprised of global market leaders: Ticketmaster, Live Nation Concerts, and Live Nation Sponsorship. For additional information, visit  www.livenationentertainment.com

For a high-res band photo and tour artwork, click  Dead & Company 2023 Summer Tour .

MEDIA CONTACTS:

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Published: 2023/07/17 by Hana Gustafson

Long Strange Trip: Dead & Company Conclude Final Tour in San Francisco

Photo Credit: Hana Gustafson

On Sunday night in San Francisco, Dead & Company performed the last concert of their final tour at Oracle Park. During the evening, bassist Oteil Burbridge paid tribute to Jerry Garcia, having applied the guitarist’s recognizable handprint to the side of his profile in white paint. On the opposite coast, New York City recognized the band’s achievements, lighting up the Empire State Building with a psychedelic tie-dye effect to mark the historic end of Dead & Company’s final tour. 

The first set commenced with a John Mayer-led “Bertha,” accentuated by Jeff Chimenti’s keys and Bobby Weir’s soft assistance on vocals. The initial song of the night merged into The Rascals’ original “Good Lovin’,” complete with a driving backbeat courtesy of Mickey Hart and Jay Lane. To complement the chorus, Weir added “too easy,” driving his admiration for the night and the people during the cover. A soulful “Loser” ran into an Burbridge-sung “High Time.” In fitting fashion, the band nodded toward the day of the week with the biblically infused traditional, “Samson and Delilah.” The aforementioned number saw a solo from Chimenti, who glided his fingers across the keys as many had before him, nonetheless making the moment his own. 

With the night’s energy reaching new heights, the band decided to turn it up even further by adding “Althea.” From the first notes, it was clear Mayer had hit his stride, closing his eyes and letting the music guide him as the band moved through the tune. While it seemed like the first set was coming to a natural close, Dead & Company landed on a pairing of Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” with The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” coda, a perfect combination for the stadium atmosphere, as the sold-out crowd sung back the favored late-‘60s lyrics, which faded into the final song of the frame, a soaring rendition of “Bird Song.” Its lyrics: “Don’t cry now, don’t you cry,” felt especially fitting given the dynamic nature of the night. 

After the set break, the band returned to their places on stage and cut into pulsating sister tunes, “Help on the Way” > “Slipknot!” Snappy guitar electrified the mid-section of the jam, which paired well with Hart’s calculated beats. Those who were not already on their feet, rose with recognition of the initial notes of “Franklin’s Tower.” “Estimated Prophet” emerged next and served as a locational ode to California–where the Grateful Dead got their historic start. “Eyes of the World” got special attention, with big keys, a bass solo, and Hart’s build into “Drums,” which saw Burbridge assist on the banjo bass and Hart excel on balafon.  “Space” was all about the Beam, propelled by Meyer Sound, and inspired by the longtime drummer’s experiences with Ram Rod, Tom Paddocks and more. Images of Hart’s drumming career appeared on oversized screens, often morphing into distorted versions of hypnotic renderings. 

At the end of “Space,” the first lights became visible in the sky, and drones created recognizable imagery associated with the Grateful Dead. Subsequently, the band started to work back into their grove, and beams of color ignited the night sky. Understanding the touching nature of the final show, Weir led the group through a stunning “Days Between.” The cool, emotional number was dropped into “Cumberland Blues.” Burbridge was visibly excited, dancing with his instrument as they migrated through the coal-tinged number. To the pleasure of the crowd, they added “Sugar Magnolia” before walking off stage. 

After a momentary absence, the band was back for their encore, which kicked off with “Truckin’,” before they got deep during their send-off, a moving display of “Brokedown Palace,” perfectly picked given the water-side location and feel of the night. Then, for their absolutely last song of the final tour, Dead & Company reprised  The Cricket’s “Not Fade Away,” evoking a clap response from the audience, who continued the chant even after the band had brought up their crew, and Hart addressed the crowd: “You’re only as good as your crew.” He then turned the flattery toward those in attendance, adding, “Without you, there would be none of us.” 

Watch clips from last night’s show below. Replay the concert via nugs.net, visit this link .

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dead & Company (@deadandcompany)

Dead & Company 

Oracle Park – San Francisco 

July 16, 2023

Set I: Bertha > Good Lovin’ > Loser, High Time, Samson and Delilah, Althea, Dear Mr. Fantasy > Hey Jude > Bird Song 

Set II: Help on the Way > Slipknot! > Franklin’s Tower, Estimated Prophet > Eyes of the World > Drums > Space > Days Between > Cumberland Blues > Sugar Magnolia 

Enc.: Truckin’ > Brokedown Palace > Not Fade Away

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A Requiem for the Dead

Dead and Company—the most successful and longest-running post-Jerry configuration of Grateful Dead members—has purportedly given up the road. We took one last trip to Shakedown Street to make sense of what it all meant and what it means if they’re done.

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The Grateful Dead have died many times. Depending on whom you ask, their first death came only a few years after their 1965 formation, as the raunchy organ jams and all-night raves of their psychedelic days gave way to statelier songwriting and more sophisticated playing. The transition was punctuated by the 1973 death of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the harmonica player and vocalist whose ability to command a room and yelp out blues ad-libs for half an hour on “Turn on Your Lovelight” made him an intensely personable figure; at one point, he was so recognizable, the band’s label ran a Pigpen look-alike contest. But as the Grateful Dead’s exploratory ethos inevitably led them to new territory and better drugs, Pigpen was left behind. He avoided psychedelics, drank bottle after bottle of wine, and stopped touring a few months before his death. Though Jerry Garcia was already the band’s intellectual center, Pigpen had been its major draw and frontman, until he wasn’t. His final show, at the Hollywood Bowl in 1972, marked the last time a truly charismatic singer performed Grateful Dead music with any of the band’s original members.

Until October 29, 2015. That was when Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann took the stage at Times Union Center in Albany, New York, for the first gig with their new guitarist and co-vocalist: John Mayer. The surviving members of the Grateful Dead have reconfigured themselves several times since Garcia’s 1995 death, playing under a variety of names both together (the Other Ones, Furthur, the Dead) and solo (Phil Lesh and Friends, Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros., RatDog). Plenty of guitarists have been put in the unenviable position of stepping into Garcia’s role as the band’s primary musical force, to varying degrees of success. But with all due respect to Warren Haynes, there has never been anyone quite like Mayer involved with this music before.

The Dead and Company lineup didn’t make immediate musical sense in 2015 and was, quite frankly, very funny for people who didn’t care about Mayer or the Dead. Enlisting Mayer, with his bankable face and blandly virtuosic blues-scorching style, seemed like an extraordinarily obvious cash grab and an artistically suspect decision; it seemed equally impossible to imagine Mayer fans wooking out to the red-eyed reggae of “Estimated Prophet” and crusty Deadheads savoring slicked-back versions of old Pigpen songs.

But over the course of eight years and 235 shows, Dead and Company performed several miracles. They lasted longer than any post-Garcia configuration of Grateful Dead members—a genuine feat considering the level of animosity and manipulation among those surviving players—and consistently played to crowds that rivaled those the Dead drew in the heady gate-crashing days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they were the biggest touring act in the country. Those bigger crowds in turn rekindled the parking-lot scene that has been part of Dead culture since the late 1970s at a scale not seen since the days of Garcia. Though they fastidiously refused to expand it, Dead and Company developed a genuinely new way of performing and presenting what is almost certainly the greatest and most dynamic songbook any American rock band has ever produced.

But perhaps most important, they maintained and ultimately solidified the legacy of the Grateful Dead—not so much as a band but as the originators of a distinct form. Though it may seem unlikely when artists of their generation are selling off their catalogs for nine digits, no rock band of any era will be remembered as fondly as them. Most musicians understand their primary medium to be the studio recording, which makes sense—you can maintain control in the studio, and the songs are placed on a gallery wall and can be admired like paintings. They are, essentially, finished. But by understanding their music as something that should be made fresh night after night for new fans, year after year and decade after decade, the Grateful Dead suggested that their songs are never complete. There is no final version; there’s not even a definitive live version.

In 2023, even the most proficient Beatles tribute acts are working the college-bar circuit, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone daring to take up the mantle of the Lennon-McCartney catalog with any credibility once Sir Paul calls it quits. But in 100 years, there will still be bands who are able to tour the country playing Grateful Dead music in new and inventive ways, bringing the old corpses to life once again, and there will be crowds eager to hear them do it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. These are all solidified thoughts, intellectual end points, and even if they’re where we’ll end up, there’s no telling how we’ll get there.

Which is, as you’ve probably heard, the whole point. I set out to see as many Dead and Company shows as I could this summer, ultimately catching 10 concerts in four states, from the warm-up at Jazz Fest to the three-night finale in San Francisco. I wasn’t in search of the true meaning of America or after any of the other very literary reasons people often give for going on the road; we have more than enough writing from white people who are trying to figure out why they don’t feel at home here. I am a Deadhead. I sigh as I say so, for I see the paisley-patterned connotations that spill out of that word the moment I type it. I was 9 years old when Garcia died, and my natural taste runs between slippery jazz and blackened death metal. But the music of the Grateful Dead has a hold on me that I cannot explain. I wanted to figure out why I’m not the only one.

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival has run nearly every year since 1970, and it has almost always had terrible weather. There is really no good time to stage an outdoor festival in New Orleans, or at least not one that spans seven days of on-site performances over two weeks. For hours leading up to Dead and Company’s set on May 6, it rains hard—pelting, driving, tropical rain, the kind that obviates any rain gear—and, perversely for New Orleans at this time of year, it’s cold . I clutch my link of boudin and shiver, resigned to being physically miserable in a way that is at least novel, while my battle-hardened local friends and warm-blooded midwestern spouse laugh and place bets on what the band will open with. A shirtless guy in a crumbling cowboy hat wanders past selling enamel pins of the Steal Your Face skull and lightning bolt logo (a.k.a. the Stealie), the Terrapin Station turtles, and Garcia’s Wolf logo. I mention to him that I’d seen him at the Hollywood Bowl in the past and ask whether he still has any of his “Gayer for Mayer” pins. He shakes his head and tells me he’s out of “Queer for Weir,” too.

Then, finally, with very little fanfare, Dead and Company wander onto the stage. Drummer Jay Lane, a one-time member of Primus and frequent Weir collaborator, has replaced Bill Kreutzmann. Decked in an Ancient Aliens T-shirt, he takes his place behind the kit as Weir and Mayer play a few tentative sideways notes. They resolve into “Truckin’,” and the clouds part, and the rain stops, and the sun shines. I know how unlikely that sounds; all I can tell you is that it’s true.

“Truckin’” is the final song on 1970’s American Beauty , which is, alongside the same year’s Workingman’s Dead , the Grateful Dead’s high-water mark as a studio band. Both albums are filled with country tunes with deceptively complex chord changes, stacked harmonies that defy the individual singers’ occasionally pitchy individual performances, and a rustic charm that feels more attainable than, say, the baroque folk-pop of their friends in Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Every song on both albums feels like it could have been written in the 19th century.

Dead and Company play “Cumberland Blues” at Jazz Fest. They play it again in Phoenix a few weeks later, and again in Bristow, Virginia, and at Wrigley Field. They cannot stop playing “Cumberland Blues” on this tour. It’s fairly straightforward, at least for a Dead song: a two-stepping shuffle that moves a touch faster than the rhythm seems to be comfortable with. The music is a nice mirror of the narrator’s exhaustion after being kept up all hours of the night by his beloved Melinda, who seems not to respect the physical and emotional rigors of his life in the mine. The narrator pointedly does not want to dance—or whatever else Melinda’s trying to get him into. But the song doesn’t care, and throughout the summer, the band seems to side more and more with Melinda. Dead and Company long ago developed a reputation in the wider Deadhead community for their slackened tempo—Dead and Slow, they’re called—but all tour, they play the song at a blistering pace that they’ve never even tried before. Mayer reels off lines in the breaks, getting notes out like he’s bailing out a boat. By the time they get to San Francisco in mid-July, “Cumberland Blues” has transformed from a lovely bit of electric bluegrass into a country dervish, a spinning, hyper-rotating hurricane of a song. This early performance in New Orleans is the first indication that—whether because of the addition of Lane or the stakes of the tour itself—the band is finding new life in the material.

If you consider yourself a discerning music person, the kind who has to call themselves a “music person” instead of a “fan,” it’s easy to get into Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty . All you need is a general appreciation for sturdy songs and a willingness not to think too much about how much Marcus Mumford probably likes them. But to get into the band’s live tapes—and thus into the essence not only of the Grateful Dead but of Dead and Company, as well—is much more difficult. You have to listen to a lot of 1950s rock covers. You have to listen to a lot of George Jones songs sung by someone who isn’t George Jones. You have to be able to look at a track list, see a 12:57 version of “Dancing in the Streets,” and have faith that whatever’s on the other side of the first two and a half minutes will be worth hearing Weir sing a disco version of a soul song.

I came to the Dead as a music person. I was going to pop-up record sales and buying rare Brazilian vinyl. I had a granular understanding of the modal differences between East African and West African music; I could typically tell whether a song had been recorded in Mali. I was “not really interested in the guitar anymore.” Most important, I was listening to a lot of Herbie Hancock and a lot of Can. In the mid-1970s, the jazz heavyweight and the free-spirited German weirdos were both pursuing a form of funk music that rippled with grooves and dissolved into space. You could dance to it, but it could also catch you up the way driving through the mountains sometimes does: You keep moving, but your mind is suddenly still.

At the same historical moment, the Grateful Dead were in pursuit of the same kind of sound. There are versions of “Dancing in the Streets” and especially Weir’s “Playing in the Band” from the mid-’70s that pulse and shimmer, where all sense of the original melody and tone has been completely scraped away and the band is intently exploring the foundation on which it was built. Kreutzmann liked to say that his goal as a drummer wasn’t to keep time but to keep mood, and once you begin to tune in to the mood that’s being cultivated by any form of the Dead, their ability to find new ways of expressing it becomes astonishing. The jam that leads “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire on the Mountain” on the May 8, 1977, tape—probably the band’s most famous jam—is mind-boggling at a technical level; there are moments in which all five musicians seem to be playing both songs at once. But it’s no less admirable for the way it sustains a feeling of buoyancy, of pleasant surprise, of a seemingly unlimited number of happily beguiling opportunities around every corner.

You have enough moments like this, and you eventually find yourself through the looking glass. You become someone who appreciates how the zapping laser of Garcia’s guitar gooses Weir’s vocal in “Dancing in the Streets,” who dreams about cracking open a few cold ones and listening to “El Paso.” You might completely forget that the thing that got you into this music was the wild-eyed, experimental nature of it. When you sing along in full throat to “U.S. Blues” with tens of thousands of people who aren’t aware or don’t care that the original band was being ironic when it sang the “wave that flag” chorus, you’ve come a long way toward being cured of the need to use music as a way to differentiate yourself. The appeal becomes simple: It feels good to drink beers in the daytime and sing songs with your spouse and your friends and fall in love with a band. And then you watch them spend 15 minutes turning “Bird Song” inside out until it feels like tissue-paper-soft jazz, and you look around and go, My God, there are 40,000 people at Mayer’s experimental music concert .

L.A.! The Fabulous Forum! Where Magic and Kareem went back-to-back! Where Nicholson was always courtside! Where Harry Styles went on a run of 15 sold-out shows, as the only banner hanging from the rafters proclaims! Outside, half the city of Los Angeles is crammed into the narrow channel of Shakedown Street, the vendor market that runs through the parking lot and is as ubiquitous a sight at Dead shows as tie-dye. (It is, in fact, the source of much of that tie-dye.) And onstage, Mayer is making his guitar twinkle and hum; he’s going textural and pursuing blue moods. Yes, he’s ripping a few mondo solos and making the faces as he does so. You can only redeem so much of a man.

Dead and Company would not be playing to this many people this often if Mayer weren’t onstage. But his celebrity doesn’t solely account for the group’s swelling popularity. In 2016, the first full Dead and Company trek made $29.4 million, according to industry standard keeper Pollstar, good for only the 59th-highest-grossing tour worldwide. By 2021, they took in $50.2 million and finished fifth, one spot below the Eagles and two above Guns N’ Roses—even though they didn’t even leave the United States. Were Mayer’s name the driving force behind ticket sales, you’d expect them to have been higher at the outset, before the novelty of seeing a superstar slumming it with wooks had worn off.

Instead, his image allowed the band to more easily capitalize on the momentum created by the 2015 Fare Thee Well concerts, in which Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann performed for the last time with bassist Phil Lesh. Dead and Company entered the world as both a curiosity and an excuse to keep the party going, but the strong performances—and the response from aging Gen X Deadheads starved for the massive stakes of the Grateful Dead’s late ’80s and early ’90s run—instantly made them into something bigger.

When the band was put together in early 2015, Mayer was only a couple of years removed from the lowest days of his career. In 2010, he’d given an interview to Playboy in which he called his ex-girlfriend Jessica Simpson “crack cocaine,” used the n-word, and compared his penis to David Duke. (His heart, though? “Benetton.”) In 2011, he was swimming in his pool and heard the knotty, questioning, guarded opening riff of the Grateful Dead’s “Althea” on Pandora. As he tells it, he sprinted into the house sopping wet to find out what he was hearing.

“Althea” didn’t cure Mayer—the next year he’d give another infamous interview, this one to Rolling Stone , in which his claim to be able to hold his breath for four minutes and 17 seconds was probably the least noteworthy tidbit—but it did set him on a new path. In that same piece, Eric Clapton called Mayer a “bedroom” guitarist and said, “I wasn’t sure if John was aware of the power of playing with other people.” Perhaps aware he was supposed to be burnishing the younger player’s image, he added, “Though I think he is now.” The power of playing with other people is central to what makes the music of the Grateful Dead work. Garcia knew this intuitively. Though he possessed the skills to shred, he rarely did. His playing was rarely showy. Rather than draw attention to himself, he stoked the flames of what his bandmates were doing, hinting at directions they might take together or else allowing himself to soak in the mood they had collectively created. Every line seemed to end in a question mark; he didn’t make assertions, he made suggestions.

This is only part of the reason Garcia became an icon to many. Despite the Grateful Dead’s sunshine-daydream image in the popular mind, their music is deeply suffused with pain and confusion. Robert Hunter’s lyrics feint toward salvation without being able to offer it, and they’re deeply informed by the fact that each individual is ultimately responsible for navigating the fog of life. “If I knew the way, I would take you home,” goes the band’s defining statement, from “Ripple.” The scholar Brent Wood surveyed the band’s lyrics and discovered that about three-fourths of the songs Garcia sang are about suffering, and a full half of those songs are about death. Garcia played guitar in a way that perpetuated these feelings—the persistent reality of pain and the desire to find a little happiness anyway are both present in so much of what he did. With Dead and Company, Weir allows the songs to move more slowly, until the jams begin to take on an almost painterly quality. When it works, the jam becomes as much a part of the story as the lyrics, a sigh of emotion spontaneously exhaled by the six guys onstage.

It took Mayer a moment to understand how he fit into the music; witness him trying to play roadhouse blues in the twilit silence of a “Space” jam in 2015. But as he found his footing, and particularly as he developed his musical relationship with keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, his ability to meet the songs on their own terms deepened. “I’ve always said that if I’m doing my job right, I bring the crowd closer to the music they love while disappearing from the equation a little bit,” he wrote on Instagram a few days before the Forum shows. Indeed, it’s a minor miracle that his star power vanishes the moment he steps onstage, where he appears to be just some dude in an expensive-looking T-shirt and with very bad tattoos. While the jokes about 17-minute versions of “Your Body Is a Wonderland” never subside from some corners of the Dead world, by the time the 2023 tour arrived, Mayer was fully integrated into the cosmos. There have been “John Mayer Is Dead to Me” shirts on the lot for years. In San Francisco, I see one that says, simply and provocatively and sincerely, “He is my Jerry.”

Onstage at the Forum, he’s restrained and tasteful. He plays “Althea” as if he, too, is awed by the oracle at the song’s center, and by the oracle the song has been for him. It’s not hard to understand why. The titular character functions as a mirror for the narrator, telling him he’s been “honest to the point of recklessness” and “self-centered in the extreme.” He says he’s “lacking in some direction,” that “treachery” is “tearing me limb from limb.” “Ain’t nobody messing with you but you,” Althea tells him, and the truth cools his head.

The most commonly asked question on tour: “Where is Shakedown Street?” Named for the Dead’s disco-funk song, it’s ostensibly a tailgate, but that descriptor is wildly insufficient. The most common answer, also taken from the song: “You just gotta poke around.”

This is probably true in some places. In New York, at Citi Field, you do not have to poke around. Shakedown Street pokes you. It is impossible to miss, taking over a fenced-in parking lot under the elevated train tracks across the street from the stadium. Dozens of people are pushing through the narrow gate at all times, and instantly they’re surrounded by people with ice chests selling domestics, microbrews, White Claws, you name it for $5 a can. Grills hiss in the distance. Nitrous tanks hiss nearby. Balloons pop constantly. “Mushrooms, K, acid” is whispered loudly by dudes making conspicuous eye contact. A sign advertises BULK FEMINIZED SEEDS in bold type. There’s a booth selling Jerry rolls, which seem to be some kind of sandwich and not a drug. Everyone has their own version of grilled cheese: vegan cheese, gluten-free bread, but no sight of the guy from 2022 who promised “bacon in every motherfucking bite.” From every direction, tapes of old Dead shows—both Grateful Dead and Dead and Company—blast from portable stereos and car sound systems.

People started selling things in the parking lots at Grateful Dead shows as early as 1973, author Jesse Jarnow reports in Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America , around the same time they started following the band on tour. It makes sense: sell a few limp burritos, make enough money to get to the next show. By the 1980s, Shakedown became its own attraction, as its cheery lawlessness drew in crowds of college students anxious to party, runaways escaping the latchkey lifestyle, white kids with dreads claiming their parents still lived in Babylon, and genuine Deadheads, too. The psychologist Joseph Campbell, who lived next door to Weir, once took in the parking-lot scene in Oakland and declared it an “antidote for the atom bomb.” By 1989, it had expanded so much it made the Dead unwelcome in places they’d played for years, with riots and general mayhem leading the band to prohibit vending outside gigs. Did it work? Come on.

There is much to buy on Shakedown Street. Not just drugs, though definitely drugs. There are crystal sellers whose wares have gone dusty from years of exactly this, and those who are selling fragile $1,000 specimens that should probably not be out on a folding table with this many wasted people around. There are head-shop-quality patches and pins tacked to a corkboard. A guy calling himself Grateful Fred is selling metallic plaques of Dead iconography you can put on your trunk to make it look like Toyota is offering up a limited-edition Wookmobile; he has the hatchback door of a brand-new Volkswagen set up in his booth so that you can see how they look in situ.

But mostly there is versioning. In the same way that a dub producer takes the elements of a traditional reggae track and reframes it into something more wigged out, artists have been fucking with the iconography of the Grateful Dead and selling it back to Deadheads for decades. A pre-fame Keith Haring sold shirts on the lot in 1977, his characteristic line work already apparent in the doodles that fill the blank space in the Stealie. A guy calling himself New Springfield Boogie exclusively makes merch that references both the Dead and The Simpsons , and with the charisma of Lyle Lanley selling Springfield on the Monorail , he gleefully shares the names of his creations. Homer disappearing into the roses of the band’s Bertha skeleton is given the “St. Stephen”–referencing title “In and Out of the Garden He Goes.”

Anything worn onstage by Mayer gets a boost. In 2022, an official shirt designed by bootlegger Jeremy Dean with a dancing bear face and the word “California” in a straightforward script was sold out before the end of the first set at the first show of the tour. When I ask one vendor how many of his $80 sweatshirts (which have a BMW logo in the Stealie) he sold after John wore one in June, he demurs, telling me only, “A lot.” I ask another vendor whether he’s concerned the band will force him to stop selling his shirts, which violate the only enforced rule of vending by having the words “Dead and Company” on them. He laughs and tells me he’ll just text Mayer and have him sort it out.

This is commerce, plain and simple, and there are obvious points to be made about the co-opting of the counterculture and the frenzy of consumerism. Dead and Company themselves certainly aren’t shy about accruing capital. But in the moment, as the beers flow and the trips come on, it feels like a convincing illusion of everything Heads project onto the band: freedom, joy, bright abandon. Unlike at a sporting event, there is no sense of aggression because there is no opponent. Unlike at a mass church gathering, there is no sense of propriety or even reverence; the enthusiasm is ungated. At least until the sun goes down and the chemicals start to curdle, it is a bright, warm—druggy, paranoid—dream, the California ideal appearing like a mirage in the heart of New York City.

We spend two days at the Gorge, mostly sitting in a scrap of shade beneath what must be the only row of trees in all of eastern Washington, and the view never begins to seem real. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of the scenic natural amphitheater on the other side of the Cascades from Seattle and wondered what it’s like to see a show there. It is beyond picturesque. It is difficult—genuinely difficult—to take it all in. The stage is placed perfectly, right in a crook of the Columbia River, and for the first set of both nights, before the sun goes down, it is more or less impossible to pay attention to the band onstage. The rugged cliff faces and soft turns in the landscape are the only things around that look older and more weathered than Weir.

Other than the surprisingly robust cell service, there is nothing convenient about the Gorge. It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, equally remote from Seattle and Spokane. Getting in Thursday night takes three hours owing to increased security. The campsites, where thousands of Deadheads are posted up from Thursday night through Sunday morning, are a rugged mile or so trek from the entrance to the amphitheater itself. Even though the venue is nearly 40 years old, there are no permanent bathrooms.

The heat is so bad on Night 1, the band seems to check itself. They cut their tempo and ease their way through the songs, whether to discourage ecstatic dance in the crowd or to ensure they make it through the evening themselves. We are near the end of the road now, a week from the end of the tour, and everyone seems to be slightly distracted by that knowledge. Weed smoke clings to the ground as the sun pours into the amphitheater.

After the show, Shakedown stays open late. There are multiple bands playing in the campground, one of them working on a pacy jam that sounds like it’s on its way toward a Talking Heads song. In the morning, there are what appear to be Hare Krishnas playing a trance remix of chant music with live finger-cymbal accompaniment. I wander into Shakedown in search of iced coffee and find two kids in their 20s playing guitar, working their way through the Dead’s “Estimated Prophet” with no vocals, just wavering in the heat vision of one of Weir’s best songs. Someone is advertising a yoga retreat “for Deadheads ONLY” in Costa Rica. Another guy is hawking some kind of Dead-adjacent red wine despite the temperature. “What a long, strange trip it’s been for these grapes,” he cries. “But they’re here now, and so are you.”

So are we. “At this point, two and a half months in[to the tour], I’m exhausted,” Michael Koppinger Jr. tells me the next weekend in San Francisco. Koppinger is a vendor in his early 20s who went to his first show in Raleigh in 2018, was given LSD by a friendly beer salesperson before he even made it to Shakedown, and never looked back. “It blew my mind,” he says. “I was raised Catholic and in this strict upbringing and culture. If people did drugs, it was like, you were bad. So to just be in a space where you could do whatever and it was normalized, it kinda blew my shit.” He printed up his first shirt in 2021, with plans to sell a hundred or so over a weekend run, then come home. Instead, he pulled out of a plan to buy a house with his (now ex-)girlfriend, put everything he owned in his parents’ attic, and split. “I’ve been on the road pretty much since,” he tells me.

Besides the profound bodily exhaustion, the biggest struggle of being a touring Deadhead in 2023 is scraping together gas money. “Once you get to Shakedown, you can make things work,” Koppinger says. “You can get into the show, you can get fed, you can get a drink. The community takes care of itself. But getting show to show, spot to spot, it’s rough.” As they cross the country, Heads panhandle for gas money, pile into the backs of buses and sleep in piles, and do what it takes to get to the next show. “I don’t live in this amount of love and community in everyday life,” Koppinger says. “In 2023 America, alienated, atomized, no one does.”

It is easy to get caught up in this. Even as I roast away in Washington, I’m clinging to what remains of this tour, of the fiction that you can simply zone out of everyday life in the name of having a good time and bring the people you love with you. Nobody knows where this energy will go next summer, whether to jam upstarts Goose or to bluegrass hero Billy Strings or, as it did in ’95, back to Phish. What’s certain is that it won’t be destroyed, even if it transmutes. Even if it lies dormant.

Nobody believes that what happens on tour or at a Dead show is a truly sustainable lifestyle. Like the music itself, it’s ephemeral, being created and destroyed in the same moment. It takes up space in real life, but it exists outside it, in the carnivalesque. The trick, when it all finally ends, is to remember that and not get rolled up in the tent when the circus leaves town.

But first, we have to go to San Francisco.

There are many rumors. The obvious ones involve the last living members of the Grateful Dead who aren’t in Dead and Company: Lesh is going to sit in. Background vocalist Donna-Jean Godchaux will step in to sing. Kreutzmann will join in for “Drums” (Billy himself stokes the last one by tweeting, “You know what would be cool …” a week before the final show; he never elaborates). Bob Dylan toured with the Grateful Dead in 1987 and has been covering “Brokedown Palace” lately, plus he has a break in his tour. Neil Young is in the area and has a conspicuous hole in his itinerary, too. Some people shoot for the stars and insist Paul McCartney will come out for the twinned covers of Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” and “Hey Jude.”

In the end, none of this happens. Dead and Company set up in center field at Oracle Park and play six sets over three nights, about 10 hours of music, with no repeats. When they launch into “Bertha” to open Night 3, there is a prickling in the air. Bassist Oteil Burbridge’s wife has painted Garcia’s famous four-fingered handprint onto her husband’s face, and when the cameras focus on him during a cover of the Rascals’ “Good Lovin’,” the roar from the crowd is staggering. There have been so many big-time Dead shows in stadiums like this, and in the fresh daylight and cool early-evening San Francisco breeze, time collapses, and it feels like we’re inside each and every one of those shows; I’m fully conscious of the fact that for something to be timeless, it has to exit time, it has to die.

Weir was 16 when he joined the Grateful Dead. He grew up in Garcia’s shadow and never grew out of it. Garcia gained a kind of gravitas as he aged, even as heroin and diabetes ravaged his body and made him look 20 years older than he was. Weir courted silliness, wearing polo shirts tucked tidily into very small jean shorts. The Spinners, a religious movement that sprung up around the band and gained enough traction to warrant serious anthropological study, took as dogma what many fans felt: “Jerry Garcia is sacred and Bobby Weir is profane,” as Jarnow sums it up in Heads .

Another thing: “Bobby Weir makes me weep,” Jarnow tells me over Zoom one afternoon. He makes me weep, too. Somehow, in his old age, Weir has become a stately presence, a figure of poise. He carries with him the entire history of the counterculture, and he seems to feel its weight. When he sings Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” or Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried,” he inhabits the weariness of longing and guilt. There are Garcia songs that, thanks to age and wisdom or maybe just sheer repetition, Weir sings better than Jerry ever did: Witness him reel off the names of Billy Sunday and Jack the Ripper in “Ramble on Rose.” He sings with a far-off focus, as powerful and distant as a spaceship cruising through the cosmos. On Night 2 in San Francisco, he sings the postapocalyptic “Morning Dew” drenched in green light, his voice ragged and heartbroken as he surveys what’s left of the world after it ends.

Weir didn’t write the majority of the Grateful Dead’s best songs. “Ripple,” “Eyes of the World,” “Terrapin Station,” “Brokedown Palace,” “Sugaree,” “Althea”—they’re all Garcia’s. But over the 30 years they played together, Weir gained a better understanding of how those songs worked than anyone else possibly could. When he plays them, it’s hard to argue that they’re not in some way his.

The Grateful Dead keep dying. And regardless of whether Dead and Company are truly done right now, they will die one day, too. (Mayer set off a firestorm online by saying Dead and Company is “still a band—we just don’t know what the next show will be” a couple of days after the last show at Oracle Park; theories abound.) But written into the music is the notion that songs themselves don’t need their creators to live. This is hardly revolutionary in the world of jazz, where standards frequently outlive the people who wrote them, or in classical music, where most composers are incapable of performing their own works in the first place. But in rock ’n’ roll, where the cult of authenticity insists that meaning comes mostly in creation, rarely in interpretation, the music and ethos of the Dead are an anomaly. Dead and Company are far from the only group keeping this music alive, but Weir, convinced of the power of the songs as forms of expression and not simply vehicles for dancing or virtuosity or even experimentation, frames his band’s catalog with the dignity it deserves.

It is but one way of keeping the Dead alive. There are so many ways to express yourself, so many paths into and out of this music. Everyone has the right to desire their own expansion, to test their edges and see what else they might be able to contain. I see so many people on Dead tours who can’t possibly dress this way in their everyday lives. On tour, or at the one show they can afford to hit, or watching the livestream at home, or catching some local Dead band struggle through the “Slipknot!” changes, Deadheads enact the answer to a simple problem. The alienation we all feel is real and unavoidable. What if we learned to understand it as good?

Sadie Sartini Garner has written music criticism for Pitchfork , The A.V. Club , The Outline , and many other places. She lives in Long Beach, California, with her partner Rachelle.

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Music | Dead & Company by the Numbers: Tallying up…

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Music | Dead & Company by the Numbers: Tallying up the amazing totals from final tour

How many songs did dead & company play during the tour.

Dead & Company completed its final tour on Sunday, as it wrapped up the last of three sold-out concerts at Oracle Park in San Francisco.

In case you need a recap, here is a review of Night 1 and here is our review of Night 2 of the San Francisco run.

Now, however, it’s time to look at some of the astounding numbers that the band put up during the final tour (as well as during its career).

Number of fans at final tour:

The band drew more than 840,000 fans to see this last tour.

Tour gross:

The Dead & Company tour grossed nearly $115 million during this final run.

Unique songs played;

The group played an amazing number of different songs during the tour — 112 in total.

Number of career tours:

This was the band’s 10th tour since debuting in 2015.

Number of career shows:

The group played 235 shows during its eight-year career.

Number of fans at those shows:

Gulp! The total is more than 4 million.

Unique songs played during those shows:

The band played 145 unique songs during its career.

Stadiums where Dead & Co. have played more than any other acts:

It’s a fair number of them, actually. The venues that have hosted Dead & Co. more often than any other act include Folsom Field in Boulder, Colorado (where they sold more than 130,000 tickets on the final tour); Wrigley Field in Chicago (where they sold 360,000 tickets over the years); Citi Field in Queens, New York (where they have played 11 shows during their career).

Tickets sold in S.F.:

The band sold 118,00 tickets for the 3 Oracle Park shows.

Ticket revenue in S.F.:

Dead & Co. brought in $20.4 million in ticket revenue.

Total estimated economic impact in S.F.:

$30.9 million

Information: Courtesy Scoop Marketing, Live Nation

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'Crushed': Grateful Dead-themed music fest canceled with no refunds 10 days before event

Deadheads are venting their anger about the last-minute cancelation with no refunds, calling the skull & roses festival in ventura, california, the new fyre fest..

Not only will you not be able to sing the lyrics to your favorite Grateful Dead songs alongside fellow Deadheads at the Skull & Roses festival, but you also probably won’t get a refund, either. 

Chris Mitrovich, founder of the annual Grateful Dead-themed music festival, said Tuesday that “SKULL & ROSES 6” was canceled, citing “financial devastation from the 2023 show.” The four-day festival was set to kick off on April 19 in Ventura, a city on the California coast just northwest of Los Angeles.

Mitrovich says the loss from last year’s festival, which has been held annually since 2017, “made it impossible to sustain the weight of the new production.” 

“We have maintained hope and exhausted every imaginable possibility, right up to this very moment," he said. "It has now become clear, however, that we have reached the end of the line. All the cards are down and there’s nothing left to see."

Here’s what we know. 

No refunds available, additional details will be shared later

Skull & Roses organizers noted that while they “sincerely wished” they could refund fans for all available purchases, they do not have the ability to do so. 

Tickets and hotels are not included in the “available purchases” they wish they could refund since they were “non-refundable.” 

“Additional information will be provided just as soon as it becomes available and will be posted through our socials and at www.SKULLANDROSES.com ,” according to the post. 

Single-day tickets began at $60 for general admission and $600 for VIP passes. Concert and hotel packages were going for upwards of $2,000, according to reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle ,

This isn’t the first time the Skull & Roses music festival has been canceled. That happened in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But that time, organizers made a concerted effort to ensure refunds were available for all ticket holders, according to reporting by SF Gate. 

Deadheads express anger online, saying it was ‘Fyre Festival' all over again

Fans expressed their frustration with organizers in a Grateful Dead subreddit , saying that the cancellation would result in a number of lawsuits. 

“They just screwed over a lot of peoples time 10 days out of an event," @RowdydidWrong wrote. "All those bands that were booked, made travel arrangements, all the fans. The future doesn't hold anything if this is how that goes down. Who would ever book with these folks again?”

Another user, @dravenstone, wrote that they were absolutely “crushed” by the cancelation, writing: “We have house sitters locked down, time off of work set, a road trip planned, a hotel booked, the works - not to mention a long weekend of amazing music that is now, apparently much like the money we spent for the passes … Gone.” 

Another user wrote: “Credit card chargebacks, folks!” 

Other Deadheads confirmed that they got the same email, with @iam_santa, writing: “Was hoping it was some kind of scam, but it seems it's not. Really frickin' lame that we were notified 10 day before the show. The no refunds (expletive) is the real kicker.” 

A couple other users compared the situation to Fyre Festival , writing that “the world of festival promotion continues to get shadier and shadier. Everyone watched the Fyre Fest documentary and was like ‘Wait, it’s that easy?’" 

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The Final Shows: Dead & Company Begin Monumental Send-Off In San Francisco [Photos/Videos]

The culmination of eight years of Dead & Company began last night with the final run of the band’s final tour at Oracle Park in San Francisco.

No one could have predicted back in 2015 (or even a year ago) that it would end like this—the band sounding as good as ever with a slightly altered lineup, playing to sold-out stadiums and breaking ticket sales records, and the Grateful Dead as culturally relevant as ever. At that point, the band seemed destined to be nothing more than a legacy or nostalgia act with the added attraction of a heartthrob pop star frontman. Eight years later, they are a fine-tuned, telepathically connected, improvisational unit—without a doubt one of the best lineups to carry on the spirit of the original Grateful Dead since Jerry Garcia ‘s passing.

Like most farewell tours, the hype for Dead & Company’s final tour has been intense, and demand for tickets to the final shows far surpassed supply. Fans wandered outside the venue and down on Shakedown Street before the show, fingers raised, hoping for a miracle ticket. Their digital counterparts meanwhile queued up online for a last-minute ticket release on Ticketmaster (all hail). Lines to enter the venue stretched back all the way to Bay Bridge, but once inside, those lucky enough to score tickets were greeted with a celebratory and circus-like atmosphere.

The anticipation came to a head as the band finally took the stage to kick off its last run ever. Instead of launching into the show at full throttle, Dead & Co. opened with a symbolic “Not Fade Away”. It is rare for the tune to arrive in the opening slot, but when it does, it usually means it will be left unfinished and used to bookend the show or run, reflecting both the eternal nature of the music within the finite limits of the run and the journey of Dead & Company, which has turned out to be a temporary touchstone in the much larger Grateful Dead story.

Dead & Company – “Not Fade Away” (The Crickets) – 7/14/23

From the first note, the band was a well-oiled machine, embodying the Grateful Dead ethos of everybody solo together. Leaving NFA unfinished, Dead & Co. transitioned into “Shakedown Street”. The band has been particularly fiery on this tour, with more upbeat tempos and higher-intensity jams, but “Shakedown Street”, like the opener, was relatively laid back. Feeding off the electric energy of the crowd, John Mayer ‘s lead playing overflowed with youthful energy—at 43, he is the young one of the group. Moving his body to the disco-inspired groove, his presence was magnetic compared to his notoriously nonchalant Grateful Dead counterpart. The song also showcased some of the Jeff Chimenti -John Mayer chemistry that has delighted fans since Dead & Company’s first tour, with fans lamenting the potential end of the pair’s musical partnership.

“Cold Rain and Snow” came next, reflecting the cool temperatures of the Bay Area. The band members and audience were far more bundled up than they had been a week prior at The Gorge, where they played “Here Comes Sunshine” in the sunshine for probably the last time, as Mayer noted in his final Dead Air interview.

“Cold Rain and Snow” was kept short and sweet, indicating recognition that this was a three-day marathon, not a sprint. That sentiment was echoed as the band settled down easy with an ambling “Ramble on Rose”.

“Brown Eyed Women” brought the energy up slightly with a bluesy piano solo from Chimenti that roused the elated crowd before the band slowed things down again for “New Speedway Boogie”. Weir’s voice sounded unusually strained as he reached toward the top of his range, but his raspy falsetto and masterful vibrato were a true embodiment of the bluesman archetype

“Wharf Rat” was as sentimental as ever, with a wonderful improvisational arc and more virtuosic lead playing from Mayer, whose blaring guitar suddenly announced the start of “Don’t Ease Me In”, the set closer.

Jay Lane , who joined the band for its final tour in the wake of Bill Kreutzmann ‘s departure after filling in for the founding Grateful Dead drummer at several shows, led the start of the second set with a subdued “China Cat Sunflower”. The band was warmed up and improvising at a high level at this point. As prescribed by tradition, “China Cat” gave way to the traditional “I Know You Rider”, followed by “He’s Gone”.

Dead & Company – “China Cat Sunflower”, “I Know You Rider” – 7/14/23

Another emotional number, “He’s Gone” carried extra weight following the recent death of longtime Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones tour manager Sam Cutler .

Another traditional pairing came next, presumably played for the final time by Dead & Company,  “Scarlet Begonias” > “Fire On The Mountain” (a.k.a. “Scarlet Fire”), the latter of which featured rare lead vocals by Oteil Burbridge .

Mickey Hart then got his chance to shine as the Rhythm Devil led Lane and Burbridge into primal depths during “Drums”. The trio enjoyed a more robust percussion set-up than was available at The Gorge due to scaled-back production.

The proceeding “Space” included a “Dark Star on the Big  River” jam (“Dark Star” plus “Big River”) with elements of “Cumberland Blues” before ultimately settling into the cosmic contemplation of “Standing on the Moon”, which ended with a dramatic climax.

Dead & Company ratcheted the energy up one last time with “Casey Jones” and “U.S. Blues” before taking a moment to remember the recently departed Cutler, the not-so-recently departed Garcia, and other fallen members of the Grateful Dead family including the band’s lyricists and keyboardists, all of whose images were cast upon the screen during an emotionally contemplative “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”.

Just like that, night one was over, with two sets of songs played by the band for the final time. As Mayer said of the final takes played in the last shows of this final tour, “If those are them, I can live with that.”

Dead & Company returns to Oracle Park for two more nights, Saturday, July 15th and Sunday, July 16th, before the band hangs up its hat for good. Stream the shows live via nugs.net here .

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Dead & Company (@deadandcompany)

Dead & Company – “Shakedown Street” – 7/14/23

[Video: billzlose ]

Dead & Company – “Cold Rain And Snow” – 7/14/23

[Video: House Family ]

Dead & Company – “Brown Eyed Women” – 7/14/23

[Video: The Zalewski Law Firm ]

Dead & Company – “Scarlet Begonias”, “Fire On The Mountain” – 7/14/23

[Video: jjflash30 ]

Dead & Company – “He’s Gone” – 7/14/23

[Video: Dwd Music Media ]

Dead & Company – “Wharf Rat” – 7/14/23

Dead & Company – “Wharf Rat”, “Don’t Ease Me In” (Henry Thomas) – 7/14/23

[Video: Steam Powered Aerodyne ]

Dead & Company – “Fire On The Mountain” – 7/14/23

[Video: RIFF Magazine ]

Dead & Company – “Standing On The Moon” – 7/14/23

Dead & Company – “U.S. Blues” – 7/14/23

Dead & Company – “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” (Bob Dylan) – 7/14/23

[Video: Mary Rusnak ]

Setlist : Dead & Company | Oracle Park | San Francisco, CA | 7/14/23

Set 1: Not Fade Away (The Crickets), Shakedown Street, Cold Rain and Snow (Obray Ramsey), Ramble On Rose, Brown-Eyed Women, New Speedway Boogie, Wharf Rat, Don’t Ease Me In (Henry Thomas)

Set 2: China Cat Sunflower, I Know You Rider (Traditional), He’s Gone, Scarlet Begonias, Fire on the Mountain, Drums (with a tease of the theme from John Carpenter’s “The Thing”), Space (> “Dark Star on the Big River” jam, with elements of Cumberland Blues), Standing on the Moon, Casey Jones, U.S. Blues, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (Bob Dylan)

Grateful Dead Drummer Bill Kreutzmann Drops Out of Final Dead and Company Tour

By Chris Willman

Chris Willman

Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

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Drummer Bill Kreutzmann , one of the founders of the Grateful Dead and a member of spinoff group Dead and Company , will not be a part of the latter group’s farewell tour this summer, the band announced in a social media post Saturday.

Although fans might assume his exit could be health-related, since he has had to sit out some Dead and Company shows in recent years, the group declared that was not the case in its post, and added that he is not retiring from music. Rather, the statement said, Kreutzmann’s departure was due to a “shift in creative direction.” No further explanation of what that might mean was forthcoming in the statement.

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The statement continued, “This is the culmination of a shift in creative direction as we keep these songs alive and breathing in ways that we each feel is best to continue to honor the legacy of the Grateful Dead. The final tour will go on as planned with Bill’s full endorsement and support.”

The post concluded with a friendly “See you at Jazz Fest!” and was signed by Dead and Company’s Bob Weir, John Mayer, Mickey Hart and Kreutzmann. That New Orleans festival appearance marks the kickoff of the final tour on May 6.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dead & Company (@deadandcompany)

This doesn’t mean that Kreutzmann won’t be playing in New Orleans soon, however — just not with Dead and Company. As of now, his other group, Billy & the Kids, is still being listed as headlining a “Fleur De Dead” concert in that city’s Saenger Theatre on April 27.

Kreutzmann had to pass on some Dead and Company shows in 2021 and 2022, including one at the Hollywood Bowl which he departed midway through, as well as the band’s Playing in the Sand festival in Mexico. Back and heart issues have been cited for some of his past missed shows.

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NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Jeremy Clarkson’s distraught girlfriend Lisa Hogan bursts into tears in Clarkson’s Farm season 3 trailer

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The release of Clarkson’s Farm season 3 is just around the corner – and if the trailer is anything to go by, the next batch of episodes are going to be eventful to say the least.

There’s going to be piglets aplenty, a goat kicking Jeremy Clarkson in the nether regions, an infestation of mushrooms, laughter and tears… so be prepared for a rollercoaster journey.

The next instalment of the TV presenter’s hit show is set to arrive on Amazon Prime Video next month, three years after it first launched on the streaming platform.

In one particularly emotional moment of the new trailer, Jeremy’s girlfriend, Lisa Hogan , is left in floods of tears at the sight of a baby piglet who’s been born extremely weak, seemingly unable to move at all.

The trailer begins with Jeremy, 64, facing the frustration of a closure notice, reading the statement aloud: ‘Cease use of any part of the land, that has a restaurant or a cafe.’

Starting off on a precarious note!

Despite the disappointment of the closure notice, the former Top Gear star isn’t shying away from making big changes.

He reveals to fan-favourite Kaleb Cooper that he’s decided to make him farm manager, much to the 25-year-old’s delight.

But with that new promotion comes a healthy bout of competition with the TV personality, who’s determined to prove his superiority in farming, despite being far less experienced.

‘I’m going to make it a competition,’ Jeremy reveals to Kaleb.

‘Who can make the most money? Me, out of unfarmed land. Or you, out of farmed land.’

Kaleb is later shown looking extremely exasperated by the contest he’s been forced to take part in, admitting to land agent Charlie Ireland: ‘God knows his ideas.’

In yet another new change, Jeremy reveals to Charlie that he’s decided he wants his farm to be teeming with pigs.

‘It’d be fun to have little piglets running around,’ he remarks.

Of course, being surrounded by pigs won’t be without its challenges, as Jeremy disgustingly empties his jacket pocket to discover it’s filled with pig vomit.

Jeremy and his girlfriend Lisa stand in a marshy field with rain pouring down them while witnessing two hefty pigs in the act.

While they are blessed with the birth of adorable pigs, a heartbreaking moment occurs when one of the piglets is born extremely weak, presumably meaning their life could be at risk.

At the sight of the frail piglet, Lisa bursts into tears, sobbing into Jeremy as he wraps an arm around her, looking down solemnly.

Life on the farm is, as ever, completely unpredictable and full of twists and turns.

In a light-hearted moment of the season 3 trailer, Jeremy winds up doubled over in pain after a very spirited goat kicks him in an extremely agonising area.

At another point, the stars of the show are forced to wear face masks as they enter a room filled with enormous mushrooms.

We can’t lie, it’s giving us very The Last of Us vibes.

Part one of Clarkson’s Farm season three is set to launch on May 3, followed by part two a week later, with each batch consisting of four episodes.

Hot water is set to cause a massive hurdle for the farm, as it results in the crops failing, while inflation will cause prices of supplies to soar.

Wtih the restaurant and farm shop facing closure, Jeremy will need to try to think of innovative ways to make profit, coming up with the idea to make use of the unfarmed land on Diddly Squat.

Clarkson’s Farm series 3 launches globally on Prime Video on May 3.

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MORE : Raging Jeremy Clarkson plans to boost £55,000,000 fortune by taking revenge

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1 dead and 13 injured in semitrailer crash at a texas public safety office, with the driver jailed.

Acacia Coronado

Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas – A Texas semitrailer driver rammed a stolen 18-wheeler through the front of a public safety building where his renewal for a commercial driver’s license had been rejected, killing one person and injuring 13 others, authorities said Friday.

The intentional crash into the single-story brick building off a highway in Brenham, a rural town outside of Houston, littered debris in the parking lot and left a gaping hole in the entrance. The crash damaged the front of the red semitrailer, which was hauling materials on a flatbed.

After crashing into the building the first time, the driver backed up the truck with the intention of smashing it again before being detained, Brenham Mayor Atwood Kenjura said.

“It’s unfortunate that we are here gathered for a really senseless tragedy,” Kenjura said.

The driver — identified as Clenard Parker, 42 — was pulled out of the truck by authorities at the Texas Department of Public Safety office. Authorities say Parker did not resist when he was taken into custody and would face multiple felonies, but did not specify the charges.

On Thursday, Parker was told by employees at the office that he would not be eligible to renew his commercial driver's license, Texas Department of Public Safety Sgt. Justin Ruiz said. He did not elaborate as to why Parker's renewal was rejected.

One employee in the building was trapped “for a period of time” after the crash but no one who worked at the driver's license office suffered serious injuries, Republican state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst said.

It was unclear Friday afternoon where the person who was killed was located at the time of the crash.

Following the crash, two people were flown to a hospital in Bryan and another to Houston. Three people were transported to local hospitals but later released, and eight others were treated on the scene.

Parker, who lived in Chappell Hill about 10 miles (16 kilometers) east of the crash site, was being held without bail Friday in the Washington County jail in Brenham on two initial charges — suspicion of evading arrest causing serious bodily injury and unauthorized use of a vehicle.

It wasn’t immediately clear if Parker had a lawyer or would be appointed one at a future court appearance. The jail’s website didn’t list an attorney or pending court date.

Ruiz said he didn't know if Parker had a criminal record. He said they were still investigating whether he was armed at the time of the crash. He said they also were investigating whether his actions might be considered an act of terrorism.

“We’re trying to figure that out,” Ruiz said. He said the FBI was assisting in the investigation.

A heavy presence of police surrounded the building and drivers were urged to steer clear of the area on Friday. Brenham, a city of about 19,000 residents, is about 80 miles (128 kilometers) miles west of Houston.

Kolkhorst and Kenjura said the quick response by law enforcement helped avert a greater tragedy.

“We’re blessed more weren’t injured in this act of violence,” Kolkhorst said.

Kenjura said a fire department official told him if Parker had “veered to the left” and succeeded in striking the building again, “there would have been a collapse of the building resulting in more injuries and possibly death.”

The Texas Department of Public Safety is a sprawling agency and one of the largest state law enforcement operations in the country. It includes troopers who are a central part of a massive border security operation on the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the Texas Rangers, the state’s top criminal investigators. But the department also has offices across the state that issue driver’s licenses.

The Texas Rangers were leading the investigation into the crash, Ruiz said.

Associated Press writer Scott Sonner contributed to this report from Reno, Nevada. Coronado reported from Austin, Texas.

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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