What’s Different as Dead & Company Returns to Sphere: Concert Review

As Dead & Company returns to Las Vegas’ Sphere for a second residency, the question on the minds of many fans is, of course, what, is anything, has been updated for 2025?

From Thursday’s opening night in the domed venue, here’s one thing that stuck out as very different from last year: When Bob Weir sang the song “Standing on the Moon” and got to the line “I see the gulf of Mexico,” the capacity crowd let out a huge cheer.

Who knew, when Robert Hunter wrote that simple lyric for the Grateful Dead in the 1980s, he was penning a line that would bide its time until it inadvertently became a political applause line several decades later?

But this may not be the information on updates to the Dead residency you’re looking for; fans and the merely Sphere-curious will be wondering whether there’s been a complete or partial rethink of last summer’s spectacular visuals. The short answer is: The ’25 show still follows much the same template as ’24, with the same video bookends and a return of some of those favorite visualizer setpieces, but with maybe 30-40% new eye candy. (At least that was the case on opening night; variations in the visuals, just as in the setlists, are bound to follow on nights 2 and 3 of the first weekend.) So, in other words, it’s a refresh, but far from a total reset.

Then again, you didn’t really think they’d just toss out the ILM-produced opening and closing gambit, where the screen slowly zooms out from Haight Ashbury to outer space in the present day and finally zooms back in again to land in 1965 SF, did you? That’s not just the best single conceit that Dead & Company and their designers will ever be able to do in the venue; it’s probably the best visual anyone will ever pull off there, from now till Sphere falls down in the apocalypse. So for those who haven’t seen that framing device yet, and also all those who did, it’s a highly advisable rerun.

The musical performances that the band is providing in these shows are really reason enough for a return trip, but for anyone who may truly be looking to new visuals as a tipping point on whether to make the short, ordinary back to town, here are a few of the fresh setpieces or additions:

“From the Mars Hotel” touches down alongside the Venetian Hotel. The new fan-servicing visual highlight of Act 2 found the back cover of the group’s 1974 album “From the Mars Hotel” coming to life, with six gigantic costumed characters taking their places behind the tiny figures on stage. These surreal figures alternately struck poses or just took a seat to watch the group… or at least watch a television set that was pictured as being stationed right behind the players. Watching real actors or dancers strike still poses for minutes at a time, hundreds of feet high, proved weirdly fascinating… if ultimately not even quite as transfixing as the accompanying “Scarlet Begonias” itself. Serious fans who immediately recognized this motif were delighted, and even plus-ones who didn’t know the six characters on screen from Adam still had something delightfully colorful to consider.

Uncle Sam has a new destination. Other than the NASA-style opening and closing of the show, the visual from the 2024 residency that was least likely to get dropped was the appearance of the Dead’s trademark skeleton, jumping out of the grave to do a happy jig and then jump on a chopper. That video backdrop was back, of course, and on this particular night it was in the service of Dead & Company’s version of the traditional standard “Going Down the Road Feeing Bad” (ironically, because their Uncle Sam and his red-haired lady friend seem to be feeling nothing but good vibes in their wild ride). But now this segment has been extended, with the skeletor’s cycle touching down on the main drag of a garish resort city that’s a dreamland version of Vegas.

“Drums”/”Space” has all-new visuals… even if it’s still the ass massage that you’re really there for. Last year, Mickey Hart’s traditional extended drum “solo” in the second act had a brilliant moment in which photographic renderings of seemingly his entire percussion collection circled and danced in the uppermost part of the dome. That’s gone, now, or at least it was absent on opening night. But what replaced that motif was just as effective in the moment, if not quite as conceptually clever. One part of the segment had a stained-glass structure pop up on the big screen… with individual panes shattering and falling away to allow for closeups of the handiwork of Hart and the two members who accompany him in banging, Jay Lane and Oteil Burbridge. Another moment had a skeleton drummer joining in the fun, in a mushroom field. Much of it just had Hart’s head and hands adrift in the cosmos. But ultimately “Drums” is about what you feel, not what you see. And it’s worth the price of the seats that are equipped with haptics to experience those thunderously good vibrations in your bum and beyond.

Giant band pixellations made of tiny dancing bears. The first all-new visual to appear in the opening-night show came with the third number, “Bertha,” which featured a wall of dancing cartoon bears — part of the Dead’s traditional animated iconography — shrinking and then forming into pixellated images of the band members… i.e., a soloing John Mayer made up of hundreds or thousands of tiny, marching critters.

A collapsing wall of TVs. The final song of the first act, “Don’t Ease Me In,” sported a tower of old-school TVs offering either colorful geometric shapes or goopy, melting cartoon animals, before it finally slowly fell toward the audience, which was subsumed into one of the giant picture tubes. The faux TV sets had a “PIP” button on the controls, which speaks to how much of the Sphere visuals rely on a highly sophisticated version of a picture-in-picture effect.

An altered touchdown in San Francisco at the climax specifically honors both Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh. As mentioned before, the penultimate number of the show again has the “camera” starting in the far reaches of space and winding up in front of the San Francisco house where the Grateful Dead used to rehearse. But there’s a difference now. Instead of newsreel audio about those wacky hippies, the voiceover the audience hears is an interview snippet of Garcia, who died in 1995. And the upstairs window at the house features a silhouette meant to be understood as that of Lesh, who passed away this past October. It’s a remarkably deft way to pay tribute to both fallen Dead founders simultaneously.

So the Dead & Company/Sphere visual repertoire has been expanded now… but sometimes the simplest choices are the best. There were moments that just had a widescreen B&W image of the live band hovering over the stage that were nearly as compelling as anything in a more razzle-dazzle mode.

And there might not have been any more satisfying visual choice than Weir singing “Standing on the Moon” against… no, not a moonscape, but a screen of pure, deep blue, even as he sang a lyric that includes a mention of “indigo.”

What’s new visually is what’s news here; the fact that Dead & Company are doing completely unique setlists each night — or at least completely differentiated over the course of a three-day weekend — is an old, dog-bites-man story. Thursday’s nearly four-hour show didn’t offer any radically unexpected song choices, with one exception: The concert opened with a cover of the Spencer David Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’,” a song that had never showed up in a set by the offshoot group Dead & Company over the last 10 years, but was a recurrent in Grateful Dead shows for a few years in the 1980s.

Truth be told, as welcome as the choice was to fans as a relative novelty, that opener was not one of the better selections of the night; their arrangement felt relatively sluggish, compared to probably any other version of the venerable rock standard any audience member has heard over the years. And hearing their more typical version of “Good Lovin’” show up later in the first set felt reiterative, with both covers serving basically the same function. When intermission hit at the one-hour point, the band had yet to completely take off.

And then what happened after intermission was staggeringly good. It was if a pretty good party band had opened for an utterly phenomenal one. It’s not that the first act was without highlights, but the transformative, haunting, unhurried excellence of what transpired in the second “half” (or second two-thirds, really, quantitatively) was testament to what the most discerning part of the audience was really there for: American beauty.

Mayer did as brilliant a job of leading the band through an epic, possibly best-in-show “Terrapin Station” in the second set as he did of playing the song acoustically at the recent MusiCares salute to the Dead. It would be difficult to hear his extended leads at this show and not immediately leap to the conclusion, not necessarily for the first time, that he is good — and, yes, as soulful — as any electric guitar working today. He partners himself in alternating currents: part of the time playing off of Weir’s rhythm parts, and part of it engaging with pianist Jeff Chimenti in what you might call instrumental dueling, if that wasn’t too corny a term for their graceful interplay.

Increasingly sphinx-like over the years, Weir has fully grown into the role of a shaman in shorts. But if he’s somewhat affectless under that beard, as opposed to Mayer leaving no emotion off the table in his facial expressions, there was little doubt as to how invested he was Thursday night, bellowing “This darkness got to give!” (from “New Speedway Boogie”) like his life and raging-against-the-dying-of-the-light depended on it.

There’s a hell of a songbook at play here. And the dirty little secret of the Dead is that the whole “psychedelic” image is a smokescreen for the mother band’s cozy innovation as the original kings of Americana.

But the very best reason to see Dead & Company again at Sphere — and there are many, many selling points — is the number that is not a song at all, i.e., the nightly “Drums”/”Space” segment. Every member of the band is riding some kind of plateau, but Hart is the one who can reasonably be said to be peaking in this moment, since the technology of Sphere is allowing him to do things with his spotlight moment that were previously unimaginable. With all due respect to fans who want to stand on the floor, or those who can’t afford the premium seats, there is nothing in the entertainment sphere remotely like experiencing Hart’s adventures in rhythm while feeling each mallet hit through chairs that are equipped to send those sensations through your entire body. It’s as close as anyone will likely come to combining a Magic Mountain ride with bona fide mysticism.

And when Hart leaves the stage and the more “melodic” players return for a soft and melody-less short jam in his wake, it’s a lovely re-entry that allows the band to live up to that psych rep for a few blissfully free-form minutes.

After that, ILM takes control of your senses again for the big climax. But it’s the band, not the screen, winning your heart here. This grand experiment didn’t have to last this long, and “Dead Forever” — the official title of the residencies — can’t live up to its name; see it before your train and theirs passes Terrapin Station.

Dead & Company setlist at Sphere, Las Vegas, March 20, 2025:

Set 1
Gimme Some Lovin’
Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo
Bertha
New Speedway Boogie
Brown-Eyed Women
Good Lovin’
Don’t Ease Me In

Set 2
Feel Like a Stranger
Scarlet Begonias
Fire on the Mountain
Terrapin Station
Drums
Space
Standing on the Moon
Althea
Going Down the Road Feeling Bad
Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
Touch of Grey