John Mayer on the Making of Dead & Company’s Mind-Bending Sphere Residency: ‘I Love That Adults Are Having Childlike, Wondrous Experiences at This Show’ (EXCLUSIVE)
John Mayer says he didn’t always feel a sense of urgency about getting people out to see Dead & Company concerts … not even when the group was doing a final national tour in 2023. Now, he does, with a month and a half left on the group’s engagement at Las Vegas’ Sphere. He’s not making any pronouncements about this marking an end of the road for the band — a Grateful Dead offshoot that he formed with three original Dead members back in 2015. And maybe there could be a return to Sphere someday. But for the time being, there’s an expiration date on the visa for this particular Ultimate Trip. “I just don’t want people to miss it,” he says, “because we’ll be out of that building at some point, and you can’t see it unless you’re in that building.”
In his first extensive interview about the 30-show residency, Mayer tells Variety about exactly how long it took to get from the first glimmerings of a Sphere run to May’s opening night; whether this was always in the cards when it wrapped up its farewell tour last summer; and how he acted as point man between the band and the visual team firing up the world’s biggest wrap-around screen. We also asked him whether this is a repeatable phenomenon, after the current run ends Aug. 10. He’d like to think so. (Variety‘s recent interview with Bob Weir made it sound like the veteran co-frontman has high hopes for that, too: Read that exclusive interview here.)
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But Mayer is sticking with the ethos he’s always had since he formed Dead & Compoany with three Grateful Dead original members in 2015: Play like there’s no tomorrow. That goes even when you’re not doing the kind of rarefied concerts that can only take place at one spot on earth.
When the opportunity to do this engagement at Sphere arose, were you more motivated by the thought that any chance to get this group of players back together again was worthwhile? Or was it more the unique opportunity of being able to add to the canon of Dead experiences with a real A/V experience?
I think that’s more what it is. I saw a couple of the U2 shows. I think any artists who went to go see the U2 shows were blown away by the show itself and then also the possibilities for what could be done. And I think when I think of the Grateful Dead canon, I almost think of the visual, aesthetic canon as much as I think of the music. The Grateful Dead has always been interested in lighting, and making a show out of light. And when it comes to visuals, you have this incredible lookbook of visuals that you can draw from. I think the Grateful Dead is probably the band with the most famous cache of visuals in music history, unless I’m really overlooking someone. So you kind of have the toy box there of what could be used and what could be identifiable when you see it — and how can you extrapolate this one idea and marry it with a whole new idea? Also, I think Grateful Dead would’ve done this, had Sphere been around in 1990. I think they would’ve probably invented it themselves at some point.
How far back did the initial idea or the first planning go?
Everything in this world with Dead & Company begins with what I call chatter. And I really mean this — even for me, it’s just chatter. So when I went to go see U2 the first time, it was chatter, and it was enough of an idea that I could watch it with two eyes, one of them being just a fan in the stands, and the other one studying the show, in case I was lucky enough to play there at some point. I think the timeline is, we kind of knew it was probably gonna happen in December, and then in January it became real. And it became real very quickly. Then the question became, how do we do this within the frame of time and within the budget that we have? It was very compressed. And I get excited by the projects where someone says: If you miss a day, this might not work, but if you run the calculation and the forecast, you could do it, if you don’t miss a day. I don’t know why I’m inspired by those things.
And we just didn’t have the same lead time that U2 did, and perhaps no one ever will again, because U2 was able to rehearse and grow inside that building as it was finishing being built. All I remember is people saying, “Look, if you want to do this, we don’t have the budget they had and we don’t have the time they have.” That never discourages me. I go, “All right, off we go!” It very quickly went from an idea to a treatment, to renderings, to a storyboard. I don’t do well with dead air in-between coming up with an idea and executing it. So I loved the mad dash.
When U2 was opening, I talked to their creative director, Willie Williams, who said, “I don’t know how anybody else is gonna be able to do this, because we spent a year and a half on this, and nobody else is gonna have that amount of time.” Yet here we’re seeing that where there’s a will, there’s a way to do that compression. And maybe it doesn’t hurt that his company, Treatment, is working with Dead & Company on the heels of doing U2.
There was six months to do it. It just meant you couldn’t double back. And if you can’t double back, it means you shouldn’t even worry about doubting yourself, because you don’t have time to double back even if you did doubt yourself. So what that means is “measure twice, cut once,” which I loved. And that’s how we ended up with the show, with most of it kind of working, I think. You know, the older I get, the less concerned I am with whether it’s great, and the more I become concerned with whether it just works — and the “great” comes from it working. Like with my solo tour (which he undertook this past spring): Does it work, me alone on stage? Can you “pull it off”? That’s the stuff that excites me. Other people can argue about great. “Does it work?” is what I love being involved in.
You have been described as being deeply immersed in the visual schemes? Were you to the point where you were kind of directing how the whole thing went?
So, it’s an interesting thing, because it is still democratic. But I would say that I threw my hat in the ring for being the point man on it for a couple of reasons. Mostly because I was local in L.A. and the Sphere studio is in Burbank. I’m happy to wake up and do a Zoom with (the Treatment team in) London at 10 in the morning. And I just have that drive right now. So I would say that I sort of organized everyone’s ideas.
The way it started was, I had this concept for this narrative wraparound of the show, giving it the sense of something a little more cinematic than just a concert. I just remember these reference points growing up of things that felt cinematic, even though they were carnival rides that looked like rocket ships that you’d go on with the hydraulics, and you’d get a little bit of tilt and back and forth and it would feel like you were on a ship. It dates back decades, the idea of the cinematic first-person experience. So I had this idea for this beginning and end that would create this modularity for the show. I wanted it to be whimsical, but also sort of epic-cinematic. So I pitched Bob and Mickey (Hart) the narrative for the show, and thankfully they really liked it. One of the benefits of the idea was that this now created this ability to change the specifics of each trip we took. But because it was modular, we could go to different times and spaces. Now, everyone would just make this list of ideas. … If we all went off in a corner and wrote where we think we should go, so to speak, we’d probably have 80% coverage of agreement of everyone going, “Well, yeah, we’d go here and here and here.”
What was really great was that Bob and Mickey would give really specific notes based on their experience. So, if we’re gonna play in Egypt like the Grateful Dead did in 1978, well, Bob got to see the mockup of that and it really took him back to 1978. In the Sphere studios in Burbank looking at some really early test stuff, it brought back all of these memories that he had of playing Egypt. And we took those notes, and they’re in there. There’s bats flying around in the beginning of that Egypt sequence, because Bob remembers there were bats everywhere! So, that level of granularity — it’s what I love in world-building. And the fact that it’s true to Bob and Mickey’s memories and experiences is really cool. That part was like having a historical consultant on your movie, you know? Let’s go right to the people who were there.
Talk about the bookends that begin in Haight Ashbury and have the big screen zooming out into space…
It’s difficult for me to figure out how much I should say about this. But you can find all of this online, I suppose. If this were a movie, you would know the plot. But we begin in Haight Ashbury, modern day, and we end up in Haight Ashbury, in the past. So we go through time and space, and we turn at the right place at the quote wrong time, or the right time at a different time. So what it really is… and I’ve never told anybody this; this is my first interview about the show… Let think about it for a second… It’s like metaphysical optimism. It’s like you can walk out of the Sphere knowing that somewhere in some alternate timeline, the Grateful Dead is just starting to fire it up. Or, by someone’s ingenuity, we think we’re landing in modern day and something’s gone awry. “Oh, look who’s in the window!” We’ve managed to set down and to see the dawn of the Grateful Dead. Which I think is a really interesting way to walk out of the show.
When I saw the show the second night, a few visuals had been switched in or out. That has happened more, subsequently, from all reports. But I thought, oh, are they purposely gonna switch things up a little bit — or were they running up against the deadline of opening night, and there were some things didn’t get finished in time?
Yeah, things were still being finished. I think some things we were holding onto just to have some differentiation. But there were other things that the computer was still rendering, and so we were able to put those in over weeks two and maybe three. There are still pieces coming. They’ll be slow to come out for a moment, and then there will be a bit of an update in August. So we’re working on that right now just to keep it as exciting as possible for everyone. Because I know that there are people coming every weekend who are seeing this for the first time, who should catch up with what this show already is, but in an effort to make sure that people who are coming repeat times still get some surprise, there will be some things that we will add into the show around August, just to really make something of those last six shows.
People seeing the show recently talk about the scene in Egypt at the pyramids, and that was not in the show on opening night.
Egypt’s really cool because what we’re doing now is, we’re matching the lighting on stage with the lighting of the video. So it’s got this really seamless effect, as if the moon is lighting us on the stage. It’s really beautiful.
One of the things that was introduced on the second night that was really impresive was a scene that takes place in an indoor space on a college campus the Dead once played, and it realy feels like you are watching the band in this kind of barnlike, old, grungy auditorium. It’s far from the most elaborate thing in the show, but it’s incredible as an illusion.
The Cornell University Fieldhouse, yeah. Well, that’s the thing. There are so many things that I would’ve thought were gonna be just fine on paper, but not maybe be the biggest things. I had no idea what would be the biggest things till I saw them. And with that Cornell University environment, at first glance, you believe you’re underneath the vaulted ceiling of that fieldhouse.
That’s the thing about Sphere. Especially in a world where our eyes are better than ever at judging when something isn’t real, it’s like we’ve all become forensic digital scientists, and we know when we’re looking at something that isn’t real. Like, you can just see when something’s AI. And it’s really nice that there’s something half-practical, half-artificial about the Sphere, but your brain can’t figure out which is which. In a day like today where everyone is trying to pick out what’s fake, you look at it and your eyes believe it and your heart believes it. And, without getting too artsy about it, that’s what I love the most, is that grown adults are having childlike, wondrous experiences at this show.
If you had a camera on the crowd for the entirety of the show, and you handed me a DVD or a hard drive and you said, “This is the entire show, but just the audience reaction,” I would sit and watch the whole thing in one sitting. Obviously I don’t get to see it on stage, but occasionally I’ll see videos on Instagram of people sort of slack-jawed, and I’ll be like, “I could watch two or three hours of this.” Because you don’t get that anymore when you become an adult. You know you’re in Vegas inside of a building that’s not moving, but there are several times in the show where your heart believes it, your brain believes it, and your feet start to shift on the floor, if you’re standing, as if you were gonna fall. The part of your brain that used to go on rollercoasters or love going to Disneyland comes alive during the show, and that’s probably the thing that I love the most about it.
You can’t be out in the audience, but you can take it on faith, how it’s going?
I take it on faith, and also, I’ve tested it on myself enough times before the doors opened. I saw it when it was an animatic thought, when it was a very early rendering. You know, ILM did the beginning and end of the show; that was an Industrial Light and Magic creation. A lot of people think it’s photoreal drone footage. And seeing the early tests of it in Burbank at the Sphere studios, which is like a one-third scale of the Sphere in Vegas… There were (initially) some camera moves where your stomach was gonna come out of your mouth. And I loved using my equilibrium and my intestines as the test subject for the show. I would watch it as someone at the show and go, “Nope, I’m gonna throw up.” It wasn’t like it was the first time in my life I would get nauseous, but not anxious that I was nauseous. It was just so objective, like testing a product on myself and getting a rash: “Well, that doesn’t work,” And there were camera moves that would make you feel as if you were going to fall straight forward, because forward became down…
A lot of watching this stuff was to avoid this scenario of, like, a story in the press about people walking out dizzy and wanting their money back. It was like, how exciting can you make it without people being upset? Sometimes I think about having an extreme party for those who wanna go full-tilt, and show them everything (that was rejected) that will invert your stomach, just for those who are down for the extreme ride. But I saw each iteration of the rendering as it came in, and it started to get really exciting in the last couple of months when I would see things and I’d go thumbs up or thumbs down, and occasionally I would stand up and scream and put my hands up in the air and go, ohhhhhhh!. And now I see other people do it when they come to see the show.
We spoke with Mickey Hart about the “Drums” segment, and he mentioned those are all renderings of his actual percussion instruments spinning around on the top of the dome. He was very pleased with that.
I also want it to be known, Mickey’s responsible for the “Drums” part of the show. What was great about it is that that was always going to be Mickey’s real estate. I never saw what he was doing. And when I finally saw the run of it in rehearsal, I thought it clicked into the rest of the show so well, because it was all the stuff that the rest of the show hadn’t touched on. It just almost instinctively completed the circle without overlapping anything.
It’s quite an experience during Mickey’s section, having speakers actually embedded in the seats for added percussive effect.
Yeah. As if you needed them, by the way. I mean, that subwoofer will shake the seats, whether or not there’s haptic in the seats or not. But as I’m told, it’s an incredible thing to sit and feel.
Do you have a favorite visual in the show, apart from the bookends that you talked about?
There’s a couple of mini-moments that I just live for. But the one environment I love the most are the flowers falling down on what looks to be a glass dome of the Sphere. It is so beautiful and it almost has this Instagram “wait for it” moment where you just want to watch the whole Sphere become encased in these flowers. And when you finally get covered up at the top and you still see these kind of areas of light in between some of the flowers, you just feel so cozy with 17,000 other people. It’s little bit like being under a parachute in the fifth grade in gym class. One of the reasons I love it is because it’s just so simple, right? Like, you never know what song or what lyric or what part of a show is going to be special, even if it’s really simple when you come up with it. I was grading things based on their complexity in terms of whether or not they’d be great. And what I learned throughout the process was sometimes the sweet spot is really easy to do and super beautiful. Sometimes it’s just an acoustic song that becomes the one everyone sings. And that one to me is like sitting down with an acoustic guitar — everyone loves the flowers coming down.
As far as how you guys come up with the setlist, how does that work now? There’s no visual that is only tied to one song, with the exception of “Drums.” But there do seem to be correlations thoughout between song choices and visuals, in terms of mood.
This gets really interesting. Setlist creation for Dead & Company is always a discussion, but it was automated to a certain extent, which made going to do the show kind of like, “Here’s the list. Maybe make a couple changes. OK, off to soundcheck we go.” What’s become really interesting — and I would say it’s a challenge, but it’s a really fun one — is that not only do you have to make the songs work in some kind of a flow for the setlist, but every piece of content has maybe eight or10 songs that can go with it. If you flipped it, maybe you could say every song has a certain number of content pieces that would work with it, in terms of the contextualization of it. So now you’ve got these two layers… these two columns. You have to write the setlist, but then the content goes to the left of that in a different column. And if your content isn’t balanced enough, then you have to change the music setlist. So it’s really like a 3D puzzle.
Because we learned this really early on: If you dazzle people with too much visual narrative, your brain shuts down. You start going, “That’s enough.” I would go home with headaches (during tests), going, “OK, that’s visual overload.” So what we have to do is have tension and release. You have to have tension and release with the music, but that also has to coincide with the tension and release of the content. And what that means is that what should be this super-automated experience of “OK, we’re playing Thursday, it’s Wednesday afternoon, let’s make all three set lists”… I don’t think we’ll ever do the show without really working every day on putting the content together, because the content team is always on site. They need it (the setlist) in the morning so they can start running it and piecing it together. This show is completely modular, and I don’t think we have or ever will do any two shows the same in terms of the order of content. So it keeps everyone on their toes. There’s a lot of texts going back and forth — and I love the dance. The dance can sometimes go all the way till about 3:30 in the afternoon of the show. After that, it’s like, no more phone calls, because you can’t go back and and reprogram it once they get it to a certain level of being failsafe. So it is never going to be a breeze. But it’s also really exciting, because when you pull it off, you pulled it off.
The show has built into a lot of moments where there is kind of a static frame that exists to show live shots of you and the others playing and interacting. The audience doesn’t want everything to be the Ultimate Trip; they do want to feel like they saw you guys really perform.
That’s right, and there’s a lot of that. We’re not scoring a laser light show.
There’s probably a dozen balancing acts that happen at the same time, both in putting the show together and playing the show. How much is it about the music versus the overall experience? How much is it about the super-well-known Grateful Dead songs versus the deeper things, for some of the audience members who’ve been going for years? There’s the balancing act of knowing that because you’re playing in Vegas, you’re gonna get some people who the concierge at the hotel said, “You should go see this.” So there’s just a lot of binaries at the same time.
It’s a very exciting puzzle and everyone’s been just so great. I’ve got to say, Bob and Mickey have been so great at adapting to this entirely new way of doing shows where sometimes you can’t change a song on a whip. You know, there are times where Bob instinctively wants to go from the first song to the second song and you can’t, because there’s the show piece. He’s just been so great, and Mickey too, at adapting to the very hyper-modern approach to this show. And I’ve just been so pleased and actually impressed that Bob totally gets that this is not your standard tour — and that he has also been really great at suggesting, like, “Screw it. Let’s do this anyway.” Because I can sometimes be a little too [taking the tone of a director on a film set] “Places, people!” And that is I think what makes Bob and I work together really well: We’re the odd couple. That push-pull is awesome.
The Sphere show is serving as an introduction to the Dead’s music for a lot of people, which is a wild thing to have happening in 2024.
That’s why I really want people to know that this show reads both ways. If you’re a Grateful Dead or Dead & Company completist, this show tips its hat to that all the time, but it also reads a different way. If you have friends who’ve said, “It was great, now you have to go see what it’s about,” you will not be lost. It is not serialized, like you have to see the first season of something. It is meant to be read down and across at the same time. That’s something that I’m really proud of, and will always make sure is happening throughout the course of the show: If you are just curious about this Sphere thing, you’re gonna love the show. If you’re curious about this Dead & Company thing, you’re gonna love the show. It really is designed to cover all of those bases at the same time. And I think it does. So I’ve been telling people, you do not have to be a Deadhead to come and see this show.
And I’m very bullish on this show because it’s so limited. Normally I go, “Well, you know, it’s a tour. We’re gonna be on tour again. Come find us whenever you wanna find us.” In 2024, where everything is so heavily promoted, I really just want people to come see it because I think it’s great and I don’t want them to miss it. It’s not a matter of “We gotta sell tickets.” I just don’t want people to miss it because we’ll be out of that building at some point, and you can’t see it unless you’re in that building.
Is the music still the crucial thing, or is it OK if it’s just a piece of the puzzle in this giant landscape?
I wasn’t sure going into it what latitude we would have musically with this show. And really quickly, we snapped into playing some of the best shows we’ve ever played. Because remember, we’re in the same room every night. When you’re on tour, you fight a new battle with the room every day. Now we stay in the same room, and we fought some battles, but we get to stick with our wins of those battles.
It took people a couple of weeks to get things where they like them. Now we just pick up and go, which is an entirely new way for us to play, where everyone’s happy with the way their thing sounds because everything’s already dialed in and the room is the same. So we’re actually playing better shows than we’ve ever played. It’s also because people can hear each other, because we’ve been forced to wear in-ear monitors, because you’re playing in a giant snow globe, which does not sound great if you’re on the stage in front of your instrument. And everyone’s really connected. I really can’t pick a thing for you that I’m disappointed in or that I went, “Oh, that really didn’t play out.” It all worked.
You said that you felt like it’s important for you to evangelize on this a little bit more than you would for a tour, because it’s finite and it’s got to end. So, is there a definite end? And could you come back to this, annually, perhaps, for as long as you felt like it?
Not even any chatter yet. No chatter as of now. [Laughs.] But I’m always thinking about the callback. Look, I’ve learned with this band, never count anything out. I mean, I don’t want to be coy. The show is designed to be perennial, because it’s modular, and we could always go to new places. If someone called me and said… I don’t even want to get into it, because I just don’t (know)…
I will say this: We have zero plans to return to the Sphere at this moment, and if we did, it would be a while. So I don’t want anyone getting the idea that it’s worth just hanging out until we do it again, because I have not heard a single mention of a year or a month or anything. But I don’t want to be coy. The show is probably designed from the ground up to be perennial.
So, basically, you would say this is something that could happen again, and this could also be the last time that Dead and Company ever plays? Is it sort of like, it could be any of the above?
I think that’s sort of the thesis of everything we’ve ever done. Really, I play ’em like they’re the last. I mean, when I played (the farewell tour) in 2023, I thought I wasn’t going to touch the guitar and play a Grateful Dead song again for a long time. There was no winking going on at the end of that, I promise you that. And the first time I ever heard the mention of us playing the Sphere, someone was just dreaming it out loud: “You know, that’ll be great in the year 2025 or something,” and I went, “That’s interesting.” And this band just has this amazing ability to make things happen for itself. Where I can, I will steer it. And where I can’t, I’ll just go along for the ride and go — like I always say — “If they want to, I’ll do it.”
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