Dead & Company launched its 24-date Dead Forever residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere in eye-popping trend Thursday evening, utilizing the technological marvel to each have a good time the band’s almost 60-year historical past and prolong its legacy as one in all rock’s most audacious reside acts.

You can see pictures, fan-shot video and the whole setlist from the present under.

The 200-minute, 19-song present kickstarted the third reside engagement and second multi-weekend residency at Sphere, which shares an proprietor (James Dolan) with favourite Grateful Dead/Dead & Company tour cease, Madison Square Garden. Last 12 months, Dead & Company completed its tenth and last tour at Oracle Park within the band’s house turf of San Francisco.

However, it publicly maintained that future performances had been nonetheless doable, opening the door for the two-month Las Vegas stint. After an preliminary 18 Sphere dates bought properly — although not bought out, which explains the supply of tickets underneath face worth on secondary sale websites — the band added six extra, for a complete of eight three-day weekends via July.

The sextet — boasting two longtime Grateful Dead members, guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir and drummer Mickey Hart — made super use of Sphere’s 160,000-square-foot inside display and the band’s iconography all through your entire present.

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It appeared that D&C’s visible content material creators had been closely impressed by how Sphere’s first resident act, U2, used large-scale pictures and video to make the viewers really feel it was exterior the venue. A gaggle of well-known Dead characters — the colourful dancing bears, the terrapins, the cranium and roses — popped up in a number of numbers, probably the most vibrant being Uncle Sam Skeleton joyriding via a technicolor valley throughout “Hell in a Bucket.”

In what could have been the present’s greatest second — and after opener “Feel Like a Stranger” was visually complemented with a scaffolded digital pores and skin that made Sphere seem nonetheless underneath development — the display area behind the stage parted to disclose the band’s authentic San Francisco home within the Haight Ashbury district. As D&C performed “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo,” the venue appeared to “lift” over the home and above the Bay Area, till the band and viewers had been amongst stars in area.

Dead & Company would return to the area motif a number of instances, predictably throughout Mickey Hart’s conventional solo quantity “Space,” and towards the top throughout a canopy of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” when the “Mississippi Half-Step” creative sequence was performed in reverse, bringing everybody again to the Grateful Dead home.

Watch Dead & Company Perform on the Sphere

While the group shuffled in place whereas craning their necks to get as a lot of the enormous display into their line of sight, the band held a principally easygoing groove — thanks largely to bassist Oteil Burbridge — earlier than and through its exploratory jams. Weir and lead guitarist John Mayer traded off vocals whereas additionally layering melodic instrumental prospers with keyboardist and longtime Weir bandmate Jeff Chimenti. On the rear risers, Hart saved time with fellow percussionist Jay Lane, who changed authentic Grateful Dead skinsman Bill Kreutzmann in 2023.

At the residency’s announcement, the musicians promised to carry out distinctive setlists for every of the three weekend exhibits, per longtime band apply. What stays to be seen — at the least till subsequent weekend — is whether or not D&C change up these setlists for subsequent weekends.

Dead followers have a diversified surfeit of ancillary exhibits and actions to get pleasure from all through Las Vegas’ vacationer hall throughout your entire residency, together with late-night exhibits by different acts, two completely different outside “Shakedown Street” marketplaces, a big Dead-centric exhibition contained in the Venetian hotel-casino, and even a nightly pre-party at one of many metropolis’s new hashish consumption lounges, Smoke and Mirrors.

As for the Sphere, no forthcoming performers have been formally introduced, although information reviews declare the Eagles will grow to be fall/winter residents, and nation famous person Zac Brown all however introduced on comic Theo Von’s podcast earlier this week that he’s acquired a Sphere residency lined up for 2025.

Watch Dead & Company Perform on the Sphere

Mike Prevatt is a producer and author for Nevada Public Radio in Las Vegas.

Dead & Company, Las Vegas Sphere, May 16, 2024 Setlist

1. “Feel Like a Stranger”
2. “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo”
3. “Jack Straw”
4. “Bird Song”
5. “Me and My Uncle”
6. “Brown-Eyed Woman”
7. “Cold Rain and Snow”
8. “Uncle John’s Band”
9. “Help on the Way”
10. “Slipknot!”
11. “Franklin’s Tower”
12. “He’s Gone”
13. “Drums”
14. “Space”
15. “Standing on the Moon”
16. “St. Stephen”
17. “Hell in a Bucket”
18. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
19. “Not Fade Away”

Watch Dead & Company Perform ‘Hell in a Bucket’