(Spin Magazine) Dead & Company's Last Ride

The crowd in San Francisco, the Dead’s spiritual home (Credit: Josh Hitchens)

By Jeff Weiss (Spin Magazine)

By the end of the tour, I consider them all my friends. The glacially spinning pranayama wizards with their flowing Gandalfian beards and art-teacher ponytails. The middle-aged schlubs with Titleist dad hats and 24-ounce Coors cans, subtly revealing their tribal affiliation via the dancing bear on their striped polos. The writhing moon goddesses in celestial white linen, beholden to neither human nor lease, vagabonds with steal-your-soul smiles, divining off-kilter rhythms from the dark star void. The itinerant vegan grilled cheese entrepreneurs scrounging enough for gas from town-to-town in hopes of a miracle, the human mandalas with velvet loin cloths and wayfarer sandals. The wheelchair-bound Vietnam vets with mangy roaming dogs, bellowing about encroaching fascism and reminding us in a hacksaw voice: “If they’re not a Dead Head don’t trust them!”

We’re gathered for a weird communion: to receive the sacraments from the wry cowboy prophet, Bob Weir, to lay roses and skulls before the shrine of St. Jerome Garcia, to fare Dead & Company well. After all, this is their “last tour,” which drew 840,000 pilgrims to 28 shows and grossed $115 million, almost the average team payroll of the baseball stadiums they’re playing in. The three hottest tickets of the summer of 2023 are Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and the descendants of a band who achieved notoriety electrifying the acid tests alongside The Merry Pranksters, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, the Hells Angels, and the hero of 1957’s On the Road (briefly Weir’s roommate). 

Even though they have not ascended to the great drums/space in the sky, original bassist Phil Lesh and drummer Bill Kreutzmann are absent. But The Dead has always been more symbolic than literal. Weir ensures the unbroken chain. Drummer Mickey Hart valiantly kicks up nebulae alongside three of the most talented substitutes recruitable in Oteil Burbridge (bass), Jeff Chimenti (keyboards), and Jay Lane (drums). Of course, there is John Mayer (lead guitar and vocals) whose career metamorphosis over the last eight years has only been exceeded by the Daniels’ going from the directors of the “Turn Down for What” video to cleanly sweeping the Oscars. 

More needs to be explained, but it is inexplicable to the unconverted. What I can tell you is that for a few hours, the traveling carnival promises a temporary asylum from the branded cons and schizoid alienation of modern life. These days, there are always caveats. You will have to ignore the 80-foot green steel Coca-Cola bottle at Oracle Park, the site of the final three shows, a one-time play slide until kids starting breaking their legs and parents started suing. You need to blot out the cruel erosions of time, the Soviet lines, the tickets that cost a car payment or two, the Salesforce vice presidents in greyscale Patagonia, who mistook the Dead’s quest for personal salvation and psychic freedom as justification for late Capitalist manifest destiny. You will have to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of one of Taylor Swift’s exes “crooning “Friend of the Devil” to you. Ok, that sort of makes sense.  

Maybe calling us all friends isn’t entirely accurate. We are something more like co-conspirators, a mutant caste united by our allegiance to these psalms forged from woozy jug band skiffs and ragged Appalachian folk, muddy river country and moonshine string music, hellhound blues and avant-garde jazz, jukebox rock n’roll and Beat poems, after-midnight soul and Monterey purple psychedelia, sleazy insomniac disco and grandiose prog epics. A songbook ripped from the imagination of American pulp lore: tall tales of charismatic bandits and cuckolded bigamists, coked-up train conductors and Hollywood vampires, deceitful hustlers and born deadbeats.