The Dead back to life
S I N G E R - S O N G W R I T E R J o h n Mayer proudly declared himself a “Deadhead” as he defended members of the Grateful Dead in their decision to regroup after playing what was supposed to be the band’s final tour this summer.
Mayer is rehearsing north of San Francisco with three of the four remaining members of the band for an autumn tour that starts on October 29 in New York, months after the Dead played to devoted fans who, in some cases, paid thousands of dollars for sold- out shows in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Chicago.
“I don’t know of any Deadhead in the world who said, ‘ When I paid my money, I paid to see these guys finish this’,” Mayer said this week in the Marin County recording studios of singer and guitarist Bob Weir.
Members of the Grateful Dead on Monday announced a largely free show in New York after a recent farewell reunion by the rock legends brought out massive interest.
Dead & Company – as the new version of the band calls itself after retiring the Grateful Dead name in July – opened an online sweepstakes for tickets to a newly added November 7 show at Madison Square Garden.
The band will randomly select 5000 winners, who will each receive two tickets. The 10,000 tickets would account for about half the capacity of the iconic arena.
Dead & Company did not immediately announce plans for the rest of the tickets but said that the show will also be live- streamed.
The band has already sold out two nights at Madison Square Garden on what started as a one- off show but has mushroomed into a 23- date nationwide tour.
The tour brought grumbling among some Grateful Dead fans, known as Deadheads, who feared that a band that represented the hippie- era spirit was embracing raw capitalism. The ticket giveaway could present the band with the now familiar problem of scalpers, after some seats for the Grateful Dead’s “Fare Thee Well” reunion shows from June 27 to July 5 went on resale for thousands of dollars.
Those five shows had been billed as the band’s last.
Held in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area, the band’s birthplace, the tour generated more than $ 50 million, according to an estimate by music industry journal Billboard.
The Grateful Dead, which brought elements of jazz and the blues to heavily improvisational rock, won a devoted following starting in the 1960s, in part through groundbreaking outreach to fans.
Many fans would follow the band from show to show, recording and swapping bootleg tapes of the concerts and enjoying a communal camp environment that often included marijuana.
Dead & Company features three of the “core four” Dead members – guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann.
Guitarist and vocalist Trey Anastasio will be replaced in Dead & Company by Grammy- winner Mayer.