N64 Presents: The Grateful Dead*

Pics from the Sphere & Cabana 301

Jul 22, 2024

It was my first Dead show, unless you count the night I walked the lot at Deer Creek in 1991, and of course I don’t. I can’t count the gig at the Sphere, either, right? Setlists online mark the Dead songs as covers. Do Deadheads put Dead & Co. nights in their show count? Are they using asterisks?

Were they playing the hits? I’m no deep listener to the Grateful Dead, but I knew most of the songs. They did a couple Dylan tunes, and I thought about OG Dead and Dylan touring together in the late ‘80s, at Bob’s lowest and least cool.

In 1991, I went to the amphitheater with some straight-edge punks. I was a teenage Christian dork, newly turned onto the underground and blending in with them under cover of convenient overlapping moral creeds. We didn't have tickets to the show. We went to make fun of shit.

When I told a friend from those days that I was going to the Sphere, he texted, "Okay, bridge kid." That's what we called the stoners in their drug rugs who loitered at the end of Broad Ripple Avenue dangling their feet over a canal coming off White River. We hung in front of Roses & Lollipops, a few blocks away.

"I bet those kids were nicer and more fun than we were," I replied.

"1000 percent," my friend agreed.

"I bet they didn't make fun of each other."

"Definitely not," he said.

"I bet they didn't even make fun of us," I said.

"I bet you're right. They would have gone, 'Those guys? Those are the straight-edgers. They're cool. The no drugs/no drinking thing is weird, but whatever man.'"

The first set in Vegas was only 34 minutes. Does that mean they were having an off night? A friend said he thought Mayer and the keyboard player were musically bickering, but I don’t know how much the performance matters. The stage and band disappear in the periphery as you crane your head around the screen.

A show at the Sphere combines two muscled-up versions of things you’ve seen before: a band playing an arena and an IMAX movie. What do you want from a show? I want transcendent moments; as many as you can cram into a night. Dead & Co. checked the box a few times. For me, it happened on the screen. I’m sure real heads would say a few musical moments took off, too, in the second set.

A fun game among music-biz peeps is brainstorming a list of acts who should and could play the Sphere. To knock off socks, you gotta spend crazy money on the video, then play so many nights to pay for it and also keep yourself very rich. Somebody told me one single edit to the video means two full days to re-render the show. To do it right and go all the way is not just pricy, but painstaking.

Apparently, there are ten trillion speakers in there. There are haptics in the chairs. But oddly, it only sounded loud and full, and the seats were only thumping during “Drums and Space.” I don’t get why they didn’t use that stuff for the whole show rather than saving it for the least number of people listening, the least number of bodies in seats, so many getting beer or going to pee.

As legend has it, Phish lost money to do their four-night run earlier this year. A friend who saw one of those shows reported the audio and video were on 11 the whole night. Another friend saw U2 and echoed that they used the building to its fullest. Dead & Co. didn’t appear to take that route. People threw around some numbers, who knows how true, but even if they’re in the ballpark, Dead & Co. went nowhere near as hard as those other two.

But there were moments! I loved the multi-colored smoke that started behind the band and rose in billows to fill the building. The reboot of the psychedelic oil and light shows worked well. The skeleton on a motorcycle ride was alright, and the paint-by-number coloring book scene with the giant rainbow was strong. There was a little cabin in the distance of that one, a tiny man with a white beard on the porch playing a banjo. It was the only Jerry reference I saw until the end, when a high school yearbook-ass homage of photos rolled out. The Jerry cartoon moved me more.

The real-life landscapes beat out much of the animated stuff. It was great when the video got a restrained digital touch, like a single dancing bear walking a mountaintop, but the temptation to go too far often won out. The bear would duplicate 100 times and kill the vibe.

The star of the show is a shot that starts in front of the famous house on Haight Street. The camera zooms out of the neighborhood, out of San Francisco, out of the cloud cover, out of Cali, out of the country, the earth, the atmosphere, and the galaxy, going deep space. It’s a legitimate thrill and one of the select spots in the show when the venue is weightless and floating.

I’m afraid the 200-foot live shots of the band get tiresome, jamming on fake jumbotrons at a comically low-res digital wall of sound or singing inside spinning stealies ala iMac screensaver 2005. Often the boring or bad scenes go on too long. At one point, the band played forever in a rainforest, the peak of the show’s Nintendo 64 energy. One of my favorite comments came late in the set: “Look how bad that planet looks.” It had been hanging over our heads for several minutes.

I kept thinking about Fugazi during the show. I was in DC on a punk rock road trip the day Jerry died. I was with Dischord luminaries when the news broke, surprised by their reverence. Like an idiot, I expected them to talk shit. At the time, I’d heard one Dead song, maybe two. These days, as an elderly gentleman, when I think about the purest American rock bands, I can talk myself into putting Fugazi or the Dead on top of the list.

I went to Vegas with a group of six dudes. Generously, 2.25 of us are bone fide Grateful Dead fans. The rest of us went for the building and the hang, and both delivered. A few weeks removed from the gig, it’s an amusement park ride in my mind more than a concert, but it was 100% a blast. A group text of inside jokes kept rolling long after we left town. There’s talk of regrouping for another act at the Sphere.

I’ve got to acknowledge the absurdity of flying to Vegas to see this band. Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac to the extreme. We doubled down on day two with a cabana by the pool, where we ordered massive fruit plates and multiple entrees between sessions in the water, then went for a casual dinner with high-end food.