What is different as Dead & Company returns to sphere: concert review

When Dead & Company returns to Las Vegas’ Sphere For a second residence, the question of many fans is of course what, what, is something, has been updated in 2025?

From Thursday’s opening evening in the dome spot, here is one thing that stands out as much different from last year: when Bob Weir sang the song “Standing on the moon” and came to the line “I see the Gulf of Mexico,” The capacity mass released tremendous joy.

Who knew when Robert Hunter wrote the simple lyric for Grateful death In the 1980s, he money that was to bite his time until it became inadvertently a political applause several decades later?

But this may not be the information about updates of the dead residence you are looking for; Fans and the only sphere-new one will wonder if there has been a complete or partial review of last summer’s spectacular images. The short answer is: The show ’25 still follows about the same template as ’24, with the same video book and a return of some of these favorite visualizer sets, but with maybe 30-40% new eye candy. (At least it was the case on the opening evening; variations in the visual, just like in the set lists, will surely follow at nights 2 and 3 of the first weekend.) In other words, it is an update, but far from a total recovery.

Again, you didn’t really think they would just throw out the ILM-produced opening and close gambit, where the screen slowly zooms out of Haight Ashbury to outer space today and finally zooms back in again to land 1965 SF, did you? It’s not just the best single that Dead & Company and their designers will ever be able to do on the arena; It is probably the best visual any Will ever pull off there, from now until sphere falls into the apocalypse. So for those who have not seen that framing unit yet, and even everyone who did, it is a very recommended overtaking.

The musical performances that the band provides in these shows are really enough reason for a return trip, but for anyone who can really see new pictures as a tip point to make the short, regular back to the city, here are some of the new sets or additions:

“From Mars Hotel” touches alongside the Venetian hotel. The new fan-service visual highlight in Act 2 found the back of the group’s album from 1974 “From The Mars Hotel” which came to life, with six gigantic dresses that took their places behind the little characters on stage. These surreal figures struck alternating poses or just took a place to watch the group … or at least watch a TV apparatus depicted as stationed behind the players. Looking at real actors or dancers strikes still posing for a few minutes at a time, hundreds of meters high, turned out strangely fascinating … In the end, not even as transfixing as the accompanying “Scarlet Begonias” himself. Serious fans who immediately recognized this motif were happy, and even the plus-one who did not know the six characters on the screen from Adam still had something wonderfully colorful to think about.

Uncle Sam has a new destination. Other than the NASA style opening and closing of the show, the visual from the 2024 residence that was least likely to lose the appearance of the dead brand skeleton, which jumped out of the grave to make a happy jig and then jump on a chopper. That video search was of course back, and just that night it was in service for Dead & Company’s version of the traditional standard “Go down the road that was bad” (ironically, because their uncle Sam and his red -haired lady friend seem to feel nothing but good vibes in their wild ride). But now this segment has been expanded, with Skeletor’s Cycle that touches down on the main feature of a stylish resort city which is a Dreamland version of Vegas.

“Drums”/”Space” has brand new pictures … Although it is still ass massage that you are really there. Last year, Mickey Hart’s traditional extended drum “Solo” in the second act had a brilliant moment where photographic reproduction of seemingly his entire percussion collection revolved and danced in the top part of the dome. It’s gone, now, or at least it was absent on the opening evening. But what replaced that motif was just as effective at the moment, if not so conceptually smart. Part of the segment had a painted glass structure on the big screen … With individual squares that crushed and falls off to enable close -up of Handwork of Hart and the two members who accompany him in Banging, Jay Lane and Oteil Burbridge. Another moment had a skeletal drummer that joined the fun, in a mushroom field. Much of it only had a resin head and the hands of the cosmos. But in the end, “drums” is about what you feel, not what you see. And it is worth the price of the seats that are equipped with haptics to experience the thundering good vibrations in your bum and thereafter.

Giant band pixellations made from small dance bears. The first brand new visual to appear in the show on the opening night came with the third issue, “Bertha”, which contained a wall of dancing cartoon bears-a part of the dead traditional animated iconography-shrunken and then formed into pixelled pictures of the band members … IE, a soloing John Mayer Consists of hundreds or thousands of small, marching critters.

A collapsing wall of TV sets. The last song in the first act, “Don’t Ease Me In”, sported a tower of old school TVs that offer either colorful geometric shapes or goopy, melts cartoon animals, before it finally slowly fell to the audience, which was put into one of those giant pictures. The Faux TV sets had a “beep” button on the controls, which talks about how much of the spheres rely on a very sophisticated version of an image-in-image effect.

A changed touchdown in San Francisco at the climax specifically honors both Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh. As mentioned earlier, the second last issue of the show again has the “camera” which begins in the long range of space and being discontinued in front of the San Francisco house where Grateful Dead used to repeat. But there is a difference now. Instead of Newsreel Audio about the crazy hippies, the voiceover hears the audience hears an interview extract from Garcia, which died in 1995. And upstairs in the house has a silhouette that was intended to be understood as Lesh, which passed away last October. It is a remarkable skillful way to pay tribute to both fallen dead founders at the same time.

So the dead & company/sphere visual repertoire has been expanded now … but sometimes the simplest choices are best. There were moments that only had a widescreen B&W image of the live band that floats across the stage that was almost as convincing as everything in a more dazzling-dazzling position.

And it may not have been more satisfactory visual choice than that we sing “standing on the moon” against … no, not a monscape, but a screen of clean, deep blue, even when he sang a lyric that includes a mention of “Indigo.”

What is new visual is what is news here; The fact that Dead & Company makes completely unique set lists every night-or at least completely differentiated during a three-day weekend-is an old, dog-bit-man story. Thursday’s nearly four-hour show did not offer any radically unexpected song selection, with one exception: the concert opened with a cover of Spencer David Group’s “Gimme some lovin”, a song that had never appeared in a set of the offshoot group Dead & Company for the last ten

The truth is said, as welcome as the choice was the fans as a relative news, that more open was not one of the better elections at night; Their arrangement felt relatively slow compared to probably some other version of the valuable rock standard that some audience member has heard over the years. And to hear their more typical version of “Good Lovin ‘” shows up later in the first set felt repetitive, with both covers that basically serve the same function. When the break hit an hour’s point, the band had not yet taken off.

And what happened after the break was astonishingly good. That was whether a pretty good party band had opened up for a absolutely phenomenal. It is not that the first act was without highlights, but the transformative, haunting, unpleasant excellence of what happened in the second “half” (or other two -thirds, really, quantitatively) was proof of what the most discerning part of the audience was really there for: American beauty.

Mayer did an equally brilliant job of leading the band through an epic, possibly best-in-show “Terrapin station” in the second set he did to play the song acoustically on the latest music greets the dead. It would be difficult to hear his extended joints at this exhibition and not immediately jump to the conclusion, not necessarily for the first time, that he is good – and, yes, as soulful – as all electric guitar working today. He collaborates himself in changing streams: part of the time to play by Weir’s rhythm parts, and part of what is involved with pianist Jeff Chimenti in what you can call instrumental dueling, if it was not too grainy term for their graceful interaction.

More and increasingly, Sphinx -like over the years, Weir has completely grown to the role of a shaman in shorts. But if he is somewhat effectless under that beard, contrary to Mayer left no feeling from the table in their facial expressions, there was some doubt about how invested he was Thursday night, Belling “This darkness had to give!” (From “New Speedway Boogie”) as his life and furious-to-the-dying-of-the-light depended on it.

There is a hell of a songbook here. And the dirty little secret with the dead is that the whole “psychedelic” image is a smoke screen for the mother band’s cozy innovation like the original kings in Americana.

But the very best reason for seeing Dead & Company again on the sphere – and there are many, many points of sale – is the number that is not a song at all, IE, the nightly “drums”/”Space” segment. Every member of the band rides on some kind of plateau, but Hart is the one that can reasonably be said to be topped at this moment, as the sphere’s technology allows him to do things with his spotlight -moment that was previously unthinkable. With all respect for fans who want to stand on the floor, or those who cannot afford the premium chairs, there is nothing in the entertainment area at a distance like experiencing resin adventure in rhythm while knowing each template hits through chairs that are equipped to send these sensations throughout the body. It’s as close as someone is likely to combine a magical mountain tour with Bona Fide Mysticism.

And when Hart leaves the stage and the more “melodic” players return for a soft and melodless short jam in his wake, it is a wonderful re -entry that allows the band to live up to the psych representative in some happy free minutes.

After that, ILM takes control of your senses again for the large climax. But it is the band, not the screen, that wins your heart here. This big experiment did not have to last that long, and “death forever” – the official title of housing – cannot live up to its name; See it before your train and theirs pass Terrapin station.

Dead & Company Setlist on the sphere, Las Vegas, March 20, 2025:

Set 1
Gimme some love ‘
Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Todeloo
Bertha
New speedway boogie
Brown women
Good lovin ‘
Easily not in me

Set 2
Feel like a stranger
Scarlet Begonias
Fire on the mountain
Terrapinstation
Drums
Space
Standing on the moon
Althea
Walking down the road and feels bad
Knockin on the door of heaven
Gray