My First Dead & Company Show

Every music fan has a concert or two that changed their lives in one way or another forever. Here’s the story of one that changed mine. 

In late 2017, I discovered that John Mayer was a part of a side project, Dead & Company, featuring three original members of the Grateful Dead. This included Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, with Jeff Chimenti and Oteil Burbridge on keys and bass. The only reason I went to the show in the first place was because I had recently become a massive John Mayer fan and I didn’t get the chance to see him live on his solo tour in support of his album,“The Search for Everything” the previous summer.

Now let me preface the rest of this blog by saying prior to this concert I had heard of the Grateful Dead, but I didn’t really listen to their music or have any expectation of what their shows were like. In fact a couple months before attending the concert I had decided to give the Grateful Dead a listen. At first, I didn’t really like the music or understand what made fans who are aptly named “Deadheads” want to follow them on tour year after year. My prospective on the Grateful Dead’s music all changed on Monday, July 2nd, 2018, at Shoreline Amphitheater. Shoreline being the place where I would later learn the Grateful Dead made their unofficial home playing there a total of 39 times between the venue’s opening in 1987 and their breakup in 1995.

I only recognized one song that Dead and Company would play that night, the 1987 hit “Touch of Grey.” However, I was absolutely floored by the way this music made me feel in the moment and the way it gave me a new prospective on how live music could be played. The rest of that summer I made it a goal of mine to listen to as much of the Grateful Dead catalog as I could, that way when I attended more shows in the future, I would have a better chance of recognizing the songs that the band played.  

I’ll wrap up this post by saying this: there’s a famous lyric in the Grateful Dead song “He’s Gone” where lead guitarist Jerry Garcia sings, “steal your face right off of your head.” Well, I don’t think my face was stolen necessarily but I certainly became a massive fan of both the Grateful Dead and Dead & Company. I always tell people that I went to this show as a John Mayer fan and left a Deadhead, and I’m forever “Grateful” for the experience.