Dead & Company

Dead & Company is an American rock band formed in 2015, bringing together three surviving core members of the Grateful Dead — guitarist and vocalist Bob Weir, and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann — with guitarist and vocalist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge, and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti. The group was built around performing the Grateful Dead's extensive song catalog for both longtime fans and a new generation of listeners.Mayer's involvement grew out of a personal discovery of the Grateful Dead in 2011, when a Pandora recommendation led him to "Althea" from the 1980 album Go to Heaven. Struck by Jerry Garcia's guitar playing, Mayer worked his way through the band's catalog over the following years. A creative connection with Bob Weir developed in February 2015 when the two performed together during Mayer's guest-hosting stint on The Late Late Show. Around the same time, the surviving Grateful Dead members were preparing the "Fare Thee Well" fiftieth-anniversary shows, and Mayer began learning the repertoire in earnest, a process that led directly to the formation of Dead & Company later that year.The band's first tour ran from October through December 2015, opening with performances at Madison Square Garden that drew strong notices from the music press. Touring became a near-annual pattern in the years that followed: a 2016 run added the group's first festival appearance, at Bonnaroo, plus stadium dates at Citi Field and Fenway Park. A 2017 tour was cut short in December when Mayer required an emergency appendectomy. In February 2018 the band began an annual destination-concert tradition, "Playing in the Sand," at a resort in Riviera Maya, Mexico, alongside its regular summer tours. Touring continued through 2019, including a run of New Year's shows in Inglewood and San Francisco billed as a "Fun Run."The COVID-19 pandemic cut short a January 2020 run of Playing in the Sand shows in Cancún and forced the cancellation of the remaining dates that year. The band resumed touring in 2021, during which Jay Lane stepped in for Bill Kreutzmann at several shows, including Red Rocks and the Hollywood Bowl, after Kreutzmann was sidelined by a respiratory illness. A further summer tour followed in 2022.In September 2022 the band announced that its 2023 summer tour would be its last as a touring act. The following April, Kreutzmann announced he would not take part, citing a shift in creative direction, and Jay Lane took over on drums for the run. Billed as the Final Tour, the 2023 shows ran from May through July, drew more than 840,000 attendees across the country, and concluded with concerts in San Francisco.Rather than ending the group's activity altogether, the band shifted to a residency format in Las Vegas. "Dead Forever: Live at Sphere" ran for thirty shows between May and August 2024 at the Sphere venue, selling roughly 477,000 tickets and grossing more than $131 million, placing it among the highest-grossing concert residencies staged anywhere. A second Sphere residency followed in the spring of 2025, marking the band's tenth anniversary and including tributes to former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, who had died in October 2024.In August 2025 the band returned to San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for a run of shows celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the Grateful Dead's formation, with opening sets from Billy Strings, Sturgill Simpson, and Trey Anastasio Band. Those performances are now regarded as Bob Weir's final concert appearances: he died on January 10, 2026, at age 78, closing out the era of Grateful Dead founding members performing with the band.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.