How John Mayer saved the Grateful Dead

Next summer, Dead & Company will embark on their final tour. The ensemble features three of the core members that made up the classic lineup of the Grateful Dead: guitarist and vocalist Bob Weir, and drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart. To fill out the rest of the music, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and bassist Oteil Burbridge have stepped in to bring classic Dead songs to life. But there’s one more important element to Dead & Company: guitarist and singer John Mayer.

Of course, Mayer was already well-known before joining Dead & Co. As a solo artist, Mayer became a favourite of the burgeoning acoustic pop movement of the early 2000s. Later on, Mayer shifted his focus over to blues rock with his eponymous John Mayer Trio. After a couple of notorious years as a tabloid figure, Mayer settled into a quieter life of making music. But in 2015, a chance encounter with the music of the Grateful Dead changed his life.

“A station that wasn’t far genetically from the Dead played ‘Althea’ and I heard this riff and went, ‘What’s that?’,” Mayer told Billboard in 2015. “I actually came in from being outside in the pool, I was dripping wet and had to see what was on the iPod. From there, I went [on] to know a few songs and started recognizing pieces of songs … I feel like my generation also has SiriusXM to thank. The Grateful Dead station on Sirius is its own experience, especially if you drive. If you live in Los Angeles, it’s such a brilliant way to score the commute. That was my entrance into it — how you could cut across town and sit there in traffic and listen to a dozen classic rock songs or you could just sort of drift and watch the sun go down or look at the billboards and take it in on a really abstract level.”

In early 2015, Mayer was tapped to guest host The Late Late Show and asked Weir to perform ‘Althea’ with him. From there, the two kept in touch and bounced the idea of performing Grateful Dead songs in a new band. Weir, Kreutzmann, and Hart were rehearsing with fellow Dead member Phil Lesh for the ‘Fare Thee Well’ 50th anniversary shows planned that summer, with Trey Anastasio from Phish tapped to fill in the lead guitar role traditionally held by Jerry Garcia.

“I was doing preliminary get-togethers with Trey, kicking around the material,” Weir told Rolling Stone in 2016. “Trey is also a monster musician. If I had to make a broad categorization, John is a classicist by nature. Trey is more of an iconoclast. They’re both explorers, someone who’s happy to break tradition. Juxtaposing Trey’s take on the material with the insights John brings got me looking at all of the songs afresh. I look forward to playing with Trey again, any old time. But I am really eager to get back out with John-boy and chase the music around, get to know each other.”

So that’s exactly what they did. Since ‘Fare Thee Well’ was conceived as the final performance of the Grateful Dead, Lesh decided not to participate in Dead & Company, preferring to minimize his large-scale touring and instead tour smaller venues with his own group, Phil Lesh & Friends. Chimenti was already involved with the ‘Fare Thee Well’ concerts and had previously played with Weir and Lesh in RatDog. Burbridge came highly recommended from The Allman Brothers Band, and soon the permanent lineup of Dead & Company was set.

In the 20 years since Garcia’s death in 1995, Grateful Dead fandom hadn’t diminished. In fact, it continued to grow and bring in fans of new generations, so much so that Deadheads became one of the biggest fandoms in the entire world of entertainment. Documentary projects and Martin Scorsese-helmed biopics dovetailed with official live releases from within the Grateful Dead business wing, which is still very much a present-tense concern. Even though Garcia’s death put an official end to the Grateful Dead, in a strange way, the Dead are still one of America’s biggest bands.

The widespread appreciation and acknowledgement of the Dead only grew once Dead & Company hit the road for the first time in 2015. With each subsequent tour, audiences continued to diversify and grow while the intraband dynamics shifted as well. Originally, Weir took on the role of lead vocalist almost exclusively. As they continued to get more comfortable, Mayer, Burbridge, and Chimenti stepped up to the mic at different points to give lead vocals a try, with Mayer becoming more fitting into the Garcia role. Although there was rampant scepticism around Mayer’s tenure when it was first announced, many fans now can’t image hearing Dead & Company without him.

Mayer’s desire to carry on the legacy of the Grateful Dead stuck with Weir so much that he spoke of keeping Dead & Company going after each of the original members had passed away. “We were playing…and suddenly I was viewing this from about 20 feet behind my head, and I looked over at John from that point of view, and it was 20 years later, and John was almost fully grey,” Weir recalled of a vision he had in 2016. “I looked over at Oteil, and his hair was white. I looked over to my left, and Jeff’s hair was all grey.” [Then, looking to where he, Hart and Kreutzmann would be playing,] it was new guys, younger guys holding forth, doing a great job…playing with fire and aplomb… It changed my whole view of what it is that we’re up to.”

There’s no telling who will carry the torch for the Grateful Dead after all of the original members pass on, but John Mayer was undoubtedly instrumental in keeping the legacy of the band alive across the last decade.

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