The Last Days of Dead and Company

Dead and Company, the latest incarnation of the Grateful Dead, finished their "Final Tour" in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. I resisted the temptation to watch the webcasts of the final shows; I'm too old to sit up until 2:00 a.m. watching a concert on TV, though I would have gladly gone to see them play if they had deigned to come to Toronto.

I don't have the emotional connection to Dead and Company that I had to the Grateful Dead, who I saw eight times over three decades. The music I heard from them over the years before COVID hit seemed aimless and unfocused. But something changed over the last couple of years and the shows this year were as good as most of the Dead shows I attended. They had obviously jelled as a band. You can judge for yourself; go to relisten.net and pick a recent show. 

Sadie Santini Garner was able to follow Dead and Company on the last part of their tour and saw the final ten shows. She writes about her experience in The Ringer. It's one of the best essays I've read about the Dead, their music, and the scene that's grown up around them. 

But over the course of eight years and 235 shows, Dead and Company performed several miracles. They lasted longer than any post-Garcia configuration of Grateful Dead members—a genuine feat considering the level of animosity and manipulation among those surviving players—and consistently played to crowds that rivaled those the Dead drew in the heady gate-crashing days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they were the biggest touring act in the country. Those bigger crowds in turn rekindled the parking-lot scene that has been part of Dead culture since the late 1970s at a scale not seen since the days of Garcia. Though they fastidiously refused to expand it, Dead and Company developed a genuinely new way of performing and presenting what is almost certainly the greatest and most dynamic songbook any American rock band has ever produced.

But perhaps most important, they maintained and ultimately solidified the legacy of the Grateful Dead—not so much as a band but as the originators of a distinct form. Though it may seem unlikely when artists of their generation are selling off their catalogs for nine digits, no rock band of any era will be remembered as fondly as them. Most musicians understand their primary medium to be the studio recording, which makes sense—you can maintain control in the studio, and the songs are placed on a gallery wall and can be admired like paintings. They are, essentially, finished. But by understanding their music as something that should be made fresh night after night for new fans, year after year and decade after decade, the Grateful Dead suggested that their songs are never complete. There is no final version; there’s not even a definitive live version.