Over the weekend, I attended a four-hour rock show that I can honestly say was the most magnificent feast for the eyes and ears I have ever experienced.
I had been to The Sphere in Las Vegas once before, during its opening run in late 2023. Postcard from Earth was a film directed by Darren Aronofsky; it was his vision of a portrait of our planet reimagined as a sci-fi experience.
If you haven’t been to The Sphere yet, try to wrap your mind around these numbers/features:
The enclosed auditorium is the highest-resolution LED screen in the world at 16,000 x 16,000. It consists of 64,000 smaller LED panels that add up to more than 268 million pixels.
At its broadest point, the structure is 366 feet high by 516 feet wide, making it the largest spherical building in the world.
The seat-shaking sound in the stadium comes booming out of 167,000 individually amplified loudspeakers.
In 2024, The Sphere shattered the record for highest gross revenue for concerts in a year. No venue had ever reached $300 million; The Sphere brought in $420 million.
To be clear, mere words cannot do justice to the incredible sights and sounds that are the product of The Sphere’s unprecedented use of technology. And my friends and I really liked Postcard From Earth. Aronofsky shot it on a customized 18K resolution camera — which requires 12 people to operate. The way he and his crew shot and assembled the film was truly historic.
But it was no Grateful Dead show.
I listened to the Dead a lot more when I was younger. I loved the records they put out in the 70s, in particular Shakedown Street and Terrapin Station. But I was never a super-fan, and had never even gone to one off their concerts — until last Thursday. It was the debut night of their 2025 18-show residency at The Sphere and, in my opinion, an indescribably sublime performance.
The visual narrative of the show starts with an image of the band’s roots in Haight-Ashbury, then launches into outer space and takes your eyes on a truly wild ride. Even if you’re not one of the audience members who are officially tripping, you’re tripping nonetheless. It’s only a matter of degree.
But even with all of that mind-bending technology and imagery, it occurred to me about an hour through the concert that without the fantastic talent, creativity and amazing caliber of performance coming from the six people on stage — it would just be a cool visual show, like Postcard was. The Dead turned The Sphere into an epic and unforgettable human experience.
The preceding might seem like a fairly obvious observation. But in a world that has become suffused in pixels and social media and whatever the latest newfangled tech attraction happens to be this week — my observation felt good. The six guys up there, who all carry unique talent and have honed their skills through rigorous dedication for so many years, well, they still matter. If you’d put an average band up on that stage in The Sphere, the visual riches behind them would still look interesting — but that’s a far cry from “epic.”
In fact, even with all of the glorious visual elements on the world’s biggest screen, I did lean my head over several times, closed my eyes, and just listened. As great at the eye candy was backing up the band, the human element was still the main attraction. Without this legendary group’s masterful long-form versions of their touchstone tunes — plus a few covers — all of the surrounding beauty wouldn’t mean very much.
Technically, the band is now “Dead And Company.” It was started 10 years ago with three of the original Grateful Dead members: Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman. Weir and Hart, at the respective ages of 77 and 81, are still up there playing and sounding amazing. And the additions of John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti and Jay Lane have been the perfect additional pieces to the puzzle.
Mayer’s guitar playing was almost a show in and of itself. Of the 3.5 hours that Dead and Company played, at least 45 minutes were closeups of Mayer picking. And that was the ultimate proof of the value of the human element: During much of Mayer’s playing, the cameras were directly on him — in the midst of pulchritudinous imagery on the massive screen that was his background. But your eyes were transfixed on Mayer’s fingers working the frets and strings like a magician. As long as he was playing, the happy horseshit in the background might as well have been Saturday cartoons.
The beauty, of course, is that it’s not an either/or proposition. The wondrous visuals enhanced the band, and vice versa.
But the bottom line was clear: The musicians were the beating heart of the show. Humans still appreciate humans. Technology may be advancing at what seems like the speed of light — but we haven’t yet lost that sensibility where we are most inspired by what we have the potential to create.
May we always feel that way about each other’s good works. Once they don’t matter anymore, neither do we.
MICHAEL GOLDEN is the cofounder of One Million Degrees, a national award-winning journalist and the author of STAYING ALIVE.
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