SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dead & Company opened it’s three-night final stand at Oracle Park in San Francisco on Friday with “Not Fade Away.”
Two days — and some 11 hours of live music — later, the band closed its touring career on Sunday by playing the exact same song, making for the only repeat of the 50-plus tunes performed over the weekend.
Guess they wanted to drive home a point, one made abundantly clear by the (slightly altered) lyrics in this cherished cover of the Crickets classic:
“You know our love will not fade away.”
And it goes both ways, for sure. Dead & Company used the last weekend of its final tour to show fans how much they’ve meant to the group during its eight-year run — as well as thank them for the prior 50 years of support for its parent band, the Palo Alto-born Grateful Dead — while fans showered their musical heroes with love from the first note of Night 1 to the closing bell on Sunday.
Truly, this is a relationship that is built to last.
The group gave a little extra to fans with this closing show, moving the advertised start time back by an hour (from 7 to 6 p.m.) so that they could let even more songs fill the air. The result was a nearly four-hour performance that had the third consecutive sold-out crowd of the weekend grooving and smiling throughout the night.
The band charged out of the gate, opening the show with a high-adrenaline version of “Bertha” and then upping the ante even higher with the Dead’s well-known cover of the Young Rascals hit “Good Lovin'” before the crowd of 40,000 fans.
Yet, just when it seemed like they might keep the peddle to the metal for the majority of the first set, the musicians — vocalist-guitarists Bob Weir and John Mayer, drummers Mickey Hart and Jay Lane, bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti — went the other direction and really slowed things down with a double shot of “Loser” and “Althea.”
The mood changed with the up-tempo “Samson and Delilah,” which was notably one of the relatively few “Bobby songs” (Grateful Dead that traditionally featured lead vocals from Weir) performed over the weekend.
The highlight of Set 1 was the cover of Traffic’s soaring “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” with Mayer doing an outstanding job interpreting Steve Winwood’s career-highlight guitar solo. The group ended up taking this song into the stratosphere and then back down to earth for a joyous snippet of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” — the extremely satisfying “Na-na-na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey, Jude” part — before settling into a set-closing “Bird Song.”
Following a short break, Dead & Company opened what would turn out to be a two-hour second set with “Help on the Way.” Having kept the jamming somewhat under check during the first half of the night, the group really opened up as it delved deep into “Franklin’s Tower,” “Estimated Prophet” and “Eyes of the World.”
The trio of tunes definitely set the mood for “Drums” and “Space,” the exploratory percussion-and-noodling segment that has been utilized by generations of Deadheads as the right time to make a run to the bathroom. I’ve always felt that if you took a poll that half of the fans would say that they don’t actually enjoy “Drums”/”Space” — and that the other half would be lying.
Yet, this “Space” trip resulted in one of the big treats of the weekend, as a massive drone show lit up the sky above Oracle Park and wowed the crowd by creating some amazingly precise images (most notably, the Grateful Dead’s signature “steal your face” skull).
Dead & Company finished up the second set with a nicely meditative “Days Between” that led into a pair of high-octane numbers — “Cumberland Blues” and “Sugar Magnolia” — and then returned for an encore that included all-time favorites “Truckin'” and “Brokedown Palace.”
Then it was time — one last time — for “Not Fade Away.”
“A love for real not fade away.”
And that lyric will continue to describe the relationship between these fans and this music long after the memory of Dead & Company’s final tour begins to fade away.
Set list (July 16, 2023)
Set 1:
1. “Bertha”
2. “Good Lovin'”
3. “Loser”
4. “High Time”
5. “Samson and Delilah”
6. “Althea”
7. “Dear Mr. Fantasy” (with “Hey Jude” snippet)
8. “Bird Song”
Set 2:
9. “Help on the Way”
10. “Slipknot!”
11. “Franklin’s Tower”
12. “Estimated Prophet”
13. “Eyes of the World”
14. “Drums”
15. “Space”
16. “Days Between”
17. “Cumberland Blues”
18. “Sugar Magnolia”
Encore:
19. “Truckin'”
20. “Brokedown Palace”
21. “Not Fade Away”
