Dead & Company’s Co-Manager on How the Band ‘Found a New Gear’ at Sphere — and If They’d Do It Again

Surely many Dead Heads took in multiple performances of Dead & Company’s 30-date residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere this past spring and summer. It’s unlikely, however, that many of them saw more than Bernie Cahill.

Cahill — who, as a founding partner at Activist Artists Management, co-manages Dead & Company with Irving Azoff and Steve Moir — caught 20 Dead Forever shows at the fantastical, $2.3 billion venue, with his box suite perch offering impeccable views of the band as it seemed to lift off from the Grateful Dead’s former house in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district and hurtle into deep space.

“This definitely was a work in progress,” Cahill tells Billboard. “We were adding new content as late as the final weekend. We feel like we had made a commitment to the fans that we would continue to evolve the show and deliver, and we did.“

The run made Dead & Company the third group to play Sphere after U2 opened the venue last September and Phish put on a three-night run of shows this past April. Dead Forever grossed $121.5 million and sold 429,000 tickets over 27 shows from May 16-Aug. 3, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore.

Here, Cahill talks about helping break in the cutting-edge venue, bringing Dead Heads to Vegas and why, if asked, they’d likely do it all over again.  

Was there a sense of learning as the residency went on, and if so, what were those lessons? 

Getting in that room and dealing with the audio and some of the basics of not having amplified sound on stage, you learn a lot. Obviously, Irving had just gone through it with U2, so we definitely had a leg up and were lucky that U2 shared so much institutional knowledge with us.

But still, until you get in that room, you just don’t know what you’re in for, so it was a constant evolution. Every single night we were learning things about the room, the audio, the content. Sometimes we would see new content that we would have, and it would just pop and be remarkable, and other times it didn’t always work exactly as it was envisioned. That’s just part of the process of this new medium and new canvas. 

I imagine by the end, you have this performance that feels really fully formed, because you’ve developed it over the course of all these shows.

I feel like the guys were inspired as well. They found a new gear at the Sphere. Maybe part of it is the residency, part of it is the challenge of doing something new. I think that was huge for them. You’ve been doing this for particularly as long as Bob [Weir] and Mickey [Hart] have, and I think they were really fired up about the challenge of it. They leaned into all parts of it without ever losing sight of the songs. They were just knocking it out of the park. After the final tour, I didn’t think the band could get much tighter and better, and they pulled it off. 

Do you feel they were leveling up because they had to compete with this fantastical thing they were in? 

Yes, there’s some of that. But also, they were looking for ways to make this a complimentary integration of their visual storytelling and their music. With this immersive experience happening around you when you’re on that stage, I think they probably felt — and it shows — that they needed to deliver it at another level musically, and they did. I think the room invites that.

Were there unforeseen challenges that came up over the course of the residency? 

Lots. [Laughs] I think some of the bigger ones were just things Derek Featherstone, our tour director and front-of-house engineer, had to manage, which was we had less rehearsal than we probably would have liked. When we’re loading in after they show the [Darren] Aronofsky movie [during the daytime], for instance, and we can’t do a full tech run-through of new content, that can be scary and flying without a net a bit. But I think what we see in our granular understanding of the show and then the fan experience, I don’t think they felt any of that stress or worry.

Were you finding that fans were going again and again, or was it more of a one-off experience for people?

Definitely repeat. There were so many repeats, and I think people were really gratified that they were doing more than just a show or more than just one weekend. We had people that saw shows every weekend. Most people saw at least two or three shows. That’s kind of the magic of this band and this community. They know that at a minimum, Bob and John [Mayer] are going tell a story over the weekend and they’re not going to repeat any songs. That story would unfold Thursday, Friday, Saturday, almost like a three-act play. That really appealed to our community.

Having done this, what advice would you give to a manager whose group is about to play the Sphere?

Well, for one thing, learn as much as you can from folks like U2 and Dead & Co. and Phish that have done it. We’re an open book, we’ll share whatever we can. We made mistakes, and we learned a lot, and we’re happy to share that with other artists that are coming after us.

Being a band that has always had visuals as a prominent part of the storytelling helped us a lot. It was very natural for us to explore that and go much deeper at the Sphere. I think bands that come after us who have those visual elements as a part their story and their brand will have an easier time creating their show. I would just advise to get started as soon as you can and don’t stop pushing the margin, either. Keep going with it and keep exploring and experimenting throughout your run. 

The venue also really makes sense for a band with such a long a rich history, because the show so effectively leaned into that visually. Obviously, that’s not something a newer act can really do. 

True. We have this very rich palette to draw from, and it really clicked in this venue. Yes, there were the crazy moments when it felt very 3D and hurtling through space. Then there were the analog moments and, I think, important emotional moments where the band was just connecting, whether it was Bob playing while standing on the moon and the ballads that just brought everybody to a whisper. I guess the other advice would be to strike that balance of those emotional, analog-feeling moments and then playing with the technology and how big you can go.

It was touching, thinking about the life of Bob Weir and where he and Mickey are coming from and now, they’re effectively playing in a spaceship.

Yeah, exactly. But by the way, it’s very Bob Weir if you know him. He loves technology.  They’re all really technophiles. They love it. I think they love anything that allows them to go deeper with their storytelling and their exploration of this music. That is a gift to these artists, and I think is a big part of why the Sphere worked so well and was such a success.

Would they try it again? 

When asked in interviews they’ve done since, I think they’ve all said they would definitely entertain an invite and would love to come back and do some things. Bob wants to really lean into this idea of being able to affect the visuals in real time and synching them more with the music itself.

But there were already some interesting things happening in that room that I don’t know if people even realized. [One night] there was a full moon outside, and we beamed the actual live full moon into the Sphere. That wasn’t video. That was a Weir idea.

If you were to do another residency, is there anything you would change?

Jim Dolan, you have to give him so much credit. He nailed it with this venue, which is impeccable in almost every way, from the backstage where we all spent most of our time, to front of house. Maybe [it would be] having a bit more time to rehearse, more tech rehearsal, just getting comfortable in the Sphere, because it’s one of one. It’s the only one in the world.

I’m curious how everyone fared at not just a singular venue, but a singular city, and an extremely hot one in the summer. How did everyone deal with what seemed like it was perhaps a generally intense scenario?

Different band members dealt with it different ways, but I think what seemed to be the best way was staying put in Vegas, rent a house and not stay in a casino and make the most of what is a pretty beautiful place when you get a little bit outside of town, with the backdrop of the mountains.

The residency itself was great because — being in Vegas, it’s dry, it’s hot — but it’s still better than being on trains, planes and automobiles and what that does to your body when you’re on a routed tour and every day you’re off to a to a new city. The residency was great. The band loved it. The crew loved it. The reviews on Vegas were way better than we thought. The culinary scene there is incredible, obviously, and there’s a lot to love. If you’re an outdoorsy active person, there’s a lot to do in and around Vegas.

Was there anything remarkable to you about what felt to like a kind of strange juxtaposition of Dead Heads in Vegas?

Totally. It’s so funny you mention that because, yes, it’s like any other time you go to Vegas, you don’t see a lot of tie-dye. There’s a lot of history, obviously, with Grateful Dead in Vegas, first of all. But what felt like maybe not a perfect fit for Dead Heads in the community ended up being really quite wonderful. 

My partner, Red Tanner, produced a pop-up at the Venetian. It was amazing. It had a cinema built into it and a lounge. We were probably doing 4,000 or 5,000 people a day through the pop up, and they would hang out. Seeing these Dead Heads, whether at the pop-up, or at the Sphere, or just walking around Vegas, it all started to make sense after a while. It really did. As odd as it is to say about Vegas, it felt like home.