Quote:Roving bazaar of all things Grateful Dead hits Las Vegas
Shayne Dunn sells floral headbands at Shakedown Street at the Tuscany Suites on Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Las Vegas. Shakedown Street is a vending and tailgating space before Dead and Company concerts. Named after a Grateful Dead song, it began in the early 1980s. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal)
Grateful Dead themed ornaments for sale are seen at Shakedown Street at the Tuscany Suites on Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Las Vegas. Shakedown Street is a vending and tailgating space before Dead and Company concerts. Named after a Grateful Dead song, it began in the early 1980s. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal)
Grateful Dead fans check out merchandise at Shakedown Street at the Tuscany Suites on Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Las Vegas. Shakedown Street is a vending and tailgating space before Dead and Company concerts. Named after a Grateful Dead song, it began in the early 1980s. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal)
Wooden art for sale by Om Grown Art is seen at Shakedown Street at the Tuscany Suites on Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Las Vegas. Shakedown Street is a vending and tailgating space before Dead and Company concerts. Named after a Grateful Dead song, it began in the early 1980s. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal)
Grateful Dead merchandise is seen at Shakedown Street at the Tuscany Suites on Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Las Vegas. Shakedown Street is a vending and tailgating space before Dead and Company concerts. Named after a Grateful Dead song, it began in the early 1980s. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal)
Grateful Dead themed clothing is seen at Shakedown Street at the Tuscany Suites on Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Las Vegas. Shakedown Street is a vending and tailgating space before Dead and Company concerts. Named after a Grateful Dead song, it began in the early 1980s. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal)
Wooden art by Om Grown Art is seen on a display at Shakedown Street at the Tuscany Suites on Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Las Vegas. Shakedown Street is a vending and tailgating space before Dead and Company concerts. Named after a Grateful Dead song, it began in the early 1980s. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal)
A cardboard cutout of John Mayer sports a Grateful Dead shirt at a booth inside of Shakedown Street at the Tuscany Suites on Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Las Vegas. Shakedown Street is a vending and tailgating space before Dead and Company concerts. Named after a Grateful Dead song, it began in the early 1980s. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal)
Grateful Dead buttons and patches for sale are seen at Shakedown Street at the Tuscany Suites on Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Las Vegas. Shakedown Street is a vending and tailgating space before Dead and Company concerts. Named after a Grateful Dead song, it began in the early 1980s. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal)
A skeleton sports merchandise for sale at Shakedown Street at the Tuscany Suites on Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Las Vegas. Shakedown Street is a vending and tailgating space before Dead and Company concerts. Named after a Grateful Dead song, it began in the early 1980s. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

By Jason Bracelin Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 31, 2024 - 6:21 pm

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Updated June 1, 2024 - 11:32 am

The parking lot has moved indoors.
There’s carpet beneath our feet in place of asphalt, but all of the rainbow-colored tie-dye T-shirts, the skull-festooned dog collars and the meticulously crafted, throwback vomit receptacles have remained in place.
“I’ll get you a barf bag,” our tour guide says by way of introduction.
And with that, Robert Shatzer leads us into a side room on the second floor of the Tuscany on Thursday afternoon and hands us an exact replica of a Grateful Dead airsickness sack from the ’70s, whose dimensions he re-created within an eighth of an inch of the original.
“Boogie Till You Barf,” it reads beneath the band’s signature “Steal Your Face” logo.
The Dead used to package merch in bags like this decades ago, he notes.
The only difference nowadays?
The bottom line of print on the paper container: “Shakedown Vegas 2024,” it commemorates.
With the [url=https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/entertainment-columns/kats/livin-on-dead-company-extend-sphere-series-into-august-3058012/]Dead & Company back in town at the Sphere this weekend, so is Shakedown Street, the roving bazaar of all-things Grateful Dead, from car emblems to clocks to patches to jewelry to infant onesies.
Shatzer is one of the main reasons it’s here, having worked for months to bring the Shakedown to Vegas, celebrating the occasion — naturally — by reproducing the aforementioned barf bags.
The Shakedown dates to the early ’80s, when a traveling crew of vagabond vendors/Dead diehards began setting up shop outside the group’s gigs, peddling everything from food to water to just about every kind of handmade ware you can imagine — and perhaps the occasional illicit substance.
“We’re chaos. We’re a gypsy caravan circus,” explains Tuber Lorentz, a shaggy, affable Colorado native selling tie-dye shirts. He’s been following the band since the early ’90s. “We pop up in the city, and it’s ‘Whoa!’ And then we pack it all up at the end of the night and we’re off.”
The Shakedown has always been more than a place to score Grateful Dead-themed pet gear, though: It’s a party, a gathering place before and after shows, the spot where Deadheads head to feel at home when away from home.
For this communal, come-as-you are crowd, the main attraction here isn’t the merch: It’s one another.
“It’s a place to see all of our family in one spot,” says Sunshine Powers, who runs San Francisco’s Love on Haight art and clothing shop, which has a booth here.
“A chosen family,” clarifies Jenny Aiken, co-owner of Atlanta-based Om Grown Art company, which specializes in custom-made crafts cut from wood.
But Dead & Company’s Vegas stint provided a challenge for all involved here: The Sphere has no traditional parking lot or large, available spaces nearby, so where was the Shakedown to go?
Enter Shatzer, who grew up in the Bay Area — birthplace of the Dead — but who’s lived in Henderson for the past decade.
Along with friends and fellow vendors Liora Soladay and Molly Henderson, the trio set out to find a way to bring the festivities to Vegas.
Doing so was no easy endeavor for this easygoing bunch: hosting the event at a casino — initially in the parking lot during the first two weeks of the Dead & Company’s Sphere residency and then moving indoors to a convention space as temperatures rose — meant navigating something very un-Dead-like: red tape.
“What these guys have done to pull it off here, it’s a feat itself,” Lorentz marvels. “To get all these hippies to sign up for business licenses and tax permits and all that other stuff, it’s monumental that they’ve pulled this off.”
On the road with the Dead
“Three beans, rice, lettuce, salsa, onions, carrots, corn, green peppers and cilantro.”
Robert Shatzer rattles off the ingredients by heart.
“I’ve said that probably about half a million times,” he notes.
After seeing his first Grateful Dead show in 1991, Shatzer got hooked, eventually joining the band on tour for 160 shows total, including their last 120 gigs in a row before frontman Jerry Garcia died in August 1995.
He sold vegetarian burritos on Shakedown Street to fund his travels.
“It was a way to propel yourself across the country, to make a little bit of money just to get to the next show,” he says. “You could make the burritos for about $50 with my recipe. And so I was able to start the tour with like $100 in my pocket — that was my share of the gas, my share of the first hotel room, and then enough to make my first batch of burritos. I’m 19, 20, and I’m coming home with a couple of grand more than I left with.”
Like Shatzer, Henderson grew up in the Bay Area and pined to follow the Dead on tour when she was a teenager.
“I just wanted to do it,” she recalls from her clothing booth at Shakedown Street. “And there was no way I could do that when I had to pay for school.
“So, I made up some shirts,” she continues, “I went on the road. I did the summer tour, made more money than I would have made working at, say, a fast-food restaurant or something that I could get when I was 18 years old. And it just snowballed.”
Henderson would later bring her four younger sisters on tour with her.
All of them paid their way through college on Shakedown Street.
It’s this mix of commerce, creativity, wanderlust and unfettered fandom that unites the disparate bunch of Deadheads gathered at the Tuscany.
The vendors span generations, ranging from Ken Czajka, a retired mailman from Buffalo, New York, who sells framed artwork, to 30-something Las Vegan Jocelyn Poirier, owner of The Honeypot boutique downtown, to “Grateful” Don Bryant, a former military medical officer who now lives in Thailand and who first saw the Dead live in 1973.
“It’s an overused phrase, but we are a collection of like-minded individuals,” Bryant says. “I think there’s a very adventurous part about each one of our souls. Shakedown is out there on the road. There are 22-hour workdays followed by 12-hour drives to follow the band. So at the core is a love for the music. But it’s also a business. We’re paying for our livelihood by following the band that we love.”
In doing so, they’ve become an indivisible component of the Dead live experience.
The Grateful Dead truly was a band of the people: To cite but one example, the group allowed fans to record their shows from the get-go, resulting in rampant tape trading among their faithful who swapped music and memories alike, forming a tight-knit community that’s endured for decades.
Shakedown Street is a direct extension of this mentality.
“What we do is part of the culture of this band,” Henderson says. “The fans not only come to see the music, this is a whole other aspect of why they come.
“To make this happen in Las Vegas, I feel was necessary for everybody: necessary for the vendors, necessary for the fans,” she continues. “Something would be missing if we weren’t here.”
Big hurdles, big crowds
Long hours, late nights, a lack of sleep: The process of bringing the Shakedown to Vegas proved to be nearly as exhausting as being on the road with the Dead for weeks at a time.
“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” notes Soladay, a native of South Africa, whose future husband introduced her to the Dead in 1993. “We had to move mountains to make it happen.”
Soladay, Shatzer and Henderson initially looked into properties closer to the Sphere, from The Venetian to The Linq to the Flamingo.
Everywhere was either too expensive, didn’t have enough space or wasn’t available for four all-day stretches at a time.
They eventually found what seemed to be an ideal spot in the Tuscany, about a 10-minute walk to the Sphere, though their work was hardly done: They still needed a fire permit, a special-events permit, a promoter’s license and more, all these formalities that stood in stark contrast with Shakedown Street’s decidedly informal origins.
With the help of local promoter Danielle O’Hara, founder of Nevermore Productions, they were able to get the paperwork done just in time for the Shakedown’s May 16 launch, the event spanning eight of the nine weeks of the Dead & Company’s initial Vegas run. (The band recently announced more dates for August.)
At the Tuscany on Thursday, the Shakedown was in full swing only an hour after its 11 a.m. opening, Shatzer estimating that it’ll draw 5,000 to 10,000 fans daily.
“It’s more than we expected, so it’s been really, really nice,” says Debbie Hansen, director of banquets and catering at the Tuscany. “We’ve time-traveled back into the ’70s. They’ve done a lot of work putting this on.”
A band, a way of life
A new twist for the Shakedown after all these years: carpet.
And air conditioning.
“Usually, you pull into a parking lot, and you got, like, dirt and stuff all over,” says Barry Bailey, a Californian who’s worked the Shakedown since 1983 and who now runs BB Pots, which sells handmade pottery. “It’s nice and cool in here. And we’re having a great time.”
Around him, the room is filled with strangers who don’t act like strangers: “Like your shirt!” one middle-aged fan bellows to another. “Like your shirt!” the other guy exclaims in return, a common refrain here.
Shatzer strolls through the hall, eager to share the backstory for nearly every vendor we encounter, greeting one after the next like a college buddy you haven’t seen in years.
“You can have these really intimate conversations or experiences with each other all over the country,” he says, “and then you run into each other again down the road in another venue, in another state, and you just pick up right where you left off. That’s the magic that I really, really enjoy.”
Later on tonight, the Dead & Company will take the stage once again, just up the street.
You could argue that the show really begins on Shakedown Street, though.
Of course, there’s a clear difference between the two: Here, the show never ends, because the show is a way of life.
And there’s no curtain call for that.
“You’ve got the music, you’ve got the lyrics, you’ve got the art,” Shatzer says of the multifaceted appeal of the Grateful Dead, building toward the thing that ties it all together, the reason he’s here. “And you’ve got the community.”

Quote:Dead & Company Come Out To Play On 3rd Night Of 3rd Dead Forever Weekend At Sphere
Night nine of the residency in Las Vegas featured a batch of debuts at the venue, including a cover of a classic The Beatles song.
By Andy Kahn Jun 2, 2024 • 12:48 pm PDT

Photo by Chloe Weir
Dead & Company completed the third weekend of their now 30-date residency at the Las Vegas Sphere by staging their ninth show last night at the state-of-the-art venue. Saturday’s setlist presented another batch of Sphere debuts – including covering The Beatles — as well as a revisiting of guitarist John Mayer’s favorite segue. 
The first set opened with Mayer leading his bandmates – Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and drummer Mickey Hart, alongside bassist Oteil Burbridge, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and drummer Jay Lane – through the first Sphere debut of the night, “Alabama Getaway.” 
Mayer and Weir’s guitars were still adorned with tie-dye #32 decals honoring legendary NBA player and Deadhead Bill Walton. Set one continued with “The Music Never Stopped,” “They Love Each Other” and “Ramble On Rose.”
Back-to-back-to-back Sphere premieres completed the first set with Mayer steering the blues staple “It Hurts Me Too” and Weir fronting the often united “Lost Sailor” into “Saint Of Circumstance” that ushered in intermission.
The band opened the second set with the gentle rock of “Sugaree.” The second saintly tune of the night, “St. Stephen” followed in psychedelic glory. A rare second-set placement of “Brown-Eyed Women” was on tap next. “Cumberland Blues” then galloped along before opening the way into “Drums.” 
During “Drums,” video of Bill Walton playing drums with Hart was shown in the center of the virtual drum circle spiraling above Hart, Lane and Burbridge thumping away below. The otherworldly unscripted “Space” would soon lead to another Sphere debut as The Beatles’ classic “Dear Prudence” came out to play for the first time at the Vegas venue.
Dead & Co. then gave a go at a segue previously attempted last summer on their Final Tour that Mayer called the band’s “#1 transition of all time.” The sequence started with the second sugar tune of the night, “Sugar Magnolia” that seamlessly progressed into “Scarlet Begonias” before transitioning back into “Sunshine Daydream.” 
The steadfastly earnest “Brokedown Palace” came in as the penultimate song of the night. A 1960s news broadcast featuring the Grateful Dead played over the PA before a fitting “One More Saturday Night” brought the third Dead Forever weekend to an exuberant end. 
Dead Forever resumes this Thursday, June 6. Scroll on for The Skinny and visuals captured by attendees of last night’s Dead & Co. Sphere show.

The Skinny

The Setlist

• Set 1:
  
• Alabama Getaway, 
  
• The Music Never Stopped, 
  
• They Love Each Other, 
  
• Ramble On Rose, 
  
• It Hurts Me Too, 
  
• Lost Sailor > 
  
• Saint of Circumstance
  

• Set 2:
  
• Sugaree, 
  
• St. Stephen, 
  
• Brown-Eyed Women, 
  
• Cumberland Blues > 
  
• Drums > 
  
• Space > 
  
• Dear Prudence, 
  
• Sugar Magnolia > 
  
• Scarlet Begonias > 
  
• Sunshine Daydream > 
  
• Brokedown Palace, 
  
• One More Saturday Night
  

Setlist info via Phantasy Tour.
The Venue
NAME Sphere [See upcoming shows]
CAPACITY 18,600
PREVIOUSLY 8 shows
5/16/2024, 5/17/2024, 5/18/2024, 5/24/2024, 5/25/2024, 5/26/2024, 5/30/2024, 5/31/2024
The Music
FIRST SET 
7 songs
SECOND SET & ENCORE 
10 songs 
TOTAL SONGS
17 songs  
15 originals / 1 cover / 1 misc 
AVERAGE VINTAGE
1973
AVERAGE SONG GAP
8.64 [Gap chart]
DEBUTS
None
TOUR DEBUTS
Alabama Getaway, It Hurts Me Too, Lost Sailor, Dear Prudence, Sunshine Daydream
BIGGEST BUSTOUT
Dear Prudence  LTP 06/03/2023 (30 Show Gap)
LONGEST SONG
St. Stephen  14:38
SHORTEST SONG
Alabama Getaway  4:14
THE SPREAD
Aoxomoxoa - 1, Workingman's Dead - 1, American Beauty - 2, From the Mars Hotel - 1, Blues for Allah - 1, Go To Heaven - 3, Built to Last - 3

Quote:Fall in love with SF all over again at The Sphere’s Dead & Company show

San Francisco, seen from The Las Vegas Sphere during a Dead & Company show on June 1. | Source: Joe Burn/The Standard

By Joe BurnPublished Jun. 09, 2024 • 10:00am

Once in a while, you get shown the light. In the strangest of places, if you look at it right. 

For me, that place was inside a multi-billion dollar glowing testicle, surrounded by tourists, in the tackiest, gaudiest city in all the world. Watching a band whose most important member has been dead for almost as long as I’ve been alive, I had an insanely profound experience that made me fall in love with San Francisco all over again from 400 miles away. 

I’m talking, of course, about the Dead & Company show at The Las Vegas Sphere, the technological marvel that dominates that city’s already Dali-esque skyline. Sure, John Mayer, as a singer more famous for the celebrities he dates than the songs he writes, is no Saint Jerry. And of course, I was surrounded by geriatrics in tie-dye and the occasional curious tourist who just wanted a peek inside the giant curved television. 

John Mayer projected on a digital pyramid inside The Sphere on June 1. | Source: Joe Burn/The Standard

Sure, the cost of the outing—the tickets were $250-a-pop, as was the airfare, and four drinks at a nearby bar came to $162—somewhat diluted the counterculture vibes. Not to mention, we didn’t win a thing on the roulette tables after three nights of trying. 

But believe me when I say this: As giant scarlet begonias rained down on me from another dimension to the ethereal strains of “Sugar Magnolia,” I embraced a sweaty stranger and my own mortality, and I would do it again. You should do it too. 

‘The greatest show in America’

But the magic of any Sphere voyage begins the moment you see it. In our case, it was from the flight. 

What began as a boy’s trip to the Las Vegas Sphere for me and The Standard’s business editor Kevin Truong—booked on a whim after several beers—had quickly descended into a cliched Hunter S. Thompson excursion after just one night in town.

Tragically, by the time we were headed to the show, we were just two journalists wearing Ralph Steadman Grateful Dead tees, “Sphere and loathing in Las Vegas” emblazoned across the back. With our new shirts bought fresh from Shakedown Street (inside the Tuscany Hotel), we flagged down a top-hatted hippie with two giant dreads to transport us to The Sphere via bicycle rickshaw. There are other ways to pull up, but trust me, do this one.

Standard editors Kevin Truong, left, and Joe Burn, right, hitch a ride to The Sphere in Las Vegas for a Dead & Company show on June 1. | Source: Kevin Truong/The Standard

Entering The Sphere is more seamless than any mega-venue ever, probably. The only pause necessary is for the money-shot selfie outside it. There’s solid signage, an army of helpful staff who’ll point you on your way, and a ticket check-in process that TSA-trusted travelers would be envious of. 

The lines for its many bars are short and the service is quick and friendly. Worth the $25 per cocktail, which is actually reasonable considering you’re at the most expensive entertainment venue ever built in Vegas, baby. (It cost $2.3 billion, if you’re wondering). The food is even more reasonably priced.

There is nothing underwhelming about The Sphere. Even as you ride the escalator to grab your seats, you’re treated to a sliver of a shimmering example of the technology you are about to witness full bore: a Dead skull hologram seemingly floating and flickering in the middle of the lobby. Perhaps the only thing close to an underwhelming experience was the start of this particular Dead show, the graphics not yet fully displayed, just a cinematic, zoomed-in shot of the band and their opening riffs.

Entering The Las Vegas Sphere, you're treated to a taste of its powers. | Source: Kevin Truong/The Standard

But then the screen rips open with a lightning bolt, its jagged edges slowly pull apart—and before you know it, you’re in San Francisco at the Dead’s house, at 710 Ashbury St., Salesforce Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge glimmering in the distance. Did I just feel a Bay breeze—or am I trippin?

“This is the greatest show in America,” I say to The Standard’s business editor after being consumed by a psychedelic wormhole as Mayer performs guitar wizardry that would see Eric Clapton gently weeping.

A closeup shot of Mayer’s hands floats in a box above the tiny stage as he shreds. Everywhere you look the walls are alive with light. Bob Weir is now in the box, his hair blown back as if he’d just sailed to Vegas on the Adventure Galley. Weir’s jaw opens: “Dear Prudence.” Your jaw is on the floor, your sightline arching from a crowd of twisting tie-dye to a light show the like of which has only existed for mere months. Then come those giant digital begonias, raining down from the abyss beyond the Sphere’s exterior, slapping down onto the display with a gentle force you only feel in your mind. 

I have no idea what was happening here but it was great. | Source: Joe Burn/The Standard

I won’t ruin it for you entirely, if you haven’t already done that for yourself on YouTube—but what unfolds next before your mind, body and soul is nothing short of life-changing. I wanted to text my mother and thank her for raising me in a fashion that got me to this point in my life. Or visit the nearest chapel and light a candle for my dad, a Steve Miller fan who would’ve understood whatever I was feeling. Even if the ambience was momentarily disturbed by a well-dressed tourist who dropped her lip gloss and had us all looking for it… (in 50 years, that has likely never happened at a Dead show.)

Instead, we’ll let Paul Schwering, a geoscientist from Carson City, do the talking.
“The sense of trying to find a word,” Paul said, when asked to describe what he’d just seen in the brief intermission between sets. “No, no, no, I couldn’t find a word. This is a truly mind blowing experience where my entire senses are alight. I can tell because, like all my hair has been standing up almost the entire show. And when your hair stands up, when you hear those notes and they keep taking you and they carry. That’s the journey. You know you’re in the right place at the right time.”

We embraced. 

Of course, Sphere-enhancing substances that may be deemed illegal in some locales were deftly passed around the lobby. Did my newfound love for Paul and the lip gloss lady have anything to do with those? My attorney has advised me I can neither confirm nor deny.

But who needs drugs anyway, when toward the end of the show you’re sucked into a swirling vortex of pink glowing fog and spat out somewhere above Earth. Feeling weightless for a moment, the gravitational pull of the blue planet begins to drag you back to reality. The show is ending, you’re plunging toward California and you know you’re a better person because of it. 

Before you know it, you’re right back in Haight Ashbury. Except you’re not. You’re still in Vegas. The reality of which hits you harder than the smell of post-show Deadheads dawdling toward The Strip once you begrudgingly quit The Sphere. 

The only solace for us, was that within about 15 hours, we really would be back in San Francisco.

(06-21-2024, 11:12 AM)Drunk Monk Wrote:

Quote:Have a Nice Day!
9:00 AM  – 12:00 PM 
With DJ Kai Dragon

11:09 AM
Bob Marley & The Wailers Survival Bob Marley
from Bob Marley Legacy: Righteousness

Quote:Have a Nice Day!
9:00 AM  – 12:00 PM 
With DJ Kai Dragon

11:13 AM
Grateful Dead Shakedown Street Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter
from 100 Disco