



Photo by Bill Kelly Here’s more from our Dead & Company cover story in anticipation of the tour opener in Las Vegas on Saturday. John Mayer first heard the music of the Grateful Dead anew while listening to Neil Young Pandora channel. Mayer’s fortuitous “Althea” encounter was by no means inevitable. When one is on a particular Pandora station, suggestions are generated not only through musical compatibility but also by a demographic component. In Mayer’s case, Neil Young is a generational peer of the Grateful Dead, which provides a nexus beyond the connective tissue of their song catalogs.

However, if one is listening to contemporary folk on the service, this will not necessarily lead to the complementary sounds of the genre’s iconic forbearers. Speaking from personal experience driving in the car with my teenage daughter’s Pandora app providing the soundtrack to our travels, we’ll often hear multiple songs by The Milk Carton Kids but nary a selection from Simon & Garfunkel. So too, Pandora steers us away from Workingman’s Dead or the all-acoustic Reckoning.

Mayer, who will turn 40 this fall, acknowledges, “Most of the time, it takes somebody to do something again for the new generation to find it. As an aging musician, you have to accept that there are better iterations of a design that still exist but that aren’t as popular as the current derivative version of it. But people want to participate in real-time with the artist. They want to know that the song they hear was written in the same air they breathe.”

To be clear, Mayer, is not referencing The Milk Carton Kids here, just the mechanism by which younger ears receive music.

“That’s just the way it is,” he continues, “and I have to imagine that, one day, when I have kids, my kid is going to run in the room and go, ‘Listen to this song.’ And I’m going to say, ‘You know that song is just like this other song but not as good. Let me play you this other song.’ And they’ll go, ‘No, not interested.’ There’s a certain modernity to it, where it doesn’t feel like it’s happening in their universe.”

When asked whether this perspective informs a certain missionary zeal that he brings to Dead & Company, Mayer responds, “Absolutely. That’s my nesting place in this. I think if I wasn’t looking at it that way, I’d be milling around inside this thing, trying to find a place to stand comfortably. The way that I have found to stand comfortably in this is I am helping to keep the portal open. I think that’s what people have responded to.”

“I get a lot of people’s feelings told to me about this music,” he adds. “They tell me how many times they saw the Dead and, then, they’ll talk about how this band makes them feel. And every time someone comes up to me and wants to talk about the Grateful Dead or Dead & Company, I just go into the most placid, satisfied, comfortable zone because it’s almost like somebody talking to me from a rotary club in some other state—‘Oh, we’re both in the rotary club.’

“But when they’re talking to me, they’re talking to one representative of this larger thing; they’re not talking to the guy who does it. My strengths as a musician are only coming into play as an assistant to the entire thing. For the first time in my life, it’s not about me doing the best this or the best that. I’m there as a brace that helps keep this thing open, so that people can get where they want to go. They’re not even really making eye contact with what I’m doing or with me. I’m there so that they can make eye contact with what they want to see that’s above all of us.