Alan Sculley

Special to the Detroit Free Press

Many people assumed that when the surviving members of the Grateful Dead (with Phish’s Trey Anastasio taking on the guitarist-singer role of late band leader Jerry Garcia) booked a pair of stadium runs last summer billed as the “Fare Thee Well” shows, it would mark the end of members of the legendary group playing together.

But guitarist Bob Weir says that was never the intention. In fact, he knew as far back as winter 2015 that there was a good chance that he and the Grateful Dead drum tandem of Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart might play together in a new entity called Dead & Company that also would feature guitarist-singer John Mayer. (Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh did not want to return to extensive touring after the "Fare Thee Well" concerts.)

Now the group is on the road for a full-fledged summer tour, including a stop on Thursday at DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston.

The unit began to take shape when Mayer, who was guest-hosting CBS television’s “The Late Show,” invited Weir to perform with him on the program. What was to be a rehearsal of two songs turned into much more.

“We did a soundcheck that lasted about an hour and a half and touched on those two songs briefly and then just went and kept going,” Weir recalled in a recent teleconference. “They finally had to unplug us.”

Mayer, too, sensed something magical was happening during that soundcheck.

“I had never experienced anything like that musically, where I floated in that particular place in the sound of the band,” said Mayer, who joined Weir for the teleconference. “And then when we got in the room together with Billy and Mickey, for me, the idea just took hold of me when I heard it. And it was as big and strong as any idea I’ve ever had in my life.“

Mayer came to Dead & Company not as a longtime Grateful Dead fan but a fairly recent convert. He first heard the group’s music on Pandora radio in 2011 and quickly dived into the band’s extensive catalog of studio albums and live recordings after that.

He was so intrigued about the opportunity to play with Weir, Kreutzmann, Hart and the other two musicians in Dead & Company — bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti — that he put his solo career (and an in-progress solo album) on hold.

That was no small deal considering the success Mayer has had as a solo artist. He made a big commercial splash with the relaxed acoustic-leaning brand of pop rock on his first two albums, “Room for Squares” (2001) and “Heavier Things” (2003). Both were multiplatinum successes that included multiple hit singles, including the Grammy-winning “Your Body Is a Wonderland” and “Daughters.”

It was after that huge rush of success that Mayer first took a break from pop music, forming a blues-based trio with bassist Pino Palladino and drummer Steve Jordan, before returning to his solo career with the 2006 album “Continuum” — another hit album that won a Grammy for best pop album. The albums that have followed — “Battle Studies” (2009), “Born & Raised” (2012) and “Paradise Valley” (2013) — haven’t been quite as popular, but Mayer remains a major figure on the music scene.

He actually was expecting to have a new solo album out by now, but then Dead & Company intervened.

“I put the (solo) record aside last April, I would say, and just started wanting to learn all this (Grateful Dead) music,” he said. “And (I) came back to the album in January, which was actually really good to take time to step away from it and listen back to it again, and decide what are the songs that have stood the test of time, or what could I do to this song to make it better? And so now, I’m back in the studio making the record. I’ll finish it by the end of the year.”

Making time for Dead & Company in the future might not be limited to just tours for Mayer. He and Weir aren’t ruling out the possibility of making new music in this group.

“I’m open to any of it,” Weir said.

Mayer seconded that notion and elaborated on what circumstances would need to exist for Dead & Company to become a recording act.

“I’m open to anything that — how do I put this — that could really take strong root on a musical level, that can really validate itself on a musical level,” he said. “If it can state its case for the reason it needs to exist, then I would absolutely jump to doing it. It would have to sort of come out of earth. It can’t be planted from above the soil. ... I would actually be very interested to see what the band could do as composers and as improvisers. Composing through improvisation, I think, is really interesting. But I’m open to anything that this band could or wanted to do, as long as it had — as long as it answered sort of the constant question like, well, ‘Why?’ And if it has a strong answer, I would love to do it.”

Dead & Company

7 p.m. Thu.

DTE Energy Music Theatre

I-75 at exit 89, Clarkston

248-377-0100

$40-$149.50