Late last week, John Mayer sent the Grateful Dead fan community into a mild frenzy when he seemingly suggested he was closing the book on Dead and Company following the death of Bob Weir in January.
“Grateful Dead will be remembered for having been around 60 years,” Mayer told USA Today. “And if I had anything to do with that, great. But to some extent, I’m going back to my corner. The bus kind of dropped me off, and I get to be a lover of the music. I was on a beautiful ride, but I couldn’t really see the vehicle because I was in it. So where I used to be on stage, I’m now in the crowd with everybody.”
But he said this as part of a broader conversation about his radio show Grateful Dead Listening Hour With John Mayer, where he is indeed approaching his role as a fan more than a member. It wasn’t totally clear if he meant to imply that Dead and Company shall never rise again, even though many fans examined his words like the Talmud, trying to parse his precise intent.
In a new interview with Andy Cohen on SiriusXM, Mayer clarified his thoughts. “I was talking to USA Today about Grateful Dead Listening Party and that I was really enjoying just being a listener of the music and I said to some extent I’ve gone back to my corner and I think I just — part of the grieving process is to hang it up,” he said. “If you don’t hang it up, then you don’t grieve fully, so I’m in the process right now.
“And I think people — or at least I hope they can decode this,” he continued. “I’m not thinking beyond just the healing and the grieving, as so many other people are doing along with me, that it doesn’t feel right to think about it, but in no way is that my—I’m not swearing it off. I’m not saying like, ‘You’ll never see me on stage doing that.’ I don’t know how you will yet, and I don’t really want to start thinking about actionable ways to do it. I kind of want to wallow a little. I kind of—I think it’s important sometimes to say, “Well, that’s that,” so that you can feel it and go through that and mourn that, so I hope people understand that, and if they don’t, then maybe I’ve sort of helped. I don’t have any specific plan.”
To “decode” what he’s saying here, or simply to summarize it, Mayer has no idea what the future holds for Dead and Company. Weir’s death is too fresh to really consider “actionable ways” to get the group back on the road in any capacity. But crucially, he’s not ruling it out.
The surviving members of the Grateful Dead toured together in many incarnations over the years, but Dead and Company was the most popular one by a significant margin. It brought the band back into stadiums, and introduced their music to an entirely new generation. A new formation featuring Mayer, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, drummer Jay Lane, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, and bassist Oteil Burbridge would still draw significant crowds, even though they’d have to figure out how to fill the enormous hole left by Weir’s death.
It might be many years before they figure this out, and it simply may never happen, but at least Mayer has given fans a significant degree of hope.
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