The summer tour for the group is set to last for just over a month, starting at Dodger Stadium on June 11 and wrapping up with a two-night stand at New York’s Citi Field, the home of the Mets, on July 15-16. Other dates include pairs of nights at the Bay Area’s Shoreline Amphitheater, UC Boulder’s Folsom Field and Chicago’s Wrigley Field.“The Long, Strange Trip Is Over,” declared the headline in Rolling Stone, which has been covering iterations of the Grateful Dead almost since its first issue.
Health concerns have occasionally popped up among band members. In 2021, Kreutzmann bowed out of the group’s second show at the Hollywood Bowl, then missed a few more with an issue said not be related to COVID but rather his heart. He also bowed out of the Playing in the Sand festival in Mexico before the entire thing got canceled amid a COVID variant rise.
In an interview as recently as this past December, Mayer had said that he expected Dead and Company to keep going indefinitely, even with foreseeable changes in personnel. “To hear Bob Weir talk about it, he wants this to continue after [the surviving Grateful Dead members] are done touring,” Mayer explained to Sammy Hagar on a segment of the latter rocker’s “Rock & Roll Road Trip.”