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\n\tToward the end of their opening-night concert at Las Vegas\u2019 Sphere, Dead & Company<\/a> performed \u201cHell in a Bucket\u201d backed by a floor-to-roof technicolor video that included so many of the visual touchstones we\u2019ve come to associate with Grateful Dead: There was a skeleton riding a motorcycle with his long gray hair blowing in the wind. There were roses blanketing a hillside. There were dancing bears poking their colorful heads out along the road. There was a soaring turtle with a lightning bolt on his belly. And they were all surrounded by a psychedelic scene of cotton-candy clouds, bubblegum-pink windmills and flying eyeballs.<\/p>\n \n\tBut this eye-popping visual wasn\u2019t par for the course on Thursday night (May 16). The Grateful Dead spin-off group \u2013 made up of Dead founding members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart alongside John Mayer and the band\u2019s longtime collaborators Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti and Jay Lane \u2014 put music center-stage while sparingly (and effectively) deploying Sphere\u2019s bombastic bag of tricks.<\/p>\n \n\tJust as often as a lightning storm or a galaxy of stars lit up the massive screen, a static-but-decorative frame would display a straightforward video of the musicians performing a 20-minute-plus jam session of one song. Those concert videos were much larger than any jumbotron at a typical arena, given the Sphere\u2019s 240-foot-tall display, but it was an example of Dead & Company sticking to the live strategy that served their parent band for decades, with an extra dose of spectacle that felt like an organic extension, not a stretch.<\/p>\n \n\tThose technical spectacles, while very much a product of 2024, were often in the service of a history lesson about the band\u2019s origins. As the third band to break in the Sphere \u2013 following a six-month stint from U2<\/a> that wrapped in March and a four-concert mini-residency from Phish<\/a> last month \u2013 Dead & Co. molded the striking venue in their image on Thursday night, finding ways to give fans a modern show while embracing where they\u2019re from.<\/p>\n \n\tBelow, find Billboard<\/em>\u2019s five best moments from opening night of Dead & Company\u2019s 24-date Sphere residency.<\/p>\n