Report | John Mayer To Team With Dead Members For Tour

Will guitarist John Mayer team with members of the Grateful Dead for a fall tour? Billboard reports multiple sources indicate a fall tour featuring Mayer and members of the Dead is in the works.

Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart have indicated the upcoming Fare Thee Well -Celebrating 50 Years Of Grateful Dead shows in Chicago and Santa Clara will be the last time the “core four” will perform together. They didn’t say anything about three of them or two of the Dead members pairing up in some capacity. As for now there’s no word of just which members of the Dead would be part of this tour with Mayer filling the Jerry Garcia role though by all indications Bob Weir is part of the package. Recently a photo which seems to have been taken at Weir’s TRI Studios featuring Bobby, Mayer and Phish bassist Mike Gordon surfaced, while earlier this year a photo showing Hart, Weir and Steve Kimock rehearsing at TRI came out.

Bobby is chief among those slated to be a part of the potential tour. “According to insiders, the trek is due to kick off in October, with the Grammy-winning singer and guitarist having already begun to jam in a rehearsal-like setting with select members of the group, chief among them Weir,” Billboard reports. Earlier this year Mayer teamed with Weir for a pair of performances on The Late Late Show including this version of “Truckin'”:

Last August Mayer professed his love of the Dead in a series of Tweets and covered a handful of Dead tunes on a recent tour. A rep for the band told Bilboard “that it’s ‘premature’ to suggest any such outing is being planned.” Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Fare Thee Well co-organizer and Relix publisher Peter Shapiro told Billboard a possible Mayer/Dead tour wouldn’t go out under the Grateful Dead banner. “There’s nothing more coming,” he said. “I think you will see each of these guys continuing to do creative, cool things. Sometimes one or two may do something together. What you won’t see is the four surviving members together saying goodbye in this kind of way. This is it. Chicago is the end, and Santa Clara is leading into the end. But like a great Dead tune, it will evolve and they will wander around on their own.”