“He was a huge fan. He could identify, ‘No, that’s not ’78 because Jerry’s playing through this pedal’”: John Mayer was a Grateful Dead fanatic – before he landed the Dead & Company gig

After 10 years of playing electric guitar together, John Mayer and Bob Weir have forged a truly formidable guitar partnership in Dead & Company – and they’ve learned a lot about one another in the process, too.

Now, as the dust on their second mega-selling Las Vegas Sphere residency settles, an interview clip of Don Was has resurfaced, with the revered producer and musician revealing how Mayer got the gig in the first place – and how he helped facilitate the group's formation.

Was' musical network stretches far and wide, and in 2015 he proved to be the missing link between Mayer and a band he grew up adoring.

Mayer and Was worked on two records prior to the onset of the Dead & Company days: 2012's Born and Raised and Paradise Valley, which arrived a year later. A third album together, Was says, was in the works, but ultimately got kicked to the curb when the opportunity of working with the Grateful Dead’s surviving members arose.

“He was a huge fan,” Was tells the Go with Elmo podcast. “I'd get in the car and drive him to the studio and stuff, and he always had the Grateful Dead channel and Sirius on. He could identify, ‘No, that's not ’78 because Jerry's playing through this pedal,’ or something like that.

“He'd locked out Capitol Studios with an eye towards making a new record, and Bobby and Mickey [Hart, drums] came to see me,” he continues. “So I called him up. I said, ‘You better come up here.’

“He was very eloquent about how much he loved the Grateful Dead and why. They were kind of taken aback, so they invited him to come on up and play sometime. When the opportunity cemented itself for him to go play with those guys, three months later, he shut down the record, cleared out all his stuff, went home, and cracked the code on the Grateful Dead.”

Anyone vaguely familiar with John Mayer’s work will know just how exacting a man he is. Just ask esteemed guitarist and educator Tomo Fujita, who had told him to quit Berklee and come back when he'd written a hit record. He took that advice to heart and carried it out to the letter.

To Mayer, this wasn’t just a chance to kick back and jam with his idols, it was a job interview, and he didn’t waste a moment preparing for it.

“Particularly,” Was says of Mayer's tone-cracking mission, “what was behind what Jerry [Garcia] was doing.

“He knew not to do karaoke. He really studied. I drove up there with him; we got a couple of airstreams, parked in the parking lot of Bobby’s studio, and we stayed about four days. At the end of the fourth day, they came in and said, ‘All right, let's do this. You'll be a partner. You'll be in the thing.

“That’s something I learned from John,” he concludes. “Don't go in unprepared.”

SCARLET BEGONIAS-FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN/DEAD AND COMPANY @ SPHERE 5/17/25 - YouTube

Watch On

Dead & Company had played what was billed as their final-ever show back in 2023, but the prospect of a stint at Las Vegas’ ultra-futuristic Sphere venue brought the band out of retirement. Now, it seems those two residencies may serve as a prelude to a new era for the band, rather than a final swan song.

Bob Weir and John Mayer are leaving the door open to recording music together, and more gigs don’t seem out of the question either.

“The mission statement has always been forward-facing,” Mayer ascertains. “Whoever dreams up the next something incredible and wants us to be a part of it? I would never say no to that kind of experimentalism.”

A decade earlier, the prospect of him playing with an incarnation of the Grateful Dead would have sounded like wild fancy to Mayer. Was changed the course of the guitarist’s career by connecting them, but nailing the gig lay solely on his shoulders.

His tireless work ethic was shown again as he came towards the end of the first Sphere run. With a finger broken, he spent every day practicing guitar using the other three fingers as he looked to reconfigure his playing style.