Get Your Deadco Loafers -- 2 for 4 (hundred dollars)!

LA Times:

[Four hours or so before they’re due beneath the massive wraparound video screen at Sphere, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and John Mayer amble into a backstage production office like three guys showing up — again — for the work of blowing 17,000 minds.

“Nice to meet you,” Mayer says, grinning as he extends a hand. “John Mayer, Mayer Industries.”

As original members of the Grateful Dead, guitarist Weir, 76, and percussionist Hart, 80, are jam-band royalty; Mayer, 46, is the singer and guitarist known for pop hits like “Gravity” and “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” Together they represent the nucleus of Dead & Company, which on this recent afternoon has just passed the halfway mark of a 30-date summer residency at Sphere, the state-of-the-art dome-shaped venue behind the Venetian resort on the Las Vegas Strip....

Mayer insists it’s not ego that’s driving musicians to play Sphere — “Well, it’s a little ego,” he clarifies — but rather the drive “to delight and surprise people more than they expected to be with this big, empty canvas and this really big palette.”

Amid the other offers Dead & Company fielded for engagements that didn’t require extensive travel, Hart says, “This was a very juicy option.”

Dead & Company’s residency, which is called Dead Forever and runs through Aug. 10, has been a clear box-office success, with an average nightly gross of approximately $4 million, according to the band; what’s more, the group says that nearly a third of concertgoers have bought tickets for more than one date — repeat business likely to correspond with a hefty spend at Dead & Company’s pop-up merch store at the Venetian, where fans can buy T-shirts, hoodies, even a pair of handmade Belgian loafers emblazoned with the band’s cheerful dancing bear logo. (The shoes will run you $395.)]