The Dead was the name the four surviving core members of the Grateful Dead, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, used for their reunion band in 2003–2004 and again in 2009. It grew out of The Other Ones, which Weir, Lesh and Hart had formed with Bruce Hornsby in 1998 for the Furthur Festival. That band changed lineup often. Kreutzmann joined in 2000, the year Lesh sat out. In 2002 all four returned together for the “Terrapin Station” reunion at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin, followed by a fall tour. With the core four back on stage, using the Other Ones name no longer made sense, and the band was first billed as The Dead on February 14, 2003, at San Francisco’s Warfield. Guitarist Jimmy Herring and keyboardists Jeff Chimenti and Rob Barraco stayed on from the 2002 Other Ones. Singer Joan Osborne joined for the 2003 “Summer Getaway” tour, which opened at Bonnaroo on June 15, 2003. For 2004, Warren Haynes replaced Osborne and Barraco on guitar and vocals for the summer “Wave That Flag” tour, which ran from Bonnaroo on June 12 to Atlanta on August 19. After that the band went quiet for four years.
Presidential politics brought The Dead back. On October 13, 2008, the four core members played a “Change Rocks” benefit for Barack Obama at Penn State, with Haynes and Chimenti, and the same group played one of the official inaugural balls on January 20, 2009. A 23-show spring tour followed in April and May 2009 and ended at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington on May 16. Their headlining set at the Rothbury Festival in Michigan on July 4, 2009, was effectively The Dead’s last show. Kreutzmann and Hart went back to their own projects, while Weir and Lesh formed Furthur that fall, a band that worked the Dead songbook in depth through early 2014.
The Dead was one of several post-1995 lineups. Lesh had been leading Phil Lesh & Friends, a rotating band, since 1998. Its first tour began with three April 1999 shows at the Warfield with Phish’s Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell. Weir’s RatDog, active since 1995, played alongside The Other Ones and The Dead but scaled back once Furthur began, and it ended in 2014. The four core members reunited one last time for Fare Thee Well, five 50th-anniversary shows in Santa Clara (June 27–28, 2015) and at Chicago’s Soldier Field (July 3–5, 2015), with Trey Anastasio, Bruce Hornsby and Jeff Chimenti. Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann then launched Dead & Company with John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Chimenti. It became the biggest draw of the successor bands, touring stadiums until its 2023 “final tour” and returning for residencies at Las Vegas’s Sphere in 2024 and 2025. Among those lineups, The Dead was the main touring band to bring all four surviving core members together under a name taken from the original. It was the closest they came to being the Grateful Dead again before the Fare Thee Well shows.
