Grateful Dead alumna Bob Weir, Billy Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart along with John Mayer will perform a free show next month at Madison Square Garden in New York.
The musicians, who are touring this fall under the name Dead and Company, will add a third show on Nov. 7 to their Garden stand and give away 10,000 tickets through a sweepstakes. The contest will allow fans to support the Robin Hood Foundation, a New York-based group devoted to fighting poverty.
The free show is being presented by American Express, in partnership with Vevo and YouTube. Live video of the show and will be streamed at amexunstaged.com and via the Unstaged app on the evening of Nov. 7.
Dead and Company is the latest offshoot of the band that first started cranking out a unique mixture of rock, blues, folk and country music 50 years ago. Since the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995, various surviving members have performed as the Other Ones, Furthur, the Dead, and Ratdog.
Bassist Phil Lesh, who formed the Grateful Dead with Weir, Garcia, Kreutzmann and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, is notably absent from this line-up, preferring to tour this fall with his own band, Phil Lesh and Friends.
Lesh, Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann said their formal farewell to the Grateful Dead with a series of three mega-concerts in Chicago in early July.
The tour with John Mayer begins in Albany on Oct. 29. In an interview with Billboard, Weir talked about the preparations. "We're about halfway in and rehearsals are going well, if I may say," Weir said. "We've been through 45 or 50 tunes and I'm not going to tell you that we have them entirely locked down, but we have a good handle on them."
Weir and Mayer have had a bit of time to get used to each other's playing styles. In February, they performed together on The Late Late Show, singing this version of Garcia's warm and snaky tune, "Althea:"
In announcing the free New York City concert, Weir described a win-win-win situation. "Our fans get music for free," he said. "We get to play our music for a bunch of folks who might otherwise not get to catch it, Amex gets to support music and the arts, and everyone gets to come together at Madison Square Garden and online to benefit The Robin Hood Foundation and New York City’s less fortunate.”
To be eligible to win one of 5,000 pairs of free tickets to this show, fans can enter the sweepstakes at here from now until Thursday, Oct. 8 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Ticket distribution details will be communicated to sweepstakes winners on or after Thursday, Oct. 22.
David Saltzman, Executive Director of Robin Hood, said the event would help some of the 1.8 million New Yorkers who lived in poverty. “We are especially grateful to Dead & Company, American Express and the entire caring community of Dead fans for the opportunity to help transform lives with their donations,” he said.