Hope and change are in the air for the surviving fellas from The Grateful Dead!

Bassist Phil Lesh, guitarist Bob Weir, and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann decided to kick off 2009 by confirming what the media has been buzzing for some time: The Dead will be touring for the first time in almost five years, with nearly twenty shows spread across a month from mid-April through mid-May.

Rolling Stone Magazine reports that more than 40 years after initially forming the band and just months after reuniting to support Barack Obama (the “Change Rocks” concert at Pennsylvania State University in October), the Dead will hit the road for their first full tour in five years. “When you walk out on the stage the possibilities are infinite every time,” Lesh said. “It’s infinite and therefore you can still explore it till the day that you die.”
Keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and Allman Brothers Band/Gov’t Mule guitarist Warren Haynes will join the band.

The band is said to have started talking tour in February 2008 when they reteamed for the “Dead Heads for Obama” in San Francisco. Contactmusic.com quotes Weir: “We’ve got some unfinished business,” he said of the tour. “Everybody has a whole new bag of tricks; we have the body of material we worked up over the years and we have a mind meld going on here and it would be a sin to let that just wither and die.”

The tour will start on April 12 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Then, the band will stop on the East Coast for 15 shows (including an April 25 performance at New York’s Madison Square Garden) before heading to the Midwest and West Coast for four shows, culminating in a May 10 concert at the Shoreline Amphitheatre near the band’s hometown of San Francisco.

But let’s see the complete list of their touring dates:

April 12 - Greensboro, NC- Greensboro Coliseum
April 14 - Washington, DC - Verizon Center
April 15 - Charlottesville, VA - John Paul Jones Arena
April 17 - Albany, NY - Times Union Center
April 18 - Worcester, MA - DCU Center
April 19 - Worcester, MA - DCU Center
April 21 - Buffalo, NY - HSBC Arena
April 22 - Wilkes-Barre, PA - Wachovia Arena
April 24 - Uniondale, NY - Nassau Coliseum
April 25 - New York, NY - Madison Square Garden
April 26 - Hartford, CT - XL Center
April 28 - E. Rutherford, NJ - IZOD Center
April 29 - E. Rutherford, NJ - IZOD Center
May 1 - Philadelphia, PA - Wachovia Spectrum
May 2 - Philadelphia, PA - Wachovia Spectrum
May 5 - Chicago, IL - All State Arena
May 7 - Denver, CO - Pepsi Center
May 9 - Los Angeles, CA - The Forum
May 10 - Mountain View, CA - Shoreline Amphitheater

The tickets will be on sale from January 13!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 6:08 am and is filed under News.