John Mayer Reflects on His Friendship With Online Ceramics, From Designing Legendary Dead & Co. Tees to Stashing Cash in His Guitar Case

John: How many shares are there in total?

Alix: It was a totally arbitrary number, but I think 50,000?

John: Not bad.

Elijah: You can keep your share.

John: I get a slight kick out of seeing some celebrity wearing an Online Ceramics shirt and feeling infinitesimally connected to it. This is maybe a little bit of me hammering out the dents of my career, feeling like I’m not cool enough. But then, well, welcome to the Online Ceramics world, where I’ve sort of lived for a while. There’s a selfish aspect to it, and the connection is about as small a fraction as the shares I own. It’s one 50,000th of a real feeling. But it’s enough for me to go, hey, I’m a little bit like Kenny G with Starbucks.

Naomi: Can you elaborate on that?

John: Kenny G was one of the original investors in Starbucks. It makes Kenny G a Forrest Gump of sorts: “There was this guy, said he had a way of making coffee real fast.” You know what I mean? “He said he was going to put a mermaid on the cup.” It’s that sense of accidental entrepreneurialism. This is my own Forrest Gump-y vibe, but for me it’s, “You know he played with the Dead?” “You know he also ran with those Online Ceramics guys?”

I think we all respect smashing or twisting norms to get a laugh or to be interested. And to just keep it exciting. My favorite text is getting a design file from Elijah. Even if it’s the slightest edit, it’s like Christmas morning every single time. It’s like scratching a lottery ticket. My favorite thing in the world is to have Elijah show me something that I have to process. If I look at a design and reply “yes,” it means it’s pretty much what I was imagining. But if I look at it and I say “processing,” it means “wow.”

Naomi: The way you all met, and the way Online Ceramics started, is tied up from the beginning with this iteration of the Dead. And now, at the time of this interview, this iteration of the Dead is coming to a close this summer with the final tour. Are you guys ready to let it go?

John: This entire experience with Dead & Company, from the first note we played, has been this one long beautiful song. The way the song ends affects your memory of the song. And it’s very important to me that the song ends with a beautiful final note and a beautiful chord and the splash of a cymbal, so that everyone can be on the same page at the same moment and say, “What a gorgeous song that was.” And in the history of the Grateful Dead, sadly, there hasn’t really been that. If we all had another 100 years in us, we’d probably say, “Hey, let’s take a few summers off. Let’s make them miss us a little bit.” And we just don’t have that kind of time.

Alix: Since the beginning of Dead & Co., every summer we were all asking if you were going to tour. No one knew that this was going to keep happening. In my head, every single tour was the last tour. So the fact that we got so many is incredible. Knowing that this one really is the last tour—honestly, it’s a bummer. At the same time, it’s a relief. We started this thing in the parking lot, and then we made people aware of the fact that we’re actually artists. I’m always still excited to make Dead merch and go on tour, but knowing that the following year we’re going to have to think of something new for the summer is exciting to me.

Elijah: I’ve had a couple people ask me, “It’s the last tour, what are you going to do?” And I’m not concerned. But this summer, do I want to make the greatest Online Ceramics tour shirt that’s ever happened? Yes, I want to whoop this thing’s ass.

Selfishly, I’m going to really miss seeing this band, and I’m really going to miss doing it with our friends and traveling. I’ll miss having the full-on excuse to know that people are going to go to New York City for three days because the Dead’s playing.

John: It’s been a great excuse.

Elijah: And if we answer an email with, “Sorry, we’re at the Gorge in Washington camping for three nights to see the Dead,” everyone goes, “Yeah, that’s what you guys do.”

I’ve seen Dead & Company close to 100 times. There are probably five or six times I remember a song. That’s not really what it’s about; it’s the collective energy, the friends, the dinners, and the partying and seeing new places. A lot of people don’t make new friends as they get older. We’ve made hundreds of new friends.

Reprinted with the permission of A24.