Review: I went to my first Dead & Company concert Tuesday night. It was also my last.

I never saw The Grateful Dead perform live.

Never witnessed founding Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart perform as part of Grateful Dead spinoff The Other Ones; never caught those three doing a show with Bill Kreutzmann as The Dead, which was the group’s name for a few years in the ’00s; never saw Furthur, the spinoff of the spinoff that Weir and Lesh spun off; and — prior to Tuesday night — I’d never been to a Dead & Company concert, despite four previous opportunities in Charlotte between 2016 and 2021.

As for why I passed on Dead & Company repeatedly, honestly, it was just too intimidating. I felt like trying to tackle writing about a Dead & Co. show without a Grateful Dead knowledge base would be like trying to, say, evaluate The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando without having ever opened a book or seen a movie about Harry Potter.

There was, however, a good reason to get over my fear and get myself to PNC Music Pavilion on Tuesday night.

Because this was my last chance. Because, as any self-respecting Dead & Company fan knows by now, Dead & Company plans to be resting in peace this summer, following a culmination of its “Final Tour” that will feature three shows in San Francisco in July.

In the end, after finally seeing the band in concert in Charlotte — after, that is, 3 hours and 16 minutes of celebrating the music of The Grateful Dead via roughly 3 hours of jamming but probably only about 16 minutes of actual singing — my biggest takeaway is more of a suggestion: Perhaps they should try to stick this thing out just a little bit longer. ...

I mean, even though Hart may be pushing 80, he still seems to be able to beat on his drum kit and the other assorted percussion instruments in his arsenal with the speed and the force of Roy Jones Jr. beating on opponents’ rib cages.

And even though the 75-year-old Weir sounds perhaps better than you’d expect and plays guitar well enough these days, all that really matters is that he isn’t embarrassing himself.

If it sounds like a knock, by the way, it isn’t. My point is simply —

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.

Ahead of the show, promoter Live Nation warned fans about 17 different ways to expect heavy delays getting to the venue, since it was sold out and since sell-out shows on weekdays tend to create biblical traffic during the rush-hour timeframe.

Getting in was, predictably, a nightmare. So were the delays at the ticket entrances were arguably even worse, with standstill lines for security snaking for hundreds of yards an hour before Dead & Company’s scheduled start time. It seemed like all 20,000 fans were standing outside the gates.

But a side trip across the street and up to Lot F dispelled that myth.

There, hundreds of fans wearing tie-dyed shirts and reeking of a particular green herb milled around the famous (infamous?) “Shakedown Street,” an almost-overwhelming collection of rows and rows of vendors that springs up outside every Dead & Company concert — and that is at once endearing and disturbing.

Along with the Middle-Eastern food stand selling “Philafel With Hummus” and the T-shirt tent hawking ones screen-printed with “Jerry Loves You” are seedier folks: roving salesman offering “gummy bears” of unknown origin; random dudes with card tables, handles of well vodka, and pieces of paper with “$5” scribbled on them; and eerily cheerful strangers, at every turn, looking from their outfits like they stepped out of a time machine that just arrived from 1970 and holding up one finger, in the hopes that someone would shove a ticket to the show into the hand that finger belonged to.

This would have been the best opportunity to soak up the vibe of fans at the event — i.e. people-watch — if not for the fact that I then proceeded to go inside the venue, where the pickings were equally plump.

The most familiar sound, before the show started, was something along the lines of one fan boasting to another fan about how many times they’d seen this or that incarnation of the Dead. Or where the last one they saw was. Or what made the setlist at a particular show good, great, maybe even downright life-affirming.

Then once the show got going, around 7:15 p.m., the most familiar sight was dancing fans. And not just any type of dancing fans, but hippie-happy, “Free to Be... You and Me”-style dancing fans.

Well, maybe that’s not the best way to describe it. No, this is better: Remember “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” when Schroeder is playing the piano and Pigpen is playing the upright bass and Snoopy is playing the guitar and all the characters are dancing? Remember how the Peanuts characters were dancing?

That’s exactly what you looked like, sirs. Exactly, ma’ams. For 3 hours and 16 minutes. And it was glorious to see your joyfulness.

Three hours and 16 minutes, incidentally, is just a few minutes longer than the amount of time it took me to complete my fastest marathon. And I bring this up not to brag, but just to underscore the fact that this was a loooooong show. If you factor in the 32-minute intermission, we’re talking close to the four-hour mark.

Of course, Dead & Co. has no opening acts, and you could easily argue that most big concerts are close to four-hour affairs once you add openers’ sets. But I’d argue back that opening acts are totally optional for us fans. We can skip them.

We can’t skip the first 90 minutes of the headliner. I mean, I guess we could. But I think that would heavily impact our ROI.

So let’s talk about ROI as it pertains to Dead & Company. It’s probably dependent on your point of view.

My sense is that hardcore fans, for instance, would have struggled to have a bad time Tuesday night no matter what. Paid a premium for their ticket, for a sold-out show, for a “last-chance” tour. Primed to have The Best Experience Ever, even if this was their 30th time seeing some form of The Dead. Went berserk for all 14 minutes of the extended funk fest that was “Shakedown Street,” which opened the show, and never sat down (though they perhaps wandered during meandering second-set staple “Space,” a nightly 10-ish-minute exercise in experimental noodling that can seem, to some, like time better spent on visiting the restroom).

My sense is that casual fans, on the other hand, would single out penultimate song “Sugar Magnolia” as the high point, if not because it’s the one song they recognized than because they were amused by the animations of flying eyeballs and banjo-playing turtles against a pink-purple sky.

For me, though, I’d go back to my original point about Weir: All that really matters is that he didn’t embarrass himself.

Again, I’m not knocking him. I’m just saying the only thing he has to do to be successful in the context of this tour is keep it in the road, so to speak. He’s a living legend, along with Hart, but they’re just doing their parts as best they can, along with bassist Oteil Burbridge, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and second drummer Jay Lane. And all of those guys had at least a couple star moments. Burbridge and Chimenti, several.

John Mayer, meanwhile, is on another level. Consistently transfixing.

I mean, Weir plays guitar. Mayer is one with his guitar. It’s not about the “guitar faces” he makes — the pursed lips, the closed eyes, the look he routinely gets while he’s playing that resembles the one I wear when I accidentally touch my eye right after de-seeding a jalapeno by hand. It’s about the fact that his fingers can do somersaults, handstands and backflips on a guitar, stuff that’s the manual equivalent of a rapid-fire Eminem rap. The note I made when he was tickling and teasing the strings at light speed during their performance of “Let It Grow” was this: “My hands feel arthritic just watching him.”

Mayer is also “just” 45, which should seem pretty young to the average Dead fan. I think most people, in fact, naturally have a different visceral response to seeing him perform than they do to watching Weir and Hart.

You look at them, and you get why they decided it’s time. But you look at Mayer and you go, Gee, I don’t know. IS it?

I’ve seen Mayer in concert as just John Mayer three times now. When it comes to the guitar, and his live performances, there are some obvious similarities. He’s like a one-man jam band who happens to gravitate toward love songs. The big difference between the acts is the fact that, as a solo artist, he builds on the connection his music makes with fans by talking to them. A fair amount. He tells stories. He tells jokes. He reflects. He pontificates. He meditates on stuff.

With Dead & Company, he does none of this. No one in the band does.

On Tuesday night, as they essentially have done every night on this tour (and on previous tours), they just played. They just jammed. For hours and hours. Then at the end of the show, they just bowed and just waved and just left the stage without saying a word to the audience.

That type of performance is somewhat foreign to me. Their brand of fans is, too.

I think, though, that if I’d been a regular at these shows — these weird, wonderful, spacey, sprawling Dead & Company shows, featuring a guitar player who is at the absolute peak of his powers — I could have gotten used to them.

I’m glad I at least got to see one.

Dead & Company’s setlist

Set 1:

1. “Shakedown Street”

2. “Cold Rain and Snow”

3. “Loser”

4. “Dire Wolf”

5. “Loose Lucy”

6. “The Wheel”

7. “Bertha”

8. “Let It Grow”

Set 2:

9. “Help on the Way”

10. “Slipknot!”

11. “Franklin’s Tower”

12. “Fire on the Mountain”

13. “The Other One”

14. “Drums”

15. “Space”

16. “Black Peter”

17. “Sugar Magnolia”

18. “U.S. Blues”

By the way: If you’re a big fan of Mayer’s...

John Mayer will be back this fall. His solo acoustic arena tour hits Spectrum Center in Charlotte on Oct. 23. Details: www.spectrumcentercharlotte.com.