It’s the mountaintop
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Worth a read
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They’re what plants crave
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Got back from Vegas on Saturday and still processing the whole experience.
Was in Vegas for 3 days with my lovely wife (got married last November, been together for 2 years.) I will preface by saying that my wife is not big into jambands (more of a Taylor Swift fan) but lets me indulge in my fandom and was fully on board with going to a Sphere show. That said she’s only been to an outdoor UM show with me, not a Phish or Dead show. We’ve also seen some arena concerts but nothing with a large contingent of wooks.
We hit Lady Gaga on Wednesday (fantastic), went to Meow Wolf on Thursday and ate at some baller restaurants (Momofuku, Lotus of Siam, Martha Stewart, and Sushi Samba pre-sphere). As previously mentioned in this thread it was HOT in Vegas, especially for a gringo like me. Standing in direct sunlight is almost unbearable for more than a minute or 2. Even at night it’s still 95+ degrees. We managed to hydrate pretty well and I didn’t end up drinking a ton over the weekend as a result. I also turned 40 last year and the booze just hits me differently these days.
Lastly, we were supposed to have an 11am flight out on Saturday when we originally booked it but then back in May Southwest decided to change our schedule and put us on a 9am flight.
Anyway, Friday evening on the final night of our trip, we head into the sphere. We went in around 6:45 and didn’t have to wait in any lines at all, security was easy. We were in sec 407, row 11, pretty much dead center with a great view of the screen. It took up my whole field of vision, completely immersive. During Truckin’ was the lift-off from SF and my edible was kicking in hard and it was a bit disorienting. It’s basically an extreme virtual theme park ride at that point lol. Like I said, I was a bit disoriented but then I looked over at the wife and she looked green in the face. She’s prone to motion sickness and NOT do well with the blast off to space. However, once that was done and it was mostly just trippy visuals she was fine.
Then there was the crowd…
I’ve been going to jam shows for 20 years so I tend to tune out spun wooks as just a cost of doing business. Not so much for the wife who was very amused by the couple in front of us who was clearly tripping hard. The gal of the couple was having engrossing conversations with herself whereas the guy was doing interpretive dance. Pretty harmless. The guy behind us, however, was clearly coked up and did not shut up the entire fucking show. He zeroed in on the relatively normal couple sitting next to us and chattered at them the whole time. We heard all about his drug addiction problems (he only dabbles when on the road), he asked them to be facebook friends then had to jabber about the one mutual contact they had, he was asking them how many kids they were planning to have (despite them only being engaged), and finally gave them his pitch for his favorite cryptocurrencies but assured them “he wasn’t giving financial advice.” They were just too nice to tell him to STFU. There was also another drunk guy near him that was yelling during the whole show as well.
My wife hung in there for 2+ hours but during the drums when the seats were shaking she had to tap out. She offered to just take a cab back to our hotel (Paris) and let me stay until the end but I just decided to bag it too. 3 days of Vegas capped with a hippy visual funhouse was plenty haha.
The Sphere is a marvel of technology and there are going be some insane things done artistically in that place but it is an INTENSE experience, especially in the top section. You can barely see the band unless they’re on the screen, it’s more of an audio/visual immersion than just a concert. I would think if you were down lower and closer to the band it would feel a lot more grounded.
Anyway, just wanted to relay my experience for anyone that’s planning to check it out!
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The sphere workers were some of the best around in my experience. They were giving people tickets to move seats if they were having issues both nights I was there.
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That’s awesome! I thought about maybe going down that road at first but the wife was ok after the space blast off. I have to believe there are people that have experienced extreme motion sickness in that place.
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#1 or npa
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Have a blast dude!
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Can’t wait to hear what you think of the show!
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Love that
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Un fucking real man. I had such high expectations and the sphere blew me away. I might change my flight and go again solo tomorrow. What an experience, wow.
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Yeah @DiabetesCOLE im thinking he got it!
Love to hear it @James ! That big ball is truly the mountaintop
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Nice, I have a couple of buddies there tonight. One of them is in his 60’s and started seeing tGD back in the mid-70’s. I’m curious to see what they have to say
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This is a good read. If you need to jump the paywall, https://12ft.io/ worked for me
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Great read! Particularly this:
A woman named Gina, from Guadalajara, found herself at a bar at the Venetian among the Dead crowd, after seeing the Adele show alone. She was an executive at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which had reserved the Sphere for a corporate conference that week. HPE had hired Dead & Co. to play a private set. Gina wasn’t very happy about this: “We could have had Imagine Dragons.”
I also find it interesting that he had idiots talking through the whole show for both of the ones he went to. I had the exact same experience.
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I guess I got lucky? No real chomping at either that I went to. But a lot of the other aspects the author described were things we noticed/commented on.
The sphere is sick as fuck tho. And drum/space along made it all worth it
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I’ve been saying to my wife “Just give Mickey the sphere. That’s his ball now. I could live in that thing 24/7 with Mickey just experimenting.”
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