...
But I've been busy and yada yada yada.
Anyway, I feel bad that I didn't write about the trip, because it was actually really interesting, and I had a great time.
It's so hot in Las Vegas at the end of May that the golf courses won't give out any tee times after 10 AM. People start their rounds when it's barely light, to try to finish when the temps are still in the double digits.
Indoors, however, Las Vegas has no seasons. It doesn't even have the diurnal patterns of night and day. People have remarked for decades at how the inside of casinos never have clocks, nor windows, nor any other way for you to tell whether you should be ordering omelettes or steak dinners. Just stay and play, 24 hours a day!
But yes, I went to Las Vegas, although specifically I went to the Sphere, partly because I wanted to see what the Sphere was like, but mostly because the Grateful Dead were playing.
And I'd write more about that experience, but as it turns out Nick Paumgarten has done it for me (paywall warning): Reckoning with the Dead at the Sphere.
Paumgarten and I differ in a few of the details, but for the most part he nails the scene.
Generally speaking, it was not a young crowd, or a particularly crunchy one. I saw more canes than dreadlocks. The people skewed middle-aged and heavyset, sporting an infinite array of merch, predominantly store-bought and Sphere-specific, as opposed to the D.I.Y. parking-lot goods of yore. But there were young people, too—converts, families. The crowd, overwhelmingly white, was evidently prosperous, no surprise when you consider the cost of the travel, lodging (presumably no one was pitching a tent on the Strip), and tickets, whose face value, given the fees and so-called dynamic pricing, runs from two hundred dollars to seven hundred dollars. People seemed more weary and dazed than elated, as though overwhelmed by the sensory experience, the scale of the place, and the distance of the walk along the endless faux-palatial hallways that passed from the Sphere back to the Venetian.
Paumgarten gets lost for a while, for instance in a long and bizarre rant about people in the audience talking during the Drums segment -- what the heck is wrong with you, Paumgarten?
And he wanders around in the article for way too many column-inches about his trip to the Experience, a quasi-museum of the Dead set up in the adjacent casino. On our trip, we didn't even bother with the Experience, and after reading Paumgarten's experience in the Experience, I don't regret our decision for an instant.
But with this observation, Paumgarten sums it up far better than I could possibly do:
The Sphere program wasn’t just a concert. It was a show, in the Vegas sense, with a concept, a narrative, and a retrospective intention. It called attention to itself. It wasn’t the Dead, or even an adulteration of the Dead, so much as a presentation about the Dead, confusingly featuring a couple of its survivors. It brought to mind a Civil War reënactment with a few Vicksburg veterans thrown in for authenticity. Or “Beatlemania,” featuring Ringo.
Yes, exactly.
But the beer was cold and the seats were comfortable and the sound system was spectacular and the four-hour-long video on the ten-story-tall screen was at least somewhat interesting and fun.
And it was a Dead show, so I'm glad I went.
