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When I first got wind of this thing that was being built in Las Vegas called The Sphere I knew I would have to go. I mean, a $2.3 billion purpose-built audio-visual/multi-sensual immersive 4D concert hall that would boast the largest LED screen in the world and a spatial audio system comprised of a staggering 167,000 speaker drivers, amplifiers, and processing channels that weighs almost 180,000 kilograms?!?!
I’m in.
Well, not “in” enough to travel to Vegas to see U2, who spread the honour of opening the Sphere into a forty-night run. Next up was Phish, who played four straight nights in April of 2024, but unfortunately those shows coincided with a work trip that required my presence, lest I would have been there with bells on. So when Dead & Co. announced that they’d be following Phish with a string of three-night weekends it was a pretty natural fit. M’lady and I pored over the eight or nine weekends they had booked and came up with a series of strategies to employ during the onsale date.
I’m not sure going to the very first weekend was amongst these strategies, and I’m absolutely certain that obtaining floor tickets for the opening night at $399US a pop wasn’t, but seasoned as we are that’s what TicketBastard’s™ constantly-updating ticket-trickle panic-buy presale forced us into. Once we had wrapped our head around what we had just done (the face value of my first Grateful Dead ticket was $28; “Price Incl. $1.50 parking”) we promised ourselves – like, pinky-promised – that a) we would only go to two of the three nights, and b) if we couldn’t pull tickets in the cheaper upper level at the regular onsale then we would only go to the one night we already had tickets for.
And not only did we succeed in getting 400 levels (dead centre) for the second night at the regular onsale price of $195 per ticket, by the time the shows finally came up Dead & Co. had announced several additional weekends and prices in the secondary market had plummeted. As it turned out we could have gotten in to either night for $100 or less. Ah well.
We flew into Vegas the night before in hopes that we would be nice and rested when we woke up on May 16, 2024 (aka show day) but alas, trying to sleep off the four-and-a-half hour time difference in the noisiest room in the off-strip Mardi Gras Hotel had us both awake by 5:30am.
Ironically, our room was specifically requested. When we checked in m’lady asked if we could have a room with a view of the Sphere, so we were assigned one of the only rooms that faced the front of the hotel, which is on a very busy four-lane boulevard which itself is overshadowed by a rather noisy and very busy monorail.
It was hard to kill time because the hotel’s wifi couldn’t reach all the way to our far-flung room but kill it we did, and by 11am we had switched to a much better (and quieter) room near the pool. We hung out at said pool for a while talking to strangers before walking to the official Shakedown Street, which was in the parking lot of some off-strip casino. I was melting in the desert heat as we toured the hundred or so booths but I came away with a cool t-shirt and a couple of stickies from Grateful Fred’s for the back of the car.
I’m not sure how it works nowadays, but there’s no question that the Dead are getting money from the vendors somehow, because their copy-written logos were all over the place. Back in the “real” lot days that sort of stuff was always in danger of being confiscated by the powers that be’d. Not anymore, it seems.
Afterwards we stopped at a burger place to cool down (and eat burgers) and then we decided to join the merch line outside of the Sphere on our way back to the hotel. Unfortunately, what was supposed to be a brief-ish wait to hopefully snag a poster and a t-shirt stretched into a solid two hours of standing in the sun, as the booth was significantly late for their 2pm opening, and with an absurd limit of five posters of each of the five different prints (one of the five could be a foil, which are much more sought-after) once the line started it moved very slowly.
Anyway, we limped away from early-merch with a total of four posters (two foils) and a t-shirt that I really dig, aiming for as much shade as we could during the walk back to the hotel. Which wasn’t much.
We were flat-out exhausted and blatantly overheated when we got back so we headed straight to the pool where m’lady cooled her heels in the water while I stuck to the shade and looked for conversation. By showtime we had fully rebounded, though we stopped at McDonald’s on the way back to the Sphere to pound a couple of extra-large iced coffees, just to be sure.
Uh-oh…this is already too long and we haven’t even stepped inside the venue yet! Let’s get in there:
Of course the Sphere is ticketless, and for once I found it not so bad, mainly because the line was just so darn fast and efficient. M’lady has a cell phone now, otherwise I guess I couldn’t go to concerts anymore (for the most part), and the scanner beeped both of our tickets without a moment’s hesitation. The lady standing there gave us a huge smile and welcomed us to the Sphere. I walked through a metal detector without emptying my pockets (no cell phone) and was waved right through. M’lady got the same, plus a short flashlight-inspection inside her small purse. There were a couple of security dudes there frisking people but it seemed to be on a volunteer basis and I opted not to. We went directly to the floor.
Which meant not seeing the robot-filled foyer that I had caught glimpses of* in a Sphere video or ad here and there. That didn’t keep us from looking for it though, which led us to explore the small labyrinth of hallways and bars on the floor level. I was especially taken with a ring of light that provided a portal to the cocktail lounge. The ring (or sphere I suppose) of light was actually a 180º arc of light ringing the semi-circular entrance to the bar, but the light was reflected in the highly polished floor, which created a perfect circle that moved in your perception as you walked towards and through it. What a nifty, nifty idea.
When we came up robotless we showed our bracelets, ducked through a tunnel and emerged onto the floor of the Sphere. Entering such a vast space all at once made me gasp.
My gawd man, it’s big in there.
Now, I’ve been in bigger rooms like the Olympic Stadium in Montreal or the Whatever Center where the New Orleans Saints play, but somehow the Sphere just seems so much bigger. Maybe it’s because all the seats are on one side. Maybe it’s because the roof is about 350 feet above your head. Or maybe it’s just because it is so damn big.
It’s big.
It was still about an hour until showtime so we asked an usher about the robots and he told us how to take to the escalator to the lobby, which we did easy-as-you-please. As a matter of fact, everything in the Sphere was easy, especially because everywhere you looked some smiling employee was holding a sign that said “Can I help?”
As we rose to the lobby we could see that it was definitely something to see. Beautiful arcing architecture housed a free-flowing mezzanine the could serve 20,000 people all at once, instantly. All of the kiosks were cashless, and with the exception of the merch area all concessions were paid for with an automatic reader: you simply placed your items on the counter and the robo-cashier would tally it up and put the total on a tap-and-pay screen. Each transaction took a few seconds, tops. And all under the roaming eyes of a real human being of course, who did nothing but watch and smile.
(As the city is utterly devoid of humanity, the honour system is never a viable option in Las Vegas.)
There were giant rings disappearing into the impossibly high ceiling and a massive 3D video screen welcoming us to the Dead & Co. run. There were several displays too, but they were all covered up; they were undisplays I suppose. Clearly these were the interactive robots that I had seen in the promos, and they were being kept under wraps either to help preserve the ticket sales for their daily Sphere Experience or because they were worried that the Deadheads would corrupt their Artificially Intelligent workforce. Or both.
Okay, okay…this is turning into a book fer crying out loud. But it was the Sphere! I’ll try to keep it moving from here on.
We made it back to the floor with a half-hour to go and parked ourselves about thirty-five feet diagonally out from the corner of stage left (Oteil-side). I gaped at the inside of the dome, full of scaffolding and buttressing and light seeping in from the images being projected on the outside screen…and…wait a minute…
I left our spot and walked up to the edge of the floor where I was only about fifteen feet from the screen and I’ll be damned if we weren’t actually looking at a projection the entire time! There was no scaffolding, no buttresses, no nothing. Just the largest hi-def screen in the world already messing with me. So very cool.
Finally the lights went down and the band took to the stage, easing us in with a relaxed, well-played Feels Like a Stranger opener. Visually the Sphere folks eased us in as well, if not outright punking us by merely projecting the band members onto the screen, with the fake-scaffolding clearly visible as the backdrop. I mean, sure Bob Weir was about 175 feet tall but this wasn’t even a hint of what was to come.
However, as the band geared up for their second number the Sphere dropped a visual bomb on the crowd that almost knocked me over (literally). With a metallic grind, the fake backdrop split open, creating a crack in the Sphere in the shape of that oh-so-familiar Grateful Dead lightning bolt, and through this crack we could see a row-house on a bright sunny day. The crowd seemed to notice all at once that we were looking at the Dead’s famous house in Haight-Ashbury and in that moment the band started playing the opening strains of Mississippi Half-Step. For those few who hadn’t made the connection, the screen soon made it clear, displaying the words “Haight-Ashbury” and “San Francisco” on the screen as an SUV drove past the house. It was clearly modern day. Heck, for all I knew it could have been a live video feed ‘cuz it looked so…OH MY GAWD!!! The camera was attached to a drone that suddenly started to rise; from my perspective the floor seemed to drop away and the entire Sphere shot up in the air.
I came that close to falling over. This would be the first of several times over the course of the evening that I would put my hand on m’lady’s shoulder for support.
We rose higher and higher until San Francisco was a small patch below us. Then we started to float across the landscape, over the desert and ultimately so high that the Earth disappeared into the distance, leaving the Sphere and all 20,000 of us inside floating in space. The drone footage had been seamlessly edited into satellite imagery, or perhaps there had been no actual cameras involved at all. Maybe it was all done by computers and…OH MY GOD a satellite just flew past my head! The whole crowd cheered at the surprise.
As they would for every surprise of the night, which was, well, everything. Every song featured a different visual theme that ranged from amazing to unbelievable, and most of these themes included zings and surprises like that satellite fly-by that kept us all enthralled for every moment.
I’m telling you it was all sheer perfection. Astounding. Flabbergasting. Simply unreal.
Oh, and the sound! The clarity with which I could hear every single thing on the stage was jarring. The sound was so perfectly separated that it actually sounded odd. Great though, like really, really great. And shockingly quiet. From the floor the band was not much louder than the level you might set the music at a cocktail party. One could easily converse with a neighbour without leaning in or raising one’s voice (though the drunky-talky loud dude that kept going on to his crew about how the venue should sell perogies obviously didn’t get the memo; luckily it was roomy enough that we easily slid fifteen feet away from the foghorn when it was clear he wasn’t going to shut up). The following night I would find out that the volume was significantly louder (and the sound was somehow even better) from the bleachers, but from both vantage points I found the bass way, way not-prominent enough. So much so that if it had been Phil Lesh up there playing then I would have been downright upset, but it was Oteil Burbridge, and as much as I respect Oteil, to my discerning earballs he is the least engaging musician on the Dead & Co. stage. So I was okay with it but still, turn up the bass.
Otherwise the sound was immaculate. Like, scary-good. But as good as it was, it was the same “good” all night, so once I appreciated the pristine sound I was done thinking about it. The sensually enveloping eye-candy emanating from the vast hi-def screen, however, delivered a constantly shifting display of pummelling light and vibrating colours that continually stole my attention and was impossible to ignore at any moment throughout the experience.
Some of the visuals were purely psychedelic, bathing us in thousands of square feet of swirling, twirling rainbows. Other songs featured fun themes, like following Uncle Sam skeleton as he rode his chopper along a valley lined with dancing bears and flying eyeballs, or a flowery, forested meadow that came with an actual refreshing wafting breeze, thanks to the Sphere’s cutting-edge 4D technological effects. They have smell-technology in there too. The place smelled like hippies and weed all night.
Some of the songs simply cast a huge backdrop upon which to cast giant images of the band performing – like a B&W Western scene during Me and My Uncle – but mostly the screen was used to hammer us with overwhelming, unforgettable visual earthquakes that couldn’t be experienced anywhere else.
It did, and it was incredible.
If there was any downside at all, it was that the Sphere can’t help but to overshadow the music. Truly, the screen outperformed the band, and the band was killing it. To be honest, sometimes I hardly even noticed the music because my eyes were so enthralled, but that could only happen because the band was so damn good. And they were. What I mean is, if the band had been lacking then the music would have had every opportunity to distract me from the visuals, but they weren’t, and it didn’t.
I mean, the music was great. In the first twenty minutes or so I might have been looking at John Mayer with my arms crossed (I’ve pretty much never listened to John Mayer playing the Dead, though I have long known that he’s a good player and improviser), but it didn’t take very long for him to win me over, big time.
John Mayer is simply fantastic in Dead & Co. Please don’t hate me (especially because I’m right), but he is astronomically better playing Grateful Dead music than Warren Haynes ever was. In short, John Mayer is the shizzle.
But sometimes I’d swear that the real star of the Grateful Dead are the Deadheads, and when we all kept singing and singing at the end of the show-closing Not Fade Away I cried, and not just a little. Strip away the massive hi-def screens, the fifteen-hundred speakers, the tie-dyes, the VW’s, the stealies and dancing bears, and yes, even the glittering Las Vegas facade and you’ll find that at the base of the Grateful Dead is community, and it’s that community that keeps me coming back.
(Oh, and Phil Lesh. When it came to Phil Lesh all you Deadheads can go piss up a rope; I’d happily go see Phil play in an empty room.)
I should mention that throughout the evening servers were continually working the crowd running drinks while others kept busy making sure the floor was kept clear of the ensuing empty beer cups. I even saw guys going around with mops cleaning up spills during the show. I’ve never seen that before.
Oh, and the show ended with no encore. I don’t think I had ever seen that at a Dead-related show before either. That was fine though; by the time the lights went up we’d received plenty of entertainment.
If there is another downside to the Sphere it is the sore neck one gets from craning at the screen all night, though I believe this particularly afflicts those with floor tickets. Being on the floor also robs one of a smidgen of the visuals, but only a smidgen. From my seat in the 400’s the following night it was clear that the images were primarily aimed at those in the seats, not on the floor. I had a couple of “Aha!” moments when things that had seemed odd from the floor made sense from up in the nosebleeds, like the scene that covered the Sphere with a collage of old tour posters and ticket stubs. I saw them all just fine from the floor, but I wondered why the images at the bottom were all fuzzy. The next night it was obvious that the collage was projected to appear like we were in a giant square box with a flat ceiling and flat walls on all sides (all of them covered with posters and ticket stubs). From the wider perspective I could see that the “distorted” images at the bottom were merely elongated to propagate the illusion of squareness.
If you get what I mean.
But these are mere frivolities (well, except the sore neck…that was pretty nuts) compared to the amazing, awesome, astounding, exhilarating, and currently one-of-a-kind Sphere**.
It made me feel like I am truly living in the 21st Century. Would recommend.
*Once I knew I was going to the Sphere for Dead & Co. I made a point of avoiding any and all footage and coverage of the Sphere so it would be as new to me as possible when I got to experience it myself. It was difficult to look away from all the pictures from the Phish run, but I mostly succeeded.
**Okay, okay…if I had to complain I would add that I’d been extra-excited to see what they would do with Drums/Space, which has long been one of my favourite parts of any Dead show. I was expecting the craziest of craziness, a mind-twisting mish-mash of psychedelic splendour that would push me to the brink of my psyche but y’know, Drums was accompanied by pretty much the lamest visuals of the night. Sound-wise I could feel the low notes without my ears, but the screen gave us nothing more than a swirling kaleidoscope of hand drums that looked way too much like the flying toasters from Windows 95. Drums/Space was significantly better the following night when they changed the visuals to morphing footage of downhill skiers.
But that’s another story, and one that won’t be nearly as long as this one. Promise.
Todd Man Out 