I am going to see Phish at the Vegas Sphere!!#!#

[cmh6476 757]

holy fockin fock

Going to be in Vegas that week for a conference anyway, so I reached out to a friend with industry connections.  I had already extended my trip a day and got a hotel at Harrah's for myself on Thursday (opening night) as I was prepared to just wait and get a loner just to say I went and was expecting to have to pay around $500 for something with an obstructed view.  This only cost me just over $200 and likely won't have an obstructed view at all

 

[cmh6476 757]

[BeachGuy23 512]

Sounds fantastic.  Have a great time boyo!

Wear your Mahomes jersey!

[MDC 5,895]

Can you send me a bootleg? I’ve been having trouble sleeping.

[cmh6476 757]

3 minutes ago, MDC said:

Can you send me a bootleg? I’ve been having trouble sleeping.

you don't appreciate all the noodling?

[cmh6476 757]

Not many care

 

But I found out not only did I just get a ticket, but it was through connections and so my frined had to fillout an online application to jojn the Phish "guest list", explain his connection to the band, yada yada as he put it.  And the tickets are marked P1, which probably stands for priority.  So not only did I succeed in just getting into the damn venue at a reasonable cost, but I'm probably going to have some killer seats for this fockin thing  

[BunnysBastatrds 1,921]

 Outside from their  fans being the smelliest of all time, sounds fun.

[cmh6476 757]

Section 201 mother fockers !%!%@$!$!%   

[cmh6476 757]

https://aviewfrommyseat.com/venue/the+sphere%2C+vegas/202/

[Bier Meister 1,514]

 

enjoy

[wiffleball 4,647]

Phish food is very good. 

[kutulu 1,551]

Who would you be seeing if you won the bet?

[cmh6476 757]

1 hour ago, kutulu said:

Who would you be seeing if you won the bet?

Going to Maynard's 60th birthday party April 30

[Maximum Overkill 652]

Liberals love Phish for some reason. I don't get it at all. 

[BunnysBastatrds 1,921]

5 hours ago, cmh6476 said:

Going to Maynard's 60th birthday party April 30

 I got to see him play at CBGS in New York. Incredible performance. Have fun. Wish I there.

[cmh6476 757]

1 hour ago, Maximum Overkill said:

Liberals love Phish for some reason. I don't get it at all. 

Someone asked on my Facebook the other day if you let politics influence your love for art..  yesterday on the way home she swallowed it by nwa came on my Playlist.   I don't condone how eazy and crew talk about wimmens like they are minced meat.  Just the same as I don't let a band's politics or their lyrics influence my appreciation for music. 

Bawitdaba, da bang, da dang diggy diggy

[Bert 1,092]

On 3/1/2024 at 2:20 PM, cmh6476 said:

holy fockin fock

Going to be in Vegas that week for a conference anyway, so I reached out to a friend with industry connections.  I had already extended my trip a day and got a hotel at Harrah's for myself on Thursday (opening night) as I was prepared to just wait and get a loner just to say I went and was expecting to have to pay around $500 for something with an obstructed view.  This only cost me just over $200 and likely won't have an obstructed view at all

 

Did you lose a bet?

[porkbutt 861]

doooooooooooood i hope they play divided sky and the sky divides. you fockin wook!

[TBayXXXVII 2,121]

1 hour ago, Bert said:

Did you lose a bet?

This was my thought as well.

[edjr 5,569]

2 hours ago, Bert said:

Did you lose a bet?

I can't think of many things I would rather do less. Watch a Royals game is one. 

[cmh6476 757]

Pete Lunde When Phish sold out all four of the April concerts it had booked at the Sphere, just as quickly as everyone expected, the obvious question arose: Why not do more?

After all, U2 opened the $2.3 billion venue that remade the Las Vegas skyline last fall with what was supposed to be a 25-show run — until demand built to a fever pitch, and the rock veterans shrewdly extended their stay, amortizing their investment in a dazzling, site-customized light-and-video show over an entire 40 nights.

And yet as Phish prepared to take up the Sphere’s second residency slot, and the band’s fervid fans bid up aftermarket prices well beyond U2’s, guitarist and frontman Trey Anastasio hesitated.

What would an extra weekend of shows mean for quality control?

He posed the question to show director and co-creative director Abigail Rosen Holmes. “It’ll be good,” she told him. “But it won’t be great. If you just do four nights, it’s going to blow minds.”

That was all Anastasio needed to hear.

“Then we’re not doing it,” he recalled telling her.

That is the Phish way. To the uninformed, it may come across as yet another breezy, shambolic jam band, inheritor of the Grateful Dead’s traveling circus. But devoted members of the Phish “herd” understand the complex dynamics that drive these erstwhile Vermont hippies. Anastasio and his bandmates want every show to be the aural equivalent of an Easter egg, offering joy and surprise and an unreplicable magic. At some shows, fans encounter an unannounced rock opera, staged with actors and elaborate props; at another, they’ll each walk away with a free box of mac-and-cheese. Phish never repeats a set, and it refuses to commemorate its classic albums.

Not exactly what you expect to find among the A-list nostalgia acts that dominate the Strip, which in coming months will host residencies by Mariah Carey, Garth Brooks and the Killers, re-creating their 2004 album “Hot Fuss.”

“There is a quality of Vegas where older bands go to play their old album, to make a lot of money late in the twilight of their career,” Anastasio says. “That’s not what we’re interested in.”

So Phish will sweep into town on April 18, intent on playing about 80 songs over the course of four concerts, repeating none. And yes, that will include most of the new material from “Evolve,” an album fans won’t hear until its July release. (The title track drops Thursday.)

Meanwhile, the Sphere’s high-tech 160,000 square-foot LED screen will offer the band a proper swirling canvas for its elaborate visions, as channeled by Holmes. She got her start as lighting director on the Talking Heads’ groundbreaking 1983 Stop Making Sense tour and has since collaborated with Roger Waters, Peter Gabriel, Miley Cyrus and Janet Jackson.

She is also — as is required in the Phish camp — an excellent secret-keeper. Anastasio divulges that the four shows will be linked by a theme, but neither he nor Holmes will say what it is.

“I’m not trying to be cagey,” she says. “I just want people to not have any idea what’s about to happen when they come into the room. That’s part of the fun of this.”

The path to the Vegas Sphere began in an incongruous place: the tie-dye-friendly campus of the University of Vermont, where Anastasio jammed with longtime bassist Mike Gordon and dress-wearing drummer Jon Fishman for the first time on Dec. 2, 1983, in a student dining hall. A fourth member, guitarist Jeff Holdsworth, dropped out before graduation but the others kept going, soon joined by keyboardist Page McConnell.

It was a Burlington band through and through, imbued with the crunchy spirit of a city that had elected Bernie Sanders mayor, launched Ben & Jerry to ice cream fame and nurtured Bread & Puppet, a politically radical theater company known for its antiwar, anti-nuke parables told through gigantic puppets.

Phish built its loyal audience over a decade through constant touring, without MTV or radio hits. Eventually, after signing with Elektra, the band played “Saturday Night Live” and David Letterman’s show. But the musicians followed the Grateful Dead’s grass-roots model by creating their own company, Dionysian Productions, to handle tours and merch.

It was perhaps not surprising that Phish intersected with certain other aspects of Dead culture. Every show was a freewheeling party, awash in exotic substances. As the party grew, so did Anastasio’s personal struggles, and the band made the difficult decision to break up. The farewell show in Coventry, Vt., grossed almost $9 million, but the guitarist remembers a more dizzying number — the 3,000 friends on the guest list for the out-of-control backstage festivities.

But Phish never fully drifted apart. The musicians were best friends as much as bandmates. Even at Anastasio’s lowest point — he was briefly jailed after a 2006 narcotics arrest — he remained in regular communication with Fishman, Gordon and McConnell. Stranded in Upstate New York for 14 months as he completed a felony drug-court program, he found himself picking up the phone to call McConnell.

“Like, a lot,” Anastasio recalls. “And he wasn’t happy because the band had broken up. Yet I never got that. I would call him, and he would answer the phone, and we would talk. I can’t even say how much I care about that man.”

“I guess in my heart, I never actually believed that the band was over,” explains McConnell.

In 2009, a rehabilitated Anastasio returned to the stage with the rest of Phish. There were some changes. The band members signed to a management company, Red Light, to liberate themselves of the pressure of overseeing a staff. And they altered the culture. No more open bar. Not even a can of beer. There was no discussion about this. It just happened.

“I think everyone was relieved to stop having these huge scenes backstage,” says McConnell. “It was just, you know, Trey’s sober and do we really want a bunch of people drinking backstage?”

Even while the easy, loose-limbed sound of classic Phish sprang back to life, the revived band’s prankster glee seemed to swell in scope and ambition. Lighting master Chris Kuroda handled a rig that grew so large it couldn’t always fit into arenas. At a show in 2009, Fishman was shot out of a cannon. In 2017, Phish played 13 Madison Square Garden concerts in a row (now known as “The Baker’s Dozen”) in which not a single song was repeated and a special doughnut was distributed to everyone in the audience. In 2018, a Halloween show turned into the debut of Kasvot Växt, an alter-ego band of white-suited Scandinavian ’80s-synth enthusiasts, with an entire set of new songs written just for the gig.

[cmh6476 757]

 

[cmh6476 757]

Cheapest tickets after fees for this show on stubhub right now are $811.  In my section they are $1,379.  You guys can act like you don't want to be there, but you'd fockin go too just to say you went

[frank 2,147]

Just think, you will be at a Phish show and see crazy colorful shapes flying all around you. People who went to all their other shows will be so jealous. 

[cmh6476 757]

I think OJ's visitation is tomorrow here,  should i?

[cmh6476 757]

It's happening

Been waiting months for this day to finally get here.   Hope the experience lives up to the hype

[Baker Boy 1,485]

16 minutes ago, cmh6476 said:

It's happening

Been waiting months for this day to finally get here.   Hope the experience lives up to the hype

The only hype I’ve heard is from you

[cmh6476 757]

39 minutes ago, Baker Boy said:

The only hype I’ve heard is from you

You ain't coming?

[posty 2,296]

40 minutes ago, Baker Boy said:

The only hype I’ve heard is from you

Baker Boy won this thread...

[cmh6476 757]

That was phenomenal.   If you ever get the chance to see a show at this venue, do it!

[cmh6476 757]

Here's the review I put on the Facebook sphere run group page.  A lot of people were b1tching about the lame video and show, but I think people just like to complain:

Here's a review from someone that's been to two shows now, after a night 1 that I was simply lucky to be part of.   The other show I attended was a Starlight show in KC back in '15 I think.   Went with someone who is a more experienced attendee (deer creek and multiple others) and two first time attendees but are very well traveled in music in general. 

I was absolutely blown away and in awe most of the show.   It is a little different to get used to, because the entire canvas is the screen but they did an outstanding job using what they had to work with.  We were in 202, and I couldn't complain at all about the venue.   Whether sitting or standing you had a decent view and either was a little different experience.   Sitting you could better see the entire video and got something out of the music coming from your seat.  And standing felt more like being part of the show.   I'm still an up close and personal concert goer, so there were times I definitely wished I was down partying with you all standing in GA. The sound was immersive and other than some feedback that seemed to be quickly resolved, I thought it sounded amazing.  It was weird getting sound coming from everywhere, but the band was playing with it as a result and it was cool once you kind of accepted that it's different than what you normally get attending a show.

My friend that helped land my tickets was production manager for the Flaming Lips for a long time.   First time seeing Phish for him, but he genuinely seemed blown away with the venue and the canvas it can provide for an artist.  It'll be interesting to see how the venue is used longterm, as a 40 day residency will be different than bands gearing up for a one or two day performance. As he said, the Lips would be elated to get in there and do something with it.   But will it be reserved for long running shows with a handful of acts each year, or eventually become like a destination for many different artists to visit each year?  I don't know, but I hope you all get to experience it at some point as I'm sure you all love live music as much as I do. 

For me, this felt like the Closing of Winterland, which I inherited the DVD of from my late brother.   While it's different in the sense they are basically opening a venue rather than putting a nail on the coffin, from my perspective it felt like something incredibly special to be part of from start to finish.   I'm so grateful I was simply a small part of it, and I hope you lucky ones there for the next couple nights enjoy it just as much as I did.

[IGotWorms 3,317]

Nice, sounds like a great experience!

[Bier Meister 1,514]

[cmh6476 757]

Here's the vidoe phish put out on youtube from the night i attended:

 

[Pimpadeaux 2,271]

I'm going to see CMH at the Vegas Uranus.

[cmh6476 757]

1 minute ago, Pimpadeaux said:

I'm going to see CMH at the Vegas Uranus.

Is that where you are doing your residency?

[Pimpadeaux 2,271]

1 minute ago, cmh6476 said:

Is that where you are doing your residency?

Yes, except with crappy music!

[cmh6476 757]

11 minutes ago, Pimpadeaux said:

Yes, except with crappy music!

Some would argue the music I was listening to was crappy.  There was definitely a tremendous amount of noodling. 

[Pimpadeaux 2,271]

22 minutes ago, cmh6476 said:

Some would argue the music I was listening to was crappy.  There was definitely a tremendous amount of noodling. 

Are they still playing?

[BunnysBastatrds 1,921]

 That venue looks amazing. Wow. On my bucket list now. There and Red Rocks.Sounds  like you had a great time.

 And music is so subjective so enjoy who you love.