Sphere

Started: 2023-11-11 14:36:19

Submitted: 2023-11-11 21:47:09

Visibility: World-readable

Seeing U2 in the Sphere in Las Vegas

After returning from Hoover Dam I set out towards the Sphere to see U2.

To get to the Sphere from the Luxor, I caught the little tram north from the front of the Luxor. The tram was a little cable-pulled car on tracks with little individual cabins, with a streamlined nose cap on either end for decoration. This tram ran between Mandalay Bay and Excalibur, with a stop at the Luxor. From the "transit center" at Excalibur, I walked north across Tropicana Ave to New York New York, then passed through their smoke-filled casino floor. The next casino north was Park MGM, which proudly advertised that their casino floor was non-smoking (never mind that all of the other casinos I had been walking through were also owned by MGM and none of them were non-smoking). Here I stopped to eat supper at Eatly, a food hall on the edge of the casino with a bunch of Italian-inspired stalls, including one with large slices of pizza. I picked a pizza covered in mushrooms, because Kiesa wasn't there to object to mushrooms on pizza.

From there I found a second tram, heading from Aria to Bellagio. I stepped into the indoor gardens at the Bellagio, with plants set up to decorate elaborate fairy-tale sculptures, crowded by people taking pictures for Instagram. I couldn't make it to the Bellagio's fountains, because they were obstructed by construction scaffolds to set up to build spectator stands for an F1 race in two weeks. This scaffolding obstructed my path north along the strip; I headed east and walked along surface sidewalks (including a good view of a temporary bridge built over the race course) and along the course itself until I reached the Sphere.

As I walked I began to see people heading in my direction who looked like they might be heading to the same place. The most obvious was a group of Gen-X people wearing a U2 Joshua Tree tour. (The shirt looked like it was newer than the tour 35 years ago.) Once I was clear of the Strip I began to see glimpses of the giant LED screen on the outside of the Sphere. I didn't get an unobstructed view until I walked past a set of spectator stands for the F1 race and found myself on the other end of a parking lot with a clear view of the Sphere. The image on the outside of the Sphere was rotating so we could see different pieces of the image as we watched.

I scanned my ticket at the door and stepped into the lower lobby, which had a couple of merch tables and an escalator to go upstairs to the main lobby. I stood in line for the merch table and bought a shirt reading "U2•UV". I took the escalator up to the main lobby (past a statue of Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still, for no obvious reason).

The main lobby inside the Sphere was decorated with strange circular sculptures hanging from the ceiling, probably taking off on the idea of "sphere". There were people milling about the lobby, all there to see U2, plus more merch tables, as well as food and refreshments. The wide open space in the lobby was lit with soft blue light that looked neat but did a good job making it hard to see inside the lobby or get a picture to capture the space.

My seat was in section 211, the on the second tier of stadium seating overlooking the stage. Below me was a tier of seats that reached all the way to the general-admission floor immediately in front of the stage. The sections curved around in an amphitheater, filling in the space below the massive curved screen in front of us, so the screen occupied approximately half of a sphere. My section was the last section on the right, and I was on the right side of the section, close enough to see the pixels on the LED screen six seats to my right.

The giant LED screen in front of us had a large notch at the back, which is sort of like the top of the screen once it's wrapped around. This gave me the idea that the screen must have been designed by Apple, given their interest in building notches with curved edges into the screens in their products.

When I arrived the screen was displaying what looked like large concrete panels going most of the way up the screen, then transitioning into recessed panels topped with an oculus that made me think of the Pantheon. While I sat and waited for the show an animated bird flew in through the oculus and flew around the screen, landing on different panels to rest, before flying out again.

A DJ appeared in the crowd as the opening act, playing from the shell of a car in the crowd surrounding the stage. Half-way through the set the car was pushed through the crowd until it ended up on the opposite side of the crowd, just as the DJ was playing Nirvana (which struck me as another band that the mostly-Gen-X crowd would probably appreciate).

The DJ departed and the house lighting shifted, giving us the idea that we would see the headline act soon. The image on the screen began to darken, as if the lights were being turned down. The ambient music shifted, becoming a prelude, and each of the for members of U2 appearing at once from stairs on different sides of the stage. The band began playing, with Bono signing in a spotlight from the front corner of the stage, and the image on the screen showed what looked like Bono's shadow as he sang into his wireless microphone (though the image looked like it didn't quite line up with him on stage, giving me the impression it was a previously-recorded animation).

The show covered all of U2's 1991 album Achtung Baby, with the songs split into two halves at the beginning and end of the first set. Each of the songs had its own animation on the giant screen; "Zoo Station" had a series of giant words projected on the screen (inspired by, but not directly from, the lyrics of the song), fading quickly into the next word. Bono spent most of the first part of the set on a small rotating platform in the middle of the stage (maybe a meter in diameter, though it was hard to guess the size from my seat), swinging from the microphone stand like it was a piece of grade-school playground equipment while singing.

Most of the songs featured live video of the band displayed on the screen. Each song had a different visual scheme, and sometimes the image from the screen was visible behind the performers in their video, giving a brief impression of the hall-of-mirrors effect from screen-sharing one's own video conference screen. Most of the video seemed to be coming from a series of automated cameras mounted on tracks around the stage.

I've listened to the album Zoo Station countless times, and the arrangement the band played large sounded close enough to the studio recording that it was hard to tell a difference, except for some snippets embedded from other songs by other artists, including "Purple Rain". (I assume they must have had some backing tracks, because the band members stuck to their primary instruments, though I didn't try to decompose the mix while watching the concert.)

In the row in front of me was a family with two grade-school-aged children, each equipped with sizable ear protection, in different shades of green. The mom looked like she was more excited than the rest of the family put together; she came prepared for the concert wearing a sparkly body suit and leather jacket. The dad had an air of detached amusement. The kids started out cautiously optimistic, but as the show went on they progressively lost interest. By the second half of the show, when the mom tried to dance with her son, he was bored and done with the show and just wanted to go to bed.

Most of the audience seemed thrilled to be there, watching one of the biggest arena rock bands of the modern era play one in the buzziest new venue in Las Vegas, presented with a stage show that would not have been entirely out of place in a Eurovision ballad. At times we stood and sang and danced and gesticulated to the music; much of the time I sat leaning forward in my seat (with an unobstructed view thanks to the angle of the stadium seating) letting the music wash over me while I watched the band perform live in front of me while the wrap-around LED screen filled my peripheral vision.

The middle of the first set was the "Turntable" session. The drummer and bass player left the stage, The Edge picked up an acoustic guitar, and he and Bono sang songs from War, including "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (which the setlist I found reports that they performed for the first time during their residency at the Sphere). The lighting and stage presentation for this part of the set was subdued, without the bombastic animation of the earlier songs. After four songs the whole band returned to the stage to finish Achtung Baby, then the whole band left the stage for a brief intermission.

The band returned for an "encore" with songs from their other albums plus "Atomic City", the single they released a month earlier at the beginning of their residency. During this set the screen depicted a version of what we would see if the walls of the Sphere were gone and we could look straight through to the Las Vegas strip (though I noticed that the nearby streets were depicted without the spectator stands, Jersey barriers, and fencing set up for the F1 race), then they animated the deconstruction of all of the hotels and casinos and other buildings (complete with tower cranes above the buildings to facilitate their deconstruction) until we were left with the empty desert; which led into the backdrop behind my all-time favorite U2 song "Where the Streets Have No Name".

U2's 1987 album The Joshua Tree was written in and for the wide-open desert spaces of the American southwest. I grew up visiting the desert southwest so it's familiar and comfortable to me, like an old jacket I don't wear often but always fits just right. The album in its entirety, and the opening song in particular, took on special meaning to me as I sought refuge from the overwhelming gloom of the Seattle winter through visits to the Mojave and Colorado deserts of southern California. (On one of these trips I stumbled upon the tiny motel outside of Joshua Tree where the band stayed while writing the album.) Listening to the song, played live on stage in the Mojave desert where it was written, with 17,500 other people filling an arena, meant a lot to me.

For the last two songs, "With or Without You" and "Beautiful Day", the wrap-around screen faded to white and animated insects began to fall onto the screen, as if it were a giant dome and they were falling from the outside, until the whole screen was covered.

And then the band took their bows to thunderous applause and left the stage, and the house lights came up and we began to file out of our seats.

Actually getting back to my hotel proved more difficult than I expected. I took a different route out of the Sphere, following the pedestrian bridge to the Venetian, which seemed to be what everyone else was trying to do, so we ended up with thousands of people packed into a long hallway in an uneasy standstill that eventually started moving. Once we got to the Venetian the crowd disappeared into the casino-resort, but I got turned around trying to find where I was going (and ended up walking along the fake indoor Venetian canals inside the resort, with gondolier pushing boats with tourists in a wholly-artificial canal under a ceiling painted to look like a blue sky, which was simultaneously endearing and also creepy) and eventually headed out to the sidewalk on Las Vegas Boulevard to find the entry to Harrah's, which eventually led me to the Las Vegas Monorail. I bought a ticket, missed the first crowded monorail, and caught the next train to the south to the terminus at the MGM Grand. From there I made my way through the smoky casino floor and crossed Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Ave on foot bridges, then got lost in Excalibur trying to find my way back to my room in the Luxor.

Seeing U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas with 17,500 other fans was an amazing experience and I'm glad I took the opportunity to do it.