I don’t know if you all have seen a concert at the Sphere yet, but I can’t speak highly enough of the place. It is absolutely incredible and until you experience it in person, it’s very hard to understand the impact it can have on you. I saw videos before I went and thought I understood. I was expecting something like IMAX 2.0 with a bigger screen or at least that is what my brain could understand before I experienced it. However, with your entire field of view full and with the screen having depth as it is wrapping around you, it fully tricked my brain into being different places instead of looking at a screen, as I always have in the past. The difference in experience between looking at a screen in front of you and feeling like you are there is absolutely huge for me and I highly recommend everyone check it out if they get a chance.
My first show there was Dead & Co a couple years ago. They fooled me at first by intentionally making it look like a less impressive screen similar to a giant IMAX experience for the first song, which had me a bit underwhelmed. At the end of the first song they opened up the screen like they were revealing a new world and place you in front of the Grateful Dead’s old house in San Francisco. As they played, you start to float up. Slowly you start to see the neighborhood, then the city, the Bay area, and you drift up into space. As you drift further and further from earth into space, the International Space Station flys from behind your head past you and across your line of sight and the audio is actually good enough that you get good imaging and can track it by sound alone as it passes from behind you and across your field of view.
I’ll be honest and say I not only wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, I still want to be an astronaut. I went to a space camp as a kid, had a telescope, made my own rockets, etc. Going to space never seemed achievable for me though. It was always a dream, but I found myself in space rocking out, with tears running down my face at the Sphere. This new experience that I was not fully expecting took me closer to a dream than I ever thought I was going to get and absolutely blew me away. The sound was also fantastic, especially for a stadium. You are generally either into the Dead or your are not, however, this venue was perfect for them. The Dead normally do a long drum solo and instrumental solo called Drums and Space in their shows. At the Sphere, they have transducers connected to the seats, so everyone sits down and you get to feel the bass transmitted through your seat. I’ve got transducers on my sim rig to simulate driving over curbs, bumps, gear shifts, and engine vibrations, etc but adding them in a concert so you can feel the music was fantastic. Plus, giving Deadheads this visual candy during a show was special and this show immediately vaulted to the best show I have ever seen by a gigantic margin. My wife and started planning our next trip as we walked back to the hotel that night and came back for a three show set last year.
When I heard that Bob Weir died, I felt a bigger loss then I have felt when any other musicians I like have died in the past. I came to realize part of that was that I’m not going to get to expense one of these shows again and these shows were absolutely special experiences in my life that I wanted to live on and that I had been looking forward to.
When I spotted the Metallica was coming to the Sphere, I got my wife signed up for their fan club to double my chances at the presale but we both kept missing out on tickets. Annoyingly but maybe for the best they ran laround 8 different presale events. I was able to get a pair of two day tickets in the 20th row but far to the side for an October set in my fifth attempt. I then got our ideal seats (centered with nobody behind us in the section) in the next to last presale they ran. My wife does not like Metallica, but she is still excited and I can’t wait to see what they do at the Sphere. Certainly going to be different from Dead & Co. but I’m can’t wait to see what journey I get to go on at the Sphere. I’m not sure yet if we are going to go to both the October set and the February set I was able to get tickets to but will be going in February for our idea seats at least. My wife wants to resale the Oct. shows but I’d like to go to both.
Who else is going to Metallica or has a Sphere experience to share? If you have not been, who would you like to see there?
