In the late 1990s, I reviewed concerts for the Las Vegas Sun. At that time the Sun was publishing a full afternoon edition, which meant that to meet the deadline I needed to write the review immediately after the show. I’d go to the Sun’s former offices on Valley View and write a 300 to 400-word review while the assignment photographer, Ethan Miller, developed the photos he took a few hours earlier. We would finish around the same time, at 1 or 2 a.m.
But let me tell you about the venues. For the most part, I’d bounce between the Huntridge Theater, with an audience capacity of approximately 1,000; the original Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel, capacity 1,200; the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay, capacity 1,800; and every so often, the Aladdin Theatre (now PH Live), capacity 7,000. In a two-year span, from January 1998 to December 1999, I saw Bauhaus, Van Halen, Morphine, Garbage, Beck, Elvis Costello, Underworld, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, B.B. King, Moby, Lenny Kravitz, Blondie and more without once stepping foot in a venue that held more than 2,000 people. Going back further, in 1996, I saw Alanis Morissette, the Fugees, Duran Duran and Tori Amos all in the same month.
Now let’s talk about the present. In the past few months, The Black Keys, Kid Cudi, Post Malone, Meghan Trainor and Zayn, among others, have cancelled shows or entire tours. The music industry nickname for this reticence is “blue dot fever”—meaning, artists and management are possibly looking at all the unsold, blue-dotted seats in a Ticketmaster seating chart and deciding it’s not worth the money and headache.
I fear we’re losing touch with live music in significant ways. I think about the shows that have gotten Vegas pumped up in recent months—No Doubt at Sphere (capacity 20,000), BTS at Allegiant Stadium (concert capacity 50,000 to 70,000). They’re like luxury cars: expensive, available with high-priced extras and seemingly too big to fail. Their seating charts have mercifully little blue, because their audiences are drawn to them for reasons that go beyond their music: fan worship, nostalgia. And they’re presented in ways that stress their novelty: “Just wait until you see Gwen Stefani on a 24-story screen.”
The music itself no longer sells the show. People aren’t going to Coachella for the bands; they’re going to make content. Speaking as someone who went to a lot of damn concerts for his job, maybe too many—someone who had the privilege of seeing Lauryn Hill on one night and the responsibility of seeing the [expletive] Rembrandts on another—it’s depressing to think that COVID, corporate consolidation, rising prices and TikTok have managed to do what irate parent groups, government clench-butts and religious zealots couldn’t. They’ve very nearly killed off the simple pleasure of standing too close to the PA, raising your hands in the air and reveling in the sound of a song you’ve only heard before on earbuds.
Listen, though: There’s still hope. My second great burst of Vegas show going, in 2014-2015, was as starry as my 1990s streak: Elvis Costello with The Roots, The Drums, Rakim, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Laura Jane Grace, Yo La Tengo. I saw most of those shows at Brooklyn Bowl, capacity 2,000, and the Bunkhouse, capacity 250—and while the Bunkhouse is gone, the new Swan Dive is proving to be a worthy successor of equivalent intimacy. (And the former Swan Dive, now Bizarre Bar, continues to book shows.) Brooklyn Bowl, House of Blues are still in the game, making solid bookings. And the midsize halls at Park MGM, Fontainebleau and Virgin are decently booked this summer and fall.
We must turn back the clock. I don’t even know if that’s possible, with the big bites streaming has taken out of the recording artist’s financial ability to take their music on the road. But we have venues smaller than arenas that can accommodate big-ticket artists willing to downscale. We have a growing number of club venues that can be actively and successfully booked if we just freaking show up and engage with the bands—buy vinyl, buy T-shirts, tell our content creation-crazed friends that they missed something real and great. That’s how I start building my show numbers again. That’s how we cure blue dot fever, now and always.
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