The Greatest American Revival
'Sin City' Is The Town, The Tent Is A Giant Sphere, The Pulpit A Turntable, And The Salvation Is Real
Part One: How Long To Sing This Song
Readying for my senior year of high school, full of spiritual fervor, dreams, rock n roll, and beer I often found myself amongst the typical 1980’s middle-America church youth group doing pizza parties, prayer meetings, gatherings and whatnot that may have included a low-grade Christian movie depicting how we would all end up locked out of the bread-line if we didn’t accept Jesus soon. That exclusion also probably included some sort of ‘666’ marking on our forehead or back of our hand that would certainly seal our doom. Like many youth from my day I straddled the line between the Christian America that Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell were watering the seeds of, planted back in the early 70’s, and the ‘world’. That’s a ‘world’ that included everything normal our beautiful creation had to offer, but also everything that didn’t square with the hammer being pounded on any of a thousand denominational pulpits on Sunday morning, evening and even Wednesday night. We listened to music, played sports, drank, chased girls. We even had a Christian rock band called MAGI! We’d play a gig in our cutoff white t-shirts, emblazoned with the One-Way Jesus symbol, then head out to chase girls and have some Coors tall-boys (still wearing our band uniforms).
On a typical Kansas night in 1983, our Nazarene pastor invited our youth group over for a party. Excited to share a most wonderful discovery with the group, I brought with me a VHS recording of U2’s ‘U2 Live at Red Rocks: ‘Under A Blood Red Sky’ to hopefully watch with my church friends. This wildly different Irish quartet had nothing to do with any of the typical Christian rock of the day, but was nailing a message of hope, love and fighting for peace. They sounded like nothing else, looked like no other band, and resonated with a bunch of 16 and 17 year old’s unlike any youth pastor’s ‘two-liter coolness’ could ever touch. U2 was on MTV. They were saying something that a post-Vietnam generation who wasn’t heading to war could be challenged by, impossible to ignore. I make no claims that I had my ‘shit’ together and had a good head on my shoulder during that time, but, U2 got to me. It got to me to the point that I was ready to commit moving across the land to a Christian college that had a Christian radio station where I could learn and live the CHRISTIAN music business. I was going to be a part of saving the world. Luckily, my opportunity opened up at the party and I put the video cassette into the deck and hit play. The sound and vision of “Gloria” filled the fire place adorned parsonage basement and my friends were mesmerized, so I wanted to believe. I was so excited to be sharing this ‘gospel’. And, ‘Just wait until they see this guy singing Psalm 40!’ I thought. All was heavenly until the ‘King’ pastor came down and saw Bono evangelizing in a manner that would make Elvis blush. I won’t pretend to remember the exact interaction, but it involved someone pushing ‘stop’ on the VCR, the pastor claiming this ‘isn’t Christian music’ and me rebutting, ‘but they are a Christian band!’. That didn’t fly. I retreated that night, VHS in hand, confused, mad, betrayed. But, not defeated.
Forty years later, in a space 900 miles removed from that night’s episode, I am at the later end of a journey that did take me down that path of ‘saving the world’, at costs no education could prepare me for, a path lined with excommunications, exorcisms, removals, quitting and embracing. But, those tales are for other times than this. This journey’s spot finds me in a desert, about to walk through the folds of a revival tent never its likes known. While I hold no ill-will toward that pastor of my youth, I am about to discover a compassion for him as his lights dim in this world, and I am about to be bathed in the very springs of life.
Part Two: Surrender
Providence, destiny, preordained, predestined, luck, coincidence, grace; we all have words for describing that ‘thing’ that follows us through life seemingly aware of what brick lies next in our path. That ‘something’ that gives us a confident feeling of what needs to come next, or really what must come next. With as many run ins that I have had with these fateful experiences, I can’t quite imagine life without them and I certainly pity the person who hasn’t experienced these feelings, whether for the good or bad.
I got Taylor Swift tickets. For the Eras Tour! On Saturday, April 29, 2023, we would be sitting in nice, VIP seats at Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta, GA witnessing T-Swift invade our hearts with the wonders of a sampling from her entire catalog. If you were breathing in late 2022 you knew that Taylor Swift was embarking on what would surely be a record-breaking tour and that getting tickets to it was an absolute ‘cluster-f*#k’. I did not withhold my frustrations with the ticketing processes, yet, I followed the rules and got in line. The process worked for me, and our anticipation commenced on November 15, 2022 when I received an e-mail from Ticketmaster saying, “You Got Tickets To Taylor Swift.”
A chilly Birmingham (Alabama, not U.K.; sorry Black Sabbath fans) evening on January 24, 2023 we took our seats at a table near the door of our favorite Italian eatery in a bustling downtown. We were celebrating our daughter-in-law’s birthday and awaited the young couple’s arrival. Jessica sat down at the table as Jake parked their car. Jake was in the homestretch of finishing up his law school career, and we were excited about his graduation in May. Vigorous planning was about to take place for the much deserved celebration. A quick conversation, before Jake arrived, between Shannon and Jessica took place about that upcoming day. At some point, Jessica mentioned the date of graduation: April 29, 2023. The sound hit my ears like the deafening bells of Notre Dame to poor Quasimodo. What did I just hear? I thought graduation was in May? I knew it did not register yet with Shannon, and I felt my heart sink as I pulled up the Ticketmaster app on my phone. I tapped Shannon on the arm and showed her. Graduation was the same day as Taylor Swift.
Shannon handles challenging situations much better than I could ever claim to. The realization that our destined journey to see the world’s biggest artist bring to life the stacks of music that take up an entire Ikea Kallax cube of our vinyl collection has to be a big blow, however. Nonetheless, we got home from dinner and one thing was clear: We would sell our Taylor Swift tickets. I put them up for sale on Seat Geek the very next day.
While I didn’t understand it at the time, the winter of 2023 was a highly challenging and prolific period in the compendium of my life. While resolutions were burning out for people around the globe, I was slowly finding ways to consistent paths of personal peace through more intentional listening of music, daily meditation, and reading. I found myself in a place where both of my parents were dancing and struggling with the inevitable place we all will meet, the place of being between two worlds. The very weird state that happens differently for everyone, whether slow or quick, with one part in this world and another in whatever awaits us in the other. The lights my mom and dad brought to the world were not dimming, they were morphing like some of these theoretical images we see of light traveling through a black hole; changing, bending, twisting into something we can’t imagine.
Alzheimer’s is awful, and my parents were aggressively succumbing to the disease’s debilitating outcomes. Since September of 2022, they lived in the confines of a nursing facility outside of St. Louis and faced anything from COVID to broken bones, loneliness, confusion. Our family was being frayed at the seams from dealing with the situation, and all of us were sad to see a generation who gave us so much being ushered out of this world in what seemed like a back seat on an uncomfortable, bumpy bus ride.
For some unknown reason, or inspiration, I started writing down every album I listened to at the beginning of January. It wasn’t a goal or resolution. I just did it. That list started with Thom Yorke’s (Radiohead) wonderful band, The Smile’s “A Light For Attracting Attention.” The list grew while I chronicled my listening. Sixty-three albums in January led to another 50 plus albums in February. Every album that I listened to. No repeats, and I had to listen to each record completely through. Number 102: Journey, “Escape.” Number 103: U2, “The Unforgettable Fire.”
I call it a ‘rabbit-hole’, when one trails off into somewhere like Alice did and just can’t or doesn’t want to get out. “The Unforgettable Fire” segued into the entire U2 catalog. I was reading Bono’s, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.” While I listened to other things during this time, it was obvious that I was going deep into the makings of the biggest band of my generation. March arrived, and my travels with U2 went all the way through “Songs Of Surrender” at number 158. According to my Apple Music 2023 “Replay”, U2 was my most listened to artist of the year and accounted for over 3,000 of my 60,000 plus minutes of listening. The dominant portion of that listening happened during this period, and “The Unforgettable Fire,” was my most listened to album.
On March 19, 2023, overnight, my mom took her final leap out of this world. Less than a day later, my dad joined her. Their near seven-decade journey together was not going to end with them being without each other. The weeks prior were spent with them, watching the struggle to move on from this place. My mom in hospice, confined, struggling. My dad confused and ready to go. All of us grab on to what helps us in difficult times, and for me, intentional or not, I don’t believe I would have been close to any decent frame of mind to deal with what I dealt with was it not for the soundtrack of U2.
April 12, 2023: We sold our Taylor Swift Tickets for a handsome profit.
April 24, 2023: We received confirmation that we were ‘in the queue’ for the possibility to get tickets to the added U2 shows in Vegas.
April 29, 2023: Jake graduated from law school.
May 16, 2023: “You’ve Scored U2 Tickets for Las Vegas, NV on Sat, Dec 9”
Part Three: But, we must stop in Kansas City, Memphis and Birmingham.....
What’s next? Humanity’s fascination with the future always has our imaginations running with anything from a scorched Earth to a heaven filled with unearthly delights. Flying cars, space cities, torched cities where only the people with ‘bug out’ bags survive. When I was growing up in the 70’s, depending on which side you fell, that future might include disappearing into the air when Gabriel’s trumpet sounded or perhaps running from the anti-Christ so that he didn’t stamp your forehead with a “666”. The future was so bright, with apocalyptic hopes that very well may have included an onslaught of killer bees flying toward us on the back of a Soviet nuclear missile. Good times.
I remember a time in the early 70’s when I would look at the phone book for long periods. Within the pages of that thick directory which would fuel years of prank phone calls were drawings of timelines that projected wild and unimaginable future technology; a seemingly distant future when we would have video phones on our desks and in the kitchen. We would be happily talking with our friends and family and seeing them on a screen. Wow! A popular song from the mid 80’s asked, “It’s the eighties, so where’s our rocket packs?” My upbringing, not unlike anyone else’s was replete with prognostications of what would come next, and then next, and then next. While I enjoy how far we have come technologically, I still want a companion robot, NOW! Just a nice robot to run around with, follow me to the store and do small tasks that Sassy Dustins, our current robot vacuum simply cannot do. Is that really too much to ask? After all, we got to the picture phone. It’s sitting right next to me.
While technology dances us into our future, no other area of advancement strikes me as much as architecture. Countless, futuristic structures endlessly sprouting, melting our minds and getting prepped to touch the heavens and change our lives. Some live in infamy, others melt into our skylines unnoticed and past their time, to be updated again and again grasping for their former glory. Or, to be torn down and replaced by another man-made monolith pointing straight at our destined glory.
My first collision with a ‘titan’ structure came on Interstate 70 as a young nine-year old Kansan. We were heading to Kansas City. I remember the just under two-hundred mile drive with my dad, snaking down that long eastward highway along the fruited plains, witnessing his hijinks and taking it all in as I knew his musings would serve me well later in life. We would have many of these trips throughout my upbringing. My dad had a wonderful sense of humor. He would do things on trips like take the little microphone from his cassette recorder, and when we passed someone he looked directly at them and pointed that microphone like it was some sort of cop’s radar gun. Needless to say, the other car would slow down as we sped away laughing. I was definitely taking mental notes. Our trips to K.C. may have also included a stop at the Winchell’s Doughnuts in Topeka, where although our name is Winchell, we are no relation to THAT Winchell. Yet, Dad would make sure the folks at that shop knew we were Winchells, and the result may have been free doughnuts. Regardless of all the roadway frolic, my young mind was abuzz; for the first time I would see in real life the cathedral I had only seen on television, in magazines and pretty much every day from April - September in the Salina Journal.
Royals Stadium opened in 1973. It was the most advanced, beautiful baseball facility ever built, featuring 40,000-ish seats with a gargantuan scoreboard built in the shape of the Kansas City Royals crown logo with fountains surrounding it. The fountains sprung to life before games, between innings and after games with huge lighted shows. Niagara had nothing on this beauty of the mid-west, and I was finally about to see it in real life. We were getting close. I could see the mammoth Kansas City skyline in the distance. While I had no idea of the exact turns and curves at the time, I knew we were nearing a life changing sight as we got into the city. Just like that, a long seemingly right curve opened up into a reality so much larger than I had ever believed could exist. The giant Royals scoreboard in full view wrapped by the glorious triple decks that housed my wonderful Kansas City Royals. It was ominous, almost scary. No media, television or print; not even the colorful words of Royals radio announcers did any of this justice. This was a cathedral, holy ground. And, there wasn’t even a game that day.
Our trip was to pick up my Uncle Clark and Aunt Minnie. They were coming to stay with us hooligan Winchell kids while Mom and Dad went on a trip. I don’t know what Dad did to, or had on, Uncle Clark to convince him to stay with us, but Clark was the kind of guy who would get close to you with a really serious look on his face and then pop his dentures out and scare the hell out of you. Who knows? Mom and Dad’s trip was to Mexico or Hawaii, somewhere they could get away from us a bit and bring me a t-shirt or some sort of crazy mask or something. Definite Kodak slide show fuel. It would be another year before Dad took me to my first baseball games, yet, that day, he took the time to make sure I saw that stadium. He pulled into the parking lot and took me up there to see it. He even got us in. I will never forget that feeling of majesty, of awe, humility. How could this structure even be? This just felt right, like nothing else. Much safer, real and truthful than anything I was getting at that Southern Baptist church I was being drug to on Sundays. Why couldn’t I just walk out onto the field and accept salvation here?
A year later, on June 5th 1976, we made that long right-hand curve again, and this time it was for a double-header. My first live Kansas City Royals game. The awe was no less from that first bend around I-70, but this time we were in the action, sitting in our seats down the left-field line. My baseball card heroes were alive and real. I saw this cathedral in full working order, in real life. It housed my heroes. That day it housed Hank Aaron. He was winding down the greatest career in baseball history as a Milwaukee Brewer, and while I didn’t see him hit one of his 755 homeruns that day, I did see him play. I saw him get one hit and fly out another time driving in a run for Milwaukee. His teammate Von Joshua gave me the gift of witnessing my first live homerun in a ballpark. It was otherworldly. The ball traveled unlike anything I understood, unlike how I saw it on tv, or in my pee-wee baseball experiences playing right field for McDonalds. What I thought was a homerun was a high infield pop up. When I thought a foul ball was coming our way it actually dropped in the crowd many sections away from us. My entire perspective was changed, and again, it felt right.
Royals Stadium was magical. It still is magical garbed in its refurbished, updated state and its homage moniker, Kauffman Stadium. As with even some of the best structures, their time comes. Not all structures are destined to be protected like The Colosseum, and the powers that be in Kansas City are moving forward with plans for a new stadium to replace the one that has played home to four World Series (two champions), two All-Star games, George Brett, Amos Otis, Dick Howser, Bret Saberhagen, Salvador Perez and Bobby Witt, Jr. Royals Stadium will soon be a footnote in history.
Stadium concerts have been around a bit, mainly coming to form within my life. The first big one I think of is when The Beatles hit Shea Stadium in 1965, the year of my birth. Nearly 60 years later, that concert stands as one of the greats. Stadium concerts have made an especially large impact over the past decade as more and more ‘cathedrals’ go up to specifically host tens of thousands of fans, in one central place, to see the stars of the day one night and their favorite team the next. Whether Garth Brooks, Taylor Swift, or a gaggle of aging rock stars grouped up like Def Leppard and Motely Crue, these big ticket events continue to thrive. It seems like yesterday when AT&T Stadium opened up in the Dallas area with a Jonas Brothers concert. Yet, even that stadium is starting to show signs of not being exactly the futuristic hip thing. That stadium is 15 years old now, and there is a long line of newer structures that have popped up across the globe during that time.
It is no accident the first stadium concert I witnessed was at Royals Stadium’s sister property, Arrowhead Stadium. Arrowhead was built alongside Royals Stadium, as a part of the Truman Sports Complex, and as the home to the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. While I didn’t acclimate to the Chiefs, fan-wise, as much as I did to the Royals, I was not lost on the fact that Arrowhead Stadium was in the same category of cathedrals as its baseball park sister, literally in the same parking lot. May 30, 1982 my friend Danny’s parents would haul Danny, myself and our dear friend Paul down that I-70 trek (now well worn with memories of baseball, basketball, shopping and amusement park trips). We would get to stay the night at the Holiday Inn by the stadium, and Dad’s useful hijinks from my younger years would now come into very good use. On that date we were seeing “Summer Jam”!!! A full out day of concerts that included Le Roux, .38 Special, Loverboy, Triumph, and headliners Foreigner.
We arrived at the hotel, the night prior to the concert, with our own room and instructions to behave. Of course we wandered and stumbled into some party in another room with folks much older than us. We scored some beer, and then probably went to bed disappointed we didn’t meet any girls and relieved we didn’t get beat up by hoods. The next day was wonderful. It rained, we had panchos. We saw crazies who we were convinced were on drugs, we ate Pop-tarts. We rocked. Much like the dizzying feeling of my first baseball game in a big stadium, the first notes of Le Roux’s “Last Safe Place” were disorienting. It sounded different flowing through the stadium decks and the massive sound system than it did from our albums, cassettes and 8-tracks. However, very quickly, I got it together and understood that this was my language. Triumph’s “Allied Forces” was different from the album, but that change was awesome and raw. I now understood that a power trio’s guitar layers would not be the same live as on the record. We thrived through that day, from .38 Special playing “Chained Lightning” while lightning was striking all around the stadium (today they would shut it down and haul everyone out), to Loverboy imploring 20,000 people to “Jump”, all the way through Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero” where they blew up a gigantic inflatable juke box at the end. That day changed my life. Those moments merged the feelings of live sporting events with my love for music. I would continue stringing concerts along throughout high school, college and my ‘adult’ days.
November 18, 1991, coming off a several year run that had blasted them to ‘biggest band in the world’ status, U2 released "Achtung Baby”. It was the band’s seventh studio album, following the smashes “The Joshua Tree” and “Rattle And Hum”. U2 would embark on a tour of the album encompassing three legs, with the third taking place in huge stadiums. This was the “Zoo TV Tour”.
I had the privilege of seeing U2, for the first time, the night before my 22nd birthday, November 28, 1987, with nearly a year of legal shenanigans under my belt and several months prior to college graduation. This was an unexpected treat for middle-Tennessee in a 12,000 seat arena in Murfreesboro, during U2’s “Rattle And Hum” period. My friend Rick secured us tickets, I believe by PHONE, and I was lucky enough to get to go. This time of my life I was definitely saving the world. I was also causing trouble, riding the fence between good and evil. That night was a ‘poster child’ of some of the contradictions that followed me since those earlier days, you know, in the basement of my pastor’s house trying to claim that U2 was a Christian band. Even though I was speaking in the tongues of angels to thousands of people on a daily basis (I was a Christian radio DJ), encouraging them to ‘believe’ and ‘have faith’, the idea of awareness was far from my mind. Even though I was about to stumble across a stage and grab a diploma (that is, if my bill was paid), I really didn’t know what I didn’t know. That night in the Murphy Center as Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr. ripped into “Where The Streets Have No Name”, I was ablaze in the arena seats adorned with a Hank Williams, Jr. t-shirt, having the time of my life.
Just a few steps in life later, 1991, I moved my operation to Memphis, home of Stax, Sun Records, Elvis. This is the place in Rattle and Hum where the U2 fellas visited Sun Records and sat on the shores of the Mississippi. Memphis is palpable. It feels like no other city I have been, and I seemed to fit in at the time. During this period, you were more likely to see me holding an ‘Abortion Kills Babies’ sign at some sort of paltry republicanized display in an effort to get the church girls attention than to see me crawling through a club with a Jack & Coke in hand watching bands. Wait, I was doing both. Still oblivious to how unaware of things I actually was, I acted, talked and projected like I did know what was up. Maybe that’s the Sagittarius in me, but looking back on those times I had no clue, yet thought I had it all together. I cannot deny, however, I did have cool friends and we somehow got organized enough to plan a pilgrimage to Birmingham, AL to see “Zoo TV”.
October 7, 1992, a carload of folks from Memphis headed east to Birmingham. This was my first visit to Birmingham, except for simply driving through on the way to Florida a few times. I had no clue at the time that Birmingham would eventually become my beloved home, one that I care not to leave for the remainder of my earthly journey. I had no idea about the city’s history. In my ‘wise’ ways of that time, I simply thought that Birmingham was a big ‘ol southern town built on the back of slavery and the Civil War. No clue. We rolled into town, straight to the venue, Legion Field. This was a one day trip, no overnight stay. Simply a drive, concert, then drive back home to Memphis.
Legion Field did not provide the awe of the Truman Sports Complex in Kansas City. It seemed to be just an old concrete and steel structure worthy of it’s nickname, “The Old Gray Lady”. Yet, the action happening within it’s bones would plant seeds in me that wouldn’t break through and bloom for years to come. Memories are blurry, but we sat and watched. This was not the Murphy Center just a few years earlier, and this was a different U2. Bigger, evolving, a little madder, yet poetically dancing with the issues of love, perhaps misunderstood within the trappings that come with international stardom. The Zoo TV stage was enormous. Surrounded by video screens the likes no one had seen. There was a show within the show as everything was prepared and pushing out a message, even if that message wasn’t understood in full. I felt like there was a purpose. Support for the concert was Big Audio Dynamite, the creation of The Clash’s Mick Jones, a wonderful crew that mixed up the bite of The Clash, hip hop and reggae. More importantly, the second support group was Public Enemy. They came on stage and hung, by noose, an effigy of a KKK member, in full cape and hood. At the time, I thought it was cool and even laughed. Again, I really had my shit together and knew it all.
Again, memories are fuzzy, but the opening of “Zoo Station” is not, nor the rumbling through “Even Better Than the Real Thing”, “One”, “The Fly” or any other of the songs from that album that hit my soul much more directly than any pastor, preacher or pulpit bully had ever shot at me. “Achtung Baby” was now squarely entrenched as my favorite U2 album, and while that wouldn’t change over the decades, sometimes a revival is needed to reclaim the salvation one may have bartered out over a couple decades of nonsensical wandering.
December 9, 2023, that unmistakable first strum of “Zoo Station”, The Edge’s distinct sound. It’s everywhere, every few seconds. I look up to find myself in possibly the most beautiful church building I have been. After seeing hundreds of them, after bleeding from altars and having to battle the problems of “I can’t find a real church”, this cathedral is bigger and more different than any house of worship I have experienced. It’s not the building that makes it that way. It is so much more. We are at The Sphere.
Part Four: Bullet To Blue Sky
Our direct flight to Las Vegas arrived early/mid afternoon on Wednesday, December 6. A much anticipated and needed pilgrimage to Sin City was a welcome wrap up to an electric year that included perhaps too much travel, too much frolic, too much death. Our batteries were low and needed a recharge, and neither myself or Shannon had been to Las Vegas for quite a long time. We had not been to Vegas together, and a trip to this desert city of lights seemed a perfect venue for a December respite. Plus, the time would be a nice entry into the Christmas season which would find us hosting our kids later that month back in Alabama.
After a smooth stop at the luggage carousel within Harry Reid International, we headed to the easy flowing taxi line to get a car straight to Caesars Palace. The early December weather was perfect, not the blistering hell imagined for a typical Nevada day, but a nice breezy 70-ish degrees blue sky day. We were not on the road three minutes before our cab abruptly halted in a sea of cars. We sat, our dear eastern-European driver quiet, with nothing unordinary happening. After all who hasn’t sat in big city traffic? Patience learned is stress endured.
With the windows down to give our lungs a shot of fresh air, I noticed two helicopters circling. These were police copters, I thought to myself. Something didn’t seem right. These weren’t traffic copters covering the arrival of Mariah Carey or the Garth Brooks concert. Shaking my consciousness into the actual reality of the moment I noticed the drivers of other cars around us. Stress, concern. It was at that moment when the driver next to us shared words that have all too clanging ring of familiarity in our conflicted land of liberty: “Shooting on campus.” We arrived in Las Vegas as the latest American mass shooting was taking place on the campus of the University of Nevada Las Vegas. That day, three people would lose their lives as a result of senseless violence. Another injured, the shooter dead and two police officers injured. We would not move for close to three hours as the perimeter of the UNLV campus was on lockdown. In our world of instant information, we knew little except that there were bigger things going on than our hotel check in and we needed to be patient.
This shooting, along with the unrelated deaths of two Nevada state troopers, killed by a drunk driver just days prior, would permeate the atmosphere of the city throughout our visit. I noticed it, in the signs, lights and media. I tried to make myself notice it simply because Vegas is a big ‘pill’ to help you forget things. The Buddhist in me needed to stay present, in the moment. As anesthetized as we have become to violence and death, there is a part of me that wants to avoid the numbness, the dumbness of it all. I don’t want to be the guy who just thinks this is the way things are, even if that is exactly the case.
The sense that traffic is about to roll: You see folks getting into their cars, brake lights blinking, and finally, the car moves. It was obvious that traffic was being rerouted, and we were in for a scenic drive, the back way around Las Vegas. With the sense of uneasiness, the need to hit ‘send’ on texts to friends sharing that we were in the middle of a shooting area, maybe making things out to be bigger than they were. After all, this happens all the time, right? No one will really care that much. Our now steady drive put our minds more on the fact that no one in Las Vegas seems to have grass, the curtains in the houses we pass are black, and the glitz of the lights is good cover for the reality of what seem like countless desert tenement apartment complexes. “Damn! Gas is expensive here.”
Though unfamiliar with the terrain, I sensed us going back toward the airport and around the city, the back way. We hit a highway. We were finally about to see the desert skyline famous for its impersonation of other places like Paris and New York City, but in the back of my mind I thought, ‘Where is it?’ Almost like a necromancer conjuring a demon at a witch party, I looked up to my right and there it was. The black sphere in real life. Huge. Daunting, sitting in its place provided by a desert once home to dinosaurs. A behemoth of modern times, monolithic, whose mere presence answers the question, “What’s next?” The saturation of social media has been quite successful at robbing us of the type of mystery and awe I had the first time we rounded that bend of I-70 and Royals Stadium appeared to me during my childhood. This current experience was awesome, but tempered. I would see this wonderful ball again, in a bit, in all its glory.
Sphere’s construction was announced and begun in 2018, within a pre-COVID world. As construction neared completion in 2023, what would be the world’s largest spherical object was still not quite top of mind in the entertainment world. The ‘pop of the cork’ had yet to happen. The bang of Vegas publicity had yet to ignite like Evel Knievel crashing through the fountains at Caesars Palace. But, it was coming. On February 12th, 2023, during Super Bowl LVII the first advertisement for U2’s upcoming “UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere” concerts appeared. That was the cork shooting out of the bottle like a rocket. Now, not only was there a shiny new toy in the desert to garner attention for millions of tourists, but an entire generation’s biggest band was going to hole up and do a christening string of shows within it. In the matter of a moment, there was reason to check this place out, perhaps a pilgrimage would be in order. Little did I understand that the cones and rods within that ball would soon enough be shooting into my soul and helping me untie many of the wrangled knots that have bound me to decades of conflictions, contradictions. The Calvinism which I thought was galvanizing my soul during the period of U2’s original Zoo TV tour in the 90’s hadn’t worn well, and the string of my kite had frayed away from its navigating flyer.
Being an expert ticket purchaser (note: I am not at all that. I simply survived the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster debacle with passes in hand and then spent months being pissed at the entire concert industry, even after selling those T. Swift tickets for a handsome profit.), I got in line, that is, I began the pursuit of getting tickets to a U2 show at Sphere. Our number did come up, and we received tickets for the Saturday, December 9, 2023 concert. Flights and hotels were instantly booked and we were on our way.
I was not purposely walking into a rock concert expecting to find revival. Nor do I want to pretend that I was saved by holy water or that I made some sort of ritualistic decision just because of a band. Those kind of spiritual accoutrements took me down a river for decades, bashing me against the shorelines and thrashing me back into the rapids. It took me years of reassembling myself into some semblance of a reasonable soul. Whether it was the feeling of abandonment at age six during a Bill Glass crusade when my parents left me in the arena so they could do their ‘public profession of faith’, being the last in line in my family or Sunday school class to walk the aisle of a Southern Baptist Church at age eleven, the rollercoaster of adopting a new doctrine in the Nazarene Church during high school through college, or the multiple changes of churches throughout the coming years, none of it worked. None of that was real, and no matter how much nightmare fuel those past demons had pumped through my spiritual veins, I was not willing to throw it all away. Nor, was I willing to kiss the ring of the political systems freely breeding spiritual cancer through the American evangelical complex. Not any longer. Confliction.
I digress. I simply wanted to see U2. Two full days of Las Vegas activities, some amazingly good food, being awed by the sites which included visits to the Mob Museum, The Fremont District, and the heroically themed Evel Pie flowed very well for us. But, it was the Saturday night U2 show we were there for.
Sphere is a part of the Venetian Resort. It is not an arena where your Uber drops you off at the front and you just walk in, get a huge beer and swagger to your seats. Our journey began at one of the Venetian’s main entrances, weaving through shopping centers, restaurants and of course, the casino floor. I was focused on getting to the main show, Sphere! We had already taken a gondola ride, purchased U2 tour shirts at the pop up shop located in the 21st century version of what a mall is. We aren’t big gamblers, as evidenced by our attraction not to slots, roulette or poker, but to the Nokami horse racing game that has actual little plastic horses rolling around a derby track. Hell, we got two hours of great entertainment out of that game and didn’t spend over $15. Once through the dizzying array of resort offerings, we were in a long hallway, obviously the convention/business wing of the Venetian, and we walked, and I sensed that things were changing.
Every few steps the lighting and signage slightly changed, and then that sound, that unmistakable fuzzy sound. Edge’s first strum of ‘Zoo Station.’ ‘Achtung Baby’ has sold 18 million albums since its 1997 release. It is hard to imagine that any popular music fan who was alive at that time has not come across the opening of the band’s second biggest selling album. Hearing those notes come from whatever unearthly realm they were beaming from shocked me back to Legion Field in Birmingham when I witnessed the first version of ‘Zoo TV’ live. The strums continued in an ethereal soundtrack that may have been merged with the oxygen we were breathing. The hallway became more crowded as we seemed to be getting to a destination. “Was Jesus preaching ahead? If so, I hope his fish and loaves are cheaper than the chicken fingers at that Guy Fieri place back at Caesars Palace’s food court.”
We arrived into the open air space that seemed more like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Logan’s Run than a concert hall lobby, taking in the scene, the people. This was not a gaggle of liquored up concert goers looking to party. It seemed more reminiscent of people pilgrimaging to a revival, something with a message. Hopeful, happy, anticipating. Some were there to simply give thanks and celebrate. Others were there for intervention, help, healing.
As we took our seats, we peered down on my favorite musical device, a turntable. There is absolutely no describing the concert to come. Wasted are the letters trying to promote the giant stage, the amazing spatial sound system (the biggest in the world), or the soul-bending production of every single song that makes anything in the world pale in comparison (i.e. Broadway, T. Swift, anything). It is impossible to describe.
What is possible, is sharing that from the first strum of ‘Zoo Station’ until the last notes of ‘Beautiful Day’, what I experienced seemed much more like a revival than a concert. The backdrop of Las Vegas seemed even more appropriate. Every beat, note, visual, lyric had meaning. Everything sewn into the fabric of a place shared with the richest of rich, greediest of greedy, poorest of poor, and the most honorable of honorable. I was a part of a big creation, problems and fixes, belief and non-belief, with the ability to embrace or walk away, to engage or drop out. I stayed. Each time, and there were many, the white flag of surrender appeared in the sky, I felt welcome; with all my fault, all my frailty and anger, all of the damage I have done, yet the efforts I have attempted to make right, I felt like I didn’t deserve to belong, but here I was safe and welcome. I should feel bad about my sins, but I was among friends. And, maybe that was all I needed to walk forward. We witnessed the shiny lights of Vegas disappear down to the desert it once was. We witnessed every endangered species of the desert appear around us, and all the splendor of Vegas with Elvis, Jesus, and an ace of spades. U2 was imperfectly perfect. The band was perfectly human, a little raspier, yet sharper in style, musicality, wit.
Was the concert absolute perfection? No. Will something come along to knock Sphere down a notch? Yes. Just think about how NRG Stadium in Houston looks compared to the Astrodome. The once ‘biggest’, the miraculous, is always destined for an appointment with ‘Outdone’. I remember walking out of the show, down the same corridor where we entered, the hum of The Edge’s guitar still alive in the air. A young lady walking next to us, ecstatic about what was just witnessed, sharing that exuberance with her partner. Like a sledge hammer, the ‘partner’ responded, “I have some criticisms.” My first thought was, “Man, I bet she has some criticisms too!”
“And I'd join the movement
If there was one I could believe in
Yeah I'd break bread and wine
If there was a church I could receive in
'Cause I need it now”1
For the first time in a long time, I had no criticisms. My dirty lungs felt alive with clean air, and my soul felt light. For the first time in 58 years, I felt the confliction of spiritual things lift, and I must say that I haven’t had any dreams of being dragged to a literal hell since. Revival.
As for the pastor of my youth, the one who made us take U2 out of the VCR during our youth group party way back in 1983? His light is going out in this world. I have no idea what his circumstances are except for the fact that time is coming to an end for him. I am positive he doesn’t remember that night. But, I do. While I can’t say that he was just trying to do his best back then, I can say that without that incident, my path to a simple concert in Las Vegas, circa 2023, may have never happened. Safe travels pastor, I hope the show you are about to enter is every bit as spectacular as The Sphere.
Monday came, and so did our trip back to Harry Reid International, this time with no incident, no shootings, no back roads, no signs of turmoil. Just blue skies and the strum of The Edge’s guitar rolling through my ears.
1 ‘Acrobat’ by U2, from ‘Achtung Baby’ Songwriters: Adam Clayton / Dave Evans / Larry Mullen / Paul Hewson Acrobat lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group