At the Las Vegas Sphere, the Eagles’ songs are the special effect
LAS VEGAS — Not a guy known for understating his own importance, Don Henley took in his surroundings on Saturday night and acknowledged that the Eagles — the hit-making, money-minting, fake-band-in-“Almost Famousâ€-inspiring Eagles — weren’t entirely what the thousands of people before him had turned up to see.
“We’ll be the house band for this evening,†he said, one of nine tiny-looking men onstage beneath the cavernous illuminated dome of Sphere. “Remember the old black-and-white silent movies, they had the organist down there performing music to the film? That’s what we are — we’re the organist.â€
With two concerts over this past weekend, the Eagles became the fourth act to play this state-of-the-art venue — after U2, Phish and Dead & Company — just behind the Venetian resort on the Las Vegas Strip. By now you’ve heard about Sphere’s 160,000-square-foot video screen and its seatback haptics and about the $2 billion the building’s mastermind, Madison Square Garden Entertainment Chief Executive James Dolan, spent to bring it all to life almost exactly a year ago.
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But if 12 months of TikTok and Instagram clips have arguably diminished the initial shock of the place, Henley was right in surmising that Sphere-goers are still coming here to be wowed. On Saturday night, the second of 20 Eagles gigs scheduled through January, folks were ooh-ing and aah-ing before the music even started as they were met upon entering by an enormous photorealistic mural jamming together dozens of landmarks from the band’s Los Angeles hometown, including the Chateau Marmont, Griffith Observatory, the Paramount Pictures gate and, of course, the Troubadour, where Henley and Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey famously met in the early 1970s as members of Linda Ronstadt’s road band. (Inevitably, a painstaking mock-up of the Troubadour inside the Venetian is now where you can buy Eagles hoodies and backpacks.)
The group’s two-hour show delivers plenty of additional eye candy, not least a scene set to “In the City†in which you lift out of a kind of grimy tenement-building panopticon to soar over a verdant landscape rendered in almost-lurid greens and blues. “Hope you brought your Dramamine,†Henley said to big laughs from the mostly middle-aged crowd. Then he joked that next weekend he might have the venue replace the floor seats with recliners.
Yet the Eagles’ Sphere production is for sure a less elaborate visual spectacle than its predecessors, with quite a few songs — “One of These Nights,†“Witchy Woman,†“Lyin’ Eyes,†“Tequila Sunrise,†“Seven Bridges Road†— accompanied by variations on a windswept desert vista or a mossy forest or a starry night sky. The result was more vibe-setting than storytelling: Sometimes you felt like you were watching a band perform in front of the world’s highest-resolution screensaver; other times, as during an underwater ballet set to Henley’s “The Boys of Summer,†you wondered whether the Eagles had repurposed footage from some lost ’80s perfume commercial.
Which as an approach makes all kinds of sense. For Sphere, the Eagles’ relatively low-key show demonstrates that the venue can host acts that don’t necessarily want to spend oodles of time and money (as U2 and Dead & Co did) to reinvent the live concert experience. For the Eagles, the show is in keeping with a long-established focus on the music beyond all else — a mindset Henley nodded to when he welcomed the audience by pointing out with genuine-seeming excitement that Sphere houses 164,000 speakers.
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“We’ve been playing these songs for you for 52 years now,†he added, and you understood that, more than the splendor on Sphere’s wraparound screen, what the Eagles have really become the house band for is the cherished memories of the band’s fans, which contain an emotional power no special effect could ever match.
Indeed, this Vegas residency comes amid a so-called farewell tour the Eagles launched in late 2023 and which they’ve promised to keep extending for as long as audiences show up. Following Frey’s death in 2016, 77-year-old Henley is the only original member still in the group, which also includes bassist Timothy B. Schmit and guitarist Joe Walsh (both Eagles since the mid-’70s) and a pair of fill-ins for Frey in the country star Vince Gill and Frey’s 31-year-old son Deacon. Last week, J.D. Souther, who co-wrote several of the Eagles’ signature tunes, died at 78; Randy Meisner, another founder known for his lead vocal in “Take It to the Limit,†died last year at 77.
Onstage, Henley introduced Deacon Frey as “one reason we’ve been able to keep this legacy alive,†and if the weight of that intro spooked the younger musician, you couldn’t tell: Frey’s singing in “Peaceful Easy Feeling†and especially “Take It Easy†was warm and soulful, even if it lacked the hint of an edge that his late dad brought to the Eagles’ rich-hippie country-rock sound.
As always, the Eagles’ playing was masterful throughout the night: crisp and strummy in “New Kid in Town,†tense yet cooled-out in “I Can’t Tell You Why,†extravagantly supple in “Hotel California,†which they opened with in case anybody came in doubting the band’s ample supply of hits. Every time the players arranged themselves in a line to blend their voices in five- or six-part harmony, Sphere’s crystal-clear sound system let you hear each part both on its own and as a component in the whole — just the kind of tech breakthrough you can bet drew Henley to Vegas (in addition to the chance to charge a premium for tickets).
On Saturday, Henley took a minute at the very end of the show to toast Souther, whom he called “a great man — smart, funny, witty†and who he said “loved a good meal and a good martini, loved to laugh, loved the pretty girls.†Souther co-wrote the next song, Henley added, which would also be the Eagles’ closer, and as the band revved up “Heartache Tonight,†Sphere transformed into a giant jukebox that seemed to pull the audience — and seemed to pull the Eagles — deep inside it.
Cool trick. Apt one too.
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