Bobby Weir’s most recent visit to Vegas was in November, when he jammed with Sammy Hagar at The Strat. That was a party.
Weir’s first visit to Vegas was a show at Ice Palace at the Commercial Center on March 29, 1969. That was a party, too. Just ask Carlos Santana. We did. Santana opened for the Grateful Dead that night.
“My first show here was opening up for the Grateful Dead, a loooong time ago,” Santana said during an interview in January. “They got me good. I didn’t realize it, but after the show they put something on my Coca-Cola can. Man, it took me three days to land.”
Thoughts, Mr. Weir?
“Our crew was … I don’t want to say evangelical, maybe a cross between evangelical and diabolical. They were militant about it, for sure,” Weir says during in a phone chat. “They thought everyone should be high on LSD, at all times. This was our crew, and they practiced that with Carlos.”
Weir and his Wolf Bros band play The Theater at Virgin Hotel at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Expect a winding voyage into Weir’s catalog, a set list still being devised with a lot of room for improv.
“We’ll come up with a set list sometime soon, by (Thursday), and that gives everybody a crack at remembering a pretty large repertoire,” he said.
“We’re getting to the point where we can almost call the tunes out as they come up, which is what Jerry and I used to do.”
Garcia is the Jerry, the legendary Grateful Dead frontman and co-founder.
For Weir, Las Vegas is far from a foreign destination. As member of the Dead, he was a rock pioneer in Vegas, beginning with that show at Ice Palace, which also hosted The Doors and Led Zeppelin in the late-’60s.
The Dead later played three shows at the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts from 1981-84. The band then constructed a city of spinners at the then-Las Vegas Silver Bowl (now Sam Boyd Stadium) for 15 shows from 1991-95. Santana opened the 1991 series, fittingly enough. The two shows sold 39,000 tickets apiece. At the time it was the largest crowd for entertainment ever in Nevada.
Legendary promoter Bill Graham, in town to see Frank Sinatra at Caesars Palace, had the vision of testing the Dead in the desert. Graham especially liked the idea of playing on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The Aladdin shows, where tripping Deadheads waded into the casino, frightened local casino execs. The Silver Bowl was the perfect place for Deadheads to mingle.
“We were coming into the entertainment capital of the world, and there was a particular style of spectacle that rock ‘n’ roll is a little shy on,” Weir said. “We definitely were a little shy on the spectacle aspect. That doesn’t mean people wouldn’t come out to see us, but there was maybe an assumption on the part of the establishment that you had to be very theatrical in order to come across in Las Vegas.”
That was not the case for the Grateful Dead.
“Once we got booked, people came out,” Weir says. “We sort of blew that myth out of the water.”
He recalls further that a quick thunderstorm hit one of the shows.
“A kid got hit by lightning up front, but he was OK. Just a little dingy for a while,” Weir says “We brought him backstage. We just wanted to meet this guy. He was he was little cross-eyed, but he was happy to meet us.”
In one of those ’90s trips, Weir and Garcia took in a genuine Las Vegas spectacular.
“We went to see Siegfried & Roy, and toward the end of the show, they managed to make an elephant disappear,” Weir says. “Jerry and I looked at each other. I think both of us wordlessly agreed that, if they can make an elephant disappear, we can make it drummer disappear (laughs). That was our thought, anyway, about Las Vegas.”
John Katsilometes’ column runs daily in the A section. His “PodKats!” podcast can be found at reviewjournal.com/podcasts. Contact him at jkatsilometes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @johnnykats on Twitter, @JohnnyKats1 on Instagram.