Vegas Diary
The Goal is Elevation.
(Vegas Diaries of a U2 fanatic)
December 2001
I’ve been accused of worshiping false idols, of being crazy, and of wasting time and money. U2 are not my god, I don’t listen to U2 on the Sabbath, and I do have religious pictures hanging along side the U2 posters that adorn my living room. OK, so I am crazy, but it’s my life and I am not ashamed of it. U2 gives me life.
In April of this year [2001], my wife and I weren’t sure if U2 were going to come to our home town Salt Lake City during their long awaited “Elevation” Tour. My wife had already seen U2 live when they came to SLC during the Popmart Tour, but at the time I was in Mexico serving as a full time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I had never seen the greatest rock and roll band in history perform live and wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity now. As of April, U2 had not announced a SLC date, so we decided to pack up and fly to San Jose. It was an awesome experience to say the least.
Finally, after U2 had been all through North America and then over through all of Europe, they announced dates for a third leg of the Elevation Tour. Sure enough, Salt Lake City was listed for November 9th, 2001! We freaked out, waited hours in line & got really crappy seats (better than the ones we had behind the stage in San Jose [see photo], but still nosebleed seats). Lucky for us, I had a friend who scored GA tickets and traded his lower bowl seats for ours, which he ironically sold to my older brother and his wife.
The San Jose show was very emotional for me, because I kept having to remind myself that the band I’d been following so closely over the past decade was actually in the same room as me for the first time in my entire life. However, there’s something about having them play in your own back yard that makes it that much cooler. Due to the events of September 11th, the SLC show was also a much more emotional show. The kind that can bring you to tears. All of the songs U2 had been singing about the terrorism in Ireland all these years suddenly made a lot more sense to everyone. Every song Bono sang sounded like could have been written on September 12th, but none of them were. It was beautiful.
[Strange coincidence: As I'm writing this, I just received an email from someone who told me where I can get a bootleg recording of the Salt Lake City Elevation show. I just emailed the guy who supposedly has it. He wants to trade me for a Zoo TV boot].
As soon as the Salt Lake show ended, my wife leaned over to me and said, “maybe we should go to the Las Vegas show.” I quickly agreed, and so began our journey.
A neighbor called me a few days later saying he had tickets to the Vegas show and offered to sell his tickets. I told him I’d call him back. We talked it over and decided that we were not going to let this pass us by. The next day, we prepared ourselves by getting work off, and me telling teachers that I would be missing some class. I also called my best friend Jared, who expressed 
some interest in going to Vegas a while back. Jared said he wasn’t sure if he could go, but that he’d see what he could do. Then the real fun began. I called my neighbor back (finally) and he informed us that he was going to end up using his tickets after all! OH NO! That night I jumped online and started frantically looking to buy some tickets. I called my friend Jared, who found his GA tickets for the SLC show at a certain website (http://www.ticketsplus.com) and suggested I look there. I found 4 tickets all together (enough for Jared and a friend, my wife and I) for face value… $135. Lucky for us, about 15 minutes later, I refreshed the page and the tickets had dropped to $80 a piece, $50 BELOW face value! I was so stoked that I whipped out my credit card and made the purchase right then.
You might think I was good to go. You’d be wrong. That night, when I got home from work, I had a message on the answering machine saying that my friend Jared had to bail on me due to lack of funds (this is the guy who had his second child one month before he had his second anniversary and neither was conceived out of wedlock). The tables had turned! Now I was online frantically looking for a buyer. I posted on about every email list and forum that I could think of and went to bed.
The next morning I had no buyers. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but the Vegas concert was only 9 days after the Salt Lake show, and by now, it was 7 days later. You can see why we were starting to panic. So I did what eBay hates people to do and started sending personal email to people who were placing bids on Vegas tickets already. It worked! Within about 15 minutes I had a buyer, and he was going to pay face value for them. That’s right, I was making $50 a piece off each ticket. That meant that our tickets were only going to cost us a total of $60 for both of them! (Shameful I know, but I’m a starving student who’s wife supports him financially, give me a break).
The very next morning (Saturday November 18th, 2001) my wife and I got up and started the 7 hour drive to Las Vegas. Thus began the most U2 craziness I’ve ever had, which is the real reason I’m writing this all now. Let me explain:
It began as we were leaving Utah, and passing through the small stretch of Arizona that one must pass to get to Las Vegas, Nevada from southern St. George, Utah. It’s a tradition in my wife’s family to crank the tunes of U2′s album with the desert theme, “The Joshua Tree,” as you drive down the winding canyon (don’t ask me what the name of the canyon it is, I have no idea). As we were there listening to those sweet melodies, I began to ponder what my life would be like if U2 never were. I mean, I even met my wife, who is as huge a U2 fan as I am, online on the popular U2 emailing list “Wire.” Then, as we pass a small square green sign that says “Elevation 2000,” I suddenly realize that everything in life is somehow related to U2 and I’m living in an Irish episode of the Twilight Zone. As soon as we get out of the canyon, we start passing this huge field of Joshua Trees only to prove my theory right.
We were staying at my sister’s house, who lives with her husband and my adorable niece in Henderson, Nevada, just 15 minutes from the Strip. The directions she gave us said to take Windmill Parkway exit, but sure enough, as we got closer we realized that it’s not a parkway but a lane. Any U2 fan is quick to note that U2 recorded most of their albums at Windmill Lane Studios located on Windmill Lane in Dublin, Ireland.
That night we were all set to meet the buyer for my ticket at the Hard Rock Café, where there was a huge U2 fan gathering going on (sponsored by interference.com). Hard Rock was kind enough to blast the first 4 songs from the Joshua Tree album so that you could barely hear the person next to you speak. While I was there, I met another U2 fan named Colin, who was waiting to buy some tickets. I would have sold him mine, but a) I already had a buyer, and b) he was buying tickets for the show in Phoenix. Good luck buddy! Colin later explained that Vegas was his eighth show this tour. Dude, here I was bragging about my third, now that’s a true fan! Colin took the picture at the left for us.
My buyer was very late, but I finally sold the tickets, and then sat down for a 21 oz. T-Bone steak, which I did, in fact, finish completely (mmmm…steak). After dinner, we headed over to the Hard Rock Hotel and got our picture taken in front of the U2 display case hanging just outside the restrooms. As we were leaving, we also noted (and photographed) the tribute to the U2 album “The Unforgettable Fire” hanging on the wall for having gone platinum.
From there we decided to head to a casino to put the only three quarters in my wallet to good use. Since my wife had never been to the Monte Carlo, we stopped there. Unimpressed with the lack of places to shop, we headed right for the slots. First quarter, nada. Second quarter, Jackpot! As ten dollars worth of quarters were dumping out of the machine, I thought about turning my shirt inside out and singing “You gamble inside out, Forever inside out!” from the old rare U2 song, “Inside Out.”
The next day was the long awaited concert. The moment we’d all been waiting for. Ironically, we sat directly behind our friend Colin (the guy we met at Hard Rock the night before). He took our picture for us again (at right) and noticed that we had both made it in with our cameras. My wife’s camera has an excellent zoom and he could tell. He asked her to email him the photos when she had them developed. After the concert, two other people would ask the same thing.
The concert was a blast! Not quite as emotional as the Salt Lake concert, and the crowd wasn’t quite as “in to it” as they were in SLC. I would have guessed Vegas would be a crazier crowd, and they were, but not in energy, just in the way they dressed. One girl in GA was dressed as Mr. MacPhisto from head to toe, and of course, Elvis was in the crowd….about 3 times. During the show Bono dedicated a song to Elvis and U2 slipped in a cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which they hadn’t played in Salt Lake.
As U2 paid tribute to those who lost their lives on Sept. 11th and continued by asking us to “Walk On,” I couldn’t believe I was there. I felt like a true fan. Here we were, at our third concert in the same tour, over 400 miles from our home, sitting with other fans who were as crazy as I felt. This is what it’s all about. It’s more than music, it’s more than going to a concert, it’s life. I had never felt so alive.
On our way back to my sister’s house, we noticed the U2 private jet parked near the strip and quickly turned into the parking lot to get a photo. I assume It was too dark, because our photos never turned out. We did notice the engine running and the stairs set up, so we decided to stick around to see if U2 would be arriving soon in hopes that we could meet them and get some autographs or something. We ran into about 10 other U2 fans waiting in their cars, one who had the Bono look down so well I had to take a double take to make sure it wasn’t him. This Bono look alike was with a girl who ended up giving us this photo. After about an hour and a half, at about 1:30am, and after being told by the guy working there to get off his private property, reality set in and we decided to head back. We had a long drive ahead of us the next morning. I had to get back to my life.