This is a post that Ray Suen started a couple weeks ago but never managed to post. I thought it was incomplete, but maybe he just never clicked the 'post' button. Nonetheless, I thought I'd post it tonight since I'm not writing...So, I've found it increasingly difficult to find motivation (and material with which) to blog about since I've been in Vegas. It is hot. Unbearingly so. It's currently 89 degrees and it's veritably cool compared to the average of 107 we've had for the last ten days since I've been here.
The sleepless lifestyle of the city must be catching up to me as I'm watching the sun rise for no particular reason. The bars and casinos are open for 24 hours around here and there are people partying all the time. This includes my gracious host, Mark, bassist of the Killers, who even now is probably out and about, if I heard correctly, carousing with the likes of Perry Farrell and Slash. I've been pretty good about being in bed before 2 and up before 10, but now, in my sleepless state, I blog. For you.
Other than my ever growing dependence on air conditioning and cigarettes, there's little to report. I'll be writing more about this giant touring machine called the Killers in the coming months, but the most interesting tidbit I have for you is the incident that went down Saturday night when Coldplay was in town playing at the MGM Grand. They invited the Killers to come see the show and while I thought this was a must-see situation, but rehearsal dragged on to the point that we were willing to waffle a bit. After deliberation, we decided to try and make it before the encores. We were told to park next to Coldplay's tour buses in the loading area of the MGM Grand.
This is where things get interesting.
As we arrived in an un-eco-friendly caravan of five cars, an old security guard with a diet coke in his hand met us, anxious to get his rocks off by exercising his privileges as a security guard. Cue much yelling, screaming.
"You can't be here! This isn't right! No! Who told you could be here?"
Coldplay Production.
"This isn't right! You can't stay here!"
At this point, we're on the phone with Coldplay's production trying to figure out if there's any parking in a non-hysterical security guard zone. We get back in our cars to get back to the next parking lot, which would hopefully be more controversy-free. No such luck. As we left, Dave, our esteemed guitar player, flipped the bird and said a lot of other things that start with the letter "F."
Turns out the next parking lot was about 50 feet away, so the offended security official came tumbling after us screaming, waving his diet coke about willy nilly. Like a baseball umpire he screamed, "you're gone! You're gone!" gesticulating with his diet coke much the way an umpire would with his index finger. Hotel security came out to deal with the ruckus that was brewing. Dave left sheepishly, thinking as we all did that we'd be getting a little farther away. However, at this point the gauntlet was down and hotel security turned into hotel managers into metro police. Meanwhile, poor little Coldplay production assistants are running around trying to make things right while certain Killers are taking up Dave's fallen antagonistic standard. I'm going to leave out the embarrassing details about what may or may not have been said, but the point is I didn't get to see Coldplay, and that's a bummer.
