Sphere wants you to talk about Sphere and not the band. The world’s biggest LED screen makes for a pretty good music venue, and if you squint past the neon lights you can imagine how it might have been great. But there’s a tension in the design, as the spectacle above literally outshines the concert below. Instead of fostering community, Sphere fractures audience focus, offering glittering temptations in every direction so that each face in the crowd tilts a different way. Sphere is designed to distract you.
For many in the audience during Phish’s four-night residency, that was hardly a problem. The venerable Vermonters became a jam institution four decades ago, and many fans have long run out of fingers and toes to count the shows they’ve seen. If Sphere became your 120th Phish concert, it was probably more memorable than the 119th.
One grizzled veteran told my companion that following Phish was like supporting a sports team: Sometimes they’re doing well and sometimes he wished they were doing better, but he was always with them. To that mindset, the sold-out four-night residency felt like the Superbowl. Phish and phans have been through ups and downs together, and both generally seem to be in a good place; the long lines of people trailing up to Sphere’s entrance had the air of queuing for a championship parade.
Sphere’s design by architecture firm Populous is easiest to appreciate after the security clusterfuck, standing in the awesome expanse of the atrium. All that open air is wonderful on ground level, but most of the seats are further up, and the path starts with slow-moving single-file lines up escalators. This is followed by arcing, surprisingly claustrophobic hallways that felt even tighter because they were often obstructed by 20-minute bathroom lines. For all I know it would have cost another billion dollars to make the venue a few feet wider, but since it’s not my money, I’ll say they should have spent it.
From here, you walk down tunnels designed to offer a sudden, breathtaking view of Sphere’s waiting screen: a viscerally intense blue-green. The technology is pretty impressive, immersing a crowd into the pretty lights at least as convincingly as this generation of VR headsets can do for a single person at time.
Seating in Sphere is graded much more steeply than at most venues, an interesting idea that works at exactly one distance. The building is made up of four tiers, from GA and floor seats in the 100s up to the 400s, where you and the screen are so close you have to split rent. In the 200s, the steep grade is fantastic: Rarely do you get such a clear look at a band from balcony seats in an 18,000 cap. house. By the 300s, your view of the stage is mostly hair and the occasional bald spot (sorry, Page). In the 400s, there’s hardly a reason to look down.