Eagles Give a Peaceful, Enormous Feeling in Sphere Residency Kickoff

“Welcome to… whatever this is,” said Don Henley, making his first remarks to the full house gathered for the first night of the Eagles’ residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere Friday night. For however much preparation had assuredly gone into putting up a 20-night engagement in the massive dome, Henley sounded in those five words just as nonplussed as any veteran of the low-glitz 1970s probably ought to be. “We’re just the house band,” he added, offering some vaguely neutral comments about “21^st century entertainment” and quipping, “I hope you brought some Dramamine.”

Not that Henley really meant to bite the hand that is feeding him. (Nor would he, likely — the Eagles’ manager, Irving Azoff, is as deeply involved in Sphere as anyone.) And there was no doubt Henley was speaking in approving terms when he made a few comments about the sound, noting that there “are 164,000 speakers behind these walls, so it should sound pretty much the same to everyone in the building… You can hear all our mistakes.” Artists can feel however they’re inclined to feel about being complemented by — or competing with — a screen literally as big as all outdoors. But when it comes to being heard through the world’s most pristine sound system, there is not a musician in the world that is going to even pretend to be skeptical about that.

The Eagles’ longish run at Sphere represents a test, of sorts, for bands coming into the venue. Not nearly as dramatic a test as the ones faced by U2 and Dead & Company, whose residencies preceded the Eagles’, but almost kind of a converse one: about whether a band that maybe isn’t  as innately interested in spectacle as Bono and John Mayer clearly were can still find a happy home in a place that means to blow your mind with many millions of LEDs. Is there a happy medium that a less visually motivated act coming in for a shorter residency can find, somewhere between the phantasmically gargantuan and a regular gig?

I think Henley would have been happy if he’d been sitting in my section in the 200s Friday night and hearing the constant vocal reactions of one middle-aged man in particular. This fellow could be heard loudly exclaiming “Oh my God!” to his companions and everyone in the vicinity when he first entered the auditorium — which does, for every Sphere first-timer, count as some kind of virginity-losing experience. And then, as the two-hour show got underway and proceeded, he could thereafter be heard yelling “Oh my God”… “Ohhh my God”… “Ohhhhh myyyyy Goooooddd” at the start of nearly every song, not because a new video concept was coming up on screen (although usually there was one), but because he was bowled over that every number in the set was a recognized classic. (He made this abundantly clear by screaming out each song title after the initial “OMG.”) OK, Henley might have wished this guy was just a little quieter, if he’d been able to hear him through his in-ears. But the bellows were telling: Even at Sphere, an Eagles audience is there more to hear one of the great song catalogs of the 20^th century than to experience future-shock therapy, though they’re happy to get both.

So by that measure, among others, the Eagles’ opening night would have to be qualified as a success: It used the wrap-around screen to surround the group and audience with dazzling, massive-scale starfields while still making clear that it’s the songs that are the star of the show. This is not a residency that intends to try to reinvent a wheel that the U2 and Dead runs already pretty well reinvented. Rather, it provides a model of how a band can come in and embrace the technology with some visual showpieces — including, sure, a Dramamine Moment or two — but also keep things mellow with the kind of not-overwhelming content that might come up behind an artist on a normal arena tour, tastefully super-sized for the occasion.

Although the group has mostly been opening shows with “Seven Bridges Road” in recent years, it’s no surprise that bumping that out of the first-batter position is one of the few small adjustments the band has made to its setlist with the setting in mind. Close-ups of five-part harmony are not necessarily the way to immediately boggle people’s minds at Sphere, and so “Hotel California” has been moved up into starter position to take full advantage of its more dramatic possibilities. Although not many of the visuals in the show otherwise take the lyrics too literally, things do begin with headlights traversing a dark desert highway, bringing the audience in to an inn where all the banquet guests are faceless and frozen.

That’s a sinister start, and the band returns to a modest sense of portent a little later with “Witchy Woman,” which for Sphere purposes is set in a mossy, moonlit forest. But, of course, this isn’t a show that meets to unsettle — most of it about a peaceful, easy, enormous feeling. Are you wondering, going in, how many songs will be presented with a desert backdrop? Well, a few… U2 didn’t invent Joshua trees, you know. Certain songs are not going to be played against type, like “Tequila Sunrise,” which, sure enough, takes place in a canyon at dawn, the sun finally cresting over the tree-lined bridge during the last verse. It’d seem corny in its on-the-nose-ness if the big screen’s photorealism weren’t too impressive to override any such concern. Same, later on, for Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way” — it’s like riding on Disneyland’s Soarin’ Over California, transposed to Colorado, and probably no one will complain at finally getting the literalized combination of slide guitar and snowy peaks that eluded us for 50 years.

The show doesn’t just trade in scenic backdrops. An early break from the panorama motifs came early on during “Lyin’ Eyes,” which used a nice effect of having the songs’ lyrics, written in script, descending horizontally from the top of the Sphere dome. The most impressive video piece of the night, meanwhile, arrived with Henley’s “The Boys of Summer,” which starts on a beach but quickly moves under the waves, for a beautifully photographed water ballet involving a female and male swimmer. Something that hasn’t been done that much so far at any of the Sphere shows is putting actual human actors, or dancers, on screen … and it works remarkably well in this bubbly tableau.

“Those Shoes,” which had been taken out of the Eagles’ set since the 2022 tour, is back in, and it’s possible that’s because someone thought up a visual design in which James Bond-like floating circles are filled with Bond-like silhouettes of female features, heels most especially. (I felt cheated by the lack of actual ankle bracelets, but that’s just me.) But it’s equally possible that the real reason the song has been reinstated is because everybody loves a talkbox.

Although it’s difficult to imagine that Las Vegas is one of once-and-future-Texan Don Henley’s favorite places in the world, the host city does play a part in a couple of the visuals. “Life in the Fast Lane” offers a cyclical trip down a mysteriously empty Strip (presumably filmed at about 5 in the morning). And for the finale, “Heartache Tonight,” there’s a top-to-bottom cascade of animated images seemingly meant to whimsically suggest to the crowd that there’s no place to get your heart broken like Sin City.

Urbanity and its discontents provide the spark for “In the City” — the Walsh solo track that eventually became an Eagles cut — as monochrome tenements that surround the stage eventually grow into skyscrapers, before the “camera” hovers above them to reveal a peaceful, green countryside behind them.

Not every visual has a direct corollary: “Take It to the Limit” (with Vince Gill assuming the vocal role of Randy Meisner, as he and Deacon Frey assume Glenn Frey’s elsewhere in the set) takes place in the cosmos, even though the song does not… although an earthly tour bus eventually is seen making its way into the stars). It’s the bit of the show that most obviously seems like it could ever been left over from Dead & Company’s trippier visual scheme. But no one should deny anyone doing a show at Sphere their chance to turn it into a planetarium.

This is not “History of the Eagles,” but a few numbers traffic in band nostalgia, with old photos or video clips inserted into snapshots hung on a giant clothesline or glimpsed in unspooled rolls of film. Eventually, in one triumph of what modern software can do, seemingly hundreds of full-motion band clips expand to fill a large hallway that expands behind the band. (It would be impossible for one person to look at each one of the tiny historic videos spreading across the screen, but I do feel confident that none of them included Don Felder.)

Is there some irony in the fact that the newest song in the set is “Boys of Summer,” which invoked the nostalgic dangers of having “a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” and warned “You can never looked back” — and now, exactly 40 years later, the Eagles are following Dead & Company into Sphere with a 100% ‘70s/’80s setlist? To be sure… but complaining about the revival of the past is mostly a younger person’s pursuit. You can, and always will, look back as long as you’re breathing, and there’s nothing any more wrong about keeping the Eagles’ repertoire in play — as one of the great songbooks of the 20^th century — than there is with reviving Porter or Gershwin, with the added bonus that some of the original principals are still around to do it themselves, with help from ringers as capable as a Vince effing Gill.

There was a nod to the recently departed on Friday night. Henley is not someone to wear the heart of the matter out on his sleeve in a rowdy atmosphere, so the moment was neither teary nor protracted. But before launching into “The Boys of Summer,” the singer told the riled-up crowd, “I don’t want to break the momentum or anything, but I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge a couple of people, one of whom we lost a year ago this month, Mr. Jimmy Buffett. We’re dedicating this next song to him. And then the song we’re gonna do after this next song, I want to acknowledge the co-writer of that song, who we lost three days ago, Mr. JD Souther. JD, as some of you may know, played a pivotal role in Eagles. He wasn’t in the band, but he certainly co-wrote some of our biggest hits, including ‘The Best of My Love’ and ‘New Kid in Town’ and the one we’re gonna play after this next song, called ‘Heartache Tonight.’ So these songs go out to those boys, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Souther. Sing it so they can hear you.”

It’s too bad that “Best of My Love” already got taken out of the band’s setlist earlier this year (not long after Souther performed it with them at the Forum in January). It’s one of the finest post-breakup ballads in all of rock history, and it would be the perfect sweet spot to pay testimony to its departed co-writer if they found a way to work it back in before the Sphere residency is over. At the same time, with age comes not just wisdom but practicality, and with the latter surely comes a realization that an audience in Vegas is mostly there to hear bangers, not get lost in rue. So maybe it’s OK if Souther is remembered via one of his most ephemeral co-writes: a heartache is a heartache, even if comes in the guise of a party, right?

The emotional heart of the show remains, as always, Henley singing a simple “Desperado” as the penultimate number, a ballad that re-grounds their concerts — however briefly — as their latter stretches of any Eagles show tilt in favor of not-so-sleepy Joe. The musical fireworks are Walsh’s, of course. Signature guitar solos that were originally played by former members of the group are recreated by Gill, Deacon Frey and Steuart Smith as if they were pieces of classical music, which is a fairly defensible way to treat parts that iconic. But the relative latecomer to the group gets more leeway when he breaks into a solo in one of his own songs, or a bonus solo in someone else’s (as in “Witchy Woman,” released four years before he joined up).

Walsh inevitably added some comedy during a break break between songs, talking about how he had awoken in the middle of the night prior to the residency, beset by deep anxiety. “Is it ‘the Sphere,’ or (just) ‘Sphere’?” he wondered aloud. “It’s Sphere — I can relax.” Him and copy editors everywhere.

The Eagles’ Sphere run continues with Friday/Saturday shows on Sept. 27-28, Oct. 11-12 and 18-19, Nov. 1-2 and 8-9, Dec. 6-7 and 13-14, and Jan. 17-18 and 24-25.

Eagles’ setlist at Sphere, Sept. 20, 2024:

Hotel California
One of These Nights
Lyin’ Eyes
Take It to the Limit
Witchy Woman
Peaceful Easy Feeling
Tequila Sunrise
In the City
I Can’t Tell You Why
New Kid in Town
Seven Bridges Road
Those Shoes
Life’s Been Good
Already Gone
The Boys of Summer
Life in the Fast Lane
Take It Easy
Rocky Mountain Way
Desperado
Heartache Tonight