Tag: mandalay bay
Hell or High Roller: Psycho Las Vegas 2021
Rob Shepyer
August 26, 2021
There was a time when for me, going to Psycho Las Vegas meant budgeting only enough money to eat McDonalds for three days while I slept on a friend’s couch in some lawless Vegas neighborhood so far off the strip, Ubers wouldn’t dare travel to such unsavory corners. Now, in the post-pandemic world, I report on Psycho with new purpose. This year, I was staying in a Delano scenic suite high above the city and budgeted enough money to properly chase the American dream. Raoul Duke’s American dream in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a metaphor for the limits of human consciousness. With freedom as the central American covenant, what greater expression of patriotism is there than breaking free of reality’s chains by dosing yourself past every threshold? Now though, as I take that same trip as Duke in 2021, my search for the American Dream is a futile attempt to connect with a time long gone. You might assume I mean the world before the pandemic but I also mean that beautiful era in music history where rock and metal bands could draw crowds as far as the eye can see. How do we recover
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The Road to Psycho Las Vegas
Rob Shepyer
June 12, 2021
Later this month, I’ll attend my first indoor concert since March 2020. People will not be wearing masks or social distancing. I’ll have dipped my toes into the cultural soup I’ve swam in the majority of my adult life, relearning all the in’s-and-out’s of concert going. Stage-dives and mosh pits have been relegated to my long term memory banks awaiting to be unearthed. Although most metalheads will be breaking their concert fasts soon (if they haven’t already), Psycho Las Vegas is the spiritual grand re-opening of the metal scene in the wild American west. As the first large festival to take place since the beginning of the pandemic, Psycho is a test much like the ones Hunter S. Thompson indulged in with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Our senses may have been perverted, inverted, dulled and destroyed by lengthy quarantines but our imaginations are in better shape than ever and if I can imagine Psycho Las Vegas being the most insane heavy metal summit of my life, then I can will it into being. related content: A High And Beautiful Wave: Psycho Las Vegas 2019 Before the world shut down, Psycho’s 2020 lineup was one of the most anticipated slates of
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A High and Beautiful Wave: Psycho Las Vegas 2019
Rob Shepyer
August 31, 2019
“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” ~ Dr. Hunter S. Thompson With the country’s current political climate putting its populous in divided disarray, one has to wonder if the American dream has remained intact and not fallen by the wayside as so many once credible ideas and institutions have. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson performed a drug fueled pilgrimage down the mainline vein of the country, the dusty connective highways between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, in search for the heart of the American dream and like a lethal dose of adrenochrome, he came bursting on the scene. What the good doctor found was both life and death, decency and depravity, all wrapped into one gaudy American nightmare churned out by the 24 hour fantasy machine of Vegas. Today, if Thompson was alive, he would think Psycho Las Vegas was the climax of the dream he was looking for, a wellspring of underground music taking over the Mandalay Bay Casino & Resort, a
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