Browsing Tag: eagles

    Music

    Mixing Rock and Real Estate in Las Vegas

    March 1, 2026

    What a week…in the best possible way.

    Cari and I just spent a full week in Las Vegas, which is not something either of us would normally volunteer to do. But months ago, when she suggested I join her for RE/MAX’s annual international conference in February, I instantly knew the Eagles were playing more shows at the Sphere, so I was all in! And that was only the tip of the iceberg on a fun week of mixing business and pleasure.

    First half of the week was business. We both attended RE/MAX’s R4 conference and got to hang with some of our favorite local RE/MAX-ers. I heard James Clear and an incredible woman named Vanessa Van Edwards speak.

    Cari had a bunch of business things going on early in the week, which meant I had enough free time to go do some stuff on my own…like SEEING DEF LEPPARD as part of their residency at Caesar’s Palace!!

    This was my second time seeing them. I think I preferred the stadium show a couple years ago, but this was still terrific. This venue seemed almost too small for them, and the sound wasn’t great for the first few songs.

    I sat next to three ladies — two were about my age, and seemed like they were sisters. I think the third may have been their mom, who must’ve been 80-90 yrs old and was TOTALLY rocking out. She was so cool! 😎🥰

    After the real estate and Def Leppard portion of the week, two of the best people in the world drove up from Arizona to hang with us for the second half of the week — Mat and Holly!!! Somehow, we hadn’t seen them face-to-face since 2017. So there was a lot of catching up, hanging out, shopping, eating great meals, and a little gambling.

    We capped that off with the Eagles concert at the Sphere on Friday night, which was fantastic. Cari and I saw the Eagles about 18 months ago at the Sphere, and I preferred this one a bit more. They had a bunch of new visuals and added “End of the Innocence” — one of my all-time fave songs.

    Before the concert, we paid a visit to the Eagles experience inside the Palazzo — it’s a really cool collection of memorabilia and mini-versions of the Troubador where Don Henley and Glenn Frey first met, and a “Hotel California” on Sunset Blvd. Cari and I didn’t get to see it in 2024 because the F1 race was approaching and had taken over that space.

    It’s been a while since I’ve traveled anywhere and stayed a full week. Pretty exhausted at this point and glad to be home after…ahem…taking it to the limit.

    Music

    Back to Hawaii in “Boys of Summer”

    November 11, 2024

    I don’t even know where to begin with this…

    Cari and I saw the Eagles at the Sphere in Vegas on Saturday night. (Incredible show. You all know how much I love them.) Our seats were down on the floor, 9th row — great spot to see the band’s faces up close, but TBH not the best spot to see the amazing visuals. You had to really lean back and look up to get the full effect.

    During “Boys of Summer,” the visuals show a man and woman swimming romantically underwater behind/above the band. I’d seen a brief clip of this before the show, so I kinda knew what to expect.

    And then I leaned back and looked up.

    I’ll get back to that in a moment. But let me turn the clock back a couple years.

    If you saw my post two years ago after my accident in Maui, here’s how I described it:

    There’s a camera shot you’ll see in most movies or TV shows that have a drowning scene: The camera is in the water, pointed up toward the sky above. You see the drowning person’s POV as they presumably look toward the air that they need to survive. It might be a few inches away or many feet, but the point is to show the desperate distance between where they are and where they need to be.

    Speaking from real-life experience, that camera angle is incredibly realistic.

    On Sept. 24, 2022, I was lying on my back on Kaanapali Beach in Maui with probably six inches of water above me, unable to breathe and, worse, unable to move. I remember looking up, my head on the sand, and seeing the gorgeous blue sky above the water, desperate to get one more breath of that fresh Hawaiian air. But the six inches of water felt like a mile, and I felt like I’d taken my last breath on earth.

    That image — looking up through the ocean water to the blue sky and sun — has been stuck in my head ever since. On several occasions, I’ve tried to get Dall-E, ChatGPT, and other AI image tools to recreate it. They never quite got it right. I remember sending Cari one of the images and saying, “I know this is kinda morbid, but this is kinda-sorta what it looked like when I was about to die.” (She agreed that it was morbid so I didn’t send her any more! 😅)

    But morbid or not, I’ve NEVER been able to get that image out of my head. There’s no way to forget that moment. When I think of that whole day, it’s always the first thing that I see.

    So, back to Saturday night when I was enjoying live music from a band I love with the woman I love in an incredible venue, and all of a sudden I look up to the top of the Sphere.

    My eyes got wide, I stopped singing, and my mouth opened wide. After a few seconds, I leaned into Cari, pointed up, and said, “That’s EXACTLY what it looked like.”

    I spent the rest of the song with my eyes glued straight up. It took me right back to that moment. By the end of the song, I was in tears and an absolute wreck.

    But here’s the crazy part: It’s been really good from a mental health angle! I don’t know how to explain it, but seeing something that looked exactly like what I saw has somehow made it less painful.

    It’s like finally I don’t have to try to create a visual memory of it in my head, or with some AI image generator. I SAW IT AGAIN in the setting of one of my all-time favorite songs, with Cari right there, a fave band, etc.

    The only bad thing…I was so frozen in the moment that I didn’t get any photos or videos of it myself. 😕

    So this morning, I joined an Eagles/Sphere Facebook group and politely asked if anyone had any photos or video of the top of the Sphere when the swimmers were on screen. Holy crap, people sent me some GREAT stuff and I got all emotional again looking at the pics and videos. That’s where I got the photos in this post.

    As Don Henley said earlier in the show, quoting Plato, “music is medicine.”