A sort of fun thing I'll never do again

Maybe only Santana was worth visiting Las Vegas

I’ve always loved Carlos Santana’s music, amazed at how you can identify his unique sound more readily than any other guitarist. Whenever anyone asks me about the top ten musical artists’ works I’d bring on a desert island, Santana is way at the top of the list. His music is rock and it’s jazz and it’s Latin with Afro-Cuban rhythms. Some of the later stuff is a little spacey and even schmaltzy but you can’t argue with his early music.

Even though there’s a big mural of Santana and his family in his Mission, and he’s probably played San Francisco a bunch of times over the 40 years that I’ve lived here, I’ve never had a chance to see him here. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, or didn’t have the money for a ticket. Now Santana is 77, and who knows how long he’ll be playing, or how long I’ll be willing to line up, squish in, and wait for a concert. So when I saw that he was doing a residency in Las Vegas at the House of Blues, I decided my husband Peter and I should go for my birthday. The February show was canceled when Santana broke his pinkie finger walking his dog in Hawaii, and was rescheduled to last weekend.

We decided to just go for one night. I haven’t spent a lot of time in Vegas, except to rent a car and head out to Zion or Bryce or the canyon country. I once stayed in Vegas for a weekend in a casino while I was doing a story on a yoga instructor who was hot at the time, which seemed anomalous, yoga and Vegas, until I realized that this particular yoga instructor was a kind of fraud who was bent on commercializing his system as much as possible. He was later accused, as many or perhaps male yoga gurus are, of using his guru power to sleep with as many students as possible, fucking up their heads when they dimly realized that what was supposed to be enlightenment was simple sexual exploitation. So in the end a yoga conference in Vegas made sense.

I already know I’m not keen on Vegas, so that’s why we went just went for the night. We pooled our frequent flier points for our plane and hotel. We went for the standing-room tickets at the concert because sitting at a table cost $350 each, and I wanted to dance in the front anyway.

As soon as we landed in Vegas, one of the first people I saw was wearing a MAGA hat. We’re not in San Francisco any more. We grabbed a taxi at the airport, which was $21 for a ten-minute ride. “Welcome to Vegas.” The driver offered to stop by a liquor store to load up on water and liquor, which he said would cost several times as much at the hotel. No longer the days of cheap rooms, booze, and food to keep you gambling, Vegas is now more family- and entertainment-oriented, and they’ve upped the prices.

The liquor store was decorated with a giant mural of Not My President with a bandage over his ear—a rendering, like the one in the Colorado capital, that he would have objected to and insisted was torn down, given his vanity, though the intent was flattery. The big slogan said, “MORE JOBS.” Not in the federal government.

When we paid for our water, there was an additional $3 tacked on for using a credit card. Apparently, that is the norm in Vegas.

We went to the Mandalay Resort and Casino, where the House of Blues is located, a big gold skyscraper that I only realized was the one where the largest mass shooting by a lone gunman ever took place in 2017, killing 60 at a festival and wounding 413, when the taxi driver proudly showed us which window the gunman used. He spouted some conspiracy theory about multiple shooters that only a JFK shooting conspiracy theorist or Robert Kennedy, Jr. could really understand.

Our room was $450 a night, which we paid using miles, and they tacked on an extra $50 resort fee, which was not optional in case you didn’t want to avail yourself of the resort. The room was as standard a room as you could find in any hotel, with cheap surfaces and bad abstract art. We went down to the lobby, where mechanical slot machines had been replaced by unappealing video game machines–almost no one was using them—and found a lunch place, where we had a couple of mediocre sandwiches and Bloody Marys for $100.

After lunch, I went out to the resort, which served several hotels at different VIP tiers, so that you couldn’t use the better pools for the Four Seasons or the W, but you could wade into the giant wave machine. Everything in Vegas has tiers of VIP status (I actually went to school with the guy who did a case study while he was at Harvard Business School about how much more money Vegas could make if they started using frequent-flier type points and statuses, and he ended up becoming a big whig at Ceasar’s, very different from the affable Midwestern intellectual he was in college.)

I went swimming in one of the pools our hotel was allowed to use, and was the only person actually swimming. Everyone else was frying on a lounge chair with a $30 margarita slushy in their hand. Some of them looked at me, like what the hell is she doing, moving around back and forth in the water? Vegas: where stupid Americans go to become more stupid.

On the way out to the pool, crossing through the casino, where there is no such thing as day or night and you can’t tell so you don’t notice time passing, I saw a sign that said “Daylight,” with an arrow. That was the first sane thing I noticed. You’re having a panic attack about how fucked up Vegas and America and the current situation with liars and showmen stealing all our tax money to pad their pockets and nevermind the damage to our institutions, our science, our health, our environment; nevermind the misery and cruelty—you’re ready to have a panic attack, and there is a sign of relief, a sign that says “Daylight,” with an arrow. I want daylight.

Daylight turns out to be the name of a club, which costs extra money than you’ve already paid in your $50 resort fee.

Obviously, I had a bad attitude about the place. Maybe it was the Not My President mural at the beginning, but I couldn’t help but think that NMP is running the country like a casino. Of course, he has run casinos before, and run them into the ground. So the metaphor is apt. But here is this over-the-top gilt, the chandeliers and the fake gold everything, the glitzy bad taste, the promise of wealth and the machines that are rigged so the house always wins big, and here are the rising prices and falling values and here are the people who think it’s all wonderful because they’ve been sold on the dream of Vegas. They save and save and work and work so they can blow it all on Vegas, willingly give everything away at rip-off prices, and that somehow seems like a fair trade. And here’s this enormous skyscraper where a guy who lost a lot at the casino and didn’t think he was being treated fairly for a high roller, a guy with a damaged ego and a grudge (a familiar type), who was allowed in with an automatic weapon and just opened fire on innocents at a concert and people shared thoughts and prayers but didn’t do fuck-all to prevent it from happening again because this is America.

At 6pm, we lined up outside the House of Blues for an hour, waiting to get in. We headed to the front of the club and waited for another hour for the band to play. When Santana came on, it was a thrill to see him in the flesh, and we were just a few rows back from the stage. It was a good band, with dynamic performers and singers, one of whom played the trumpet, too, and some excellent percussion and keys. I loved seeing videos of Santana in his younger days, and remember the story from the documentary about him, “Carlos,” of how he used to sneak into the Fillmore when he was a kid because he had to listen to the music. Rock impresario Bill Graham caught him at it once, and was going to throw him out when Santana pleaded that he just had to hear the music, and that he was a musician and so it was a necessary to him as air. Graham gave him a guitar and asked him to play, then asked if he had a band, then booked him on a tour that ended up at Woodstock.

Santana clearly didn’t have the energy of his youth, but who does? He’s a legend, and his riffs were classic Santana. It didn’t seem like his heart was really into it, though.That could be the Vegas effect. The one time he spoke, and talked about the Sixties and it being a time of love, the audience pretty much shouted him down. It was kind of cheering for him, but there was a negative tone mixed in, so it was also kind of, “Shut up and play your guitar.” Santana stopped speaking, and just introduced the band. It was a little sad.

But we got to hear Oye Como Va, Black Magic Woman, Put Your Lights On, Maria Maria, and an interminable but muscular drum solo by his wife, Cindy Blackman Santana, who seemed to be trying to drum up the energy Santana couldn’t muster. It was satisfying to see a guitar hero, a legend, even at the end of his career. I can kick that off my bucket list.

After the show, we had a late and expensive dinner at a good Italian restaurant in the complex where we couldn’t see or hear the casino machines and went up to our room to watch the lights spreading out to the mountains. All that water, all that development in a desert surrounded by hills. We finished the wine we didn’t finish with dinner and toasted our weird weekend.

The next morning, I was going to make coffee in the hotel room. There was a little packet of a cup with a pod of coffee and powdered creamer and sugar. This was not free in a $450 room. I scanned the minibar code and it was $16. Each. I like coffee in the morning, but I’m not insane. So I went traipsing down through the casino all the way to the Starbucks, which normally I would never go to, but best option in the land of really poor options, and I waited in line for half an hour to get Starbucks coffee.

We couldn’t wait to get back home.