When I left the Silk Sonic show at the Dolby Theater at Park MGM on Tuesday night, I made my way over to the official afterparty. There was a very short line to get in which they immediately steered us away from. All of us concertgoers were “guest list” which was a slow-moving, Disneyland-style mess of velvet ropes that I immediately noped out on. Why did I care about an official afterparty anyway? So I headed to the exit, only to run into the same Bay Area friend I had seen before the show. He introduced me to a friend of his who had come down from Portland for the event. He asked me what I was going to write about the show and I explained that I wasn’t going to write about it all, but then I spent the night not at the afterparty but thinking about what I should write about it.
For background, you should know that Silk Sonic is the Philly soul, disco, Motown, smooth R&B and you-name-it inspired collaboration between Anderson .Paak and pop superstar Bruno Mars. They had a number one hit last year with “Leave the Door Open” which then won some Grammys, too. That’s what you need to know.
The first thing that happens when you arrive at the venue is that your phone is sealed up into a Yondr pouch, which seals up the phone for the entire show. With your phone in this pouch, you can’t spend the entire show watching your screen. You must engage! The band even does a playful number that explains that “we took your phone” because “what happens in Vegas should stay in Las Vegas.” Some people hate this and must complain about it, but I welcome it wholeheartedly! Take our phones! Make us live in the moment!
Now that our phones are gone, we have the opportunity to get our pictures taken in front of a backdrop ($53 gets you 2 photos in a custom Silk Sonic photo holder), a variety of t-shirts ($50 short sleeve, $75 long sleeve) and a custom cocktail called “Paak’s a Punch,” made with Bruno Mars’s own brand of coconut rum, a bunch of fruit juices and finally some grenadine syrup thrown in to remind me of underage drinking at the Hu Ke Lau in Longmeadow ($18 for a double, $28 for a quadruple). If you still have any money left, I strongly recommend buying a water ($7) before heading inside to the extremely cold theater!
I’m sorry to report that my section was boring. Of the 40-50 people sitting in my area, there were 3-4 of us who were up the whole time. I got asked to move a little so they could sit down and they’re playing “777” and I’m losing my shit and I’m like “if you want to switch with me so you can sit and I can stand, that’s OK with me” and instead she just stood up most of the show. One less boring person?
I described this show to be as if one was watching the classic T.A.M.I Show, a 1964 concert film that featured a wide gallery of performers: Chuck Berry, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, The Rolling Stones, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, the Beach Boys, and more. Silk Sonic took turns being any number of bands: hard funk, instrumental jazz, classic soul vocal group, crooners and even guitar shredders. Although the show has been exactly the same throughout, it was full of surprises for me. A peek at the setlist doesn’t do the music on stage justice. The band is molten hot and the vocals are glacially cool.
There’s a running gag during the show about how Bruno Mars is a way better singer than “Andy.” They take turns impressing vocally and then Bruno wins the battle as .Paak gives up comically. Let’s be serious for a moment, though, because .Paak is a fantastic singer. That comic tone is seemingly what Anderson .Paak brings to the table for the entire project. I wrote in my brief review of their album for our 2021 Albums of the Year about how funny the songs are, and they lose none of their humor here. My favorite song of theirs, “Fly As Me,” cracks me up every time.
Based on the reactions of my boring section, many of them were there specifically to see Bruno Mars and were unfamiliar with the other material. They had a welcoming but ultimately cold reaction to “That’s What I Like” which was served up as a live reworking of Earth Wind & Fire’s “Can’t Hide Love.” The more straightforward version of “Treasure” was a bigger success. The back-to-back blasts of .Paak’s “Come Down” with Bruno Mars on drums and Mars’s “Runaway Baby” with .Paak on drums was phenomenal and I spent some of the next few minutes wondering if there would have been a better crowd in the cheap seats. Maybe it’s a Tuesday thing.
After freeing my phone from its pouch and having the encounter I mentioned at the beginning, I headed out into the night only to find one of my favorite things in the whole world: bootleg concert shirts! Now, I had bought one of the $50 ones (it’s shiny and I can never put it in a dryer), but the back of this unofficial tee says “And [sic] Evening With Silk Sonic” so it immediately became earmarked as a gift for a friend who loves that sort of shit. They know who they are.
As for the show, it’s great! I doubt they’ll ever tour it or bring it to festivals (although it would be a perfect 90-minute headline set with no changes) so you’re gonna have to go to Las Vegas to see it. They’ve added more shows in August, so that incredibly cold theater is going to feel amazing. Not that I’ll find out. Or will I?
