[This is the first of a three-part series exploring Phish's past excursions in Las Vegas, courtesy of user @paulj Paul Jakus, Executive Director of the Phish Studies Association.]

My first memory of Las Vegas remains as vivid today as it was that summer afternoon 58 years ago, descending the stairs from an airplane to the tarmac: a blast of 110-degree air straight into my face. I was ten years old, and Dad’s company had transferred our family to what seemed to be the inside of a furnace.

Our house wasn’t yet ready, so our next two weeks were spent ensconced in an apartment on the Aladdin Hotel golf course—the very ground upon which the Aladdin Theater for the Performing Arts was to be erected eight years later. The Aladdin, of course, is where Phish made its Las Vegas debut in 1996.

The upcoming 2026 concerts at the Sphere will mark thirty years of Phish in Las Vegas, which seems a good time to review the Las Vegas venues at which Phish have performed. While New York City is clearly Phish’s adopted hometown, I will argue over the course of this three-part series that Las Vegas, given its continual reinvention into something else, is the town that best parallels the band’s history.

Nevada writer and artist William L. Fox says, “There’s precious little stability in [Las Vegas’s] physical infrastructure to which memory can attach itself.” Indeed, in returning to town over many decades to visit family and to enjoy Phish, I’ve often found myself physically and psychologically disoriented, knowing that I have “been here, at this exact spot,” but not recognizing a thing. Kind of like that feeling during a Phish jam that leaves you asking, “So, what’s this song again?”

Consider this 1969 photo of the corner of Flamingo and the Strip. Looking north, the Aladdin is in the foreground, with its golf course on the right edge of the photo. In 2026, only the Flamingo (unmarked, but north of the Bonanza) and Caesars Palace remain, and even these properties look radically different today.

The configuration of the Aladdin in the photo above is close to what Milton Prell purchased in 1966. Originally built without a casino as the English Tudor-themed “Tally Ho Hotel,” the property had quickly failed. Prell added a casino and a large showroom, and reimagined the hotel’s theme in the most unimaginative way possible, basing its décor upon the fictional “Arabian Nights,” thus joining the desert theme of the Dunes, Sands, Sahara, and many other Las Vegas hotels.

After Prell fell ill, the property changed hands several times, with investors ranging from those who were a little too friendly with the Detroit Mob to local icons such as Wayne Newton. One set of owners, using questionable loans from the Teamsters Union, built a 19-story hotel tower and replaced the golf course with the 7,500 seat Aladdin Theater for the Performing Arts. Neil Diamond opened the Theater with a three-night stand in July 1976.

At this point I must inject another personal but historical, note: I cannot overemphasize how profoundly uncool mid-1970s Las Vegas was for anyone under the age of 21. Almost everything in town was marketed to its key tourism markets: middle-aged, white, male conventioneers during the week, and high rollers on the weekend. Casinos protected their lucrative state gaming licenses by programming activities and entertainment almost exclusively for the over-21 set. Local kids wandering onto casino properties—a common summer activity for us—were quickly escorted outside by security. Sure, popular bands would occasionally play at the Ice Palace or, less often, the Convention Center Rotunda. But Frank, Sammy, and Dean excepted, early-70s “Vegas” was where aging performers sought to fan the embers of a fading career in a dimly-lit casino lounge.

The Aladdin Theater was emphatically not that “Vegas.” Its primary entrance was not through the casino, there were no dinner shows or cocktail waitresses, and, most importantly, it was an all ages venue. Suddenly, popular rock acts regularly came to town. Here’s an August 1977 poster showing the month’s lineup:

On December 6, 1996, about two years before its hotel tower was imploded, Phish arrived at the Aladdin for the final show of their Fall Tour. Much as the venue was nearing the end of its first phase of existence, so, too, was Phish. Sandwiched between the ferociously tight rock of Phish’s first artistic peak in 1993-95 and the looser, extended funk jams that highlighted their hallowed 1997-98 era, Phish performances in 1996 are sometimes overlooked. But not the Aladdin show.

The first and second sets are fast-paced, sounding much more like 1995 than 1997. A long-for-its-era 2001 in the first set leads to a tight Llama, followed by a YEM with a great Trey solo, an extended bass, drum, and keys segment, and a vocal jam that anticipates both Dick’s 2012 and the 2017 Baker’s Dozen run. Set 2 is highlighted by an amazing Mike’s Groove that includes a furious start-stop Weekapaug.

The nearly 40-minute encore featured appearances by Primus’s Les Claypool and Larry LaLonde, John McEuen and the Yodeling Cowgirls, actor Courtney Gaines, and five Elvis impersonators (including Jon Fishman). The Bonus DVD issued with the Las Vegas ’96 box set proved the encore was just as crazy as it sounded on tape.

Sixteen months after this show, the Aladdin hotel tower was imploded and, eventually, Planet Hollywood arrived onsite. The Theater, which had remained a solid profit center over the years, was spared destruction and remains in use today as the PH Live Theater—if you’re in town on April 26, 2026 you can see Jeff Dunham.

Aladdin Implosion Video

Phish would return to Las Vegas less than one year later having fully completed their transformation to cow-funk jam masters. Part 2 of this series will cover the years at the Thomas & Mack Center, where the band reached great heights and, certainly, its greatest low.

Sources:

* Fox, William L. 1999. Driving by Memory. University of New Mexico Press.
* Moehring, Eugene P. 2014. Reno, Las Vegas, and the Strip: A Tale of Three Cities. University of Nevada Press.
* Wajtowicz Jr., Mark. 2025. Vegas from Fremont to the Strip: How Las Vegas Casinos Evolved. Self-published.
* Wikipedia. Numerous pages.

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