[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.

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