On The Road with Duran Duran

Here's a little photo travelogue of my weekend

Duran Duran passed through our neck of the country and we went to go see them...twice...well, sort of. We took Friday off from work because they were playing at the MGM Casino at Foxwoods which is a few hours drive for us and we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to get there. Thursday night had us making a trip to Target to pick up last minute things for the trip, including this guy...

He's similar to those string dolls you've probably been seeing pop up everywhere. These are sold in Target in the trading card area. They're called Zumbies, the Walking Thread (cute, eh?). There are 12 and you can clearly see what's in each bag! Each one is has its own area of good juju. Fred here is supposed to bring wealth, which is why I picked him out to accompany me to the casinos. Each one also comes with a trading card that details their story. Basically, Fred got deep in debt, bet on the horses and leaned too far over the rail getting trampled, hence the name Unfortunate Fred, bad for him but good for you. I'm guessing the others all have similar tales of woe that are supposed to work out in your favor.

We got to the casino in plenty of time, met up with a couple of friends who were also going to the show and did some gambling. Then we went to wait for the doors to open. In front of the doors is this interesting hanging sculpture. It was almost difficult to focus on because it was like an optical illusion.

This is looking up from directly below the...whatever it is

 And what place owned by MGM would be complete without a lion?

Rawr!!



Our seats weren't great for the show, so my concert photos aren't the best. But it was cool to see them from a way back for a change to take in the entire stage show as a whole. They blew the roof off the place, which was no surprise. What was surprising is that they did Union of the Snake, closed with Girls on Film and did not play Rio. The audience was still chanting "RI-O! RI-O!" after the lights came up.

Then we had to take the shuttle back to our hotel to pick up a $100 slot machine ticket that we'd forgotten when we went back to change before the show. Our hotel isn't that far from the casino but the whole process of waiting for the shuttle, running into the hotel, waiting for the return shuttle (with drunken party girls), going back to the casino, cashing the ticket, and waiting to go back to the hotel again was around an hour. By then it was time for bed so we could leave early Saturday. We'd been advised to leave early for Atlantic City as the Jersey beach traffic could be horrendous.

It wasn't that bad. It took maybe an extra 60 minutes or so with the traffic. After getting settled in our room, we went to scope out the hotel the concert would be at which is called Revel. The amount of open space inside reminded me of Cloud City. It's huge inside! There are a few roof decks that look out on the ocean but since we weren't guests there, we weren't allowed on them. Boo!

The waiting areas in the main lobby had some interesting retro stylings.




Invisible chairs!

Back to our hotel and the House of Blues for some dinner (meatloaf sliders!), a quick change and back to Revel. We asked a very nice hotel security man how to get to the concert location and he showed us this...

So we sat down for awhile and chatted with other disappointed fans. We also got to watch other people see the sign and watch their reactions. We weren't the only ones that had traveled for this show, I heard someone came from as far as Denver! A couple people I talked to said this was going to be their first time seeing the band.

My wife had been texting with a fellow Duranie from NY who was upstairs at one of the bars so we went up to say hi before leaving the hotel. We got up to the bar and among the crowd there was Dom Brown (lead guitarist), Simon Willescroft (saxophone/percussion) and Anna Ross (backing vocals)! They were being very nice and talking to the fans and posing for photos. I talked to Dom for a couple minutes because I thought he was especially awesome the night before. He told me to check out his site dombrown.com for his solo work. He laughed and said he doesn't bother telling the girls about it because they're usually not as interested in the music as guys are.


I don't get the whole nerdy glasses thing with celebs...

A short while later, lead singer Simon LeBon showed up also! The general vibe was that he wasn't interested in taking photos with fans and he didn't even seem open to interacting with people he didn't know. It's not like this should be new to him. If you're at a bar where you just cancelled a show, you have to expect fans are going to want to chat and/or take photos. After about 20 minutes I guess he'd had enough of the fan-paparazzi and left. We did get pics of him, just none with him.

After that, we wound down the night by going to the Steel Pier, which is a neat little amusement park area. They have helicopter tours of the Atlantic City Boardwalk during the day and night so it was exciting to see it buzzing around so close. In addition to the standard rides and games, they also have a motorbike stunt show. Unfortunatley, I didn't get to see it but would have loved to. I did snap a few pics of the stunt area including the Sphere of Death (at least, that's what I call it). You can see all my Steel Pier pics on Flickr.

We hit the road Sunday morning and after a drive that felt like it would never end, got home around 9 p.m. And for the record, Fred did not bring any wealth on the trip. Unless you want to count the 26 cents someone left in the hotel closet.