(I posted a brief update from the hotel lobby Saturday night, but it didn't seem to publish properly, so here's the whole story.)

In the cab, your travel weary host for this tale asked the driver point blank, "Who's Sam?"

"You mean, like the new Killers album?" he answered.

"Yeah."

"Well, Sam's Town is a casino. It's actually right over there." He pointed around a left-angled bend in the road.

"I heard that. Then, who is Sam Boyd?" I asked, referencing the name of the stadium where I was headed under the presumption that there might be just one Sam in Las Vegas that everyone knows.

"Honestly, I don't know. He must have been involved in the University." By University, he means UNLV. Though a good ten miles from UNLV's campus, Sam Boyd Stadium is home to the school football team.

"I would imagine that he's dead," the cabbie continues. "Otherwise the stadium wouldn't be named for him."

Fair enough. After all, I couldn't tell you what the Doheny family did except for pull in enough cash to get the name posted on L.A. street signs and an LMU dorm.

That I was able to get to Sam Boyd Stadium an hour after my flight landed and twenty minutes after checking into my hotel room is a worthy achievement on its own. Then I managed to inadvertently sneak inside the concert.

I was looking for the kiosk with my will call tickets. In the process, I ended up following a bunch of hippies. I hit the security gate, had my bag checked and then walked in, where I wandered about looking for the ticket booth until I realized that I was right in front of Mars Volta's stage.

I called my co-worker, who had arrived earlier in the day, so that we could meet. After several rounds of phone calls, we found each other by the Ferris wheel. Then we watched a bit of The Black Crowes, The Killers and Tom Petty.

As you know, I'm not much of a Killers fan. I think, though, that I prefer Sam's Town to Hot Fuss and I prefer the band live to anything on album. I don't know if it was just because this was a hometown show for the band, but they ripped off the head of Vegoose. I had to call my brother during "When You Were Young" and my sister during "Somebody Told Me" because I knew that they would appreciate it. There was one point in the show where I doubled-over in laughter. As you might be aware, "All These Things I've Done" ranks as one of my all-time least favorite songs put on record. This is mostly because of that whole "I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier" chant. Personally, I can't understand why anyone would release that as a single, let alone why people would fall head-over-heels for it. So, when the band played it, they did this huge guitar buildup towards that rousing yet vile line. How Brandon Flowers can actually sing that with a completely straight face is just one of many things I will spend the rest of my life, or at least the rest of the week, pondering.

After that, we caught Tom Petty, who was freakin' awesome. In between every song, he stood in a Jesus Christ pose, arms outstretched, as the crowd roared with applause. You have to hand it to Tom Petty. I'm not sure if there is another artists still living who has remained both cool and a househould name throughout his career. My personal favorite was "Free Falling," mostly because I'm from the Valley and felt some sort of connection to the line about the vampires on Ventura Boulevard. (For those of you who aren't from here, there used to be a Denny's on the corner of Ventura and Sepulveda that was a freak hangout for years. When I was in high school, it was a meeting place for goths. My friends and I spent a lot of time there.)