Sessanta V2.0 — Las Vegas, 2025
Las Vegas understands fake exclusivity better than any city in America. Velvet ropes. Guest lists. VIP sections full of men in bad watches pretending they invented appetite. The whole town runs on the idea that access means value.
Sessanta was different.
This was my second Sessanta show, and by then the novelty had worn off just enough for the real shape of it to come through. April 25, 2025. PH Live. Maynard’s birthday run had rolled back through town a year after the 60th-birthday concept launched, now stretched into 61 because apparently no one involved saw any reason to stop the party while it was still this good.
I got there early, like always. Some people pray. Some meditate. I show up too soon and stare at merch.
What hit me first was how insane the whole idea still is on paper. This thing traces back to Cinquanta, the two-night Greek Theatre celebration for Maynard’s 50th in 2014, when Puscifer, A Perfect Circle, and Failure rotated through one shared evening and kept bleeding into each other’s sets. A decade later, the concept had not gotten any less strange. If anything, it had become more dangerous because now it had survived long enough to prove it wasn’t a gimmick.
Three bands. One stage. No opener. No polite little reset while roadies drag amps around and everyone checks their phone. A few songs from one camp, then a handoff, then another, then the lines start going soft around the edges and the whole thing turns into a moving target. It sounds like the sort of idea people come up with after midnight when the drinks have been flowing and nobody sober is left to say no. Usually those ideas die for a reason.
This one lived because the talent was absurd and the egos, for once, seemed properly housebroken.
From the floor you could see the full architecture of the thing. Two levels. The lower deck was for whoever had the knife in their hand at that moment — singers, guitars, bass, the immediate business of the song. The upper level held three drum kits and seating areas on both sides, so the musicians who weren’t currently steering could sit up there, watch, laugh, listen, and wait. Nobody disappeared. Nobody retreated behind curtains to preserve the illusion. The wall between backstage and stage had been ripped out and left on the curb.
That is where the exclusivity came from.
Not celebrity. Not scarcity. Not collector-brain nonsense, though I am as guilty of that disease as anyone. It was exclusive because you were watching something the public is usually not allowed to see: great musicians acting like friends in public. Not “industry friends.” Real friends. The kind who know each other’s timing, know when to step in, know when to get out of the way, know when to laugh, and know how to make room. In a city built on fake intimacy, Sessanta offered the real thing and never once tried to sell it as luxury.
And look at who was in the room up there. Maynard. Carina Round. Mat Mitchell. Les Claypool. Larry LaLonde. John Hoffman behind Primus, stepping into a slot that is not exactly free of history. Billy Howerdel. Matt McJunkins. Josh Freese back behind A Perfect Circle. Too much musicianship in one frame. The kind of lineup that makes a lot of other tours look like paperwork.
The real miracle was that none of it tightened up or went stiff.
A Perfect Circle opened with “The Package,” “Disillusioned,” and “Blue,” and did what that band does best: make dread sound expensive. Primus came in right behind them with “Here Come the Bastards,” “Groundhog’s Day,” and “Duchess and the Proverbial Mind Spread,” which is about as subtle as being hit in the face with a bass neck wrapped in carnival wiring. Then Puscifer slid into “Man Overboard,” “Tiny Monsters,” and “Indigo Children,” and the room loosened into something stranger. From there the whole night started cross-pollinating the way Sessanta is built to do — “Little Lord Fentanyl,” “Bullet Train to Iowa,” “The Algorithm,” “The Doomed,” “The Humbling River,” “Judith,” “Southbound Pachyderm,” and finally “Grand Canyon” with the full cast on stage. Nobody defended borders. Songs got handed around like loaded objects.
And Vegas, of all places, was the right city for that kind of beautiful corruption.
Most big shows in this town feel engineered within an inch of their lives. Marks hit. Lights pop. Spectacle arrives on cue, clean and dead-eyed. Sessanta had a different pulse. There were projected skits. There was a birthday cake. There was Billy Howerdel and Hoffman playing ping-pong on stage like this was some deeply overqualified rec-room hallucination. There were musicians sitting on the second tier listening to each other play instead of vanishing the second the light moved off them. The whole thing played less like a concert and more like a private gathering that had somehow spilled into a theater without losing its chemistry.
That chemistry is the whole story.
Plenty of tours can assemble famous names. Fewer can create trust. That is what made this rare while it was happening, and rare is a word people abuse constantly. This was rare because it depended on human arrangement more than branding. The right bands. The right history. The right amount of humor. The right amount of menace. Too much self-importance and it collapses. Too much irony and it becomes a joke. Sessanta stayed right in the narrow, difficult lane where it could be funny, technically vicious, a little sentimental, and never soft in the head.
It also carried the right amount of age.
This was not a bunch of men trying to pretend time had not passed. It was better than that. It was people old enough, skilled enough, and comfortable enough to stop guarding every inch of turf. The original spark was a 50th-birthday show. Then 60. Then 61, because the first run worked too well and there were still cities left to hit. You only get so many chances to do something this strange before life, schedules, injuries, boredom, money, or simple common sense comes to shut the door.
By the last song, the whole thing finally gave itself away.
In the photo, everyone is still there. Three drummers across the upper tier. Singers and players spread across the front line. Red vertical lights behind them like lit fuses, votive candles, or the inside of some expensive desert cult. Yellow floor lamps burning at their feet. Smoke hanging in the room. The crowd reduced to silhouettes. By then, the audience was no longer the main event. We were there to witness it.
By the time “Grand Canyon” closed it out, the whole idea had landed with full weight. Not a novelty. Not a package tour. Not three brands sharing square footage for the sake of commerce. It was a temporary society. A private club with the roof torn off. A backstage hang turned outward for one night in a city that usually counterfeits that feeling and charges extra for it.
I liked that each band had its own poster. I liked even more that there was a giant all-in-one signed print big enough to count as evidence. That made sense. Nights like this make people want proof. Not because they need memorabilia. Because they need corroboration. Vegas merch for that night included exclusive items tied to the PH Live stop.
Second Sessanta show.
This was the one where the whole machine quit looking like a clever concept and started looking like what it really was: a rare piece of trust, built by lifers, carried by monsters, and dressed up as a birthday party so nobody had to admit how unlikely it was.
Poster
Dave Kloc — All-show print
Ken Taylor — Puscifer
Dido Peshev — A Perfect Circle
Brian Allen / Flyland Designs — Primus
Field Notes
Second Sessanta show
Arrived early
PH Live, Las Vegas
Born from the 2014 Cinquanta idea, still alive a decade later
Three bands on one stage, all night
Upper tier turned backstage into public view
Birthday cake, skits, ping-pong, ridiculous amount of talent
Vegas got a genuinely exclusive show for once
Setlist Highlights
A Perfect Circle — “The Package,” “Blue,” “Judith”
Primus — “Here Come the Bastards,” “Groundhog’s Day,” “Southbound Pachyderm”
Puscifer — “Man Overboard,” “Bullet Train to Iowa,” “The Humbling River”
Finale — “Grand Canyon”
Tags
Sessanta V2.0, Sessanta Las Vegas, Sessanta V2.0 review, A Perfect Circle live, Puscifer live, Primus live, PH Live Las Vegas, Maynard James Keenan, Carina Round, Les Claypool, Larry LaLonde, John Hoffman, Billy Howerdel, Josh Freese, concert review, Las Vegas concert review, Spiral Out Podcast
Suggested Image Alt Text
A Perfect Circle, Puscifer, and Primus share the stage during the final song at Sessanta V2.0 in Las Vegas, framed by red vertical lights and smoke.
Websites
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