Singling out the best Tahoe-Reno concerts in the past 25 years
By Jason Kellner, Reno Gazette-Journal
In 25 years, the Reno-Tahoe area has seen thousands of concerts come and go, from the small casino showrooms to the large arenas. Lawlor Events Center, which opened in 1984, helped change Reno’s concert landscape, growing it from an oft-overlooked outpost, to a main stop for artists over the years ranging from Duran Duran to Pearl Jam. More venues, like the Reno Hilton Amphitheater and Reno Events Center continued to pop up and grow the concert scene, while some listed here (Hilton Amphitheater included), are now gone.
So who put on the best concerts in the past 25 years? Ask 100 people, and you’re sure to get 100 different answers. Instead, we polled nine people, all of them firmly entrenched in the area music scene in one way or another. We combined all of our suggestions, and dug through yellowed newspaper clips to unearth some forgotten gems to come up with this highly debatable list. We easily could have made the list twice as long and there still would have been great shows that didn’t make the cut (sorry Feist, at Great Basin Brewing Co., 2006). And so now, we bring you the 25 most legendary concerts of the past 25 years.