VEGAS MUSIC NEWS: John Mayer & Calvin Harris to Headline New Music Festival, Faking Sex (Pistols)

Posted on: May 15, 2025, 05:55h. 

Last updated on: May 16, 2025, 09:06h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Las Vegas Myths.
  • John Mayer will light up the Rise Festival outside Vegas in October
  • The Sex Pistols aim to revive their punk glory days at the Palms

A festival of lights has blossomed into a festival of musical luminaries. The Rise Festival was conceived in 2014 as a simultaneous launch of thousands of biodegradable lanterns into the nighttime desert sky.

John Mayer is artificially set against a lantern launch from the Rise Festival. (Images: Live Nation and Rise Festival)

The Instagrammable moment went annual, and now, after being acquired by the nonprofit NobleLight Foundation last year, it’s going musical.

In addition to two lantern releases per night, three days of acts — headlined by alt-dance group Rüfüs du Sol on Friday, superstar Las Vegas DJ Calvin Harris on Saturday, and guitar legend John Mayer on Sunday – will perform October 3-5 in the Mojave Desert’s Jean Dry Lake Bed, 40 miles south of Las Vegas.

The occasion is billed as the event’s 10th anniversary, though it’s really its 11th. (Rise took 2024 off to hire a new CEO, David Oehm, formerly with Life is Beautiful.)

Other artists on the bill include Ben Böhmer, Goose, Elderbrook, LP Giobbi, Oliver Heldens, Emmit Fenn, RY X, Patrick Watson, Coco & Breezy, RIVO, Forester, Eduardo Castillo, Carrie Keller, and City of the Sun.

We’re too far outside the festival’s demo to recognize any of those names, but a press release describes them as a mix of “electronic, indie, folk, and experimental genres.”

Tickets and packages go on sale Friday, May 16 via the festival’s website.

Rotten’s Tomatoes

The Sex Pistols, reunited without singer Johnny Rotten, will wrap a 50th-anniversary tour at the Pearl at the Palms on October 17. The tour will feature a complete performance of the seminal punk band’s landmark 1977 album, “Never Mind the Bollocks”.

According to original Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten, the revived Sex Pistols (posing here with Rotten’s replacement, Frank Carter, second from left) should be called Karoake in the UK. (Image: Live Nation)

Rotten (aka John Lydon, solo artist), is still alive, but apparently not to original members Steve Jones (guitar), Glen Matlock (bass) or Paul Cook (drums).

Instead of asking their original frontman back into the fold, they replaced him with an unknown soundalike named Frank Carter, formerly of British hardcore punk band Gallows.

Not that Rotten has ever been happy. But now he’s really not happy.

“It’s almost malicious in its intent,” he characterized his former bandmates’ reunion to Britain’s NME. “And it’s karaoke — that’s all it will ever be.”

Honestly, if Lydon were asked, he probably would have turned it down anyway. A longstanding feud between him and the band grew deeper in 2021, when he unsuccessfully sued to block the use of Sex Pistols’ music in the FX series, “Pistol.”

The Pearl performance will cap the Pistols’ first US dates since 2008, when the band, with Rotten, rocked The Joint at the old Hard Rock Hotel.

Tickets go on sale at 10 am Friday, May 16 at 10 a.m. at SexPistolsFeaturingFrankCarter.com.