Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217)

by Zoglin, Richard

  Newton and his brother had an acrimonious split in 1971. Jerry was clearly overshadowed by his brother, and Wayne later admitted he had grown resentful of Jerry’s constant mockery. “It got to the point in the late ’60s where, no matter what I was doing onstage, he would either interrupt or make jokes about it,” Newton said. “It was driving me crazy.” Newton claimed the settlement left him $3 million in debt, and the two didn’t speak for ten years. (Jerry Newton was later convicted of bank fraud, in a case unrelated to his brother, and sentenced to six years in prison.) Most notoriously, Wayne Newton filed a much-publicized libel suit against NBC, over a story that linked him to mob figures, stemming from his purchase of the Aladdin Hotel in 1980. (Newton won a $19.3 million verdict from a federal jury in Las Vegas, but it was overturned on appeal.) None of which seemed to matter to Newton’s fanatically loyal fans, who continued to flock to his Vegas shows. By the mid-1990s he had made more than twenty-five thousand Vegas appearances, a record that will probably never be broken.

  “Vegas is unto itself,” Stan Irwin, the Sahara Hotel’s entertainment director, liked to say. “In those days it set no precedent and followed no precedent. It just was.” Wayne Newton might have been Exhibit A. He was, if nothing else, an original: he seemed to inhabit his own musical world, an imitator of no one who came before, a model for no one who came after. But Vegas in the late sixties was also opening its doors to singers who reflected more of the changes taking place in contemporary music. One was Tom Jones.

  He was born Thomas John Woodward, in the coal-mining country of South Wales. He dropped out of high school at age sixteen to marry his pregnant girlfriend and by his early twenties was fronting a local rock band, Tommy Scott and the Senators. A London manager and songwriter named Gordon Mills discovered him, changed his name to Tom Jones, and guided him to overnight stardom in 1965 with his first hit, “It’s Not Unusual.” Jones had a husky, raspy baritone, redolent of the fifties rock ’n’ roll and blues singers that he listened to growing up. (Elvis Presley, like many others hearing Jones for the first time, assumed he was black.) Onstage he was a galvanic, openly sexual performer—his shirt unbuttoned to the navel, hips gyrating in his skintight pants. “I’m trying to get across to the audience that I’m alive,” he told an interviewer. “All of it, the emotion and the sex and the power, the heartbeat and the bloodstream, are all theirs for the asking.”

  By 1968, after several hit singles and TV guest appearances, he came to Las Vegas. “There was a strong sense at the time that playing Vegas was something you earned the right to do—that it was something you had to qualify for,” Jones said in his memoir, Over the Top and Back. Not everyone in Vegas was ready for him. Jack Entratter turned down a chance to book him at the Sands. “Entratter could no more relate to Tom Jones than he could to Mötley Crüe,” recalled GAC agent Marty Beck, who represented Jones in Las Vegas. “He said, ‘I don’t want this kind of act in my hotel.’ ”

  Jones wound up at the Flamingo, which gave him a big promotional push, touting the engagement as “Tom Jones Fever” (partly to distinguish it from Tom Jones, a bawdy musical-comedy show based on Henry Fielding’s novel, which was doing good business at the Desert Inn). His debut in March 1968 drew sellout crowds and stirred up a kind of frenzy that Vegas had never before seen. Variety found him “different in both sound and delivery; he puts both voice and body into each song, the anatomical animation giving tablers an interesting visual treat.” Observed John Scott in the Los Angeles Times, “The tall, ruggedly handsome young man from Britain held first-nighters in the palm of his hand with a dynamic, temperature-raising performance. As he bounced and wriggled his way around the Flamingo’s theater-restaurant stage, Jones had mink-clad matrons and mini-skirted maids screaming with excitement.” When he played the Copa in New York, women in the audience threw their panties onstage. In Vegas they started throwing room keys.

  Much of that electricity onstage is captured in an album he recorded at the Flamingo in 1969, Tom Jones: Live in Las Vegas. (“That album is steaming, if I say so myself,” Jones said.) He holds back nothing with his angsty, tonsil-straining performances of “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”; pushes the Beatles’ “Yesterday” further over the top than anyone thought possible; and does a version of the Irish ballad “Danny Boy” so bombastic it could frighten small children. The soft-spoken, Welsh-accented lilt of his stage patter only accentuates his fevered, breath-defying performances. You almost sweat while listening to him.

  Tom Jones was a belter for a new Vegas era. And the person who would come to embody that new era was paying attention. Indeed, if there was one entertainer who laid the groundwork for Elvis Presley’s comeback in Las Vegas, it was Tom Jones.

  The two had first met on the Paramount lot in 1965, where Elvis was finishing up the filming of Paradise, Hawaiian Style, and the young Welsh singer, in Los Angeles for a TV appearance, stopped by for a visit. Tom was flattered when Elvis greeted him by singing “With These Hands,” one of the songs on Tom’s new album. Three years later Elvis drove up from Los Angeles with Priscilla to see Tom’s debut at the Flamingo and went backstage afterward to congratulate him. He wanted to see Tom’s show, Elvis said, because he was thinking of returning to live performing himself.

  They met again a couple of months later in Hawaii, where Elvis was vacationing and Tom was appearing at the Ilikai Hotel. The two spent a long afternoon together at Elvis’s rented beach house, jamming to fifties rock ’n’ roll songs, talking about the Beatles and Tom’s childhood in Wales, and comparing stage moves on the lawn.

  Jones’s influence on Elvis’s Vegas show was obvious to many of those who saw them both. “What Elvis got from Tom was the trick of working the Vegas stage,” said the International Hotel’s publicity director Nick Naff. “Tom showed him you have to be sensual in a way that gets through to the overthirties. Tom gave Elvis the freeze poses at the end of songs, the trick of wiping the sweat with a cloth and then throwing it out in the house.” Jones was the kind of magnetic stage performer that Elvis used to be and longed to be again.

  He had not done any live performing since a benefit concert in Hawaii in March 1961—an entire decade had essentially passed him by. Colonel Parker was the main culprit, keeping him on a nonstop movie treadmill, while steering him to the bland pop songs that Elvis’s publishing company, Hill & Range, owned the rights to. But Elvis’s own inertia was also to blame. “The Colonel behind the scenes controlled a lot,” said Jerry Schilling, Elvis’s Memphis friend and sometime employee. “But Elvis was really in charge of his career. If he had wanted to tour, he could have. But most of the time he was doing three movies a year. And the music business had changed drastically. He didn’t have a hit for seven years. When you’re not having hit records, when nine or ten months of the year you’re on a movie set, and you’ve got to record for those films—I don’t think he had time to really think about it that much.”

  By the end of 1967, however, Elvis was nearly at the breaking point. And the Colonel, too, was finally ready for a change. He had little choice. Elvis’s last few films had barely made enough money to cover their costs, and when his current contract with MGM was fulfilled, it was doubtful that any major studio would sign Elvis for more films—at least, not for the money Colonel Parker thought his star deserved. So the Colonel switched gears and went to NBC in December 1967 with a proposal that Elvis star in his first-ever television special, to air the following December. A deal was quickly made; Singer sewing machines was lined up as sole sponsor; and taping was set to begin in June.

  The Colonel’s original idea was for a conventional Christmas special—Elvis singing holiday songs, like Andy Williams or Bing Crosby. But NBC hired a hip young director named Steve Binder, who had a more ambitious idea. Binder—who had directed NBC’s rock-music show Hullabaloo, as well as a critically acclaimed Petula Clark special—wanted to showcase the full range of Elvis’s talents, to reintroduce the viewing audience to the �
��real” Elvis Presley. The Colonel balked, but Binder won Elvis’s confidence and essentially got free rein to put together the show he wanted.

  Binder junked the Christmas idea and came up with a concept for the show that revolved around the Jerry Reed song “Guitar Man,” with Elvis playing a small-town guitar player who tries to make it in the big city. But after watching Elvis jamming with friends in his dressing room, Binder came up with the idea of trying to re-create one of those jam sessions for the show: just Elvis and a few musicians onstage, casual and unrehearsed, on a small boxing-ring-style stage, surrounded by a couple of hundred spectators. Elvis was excited by the idea, but also petrified. When the segment was preparing to tape in late June, he was so nervous that Binder practically had to push him onstage.

  Singer Presents Elvis aired on December 3, 1968. The show had some fairly standard, TV-variety-show elements, including the long, choreographed “Guitar Man” sequence. But it was Elvis’s amazingly fresh and dynamic vocal performance—both in solo, concert-style segments and in the unrehearsed jam session, joined by Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana, his original guitarist and drummer—that was a revelation. Looking trim and gorgeous in a black leather suit with a high Edwardian collar (designed by Bill Belew, who would later design all of his Vegas outfits), Elvis blasted away the cobwebs on old hits like “All Shook Up” and “Heartbreak Hotel,” seemed reanimated on rock numbers he hadn’t done in years, like “Tryin’ to Get to You” and “Love Me,” and showed a softer side with new songs like the sentimental “Memories,” which he introduced on the show. (And, to placate the Colonel, one holiday number: “Blue Christmas.”)

  For the closing number, the show offered a taste of things to come. Binder had asked arranger Earl Brown to write a new song to end the show, something that would connect Elvis with the social and political idealism of the times. Brown came up with “If I Can Dream”—a heartfelt, if generalized, plea for tolerance and understanding. Dressed in a white double-breasted suit, with ELVIS in giant, red-bulb-lit block letters behind him (which would become his omnipresent logo in Vegas), Elvis delivered the song with passion and power. Released as a single in November, before the show aired, “If I Can Dream” was his biggest-selling record in four years.

  The Elvis comeback special, often referred to as the Singer special, drew 42 percent of the viewing audience, NBC’s highest-rated show of the season. More important, it gave notice, to fans and critics alike, that Elvis Presley was relevant once again as a rock artist. “There is something magical about watching a man who has lost himself find his way back home,” wrote critic Jon Landau. “He sang with the kind of power people no longer expect from a rock ’n’ roll singer.” “It was like nothing I had ever seen on television before,” recalled Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick, “both a revelation and a vindication.”

  Elvis and everyone around him recognized the show as a breakthrough and turning point. “He could have done it so much earlier,” said Billy Smith, his cousin and longtime member of the entourage. “But he had to be shoved into a corner and almost kicked before he would bite.” In his dressing room after the taping in June, Elvis was excited in a way he hadn’t been in years. “I want to tour again,” he told the Colonel. “I want to go out and work with a live audience.”

  Las Vegas, meanwhile, was getting ready for him.

  Like Howard Hughes, the man he would soon challenge for supremacy in Las Vegas, Kirk Kerkorian began his career as an airplane pilot. During World War II he ferried transport planes across the Atlantic for the British Royal Air Force, and after the war he built a successful air-service company that leased and chartered planes. He often stopped over in Las Vegas, where he was a big gambler, and began buying up property there in the early 1960s, including the land on which Caesars Palace was later built. In 1967 he acquired the Flamingo Hotel, along with an eighty-two-acre parcel of land off the Strip, near the Convention Center. There he made plans to build Vegas’ biggest hotel yet.

  The $60 million International Hotel was a perfect symbol of Las Vegas’ corporate transformation. It had no architectural distinction or theme-park gimmicks; it was simply a massive, thirty-story tower with three wings, 1,512 rooms, and the largest casino in the world. Kerkorian, a self-effacing mogul almost as shy of the press as Hughes (but without the psychoses), used the Flamingo as a training ground for the staff that would eventually move over to the International for its opening in July 1969. To run both hotels he hired Alex Shoofey, longtime vice president at the Sahara, who was known as one of the shrewdest hotel operators and toughest bean counters in town. (“He knew where every goddamn penny was spent,” said one Vegas PR man. “He counted the rolls of toilet paper.”) Shoofey, in turn, coaxed Bill Miller to come out of retirement to be his director of entertainment.

  Miller—who had come to Vegas in the mid-1950s and booked entertainment for the Sahara and later the Dunes Hotel—was in his sixties now, but he was a crafty booker, willing to take chances. He hired Tom Jones at the Flamingo when Jack Entratter wanted nothing to do with him. He rescued Sonny and Cher from a career slump, booking them into the Flamingo’s main room, where they developed the bantering, bickering act that led to their popular CBS variety series. To open the International, he wanted a star who was big enough to fill the huge two-thousand-seat showroom and would set the hotel above and apart from its many Vegas competitors. His choice was Elvis Presley.

  It probably seemed like a long shot at first, since Colonel Parker had for years turned down all offers for Elvis to perform in concert. After the NBC comeback special, however, the Colonel was looking for a suitably high-profile follow-up. Lamar Fike, a longtime member of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia, recalled a conversation with Colonel Parker in a limousine as they were driving into Las Vegas, not long after the taping of the NBC special. “The Colonel was in the front seat of the limo with his driver, and I was in the back with Elvis,” said Fike. “The Colonel turned around with his cigar and said, ‘You know, we can take that show you just did and put it in Vegas and make a lot of money.’ Elvis looked at me, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Sounds like we’re playing Vegas.’ ”

  A couple of weeks after the NBC special had aired, to big ratings and much acclaim, Colonel Parker struck a deal with the International. Elvis would get $100,000 a week—matching Sinatra and Dean Martin at the top of Vegas’ salary scale—for a four-week engagement at the hotel. There was only one sticking point: Colonel Parker did not want Elvis to open the hotel. It was too risky, he argued, for his boy to launch a new showroom in a new hotel before all the technical kinks—the sound system, the lighting—had been worked out. Get someone else to be the guinea pig, Colonel Parker said; Elvis will come in second. So Bill Miller went after his backup choice, Barbra Streisand, and signed her (for the same $100,000 salary) to open the hotel on July 2, 1969. Elvis Presley would arrive four weeks later.

  Before he could start planning for Las Vegas, however, Elvis had a couple of other obligations. One was dutiful and dreary: in the spring of 1969 he shot his thirty-first and last movie, Change of Habit, costarring Mary Tyler Moore as a nun helping out Elvis (as a doctor!) in an inner-city health clinic—a film Colonel Parker had convinced NBC to finance as part of the deal for the TV special. The other project was considerably more rewarding: in January and February Elvis went into a Memphis studio for one of the most important recording sessions of his career.

  Elvis had been doing most of his recent recording at RCA’s studios in Nashville—routine sessions of mostly mediocre songs, with Elvis increasingly bored and disengaged. He was scheduled to go back to Nashville in January of 1969, but two of his Memphis friends, George Klein and Marty Lacker, told him he ought to try recording at Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio, right there in Memphis. Moman’s studio was getting a lot of buzz, having turned out a string of hits for singers like Wilson Pickett, Dionne Warwick, and the Box Tops. Elvis didn’t need much convincing. Moman was eager to work with him and postponed a Neil Diamond session so
that Elvis could begin recording there on January 13.

  Moman, a savvy producer who had been one of the founders of Memphis’s Stax Records, told Elvis he wanted to find some first-rate new material for him. That meant reaching out to new songwriters and picking songs that Elvis’s own company might not have the publishing rights to. Elvis said he cared more about hits than publishing rights, and he gave Moman the OK. The result was a bounty of quality songs, among them “Suspicious Minds” (written by Memphis songwriter Mark James, who had recorded it himself the year before), Eddie Rabbitt’s “Kentucky Rain,” and Jerry Butler’s “Only the Strong Survive”—all songs that suited Elvis’s big voice and flair for dramatics, songs that would form the core of his repertoire for years to come.

  The most controversial number of the Memphis sessions, however, was an overt piece of social commentary called “In the Ghetto.” It was written by a young Atlanta songwriter named Mac Davis—who had also composed “A Little Less Conversation” for Elvis’s 1968 movie Live a Little, Love a Little, as well as “Memories,” which Elvis had introduced on the NBC special. “In the Ghetto” was a message song, about the vicious circle of poverty and crime facing inner-city children. (Davis had initially called it “Vicious Circle,” and he assumed it would be recorded by an African American singer. He even went to Lake Tahoe to show it to Sammy Davis Jr., who turned it down.) Elvis and others in his camp weren’t sure whether he should record it, worried that the song was too political. But when Moman said he would give it to another of his artists instead, Elvis changed his mind, and he performed it with a quiet intensity that buried all doubts. “In the Ghetto” was the first single on the album to be released, in April 1969. By June it was No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, the best performance for any Elvis song since 1965.