Saved in Sin City: When Elvis Went West

On July 26, 1969, 34-year-old Elvis Presley took the stage at the brand new International Hotel in Las Vegas for his first live concert in seven years. Crowding the massive stage behind him were a 35-piece orchestra, a five-piece rock band, and two gospel groups — a far cry from the three-piece rock band by which the world had come to know him.“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he told the sold-out crowd with that legendary hellcat grin. “Welcome to the big, freaky International Hotel, with these weirdo dolls on the walls and these little funky angels on the ceiling, and man, you ain’t seen nothing until you’ve seen a funky angel. Before the evening’s out, I’m sure I will have made a complete and utter fool of myself — but I hope you get a kick out of watching.”Elvis, who had spent the better part of a year perfecting and rehearsing his Vegas show, could not have known how prophetic those words would be. He had rarely been happier than he was on this evening, rarely been more excited about music, and he knew the same could be said about the 2,000 people joining him in the glamorous Showroom Internationale. It had been too long since they had seen one another.Who among the awestruck and rapturous crowd in that room would have believed that today, as we approach the 30th anniversary of his death — August 16, 1977 — Elvis’s maiden performance at the International, the first of 837 consecutive sold-out shows he’d perform there between 1969 and 1976, could be seen as the first step in a pitiable and painful decline to the grave, a cruel fate written in the fake heavens that littered the ceiling of the Showroom Internationale? This week, as newspaper articles and television specials commemorate the life of one of this country’s greatest artists — and perhaps its most important musician — they will inevitably tie the bloated, depressed state in which Elvis died to his decadent engagements in Las Vegas. It’s so easy — Sin City, where greed and materialism are king and queen, where after 30 years one can still get married in an Elvis wig, jump out of a plane in an Elvis suit, and lose thousands to a blackjack dealer with fake sideburns pasted to his head. For many arbiters of culture, Las Vegas is not just where Elvis went to die, musically and otherwise, but where he went to revolutionize the act of dying.What most people forget today is that in 1969, Elvis arrived in Vegas triumphantly, and the King would retain his crown for the next three years. He was 34, trim, healthy, ferociously handsome, and unwilling to accept the commonly held belief among tastemakers that he had peaked in 1958. Those weren’t his critics, anyway, he thought. So what if rock ‘n’ roll music, the art form he helped invent, had morphed, mutated, gone overseas, taken drugs, and freaked out since he last made his mark on it? He had millions of old friends all over the world who had missed him desperately. For years — the entirety of the 1960s, really — they had all but begged him to leave Hollywood, where he had made 31 feature films, most of them juvenile and stilted, though consistently profitable, and return to the stage where he belonged. And now he was going to give them exactly what they wanted.Times had changed dramatically since the Hillbilly Cat, as he had been dubbed in his Sun Studio days, brought danger to the radio. But to those Americans who couldn’t relate to the witty insouciance of the British invasion or the political radicalism of the folk scene, Elvis had become a trusted friend, singing comforting songs in a confusing time. His fans were disturbed and put off, as Elvis was, by the way the Beatles and the Rolling Stones seemed to hijack American music and use it to endorse drug use, near pornographic sexuality, and left-wing anti-American rancor.Maybe the hint of menace and sexuality that had made Elvis an icon a decade before had been swallowed up and sold off by the Hollywood machine. But now the 1970s were dawning, and he was new and improved, with a strong new batch of songs that deftly combined his passions for country music, gospel, rock, and soul — by far the best music he had made in more than a decade. He had his looks, he had his fans, he was the featured attraction in the new entertainment capital of the world, and he only needed about six of these pills in his hand to get through the grueling day.Between 1969 and 1976, Elvis played two four-week engagements a year in Sin City. That meant two shows a day, seven days a week, for a month at a time. Tickets were $17.50 apiece, and if you had one to the 8 p.m. show, it came with the choice of lobster or steak. In the beginning, the King kept himself busy by constantly tweaking his circus act of a show. He replaced the herky-jerky spasms and undulations that had defined his younger self with the more fluid motions of the martial arts, with which he had become smitten over the years. And, taking a cue from a fellow Vegas mainstay, Liberace, he updated his wardrobe. The long, sequined suits that have become synonymous both with Elvis and with Las Vegas were a perfect encapsulation of the man he was when he changed Las Vegas — a blend of his boyhood comic hero, Captain Marvel; his love for country music’s rhinestone vests and hats, and the bell-bottoms and leisure suits that informed ’70s style.Indeed, as the Vegas years moved along, only two elements of the classic Elvis Presley experience remained. One was his voice, which, though less agile, was richer and more powerful than ever — designed specially, it seemed, for the modern soul ballads he would belt out with every ounce of effort from the stage of the Internationale. The other was his self-effacing wit, which those close to him recognized as his persistent fear of failure and of disappointing his fans. Elvis knew his ultra-cool sun-god persona was ridiculous, and slowly he came to realize that he was out of date by rock ‘n’ roll standards.Once the novelty of the stage show wore off, Elvis was left only with the bare truth: that his second go-around in music was little more than a desperate attempt to simultaneously preserve and escape the legend he had become. The growing presence of senior citizens at his shows, and of boredom-induced binges on prescription drugs and food — not to mention an infatuation with firearms, which he came to feel were his only protection from the outside world — left the King in a tailspin from which he would not recover.By 1976, it took all the efforts of Elvis’s infamous entourage, the Memphis Mafia, to prop the portly King upright long enough to get him through one performance. Shows across the Midwest and at Madison Square Garden were marked by forgotten lyrics and impromptu 15-minute karate demonstrations. One journalist in Louisiana complained that Elvis was onstage for less than an hour and was “impossible to understand.” Fans who had flocked to see the “return” were left to wonder: “Is this Elvis or isn’t it?”It was and it wasn’t. After 1,145 concerts around the world between 1969 and 1976, Elvis Presley was spent, but Las Vegas was thriving. Today, the singer and the city are still mentioned in the same breath because of what they meant to each other. The bejeweled city, which had never turned a profit on a lounge singer until the bejeweled singer arrived, mainlined his fuel, burned him out, and surged forward into an era of material entertainment the likes of which no city has ever paralleled. The Elvis mugs, Elvis ashtrays, Elvis keychains, Elvis clocks are the only way the city knows to show its gratitude.

Saved in Sin City: When Elvis Went West

Saved in Sin City: When Elvis Went West

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