Vegas, country back in favor

Barbara Mandrell used to sing that she was country “when country wasn’t cool.” And she sang it a lot in Las Vegas, which wasn’t so cool in those days either.

Now, Vegas and country are equally cool, unless the song makes it clear you don’t want to be (“Hillbilly Bone,” “A Little More Country Than That,” etc.). The Academy of Country Music awards show today is a big, welcome event on the Strip.

But one of the awards announced prior to the broadcast reminds us of the era when country was cool and Vegas … not so much.

Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers are, along with Garth Brooks, recipients of the Cliffie Stone Pioneer Award. The Gatlins had their giant 1979 single “All the Gold in California” at the peak of the “Urban Cowboy” craze.

“It was so popular it was considered ‘pop music,’ because it was the popular music genre of the time,” Rudy Gatlin recalls. “Everything we did, no pun intended, turned to gold. … It was pretty heady stuff.”

The Gatlins played the Riviera in 1982 and had a home on the Strip for years after that. “The reason we could work those places was because it was so popular,” he says. Amid the late ’70s explosion, “we were so hot, yeah, they had to pay attention. We could draw a crowd.”

The Oak Ridge Boys said they were dropped from the gospel circuit after opening for Johnny Cash at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1974. They realigned as a mainstream country quartet and played the showrooms for years after their big hit “Elvira” in 1981.

Back in the 1950s, Vegas was cool, but country was for the rubes downtown. It was a wide mile between the Rat Pack on the Strip and the Fremont Street sawdust joints.

Bob Wills’ Western swing drew wall-to-wall crowds at the Golden Nugget in the early 1960s. But a Patsy Cline biographer claims the singer was crushed that her Las Vegas debut in late 1962 turned out to be the lounge at the Mint, not a big showroom on the Strip.

The “Urban Cowboy” craze changed all that, bringing Willie Nelson to Caesars Palace in 1979. “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”? “That’s not a pop record,” Gatlin says. “It’s a big-ass country record. But it was a big pop record because it was so big, it had to cross over.”

Unlike Train or Lady Gaga now, two mixes of the song for different radio formats were not required. Crossing over is so common for Taylor Swift, they don’t even say “crossover” as much.

But Gatlin, the old urban cowboy, laughs when he sees that Swift also received a special designation, the Jim Reeves International Award: “Sing us a little Jim Reeves tune, Taylor!”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.