Vegas wouldn’t be the same without Sinatra — PHOTOS
Maybe on Jan. 17, 2084, there will be some Las Vegas celebration of Calvin Harris’ 100th birthday.
It’s just hard to say, isn’t it? The DJ is a top “earner” for the casinos and a poster boy for the new Vegas, just as Frank Sinatra was for the old one. The big cash flow is no longer through the showrooms but nightclubs such as Omnia, where Harris is the big ticket ($125 for women, $250 if you’re stuck being a dude) on New Year’s Eve.
But Harris has been a major player on the electronic dance music scene since 2012, and Sinatra sang in Las Vegas for 43 years. We will wait and see how long the DJ ride lasts while some of us raise a glass to Sinatra’s 100th birthday Dec. 12.
Harris, Tiesto, Diplo and the rest of the super-DJs arrived at the peak of a boom that may still witness the arrival of more multimillion-dollar nightclubs. But they are unlikely to see the Strip grow and transform as it did during the Chairman’s run.
Sinatra first sang in Las Vegas at the Desert Inn in 1951, a year before the opening of the Sands, the casino that would most burn into our imagination. And he lived two more years after the Sands was imploded. One career, and not even all of it, lasting longer than the life of an iconic resort. Crazy, huh?
The Sands opened just in time for Frank’s career to be revitalized by his Oscar for “From Here to Eternity” and the Capitol albums that would define his grown-up sound. He and Las Vegas cross-promoted one another, the desert oasis and the singer who freed post-war suburbanites to loosen up a little and raise a glass to the good life.
Sinatra last sang in Las Vegas at the end of May 1994, in the MGM Grand theater that now houses Cirque du Soleil’s “Ka.” Easy metaphor there. So was his stint the previous New Year’s weekend. All the excitement was then centered on Barbra Streisand’s big-ticket arena concert on the other side of the massive hotel.
The Streisand concert pointed the way to another component of the new Vegas. Garth Brooks woke up the morning after taping Sunday’s CBS tribute to Sinatra to promote his own concerts next July in the new Las Vegas Arena. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect a press release will use the word “residency” to describe the four shows.
But 43 years, which included the Desert Inn, Sands, Caesars Palace, Riviera, Golden Nugget, Bally’s and the MGM? That’s what I’d call a residency.
Sinatra, Johnny Cash and other icons were “a little bit ahead of my time,” the 53-year-old Brooks told reporters. “You kind of learn about them as you get older. When you get into this business and you start to learn what they pulled off 40 or 50 years ago …” letting that thought hang as he shook his head.
Living long enough to see the Sands fall and the 5,000-room MGM go up, I wonder if Sinatra felt good or bad about Las Vegas growing into an era when it didn’t need him anymore. He was facing the final curtain by then, and perhaps didn’t think about it at all.
I guess we need a “That’s Life” attitude about the formal celebrations of his birthday being scattered, modest affairs around town. They include:
— Pia Zadora, doing some of the songs Sinatra used to request of his opening act, during her December shows on Fridays and Saturdays at Piero’s Italian Cuisine.
— The Bootlegger Bistro planning a “Celebration of Sinatra” at 8 p.m. with Lorraine Hunt-Bono and friends backed by George Bugatti.
— Thursday’s edition of “The Dennis Bono Show” devoted to “The Songs of Sinatra” at 2 p.m. at the South Point.
— The Golden Steer, the rare restaurant still standing from the Chairman’s days, offering its $100 “Frank’s menu” through New Year’s Eve, based on things he ordered there.
The biggest Las Vegas-based observation is “Sinatra 100 — An All-Star Grammy Concert” airing at 9 p.m. Sunday on KLAS-TV, Channel 8. It was taped Wednesday at Wynn Las Vegas, the one Strip hotel that still cares about Sinatra enough to put his name on a restaurant.
It turned out to be a mixed bag of a special, as you would expect when guest stars range from John Legend to Zac Brown. Some of it was sublime, and some of it was bad karaoke. I’ll let you watch and figure out which is which, assuming the vocals aren’t sweetened in post-production and the worst of it isn’t buried on the “Extras” section of the DVD.
My favorites included Alicia Keys doing “I’ve Got a Crush on You” and an irony-free Seth MacFarlane on “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” And since you can’t beat Lady Gaga dressed as Frank for “Theme from New York, New York” they made her do it over again. The song so nice we heard it twice.
By then, however, the stop-start of taping had drained the energy from a room where the lobby bars were shuttered in a most un-Rat Pack-like way. The only ring-a-ding that strayed from the prompter script came when Jeremy Renner flubbed an intro.
Contrast that with Quincy Jones telling the live audience, “If he was (here), we would close this place down.”
Celine Dion sings “All the Way” on the special, and who knows? On March 30, 2068, there might be some collective celebration of her 100th birthday too. Like Sinatra, she brings fans to town just to see her, and she arrived just in time to help Las Vegas through the Iraq War.
If you go by head count, Dion may even surpass the number of customers Sinatra sang to in Vegas, since she is on her way to 1,000 shows in a 4,200-seat theater, not a 400-seat showroom.
But she did not crash into a place where “the hotel owners were all walking around in cowboy hats,” as Lorraine Bono-Hunt once described the old days here, with “mohair tuxes (and) black satin shoes. That look was so cool.”
Even if you pay $250 to see Celine, you probably don’t imagine closing the place down with her.
Watching the younger singers earnestly assault the Sinatra charts, Las Vegans have to remind ourselves that most of the two-hour special is about his greater musical legacy, not just the corner of it that helped move the Strip along.
After all, he was “the coolest guy on Earth,” Harry Connick Jr. tells us in the special, and we have to share him.
— Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.
