Friday, Nov. 21, 2003 | 4:32 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION Nov. 22 -23, 2003
What: "A Musical Tribute to Liberace."
When: 1 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
Where: Liberace Museum's Grand Gallery, 1775 E. Tropicana Ave.
Tickets: $10.
Information: 597-5970.
Liberace died 16 years ago, but he's still one of Las Vegas' most popular entertainers.
More than 100,000 fans a year visit the museum he created in 1979 to help fund the Liberace Foundation for the Performing and Creative Arts.
The museum, which completed a $1 million renovation in May 2002, is filled with the flamboyant entertainer's costumes, jewelry, autos, pianos and memorabilia.
Although the musician is gone, the museum on East Tropicana Avenue at Spencer Street has engaged Wes Winters, of Kansas City, Mo., to entertain visitors.
Except for an easy smile, the 38-year-old, self-taught pianist bears no resemblance to his mentor.
But close your eyes, and you will think it is Liberace himself sitting at the 7-foot-long, rhinestone-encrusted grand piano turning Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart and other classical composers into pop artists.
Winters performs in a rather drab little room (by Liberace's colorful standards), which is outfitted with 100 or so plastic lawn chairs.
Shortly before a recent afternoon performance, the likeable Midwestern transplant discussed his budding career.
Las Vegas Sun: Do you do an impression of Liberace when you perform?
Wes Winters: I'm not an impersonator. I'm more of a tribute person. I would like to make people remember, musically, their expereince of going to his concerts and to relive his music. I want fans to feel a little bit like Liberace is here.
Sun: When did your fascination with Liberace begin?
WW: I was 5 years old when I first saw him on one of his television specials. I was completely mesmerized by the man. It blew me away, not so much the audacity of him, but the fun and the way he could take any piece of music and just turn it into this over-the-top thing.
It inspired me so much that I started playing piano four and five hours a day to teach myself to play like him. I was just a humongous fan.
Sun: You didn't take lessons?
WW: I never really thought of lessons. It was not something I needed to do, because I could play.
I think that comes from my mother's side of the family. She's one of 11 children and everybody plays and sings, but nobody's been trained. I don't read music either. I play by ear.
Sun: What did you do to teach yourself his style?
WW: I listened to him intently. I got every recording of his I could get. I watched every television program that he was involved in, so I could see his hands. Then, I would get an eight-track tape or a record and listen to the stuff over and over and then play the piano, literally, for four or five hours at a time.
Sun: When did you become a professional entertainer?
WW: I started playing for a living in '89, in clubs and hotels and piano bars in Kansas City and the surrounding area.
I have traveled some, in the United States and Europe and on cruises. I have landed quite a few really good corporate functions that have become yearly clients for me, some of them here in Las Vegas.
Sun: Are you strictly a Liberace tribute artist?
WW: No, I do my own show (Wednesdays at Carluccio's Tivoli Gardens), which is very different from what I do at the museum. In my show I do lots of vocals -- standards from the '40s, '50s and '60s.
Sun: How did this gig come about?
WW: When they held the grand opening after the renovation I performed here and it went very, very well.
I went back home to Kansas City, but decided I needed to move up. I had been performing there for 16 years, working six and seven nights a week. That was great -- I had a huge client base there. But there is only so far you can go with that.
Sun: Whose idea was it to have a tribute show at the museum?
WW: It was kind of funny to me that nobody had ever done a show here -- of all the places to have a tribute performance to Liberace, this was like an obvious thing to me. I thought of this and I took the idea to the museum and told them I could put this thing together. I can put the orchestration together, put it on a CD and we can do a show.
Sun: Why the museum and not a nightclub or showroom?
WW: I feel a debt of gratitude toward Liberace. I never had the opportunity to meet him, or to see a live performance. The reason I can play the way I play is greatly due to the influence he had on me. This is kind of a way to give something back to Liberace, a way of saying thank you.
Sun: How have audiences responded?
WW: The response from the show has been overwhelming. It's shocking to me. It's like the people are hungry for something like this again. I don't think anybody can be Liberace, nobody can fill the shoes, ever. It would be silly to try to be him, because nobody can. But I think the philosophy of his entertainment, that's what I can carry on. It would be a shame not to do that.
Sun: How long are you going to be performing at the museum?
WW: It's open-ended. I will continue to do this, and grow this thing. It's not so much the full houses right now, it's just getting the marketing out. We're taking things slowly, one step at a time. Right now the room is OK for what we're doing. But eventually, we're going to put in an actual raised stage, and lighting and have a more theatrical atmosphere.
Sun: What was it like the first time you performed on Liberace's rhinestone piano?
WW: It was overwhleming. I almost couldn't play, it was so overwhelming. I was actually performing on a piano that one of the people that was one of the greatest influences on my life had performed on. It was one of his favorite pianos, and one of the last pianos he performed on.
Sun: What is the essence of Liberace?
WW: The essence, for me, is having joy for what you do. Having joy and having great fun through what you do -- which for him was playing the piano and taking that to the common man. It was just absolutely a joyous thing. When I watched him on television I thought, "My god, look how much fun he's having."
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