Columnist Hal Rothman: Why Elvis wasn’t an immediate hit in Vegas, and how the city eventually came to love him

Hal Rothman

Sunday, Jan. 8, 2006 | 8:20 a.m.

Hal Rothman is a professor of History at UNLV. His column appears Sunday.

Today is Elvis Presley's birthday, and it should be an official holiday in Las Vegas. Every year we should stop for a moment and remember the King.

No entertainer symbolized the city better than Elvis. No one is more closely associated with us than the King.

He gave us "Viva Las Vegas," our signature song, and spawned generations of impersonators. They not only offer every manifestation of Elvis, from the sex symbol to the middle-aged man, but they also imbue the city with a good-natured kitsch that makes us lovable in a way that no other city, not even Elvis' hometown of Memphis, Tenn., can be.

When Elvis first played Las Vegas in 1956, he was 21 years old and on the way up, still young, ripped and taut, not the blimplike caricature he later became. The booking came at the last minute, and Elvis found himself in the 1,000-seat Venus Room at the New Frontier. Freddy Martin and his orchestra backed the band.

By March, 1956 had already been a good year for Elvis and the neon city of excess promised more, so much more. In pure Las Vegas style, a 24-foot-high cutout of the rising star appeared in front of the New Frontier. Las Vegas could always recognize a star and roll out the red carpet.

But Elvis bombed. For two weeks, he, guitarist Scotty Moore, bass player Bill Black and drummer D.J. Fontana were "a very nervous, very out-of-place hillbilly quartet," in the words of biographer Peter Guralnick.

Elvis even introduced one of his hits as "Heartburn Hotel." They just did not fit, too raw for the older, sophisticated Las Vegas audience. One guest bounced up from a ringside table, shouted that the music was too loud, and headed for the casino. Elvis was the fringe, and Las Vegas only did well with the center.

In 1956 the stamp of Las Vegas signaled Elvis' emergence from the ghetto of hillbilly and his arrival in the larger market. But it cost him something, too, both immediately and in the long term.

After 2 1/2 years of girls screaming, he finally reached a little Waterloo, a place where his act didn't fly, where the audience turned him back. Scotty Moore thought "people that were there, if you'd lifted them out and taken them to San Antonio, the big coliseum, they'd have been going crazy," but he was wrong.

A Las Vegas audience in 1956 was not made up of teenagers, didn't hail from the Bible Belt and was not starved for entertainment.

When Elvis returned in 1969, he was a real star. He began a record seven-year stay, performing 837 sold-out shows in a row at Kirk Kerkorian's International Hotel, which became the Las Vegas Hilton. After the rock 'n' roll revolution, Elvis finally fit Las Vegas. The years and the changes in society conspired to make him the first nostalgic act, perfect for the Las Vegas of 1969.

Elvis loved Las Vegas as much as the city came to love him. There was plenty to do, and a guy who didn't sleep much didn't have to worry about the town closing down on him. He also recognized a future in Las Vegas, a promise that an audience that rejected him in 1956 would love him a decade or more down the road. This failure with a future became the paradox and promise of the City of Entertainment.

Las Vegas entertainment still rings truer at the box office than in the coffeehouses. The city takes malleable art and fixes it, making it palatable to the widest possible audience. While this is great for business, it's hard on performers, even, and maybe especially, on Elvis.

Even today, Las Vegas doesn't nurture entertainment; it only buys it. Las Vegas validates performers, but has yet to genuinely create entertainment. An artist can hold the town, can become it, but Las Vegas pushes artists and compromises them at the same time.

Las Vegas packages experience to the widest audience it can reach. More people saw Elvis in the showroom of the Las Vegas Hilton than anywhere else in the world. But what they saw in the fading star was a memory, a package, a wrapper for desires that they once held or to which they still aspired.

So when we remember Elvis, we should also remember what it took for him to succeed here as well.