Rock rules: Is the county playing an old-fashioned tune?

Thursday, Sept. 7, 2006 | 7:13 a.m.

Ever since Ian Gillan got a cold, you've needed a license to rock in Clark County.

When Gillan, the singer for Deep Purple, felt under the weather and wouldn't go on stage at the Las Vegas Convention Center that night in 1973, concert promoter Gary Naseef recalls, the show died with an awful sound. He knew it was going to be bad when a quart bottle of wine went sailing by him and slammed into the organ belonging to Fleetwood Mac.

"You've got 8,000 kids and they were smoking pot, drinking wine and doing reds. And they wanted to see Deep Purple.

"Outside they ripped up sprinkler heads, the metal kind, and they were throwing them fast as bullets," Naseef says. "The kids were tipping over police cars. It was bad."

And after the riot - "It wasn't a riot," Naseef says. "It was a near-riot" - after the near-riot, it wasn't long before Clark County commissioners drafted a new law for rock concerts, citing their concern for the "morals and welfare" of Las Vegans. The regulations require concert promoters to undergo background checks and fork over hefty fees. The rules even include a definition of rock and its "persistent heavily accented beat."

Even those charged with enforcing it admit the six-page code is "a bit antiquated" and badly in need of an update. Police and county officials are just beginning to consider those changes.

As it is, the law doesn't concern most venues on the Strip and the Thomas & Mack Center, which get lifetime passes to rock from the county. And any club or bar that doesn't sell tickets also doesn't need to worry about it. Oh, and you don't have to bother with the special "rock music concert promoter" license and can just stick with the regular concert promoter's license if you can convince the county that what you're really playing is jazz/fusion, classical, gospel, ballet or adult contemporary music.

Generally, few people regard rock music as a public menace anymore. So, with the Rolling Stones unlikely to play at Altamont II: The Revenge, the police and regulators are turning their attention to newer musical menaces such as hip-hop and tejano. But Derek Dubasik in the county business licensing division is quick to say that he "doesn't want to stereotype one type of music."

"It's not just rap or hip-hop or heavy metal or fusion or whatever they call the new stuff. It's also some of the tejano stuff. Anything that draws the large crowds," Dubasik says. "The large crowds tend to draw certain aspects of the community. There are gangs. There may be organized crime influences in some of these things, depending on the kind of music that's being played.

"We need stronger restrictions and more classifications," Dubasik says.

But maybe not musical classifications like the one for rock ("a great degree of repetition of simple musical phrases"), since those tend to melt into meaninglessness within a couple of years. It's so hard to keep up with the devil music the kids are playing these days.

Dubasik says he "really wouldn't want to guess" what a "slimmed down, easier to understand and less complicated" code would look like, but that he hopes it might just charge promoters different fees depending on how large a concert is. But no one has started to write new rules yet, because rewriting them will involve Metro (security, traffic), the Health District (restrooms), the air-quality department (parking lot dust) and various inspectors and regulators (paperwork, money).

Naseef believes the original code was written specifically to keep him out of the old Convention Center, and to avoid it, he produced his later concerts in casinos.

"It needs to be thrown away. These guys are doing shows like crazy at the hotels. You don't need a thing like this today," Naseef says. "You didn't need it then, either."