A lot of people don’t like Las Vegas, finding it shallow, plastic and gaudy. Of course it is. Don’t go there expecting anything else. True it has no respect for history or heritage beyond a few acknowledgements to the Rat Pack and it cares more about today than yesterday and tomorrow.
Everything you’ve heard is true, it’s just a matter of whether it fits your brain or not. We first went for a few days, then a week, then three weeks and finally, in 2009, we rented a house on the Las Vegas Country Club Estate, right next door to Dean Martin’s old house, for a month. We happened to think we had some money at the time (we actually didn’t) so we did what any pair of working class northerners would do, we got royally trashed for a month.
And what a month it was. The previous year we had rented a house out west of the city in Summerlin. It was nice but we wanted to be nearer the strip. The country club estate house was near the Hilton, which was great because we did that most British of things, we walked everywhere and took the monorail when we didn’t. Just as well in that year particularly because we were adjacent to sober from 9am to 2am. If you’ve never sat pushing $20 bills into a machine, drinking a tequila sunrise at 10.30am, you haven't lived.
We went to Caesars Palace to see Jerry Seinfeld and Elton John (don’t remember much of that) and Jay Leno and were delighted that we could buy a bucket of six plastic bottles of beer and drink them at our seats. Remarkably, we got the identical seats for Seinfeld as we’d got the previous year, totally at random. I think I had 12 bottles at Elton John, hence why I don’t remember much and when we went to the House Of Blues to see Joe Bonamassa I was rendered almost blind by a gin and tonic, which cost $32 and was so big it had to be half a bottle of gin. We saw Barry Manilow in Elvis’ old room and waved glow sticks as his guitarist wigged out. We saw Dee Sneider playing a ‘greatest hits of the 80s’ show, which had dancers climbing up and down what looked like bedsheets during the whole gig, I think Rudy Sarzo was on bass and Warren DeMartini on guitar.
We saw Buddy Guy too and bought hats for the American Country Music Awards. Oh yeah we saw Tom Jones too, who was brilliant and sat with a nice couple from the midwest who really had some strange ideas about the world outside of their piece of Wisconsin. They were especially fascinated by the idea of the NHS which they believed we had to join the Communist Party in order to use. They were so shocked when I disavowed them of this notion. I think they thought socialised medicine was evil and certainly ungodly. Yet they were so sweet. They thought Tom was American because he was ‘on American TV’ like it’s a qualification. They hadn’t heard of Wales which they thought was ‘Whales.’ In essence, they were naive like children and thought I said ‘avocado’ ‘real funny.’ As down-to-earth as we are, we were exotic to them.
Then there was the business of the ‘rope abuse.’ One night I had imbibed the loopy juice a bit too much and was stuffing money in a machine as usual. I got up to go, saw a rope in my way so I stepped over it. Little did I know it was a roped off area, reserved for some minor celebrity. ‘Don’t engage in rope abuse sir’ said a large man. I was drunk, so the words ‘rope’ and ‘abuse’ seemed hilarious to me. But they were no laughing matter for the rent-a-side-of-beef bloke, as I ploughed on, over the opposite rope to elsewhere. I thought nothing of it until I could no longer get served at any bar. They studiously ignored me, I assume because I was already a drunken rope abuser.
Then we were somewhere else on loungers on another sunny hot day. It was lovely and so where the cocktails we drank like pop until being asleep seemed a better option than going to a gig we had tickets for. Though I don’t want you to get the impression we were wasted every night. We perfected the art of being relatively toasted all day and evening. Staying the right side of compass mentis.
One night at about midnight, for some reason, we took it into our heads to walk downtown to the old bit of Vegas. To get there we had to walk through the edge of a dodgy area. No problem for us. We’re used to urban violence but what we’re not used to is running battles between the police (overweight, shirts that are skin tight) and young men who dressed like every gang cliche of the time which, to our amusement, meant wearing over-sized trousers back to front. Laughing at these people probably wasn’t a wise move and they both seemed to take our presence in their psycho drama as a threat. Fortunately my stock excuse - ‘don’t shoot, we’re English and we don’t know what we’re doing’ worked and seemed to please everyone. Try it, it gets you out of a lot of trouble.
Then there was a waitress called Diana in Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall. She had clearly been told that the gang of us were losing hand over fist on the machines, thus qualified for free drinks. We consumed these at a pace unseen in America, it seemed. There were about six of us sitting in a row and about 40 or 50 plastic cups which had contained tequila and gin. ‘God, you guys can really drink,’ she said, with what we believed was genuine awe. We took this as approval and nodded in agreement, yes we could indeed. Of course we were being played and left there several thousand dollars lighter.
Of course on another occasion we stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel. We’d spent the afternoon in the pool and stupidly got awful painful sunburn. After falling asleep and waking up at 4am, I decided to go for a walk. I think my body clock was messed up with jet lag. Now, I consider it a superb thing that I can get a beer and a burger and have them at 4.10am in a casino which contains 12 other people, while listening to Whitesnake. Call me old fashioned but that sounds like heaven to me.
Every time we went we just surrendered to the place. Time had no meaning. Everything was always open. We even hired a car from a place in the Bellagio. They were out of mid-sized saloons so gave us an enormous and brand new Chrysler 300. It was huge and silent. I think it was so new that people would stop and point at us as we drove down the strip. We felt like we were drug dealers in this thing, but it took us all over the desert to Northern California eventually dropping it off near the station in Sacramento where we boarded an Amtrak train to Chicago that was supposed to take 3 days but took 4 and broke down outside Reno. It was run like a frontline battle unit in ‘nam. But more about that and those backed up toilets another day, it was a time which saw me crawling through the corridors of the House Of Blues Hotel in a state of inebriation after seeing Johnny Winter.
Shallow, plastic and gaudy...
