Viva Las Vegas! Why the stars head for sin city
For almost 80 years musicians have been making Vegas their temporary home, from Rod Stewart to Celine Dion, Britney Spears to Lady Gaga. Now Adele is set to make her mark.
Frank Sinatra once said: “Las Vegas is the only place I know where money really talks. It says ‘Goodbye’.” Unless, that is, you’re a music star, in which case it says a sunny: “Hello! Can I introduce you to a lorryload of my friends?” While dollars flow from the tens of millions of punters who visit Sin City each year, those who play residencies there are guaranteed to land a jackpot. For almost 80 years musicians have been making Vegas their temporary home, from Liberace to Sinatra, Elvis Presley to Celine Dion, Britney Spears to Lady Gaga.
The latest to board this diamante-encrusted gravy train is Adele, who this week starts a 12-week run at the 4,000-capacity Colosseum of Caesars Palace Hotel. She will be playing two shows a weekend until April, with each date earning her a reputed pounds 1.4 million. Tickets have been changing hands for more than pounds 30,000 each. Even that is dwarfed by Dion, whose Vegas residencies in 2003-07 and 2011-19 generated more than half a billion pounds in ticket sales. Under the terms of her present deal, Dion will earn another pounds 200 million for shows there over the next five years.
So a residency in Vegas is eye-wateringly lucrative, and it’s also convenient. “It’s the only time that the audience comes to you,” says Joe Elliott, the singer of Def Leppard, who did residencies there in 2013 and 2019. Basing yourself at one venue allows acts to avoid the grind, stress and uncertainty of touring, and familiarity with the stage set-up means they don’t have to soundcheck every night. Plus, Los Angeles is only an hour’s flight away. “When Rod Stewart was doing his residency, apparently he borrowed a plane off the promoter and after his gig on the Saturday night would fly back to LA and he’d be back in his own bed,” Elliott says.
There are downsides, including the bone-dry air of the Nevada desert. “That is a killer for singers,” Elliott says. “I had to fill my bath with boiling water every night and put kettles and humidifiers all over the place, so you wake up drowned.” Dion had the same problem, which her hosts solved by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on humidifiers on stage and in her home. Elliott advises Adele, who has cancelled shows in the past after damaging her vocal cords, to “enjoy the fact that you will be travelling very little but for God’s sake get a humidifier in your room”.
It’s unclear whether Adele will live in Vegas or commute back to Beverly Hills. Either way, she will not be away from Angelo, her nine-year-old son, for long. Dion decided to move to the area, buying a mansion in Henderson, Nevada, a 20-minute drive from Vegas, which let her be near her three children. “Vegas has given me a motherhood!” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today last year (her interviews are as mushy as her songs). “It gave me an opportunity to be a mum, for them to be kids, for me to perform for my fans and every night come home. That is rare.”
“It’s a great life,” Elliott says. “Having toured around shitholes for 40-odd years, to take a month where it’s the other way around.” Def Leppard played on Fridays, Saturdays and Wednesdays, “so on Sunday, Monday and Tuesdays you’re off golfing, writing new songs and just hanging out”.
During their first residency Elliott and his bandmates stayed in hotel rooms in Vegas, which proved to be a mistake. “They offer you accommodation but the big stars will never take it because you just don’t know who’s gonna be next door,” he says. “We had to get security guards to check the corridor and if it was clear we’d run like hell to get our key in the door before somebody clocks us and bangs on the door all night looking for a party.” The second time around, Elliott rented a house four miles away. “I had complete privacy and it was fantastic. I had a piano brought into my room so I could write and record on my days off.”
Las Vegas began to become a party destination in the Thirties, when the Mormon-founded town was first granted a gaming licence. Liberace was the first musician to conquer the place, making his debut there in 1944 and becoming one of the highest-paid entertainers in the world thanks to various residencies in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. When “Mr Showmanship” took off his cape, it was driven off stage in a miniature Rolls-Royce.
Another star of the first age of Vegas was Nat King Cole, who became its darling in the late Forties despite segregation laws forbidding him from gambling at the venue where he was headlining. Sinatra played there between 1951 and 1994, and when he died in 1998 the lights on the Strip were dimmed in his honour. He and the rest of the Rat Pack played many of their most celebrated shows at the Sands Hotel and Casino, of which Sinatra owned a share. The Sands had links with the mafia, as did the city as a whole - it’s no coincidence that the National Museum of Organised Crime and Law Enforcement has its home there.
Then there was Presley, who in 1969 pulled off the most famous of musical comebacks at the International Hotel, now known as Westgate Las Vegas. “There’s this little square of wood beside the stage, which they haven’t touched because it’s where he stopped before he walked out,” Elliott says. Elvis rarely left the building, retiring to a suite on the 30th floor. He did 837 shows in Vegas in eight years, but that’s piffling compared with Wayne Newton, who played an estimated 30,000 between 1959 and 2019. After each one “Mr Las Vegas” would fly his helicopter back to Casa de Shenandoah, a Greek-style desert mansion that he shared with deer, swans, peacocks and wallabies, and settle into a hot tub carved from desert rock.
If you are asking, “Wayne who?” you are not alone. Elliott says it was a running joke that “Mr Las Vegas” was a man “whose highest ever chart position was 167”. Newton dented the American Top Ten a couple of times, but it’s fair to say that he owed most of his success to Vegas. As did Liberace, even if in his twilight years the gag was that more people went to the Liberace Museum than to his shows. Vegas became known as a retirement home for superannuated crooners - in 1985 Sammy Davis Jr cancelled a residency to have a hip replacement.
That’s what put off Paul McCartney, who told GQ recently that playing Vegas was “something I’ve been trying to avoid my whole life. Definitely nothing attracts me about the idea. It’s the elephants’ graveyard.” It was, as Elliott puts it, “where people went to die”. And not just the performers. Cher once said of her audiences in Vegas: “They’re not allowed to stand up and they’re very, very old. Sometimes they had walkers and oxygen masks. It took me a long time to realise that it may be the last concert they ever see.”
The older crowd preferred acts with slow songs and easy banter. In that respect, Adele is classic Vegas. They had less tolerance for the loud or lascivious - a much younger Presley’s debut there in 1956 was greeted, said Newsweek, “as if he were a clinical experiment”.
Yet in recent decades Vegas has expanded its image beyond gambling, gangsters and grandmas. Punters and performers have become much more diverse. That is partly thanks to the rise of mega resorts with big arenas, starting with the Mirage in 1989. “It has allowed us to compete with national touring shows,” says Chris Baldizan, the executive vice-president of entertainment for MGM Resorts International, who has signed up acts such as Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars for residencies. “Before, we didn’t have theatres that were 4,000 seats, we had showrooms of around 1,500.”
Another milestone was Dion’s decision to sign up for her first residency at Caesars Palace in 2003 while still in the glow of post-Titanic superstardom. “I would call it the first real big mega-residency, where she planted her flag in Vegas,” Baldizan says. “The only place you could see Celine Dion was in Las Vegas, and that was a game-changer for the city. She was the first artist who was there at the peak of her career.”
Elton John shared Dion’s residency in 2003, one playing while the other took a break. “It’s logical that Celine Dion would go there,” Elliott says. “What was a headline grabber was Elton.” Soon established acts such as Rod Stewart, Kiss and Aerosmith were signing up too. “So many people have left Hollywood and moved to Vegas,” Elliott says, among them Dion, Carlos Santana and Gene Simmons of Kiss. “It’s a happening town. Great restaurants, great theatres, hotels the size of planets.”
In recent years the city has hosted residencies by stars such as Beyonce and Katy Perry, by rappers (Drake), country singers (Shania Twain) and DJs (Calvin Harris). Once the refuge of an artist on the wane, they can now be a barometer of success. Spears’s residency at Planet Hollywood from 2013-17 revitalised her career, making an estimated pounds 100 million in ticket sales, but when she cancelled another in 2019 it was a sign that all was not well, as her subsequent battle to free herself from her legal conservatorship proved.
Nor are audiences as demure as they were. Now they are younger, often in stag-do or hen-party mode and keen to make the most of the vices on offer. “Whatever happens in Vegas starts on the plane,” as they said in Bridesmaids.
“Vegas is kind of a naughty corner,” Elliott says. “Everybody there is visiting, and when you visit somewhere you don’t have to worry about what people think because you’re never going to see them again. So they were a bit mad, you know, they weren’t all sat down and chicken-in-a-basket.”
Vegas still isn’t to everyone’s taste. “It may not be the end of the world, per se,” Robin Williams once said. “But you can certainly see it from there.” If this is Armageddon, though, Adele and co will be going out in a blaze of glory.
The Times
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