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Listen to TMI on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports and from business to history. And our next guest has written a terrific book, Elvis in Vegas, How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show. And I welcome Richard Zoglin to our American Stories. How are you, Richard? Great.
Great to be with you. Well, you know, I want to start in the beginning, because you start by describing Elvis Presley and this town called Las Vegas. And it turns out that long before he did his big comeback show, he had actually played in Vegas, well, one time before, when he had just become a star for RCA. Talk about that first show, that first time Elvis played Vegas. Right.
Right. That was in 1956. He was just coming up. He had just, he had one hit song at that point, Heartbreak Hotel. And Colonel Parker, his manager, decided to put him into Las Vegas, which was a very strange venue for a young hip-shaking rock and roller from Memphis. He was on a bill at the New Frontier Hotel with Shecky Green and Freddie Martin's Orchestra. So it was a very strange kind of nightclub show for Las Vegas.
And he didn't do very well. The middle-aged nightclub crowd that frequented Vegas in those years just really didn't know what to make of this kid. But Elvis, it turns out, he really loved Vegas. And it became his kind of favorite getaway. He would go back there in between movie shoots just for rest and relaxation with his friends, you know, see other shows, pick up women. And he got married to Priscilla there in 1967. He made, of course, Viva Las Vegas, the kind of quintessential Vegas movie there in 63.
So it became a very familiar place to him during the 60s. Let's talk about Vegas itself, because it's a quirky city. It wasn't a big city until fairly recently. In fact, I was shocked, Richard, how small Vegas was until right around the time of the 1950s. Yeah, it was a small town.
It got founded in 1905. It kind of hit the big, started to attract people in the early 30s when Hoover Dam was constructed nearby. And Las Vegas was the place where everybody, all the construction workers went downtown Vegas to gamble.
Nevada was the one state in the union that had legalized gambling. The real boom in Las Vegas happened during the 40s. There were first a couple of hotels that opened on what we now know as the Las Vegas Strip, which was the highway leading from Vegas to Los Angeles.
But then right after the war in 1946, the Flamingo Hotel opened. And that was the hotel that Bugsy Siegel and his mob friends from New York opened. And they began attracting really the top line, big stars. And the whole idea of Vegas, the Vegas hotels, was to get people into the casinos to gamble and pay top dollar for the biggest stars, because that would get people into the casinos. And they'd make the money back from the gambling.
Then that was the money they could pay top dollar to the stars with. And so starting with the Flamingo in 1946, then all the hotels opened on the Strip in the late 40s, early 50s, the Sands, the Sahara, the Desert Inn, et cetera. By the mid 50s, it was really the entertainment capital of America in terms of live nightclub entertainment. And so it was really hitting its golden age, its heyday years, right around the time that Elvis first appeared in Vegas in 56.
You wrote this in your chapter. You said, there was just one rule. Keep the show to a strict time limit, usually an hour or less, to make sure patrons weren't away from the casinos for too long. Keeping people in the casino was the key to Vegas's whole business model. That led to one of Las Vegas's great innovations of the 1950s, the lounge show.
Talk about that. Yeah, there were, of course, the big showrooms where Sinatra, Tony Bennett, everybody played. All the major, every major nightclub star in the country played Vegas at some time or another in the 50s and 60s. But then starting in the mid 50s, somebody had the idea to have a show in the lounge, which was kind of a bar lounge area right adjacent to the casino in between the big shows, in the big showrooms. It would keep people in the casino, in the hotel.
They wouldn't leave. They'd go and spend an hour or so at the lounge where a different performer, comedians, singers, were performing jazz groups. And the whole idea was to keep them from leaving the hotel, stay in the casino. But the lounge shows became a genre of their own. Louis Prima and Keely Smith were a great duo back in the 50s. And they really set the model for lounge shows in Vegas.
So you had this double helping of entertainment in each hotel. And let's talk about a character who is from West Alice, Wisconsin. And his name Americanized, it's Wazio or something really, really hard to pronounce, but Walter Liberace. Talk about Liberace. And by the way, talk a little bit about Liberace and Elvis.
Sure. One of the big stars in Vegas in the mid 50s was Liberace. He had a really unique act, very flamboyant, you know, piano and talking with the audience and musical, you know, all sorts of music from classical to popular and very flamboyant. He was really one of the biggest stars in Vegas in the 50s. Elvis came in 1956 and he wasn't doing very well at the New Frontier Hotel. So Colonel Parker went over to the Riviera where Liberace was playing and doing very well, of course, and asked Liberace if he could come over and help out his boy, you know, see his show, maybe take some publicity shots with him. And Liberace was a very generous performer and did that for Elvis. And Elvis always appreciated that, that Liberace was nice enough to sort of help him out when he was struggling a little in Las Vegas. But also Elvis, I think, learned from Liberace, strangely enough. There was something about his showmanship. Liberace had one piece of advice for Elvis after he saw his show. He says, Elvis, your show needs more glitz. And sure enough, not long after Elvis was touring in a gold lemme suit jacket, very much like the one that Liberace was wearing in Las Vegas. And I think that they were friendly throughout their careers, continued to see each other and occasionally. And I do think that Liberace's showmanship was a big influence on Elvis, particularly in those later Vegas years when he came out with the white jumpsuits and the flashy outfits and stuff. I think you can look back and see Liberace's influence there.
Well, we'll continue with this conversation. The book is Elvis in Vegas, How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show. We'll be back with more of Richard Zoglin's story, Elvis in Vegas, after these messages. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue here on Our American Stories, Elvis in Vegas. We're talking about this terrific book with author Richard Zoglin, How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show.
Let's talk about the Rat Pack. Who were they and what impact did these guys have on Vegas? Frank Sinatra was already a big Vegas star from the early 50s. And in 1960, he was making a movie in Las Vegas called Ocean's Eleven. He was also going to appear at the Sands Hotel in the evenings after his day of shooting was done.
Well, this film had all a lot of his sort of friends from Hollywood in the cast. And somebody came up with the idea that maybe Frank could bring some of them on stage with him in the evening when he did his show at the Sands. And so, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop would come on stage every night, it turned out.
And they would just have this kind of free for all session of songs and jokes and drinking. And it was a smash hit in Las Vegas for like one month in January, February 1960. The Rat Pack shows were the biggest thing Vegas had seen. Every celebrity from Hollywood came to a, Jack Kennedy was campaigning for president.
He came to see the show on the campaign trail. And they kind of became the quintessential iconic stars of Vegas, the Rat Pack. And let's talk about what happened soon after because rock and roll is coming down the pike. A new generation, and this is always the case with pop music, a new generation is coming in.
I want to read something because it almost seemed to summarize the clash of these almost two civilizations and cultures. You write, they needed, and you're talking about the Rat Pack, to leave the stage before a new kind of Vegas entertainment could emerge. Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley represented two opposite poles in American popular music. The suave, largely urban, jazz influenced tradition that dominated radio recordings and nightclubs for decades. And the unruly, largely rural blues and country influenced music that would first catch on in the mid 1950s and virtually take over in the next decade. That seismic shift in music, as well as in the rest of the culture, was mirrored in the changes that would come to the Las Vegas strip.
Talk about that because it's fascinating. Yeah, well, as I said, the Rat Pack kind of epitomized Vegas cool in the early 60s. But then things started to change very quickly, starting in 64 with the advent of the Beatles and the whole British invasion, the whole, all the changes in rock and roll, the counterculture, the Vietnam protests and everything.
We know what happened in the 60s. And suddenly by the late 60s, the cool Rat Pack guys were looking very last generation. And the new rock and rollers were not coming to Las Vegas. The younger generation did not think Vegas was cool anymore.
And so Vegas was starting to, you know, wonder where it was going and how it was going to get the next generation. The nightclub scene was fading out. The traditional nightclub show, the nightclubs were closing around the country. Vegas was really the last outpost for real nightclub entertainment, but it was starting to fade. And so the rock and roll scene really made Vegas have to take a look at itself and figure out what to do next. And I think that Elvis's arrival in 1969 helped Vegas enter that new era, that new era of rock and roll. And it's interesting because it also helped Elvis resuscitate his career. Let's talk about the 60s, because Elvis comes back from serving his country. And Tom Parker, and that's Colonel Tom Parker, as you write and chronicle, made a big mistake in the end by focusing Elvis only on this movie career of his, which, well, these were some really wretched films in the end. And Elvis had stopped touring and playing almost entirely. So talk about that. It's almost a lost musical decade.
Sure. It was Colonel Parker's decision after Elvis came back from the army that he would become a movie star and he didn't want him to be, you know, people felt that rock and roll was for kids and that if you wanted a career, you had to graduate to something else. You couldn't just sing rock and roll forever. So Elvis wanted to do movies and had done some good movies, fairly good movies in the 50s, before the army. After the army, though, he was restricted only to movies and recording.
And through that entire decade, the movies got worse and worse. The songs he was recording were kind of no longer making the charts by the mid 60s, late 60s, and Elvis was getting bored to death. He knew the movies weren't very good. He really missed performing live, but the Colonel was, you know, very strict about this plan. He wanted to sort of restrict the access to to Elvis. And so, you know, strangely enough, he did not do any live performing, except for a couple of benefit performances.
In 1961, Elvis did no live performing during the 1960s, no concerts, until finally in 1968, when he made his famous comeback special on NBC. Finally, it was time, the Colonel decided, for Elvis to come back to live performing. And Vegas, being very familiar to both of them, was where the Colonel decided to do it.
And let's talk about that night. He had to be nervous, first of all. It'd been a long time.
But he comes out in that leather outfit, and he changes everybody's mind about him. People had thought he was washed out. Rock and roll had changed. Talk about the importance of this for Elvis's career in the culture, and particularly the cultural elites of the rock and roll crowd, the John Landows, and all those those young music critics who sort of thought of Elvis as sort of that old 50s character.
That's right. They had written him off. Now, things have started to change. In December of 68, when he did his comeback special on NBC, there they saw Elvis still as powerful a performer as ever. Still, the idea of Elvis returning to the stage, that was a big gamble for him. And he was very nervous. He had been away for so long, and so much had changed in the rock world. Elvis didn't know if he could still draw a crowd anymore, if he could still perform like he did a decade earlier.
So he was very nervous about it. The rock and roll critics all came to that show. There was so much anticipation around that return. I think the appetite was whetted by that 68 special on NBC. But all the major rock critics and rock reporters from around the country basically flew in for that one night, that opening night on July 31, 1969.
And the reviews were almost unanimous raves. And even the rock critics who were very skeptical of Elvis, who felt he was a has-been, they admitted that he was amazingly good on stage. He could still rock to the old numbers. He had new stuff that he was doing for the first time, these songs like Suspicious Minds and In the Ghetto that kind of introduced a new Elvis. He was reinventing himself. And I think the rock critics were kind of amazed and grateful to see him back as dynamic as ever. Let's talk about a guy named Kirk Krikorian.
Is Kirk, in the end, has something to do with his comeback? I mean, he's building a brand new hotel with a big, big stage and a lot of capacity. Yeah, well, Kirk Krikorian was coming to Las Vegas. He had bought a hotel, the Flamingo Hotel, I think a year earlier. And then he decided to build the biggest hotel in Vegas off the strip in the convention center area called the International Hotel with a showroom twice as large as any other in Las Vegas. He had a whole crew getting the hotel ready. He hired an entertainment director and the instructions were to get the best, the biggest entertainment available.
A guy named Bill Miller was the entertainment director who was a kind of well-known booker in Vegas. He went out and he wanted Elvis Presley. He thought that that was the kind of big name, you know, big attraction that the hotel needed to open. Colonel Parker was receptive, except he had one problem. He didn't want Elvis to open the hotel because the hotel was still being completed. Construction was, they were racing to finish it in time for the summer opening. And he said, we'll do the hotel, we'll play the hotel, but Elvis shouldn't be first.
Have somebody else be the guinea pig, we'll come in second. And so Bill Miller, the booker, went to his backup choice, Barbara Streisand, who actually opened the hotel in July, played the month of July in 1969. Barbara actually didn't do that well. Her show was not that well received.
She did more of a sort of stripped down New York cabaret style act and it didn't really fill that big stage. Elvis filled the stage and when he came he sold out every single show for 28 straight days. And we're talking to Richard Zoglin. The book is Elvis in Vegas, how the king reinvented the Las Vegas show.
We'll continue with this story after these messages. And we continue here with our American stories and Elvis in Vegas by Richard Zoglin, how the king reinvented the Las Vegas show. Go to Amazon.com, pick this up. If you love the culture, if you love music, you're going to love this book. And if you love Vegas, and well who doesn't, at least for a few nights, by the fourth night I got to go home.
But three nights, it's just perfect. And we continue now on the chapter called The Comeback. And Elvis had gone through a lot, clearly in that decade. But what I really had forgotten was, as you said, how much the counterculture, all these young rockers, all these new musicians from the Woodstock era and after, so many of them just didn't like Elvis at all.
They recognize him as an influence, a major influence. I mean the Beatles, John Lennon, all knew that he was the original rock and roller that they all were inspired by. But he was so far out of the picture.
The movies were kind of being made fun of. And it just wasn't a factor anymore. And playing Las Vegas was not the cool thing to do. Most of the rock and roll groups, certainly the big rock groups, were not playing Las Vegas.
So the idea that Elvis was doing Las Vegas did not exactly enhance his credibility with the sort of hip rock crowd. But I think they were won over by the sheer power of his stage performing. He was really never better as a stage performer than he was in that first year or so in Las Vegas. And his voice was bigger than ever. And his energy level was absolutely at the peak. He was so excited to be back in front of his fans again. So it was really the peak of his stage performing career, I think.
Let's talk about the show itself. You write, Elvis had no intention of becoming a nostalgia act, nor did he want to do a conventional Vegas show. A little bit later you said, Elvis had a dream one night in which he saw himself on a Vegas stage filled with a huge collection of musicians, a rhythm band, two backup singing groups, and the biggest orchestra Vegas had ever seen. Talk about that.
Yeah. The Colonel, Colonel Parker's idea for a Las Vegas show was chorus girls, showgirls, a kind of traditional Vegas show. And Elvis said, no, I'm going to do it my way or I'm not going to do it at all. And he just went out and he first he had to select a backup band, rhythm group, starting with James Burton, the famous guitarist who people knew from people knew from Ricky Nelson's TV show. And he really put the show, surprisingly, what surprised me was there was really no director or producer, hands on producer of the show. It was really Elvis with just a couple of his friends going through figuring out what songs to do in what order. He picked all the musicians, the backup band, the two singing groups, a male, white male gospel group and a black female soul group, the Sweet Inspirations. And he just put the show together himself.
He just knew what he wanted to do. And it was kind of the first sort of rock concert like showed to that Las Vegas had seen. And, you know, it was it was kind of a brave thing for Elvis to do.
He was not fitting into the usual mold of Vegas shows that the traditional nightclub Rat Pack style nightclub show more intimate. Of course, he was on a much bigger stage and he knew we had to do something bigger and also something that would showcase what he did well, the old rock songs, the new big ballads. And, you know, he just knew what he wanted. And he had his instincts were right on the money.
I want to read another passage. The musicians on stage represented a grand coming together of all the music Elvis loved and that had shaped him as a singer, rock and roll, country, gospel, rhythm and blues, plus the symphonic sound of a full orchestra. What a dream that is to represent in the end almost all of American music on one stage and probably one of the only people in American history who could have pulled that off. Richard.
Yeah. And I think it was a great achievement. And Elvis, he may not have been the coolest, the most cutting edge thing in rock and roll at that point. I mean, he wasn't. But he wanted to sing to everybody. He wanted to bring all the audiences together. You know, Elvis was the guy who really split the audience back in the mid 50s. You know, before rock and roll came along, before Elvis and rock and roll, everybody was listening to the same music.
There was all the hit parade tunes and Tin Pan Alley, Broadway show tunes or whatever. After Elvis, there was a split. There was the traditional kind of Tin Pan Alley type of songs that the adults were listening to and this newfangled kind of music that the kids were listening to, rock and roll.
Well, by the late 60s, that split in the culture had gotten wider and wider. But Elvis really, he didn't want to just sing to the kids. He wanted to sing to everybody.
He wanted to sing. He sang old standards like Are You Lonesome Tonight. He sang rock songs.
He covered hits by the Beatles and Neil Diamond, whoever. He just did everything, gospel, country. And so I think he was, I like to say that in the 50s, he was the great divider.
He was the guy who divided the culture in two. And in the late 60s, he became the great uniter, bringing the audiences all back together. And the fact that he could do that so well and sell out four weeks of shows. And by the way, that was two shows a night, seven nights a week for four straight weeks, not a single night off. No one could do that anymore. And he sold out every show as he sold out basically every show he did in Vegas.
That's amazing. You write again, the show lasted an hour and 15 minutes and Elvis worked himself to a frazzle, pacing the stage like a panther, crouching, lunging, leaping, doing karate kicks and punches. He was like a wild man, recalled Felton Jarvis, his RCA record producer.
Talk about that. Yeah, he was just so revved up to be back in front of a live audience again. And it had all been stored up for, you know, for a decade basically. And so it was just an incredibly exciting show. He had an audience filled with celebrities, you know, from all over and all the rock critics from all over the country there.
So Elvis, the adrenaline was flowing. And what's amazing is he was able to sustain that energy all the way through 28 straight days and I think for the next year or so. He came back, by the way, after the first night the hotel signed him to a long-term contract five years and have him come back. The idea was that he would come back every six months for four weeks, twice a year, for four-week engagements. And I contend that for the first two or three of those engagements Elvis was absolutely at his peak as a stage performer. He started to go downhill later but when he was first, you know, back in front of the live audiences again, in front of his fans, he was so excited and juiced by that idea, the ability to be back on a stage again performing live for his fans.
And I think that just sustained him for a long time. And indeed a stage of his choosing, the musicians of his choosing, and the set of his choosing, Richard, really helps. I'm going to read one last thing. We'll go to the final segment. The nation's top rock critic soon weighed in with nearly universal praise, quote, Presley came on and immediately shook up all of my expectations and preconceived categories, wrote Ellen Willis in the New Yorker. There was a new man out there.
That's what she said. And then down later, David Denton said this, Elvis was supernatural. His own resurrection is what I witnessed at the showroom international in Las Vegas last August. And indeed it was a resurrection of a remarkable career. When we come back, more with Richard Zoglin, the book is Elvis in Vegas, how the king reinvented the Las Vegas show and go to Amazon and pick it up or better still go to a local bookstore.
Tell us just buy one. If you have a friend in the family who loves Vegas or loves Elvis, buy two. When we come back, the last part of our conversation, the story of Elvis in Vegas here on our American stories. And we're back with Richard Zoglin, author of Elvis in Vegas, how the king reinvented the Las Vegas show.
Let's talk about the success because my goodness, the numbers were staggering. He just kept selling the room out and selling the room out. And ultimately this led to his undoing in a way, didn't it? Well, yeah, you know, he was so successful and profitable for the hotel and profitable for Elvis and Colonel Parker was good at sort of repeating what worked. And so he brought Elvis back every six months and Elvis started touring again and it became a grind. It became a grind for him.
He was excited at the beginning of the Las Vegas runs and for the first year or so after that, then he started to get bored with it. And it was a tough a lifestyle for him for four weeks to be kind of cooped up in a hotel room. He had trouble even, you know, going out because he was such a big star in Vegas.
He couldn't go out and not be mobbed. It was a nocturnal lifestyle. He was staying up all night, sleeping all day. As we know, the drug use began to increase. He had his weight problems.
So I think that's when the downhill slide started. You wrote, it soon became a grind in his 30th floor home at the International Hotel, later the Hilton, with a palatial 5,000 square foot suite complete with private swimming pool and rooftop terrace from which Elvis and his pals would sometime hit golf balls had become a prison. Yeah, I know. It was tough. Some people think that Vegas is what killed Elvis.
I think that's unfair. I think that he was, just every artist has to keep moving, you know. That's why he got so bored with the movies in the 60s. They were getting worse and worse and Elvis was bored. He reinvented himself and found a great new venue in Las Vegas.
But after a while, it became the same thing over and over again. Combined with maybe an entourage that was a little enabling of his bad habits, the things, you know, started to go downhill. I wouldn't blame it on Las Vegas, but Vegas was certainly part of the problem. You know, at the same time, this also was happening because he was establishing, well, something new that we now come to know as the residency. You wrote, he was the first major star to establish something like a regular schedule in Las Vegas. Two four-week engagements a year, one in the winter, one in the summer, a forerunner of the residencies of latter-day Vegas stars like Celine Dion. Elvis's show set a new standard for Vegas.
The star was now his own spectacle. Yeah, that is the important point is how Elvis, not only did Vegas help save Elvis's career and re-help him reinvent himself as a performer, but Elvis in a way saved Vegas or at least changed Vegas. His show was not a traditional Vegas show, a traditional intimate Rat Pack style nightclub show.
It was a big rock concert like Extravaganza and it drew a different kind of audience. It got people from around the country who were maybe not necessarily Vegas goers. They weren't big gamblers, high rollers that Vegas traditionally catered to. They were just fans of Elvis.
They were middle America. They were families in a lot of cases, and they would make their summer vacation, organize it around a trip to Vegas for Elvis. And so that opened Vegas's eyes to a new kind of audience, a broader based audience, and that was the audience that Vegas over the next couple of decades would discover in its own reinvention. I think Elvis was sort of the starting gun for the change in Vegas from a kind of nightclub and gambling town for adults to a theme park family vacation, the place that we know today. And then the residencies came starting with Celine Dion in the early 2000s. In the 90s, pretty much the headliners kind of went into Eclipse as the Cirque du Soleil kind of Extravaganzas took over. And they're still of course very big there in Vegas, but now you're seeing a comeback in the kind of traditional headliners who were following what Celine Dion started. And a lot of rock performers now are coming to Vegas who wouldn't have done it before.
I think now you see Lady Gaga there and Aerosmith. And so Vegas, of course, has become a huge family vacation destination. It took a little while, but I think he really opened the door to a broader based audience and kind of introduced Vegas to that new audience that it would go after over in the next couple of decades.
Indeed, you note that his decline started somewhere around August of 71, this slow steady decline. But you write this, but he packed the audiences anyway and that was part of the problem. The fans loved him no matter how bad he looked, no matter what he did.
Talk about that. Yeah, well that's probably not something that Elvis fans want to hear, but I do think there was a little indulgence. There was indulgence by his entourage, the Memphis Mafia. And I think his fans, they were so excited to see the guy on stage and he did a great show. But he began to, I think he got lazier as the years went on and his patter on stage sometimes was a little wacky. The amazing thing was even as his decline was starting, I think in terms of his behavior on stage and his weight, the voice was still as good as ever.
You could hear recordings from like 74 and the voice is still great. So maybe that was enough for the fans, but I do think that there were times when he was just not in good shape. You could tell he didn't have the energy was starting to fade, but they did love him so much and the women would, he would throw out the towels to the women.
It was just, it got a little crazy and by the end it was a little bit of a self-parody and I don't think the fans helped by just loving everything he did. Indeed, and this is a remarkable quote you have here towards the end of the book. After sitting through Elvis Presley's closing night performance at the Las Vegas Hilton wrote the Memphis Press Scimitar in an eerily prophetic review on December 15, 1976, one walks away wondering how much longer it can be before the end comes, perhaps suddenly, and why the king of rock and roll would subject himself to possible ridicule by going on stage so ill-prepared.
Prophetic indeed. Yeah, that was an eerie review written just eight or nine months before he died. It's too bad what happened, but I just want to remind people that Elvis in Vegas, he was great before he got fat. I mean he was, he was terrific in those early Vegas shows and if you see some of the the very late ones it is kind of sad to see, but I think that's the consequence of a performer who was just forced to kind of repeat himself constantly.
He should have done other things. He should have toured overseas. Everybody wanted Elvis to tour overseas except for Colonel Parker who we learned later had some passport problems. He was an immigrant from the Netherlands who apparently never had a passport, so he was always making excuses why Elvis could not tour.
He would blame it on security issues or something, tour overseas, but he was really, he was just worried about his own status as an illegal immigrant. So that's the kind of thing that I think would have revived Elvis, would have re-energized him, and he couldn't do. So Vegas became unfortunately a kind of prison for him by the end.
I'm going to close with something and then get your comment. Elvis didn't kill Vegas, but he did change it. His triumph in Las Vegas helped ace in the demise of the old nightclub shows and sounded the starting gun for a very different era of Las Vegas entertainment. By the way, it's an era we all so readily enjoy and I think it's why it's the top tourist attraction in America and Elvis had a lot to do with that. Let's leave on a positive note. Talk about that.
Definitely. You know Celine Dion, they did a tribute show to Elvis a few years ago that was televised and she said if it weren't for Elvis, I couldn't be doing what I'm doing here in Las Vegas. After Elvis died, you had performers like Cher and Dolly Parton who were the kind of performers that maybe wouldn't have done Las Vegas before, but I think Elvis showed that rock and roll could work on the big showroom stage and as I said, he showed that there could be a bigger sort of broader audience for Las Vegas. It wasn't just for the high roller types who loved Sinatra and the Rat Pack. It was for everybody and so it was just the natural progression that took a little while, but now we have a Vegas that is just a huge tourist attraction for the whole family and that's why Elvis continues to be a presence in Las Vegas.
The impersonators and the wedding chapels and so forth because I think everybody recognizes that Elvis inaugurated a new era in Las Vegas and that new era, they're still reaping the benefits of it today. We've been talking to Richard Zoglin, the book Elvis in Vegas, how the king reinvented the Las Vegas show. Go to Amazon and get this. You won't want to put it down.
Better still, go to a local bookstore and buy the book. This is Lee Habib, Elvis in Vegas, Our American Story. You may know Jackson Pollock, the painter famous for his iconic drip paintings, but what do you know about his wife, artist Lee Krasner? On Death of an Artist, Krasner and Pollock, the story of the artist who reset the market for American abstract painting, just maybe not the one you're thinking of.
Listen to Death of an Artist, Krasner and Pollock on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. From LinkedIn News, I'm Leah Smart, host of Everyday Better, an award-winning weekly podcast dedicated to personal development. Whether you're looking for ways to shift your mindset or seeking more fulfillment in your life, we've got you covered. Join me as we dive into captivating stories and research-backed ideas that have empowered me and others to lead lives with more clarity and intention. Everyday Better, making growth an everyday practice. Listen to Everyday Better on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From LinkedIn News, I'm Jessi Hempel, host of the Hello Monday podcast. In my 20s, I knew what career success looked like.
In midlife, it's not that simple. Work is changing, we are changing, and there's no guidebook for how to make sense of it. Start your week with the Hello Monday podcast. Listen to Hello Monday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are your hosts of TMI. And catch us every Wednesday on the Black Effect Network, breaking down social and civil rights issues, pop culture, and politics in hopes of pushing our culture forward to make the world a better place for generations to come. Listen to TMI on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's right.
