Cult Vegas
by Mike Weatherford
When you’re a Old Vegas fanboy like me, you tend to place related historical books about this town permanently on your radar. However, if you read enough of these books, certain facts tend to repeat themselves into redundancy and when you’re anxious for some new meat on these old bones, these repeats will wear you out to the point that you know enough about the mob you turn into an FBI informant.
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​‘Cult Vegas’ is a break from this endless loop of historical timelines by focusing on a topic that, to my eyes, is pretty rare in Vegas books, the entertainment history of the city! Sure, there are the usual Rat Pack and Elvis material, but author and R-J entertainment reporter Weatherford digs deeper for names that I haven’t seen in print in a long time like Mary Kay Trio, Shecky Greene, Cook E. Jarr and the dynamic trio of Vegas Lounge, Louis Prima, Keely Smith and Sam Butera!
Right off the bat, Weatherford warns you that the book will not start with the city’s birth of 1905, but September 4, 1951, the date of Frank Sinatra’s Vegas debut….and according to the book, it was a tricky entrance; Frank was between a divorce and a stormy relationship with Ava Gardner and his movies, records with CBS and TV series weren’t doing very well either, all of which was leading to his premiere at the Desert Inn. From this point, there was nowhere else to go but up for Frank and the rest of this city and this book does a fine job of following the projectory.
The book is broken into three sections; general entertainers with chapters on Sinatra (Frank’s Room), Elvis (The Comeback Kid) and the almost endless parade of comics going in and out of the city’s ranks (Comedy On The Rocks), ‘Las Vegas Drive-In’ provides analysis on movies filmed in this fair town for part two (and, yes, that does include details about Ocean’s Eleven and Viva Las Vegas) and part three focuses on female entertainers and floor shows.
….and if that wasn’t enough, there are side-bars a’plenty about Exotica and Space Age music genre invading the lounges (thanks to Martin Denny and Esquivel!), the wonder of Tom Jones and his influence on Elvis, Prima & Smith first and only starring movie (?!), an army of failed TV actors shots at Strip fame, Foster Brooks, The Beatles invasion, David Lee Roth’s own brief Vegas flirtation, etc., The author is reasonably honest with many of its toughest subjects; the downfall of lounge (Howard Hughes and Bill Maurry are one of the many suspects listed) and the sunset of the Rat Pack members.
Clocking in at 247 pages, this title is indeed crammed with all that entertainment and many of its related sub-cultures that pumped through its clubs, lounges, casinos and, in Shecky’s case, streets of this crazy city. To my limited knowledge, I doubt I’ll ever see such a book of this caliber covering this topic so well and thoroughly researched.
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UPDATE: Alright, I spoke too soon here. As I was doing research for this review, I discovered a book about Louie, Keely and Vegas Lounge History of the 50’s & 60’s called ‘That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas’ by Tom Clavin and it came out in 2010. It also comes with an endorsement by Shecky Greene: “"This book brought me back to my days in Vegas, which we’ll never see again. That was a one-time-only event. I enjoyed Louis Prima more than any other entertainer I’ve seen onstage, that’s how good he was." Now who can argue with that!?