Upping the Music Ante in Las Vegas

I’m standing in the middle of the desert, waiting for my ship to come in.

--”Leaving Las Vegas,” Sheryl Crow

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The casino boss scoops up a small pile of chips, each embossed with the photo of a rock star, and flashes a smile--the smile of a man who knows he has a sure bet.

“Let me show you something. This is one of our $5 chips,” says Gary R. Selesner, showing a bettor’s token with Sheryl Crow’s face in the center. “People look at it, see Sheryl and say, ‘What the hell,’ and they take it home as a souvenir. For a casino, that’s pretty close to pure profit.”

Profit has always been the drumbeat of this desert city, but now it’s appearing on a new soundtrack: Big-name rock music has finally arrived in the gambling oasis, and not just as a gimmick to decorate chips (faces on other denominations include the Rolling Stones on the $25 chips and Tom Petty on the $100s).

Two premier concert halls--the Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, where Selesner presides, and the newly opened House of Blues at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino--have energized a live music scene that had largely been defined by easy-listening crooners, veteran lounge acts and showgirl revues.

“It used to be that for anyone of any relevancy [in contemporary music], if you went to Vegas it was a signal that your career was over,” says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, a concert industry trade publication. “Not anymore.”

Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, Alanis Morissette, Neil Young, Billy Joel, the Offspring and Crow are among the stars whose names have or will soon appear on the marquees at the two venues, which are housed, of course, in casinos.

For fans--both locals and the torrent of tourists--the small-room shows are dazzling. If they can get a ticket. For the artists, the sizzling new rivalry can translate to big paydays as the two venues seek out “event shows.”

The 1,800-capacity House of Blues, for example, opened this month, and to create a splash it lined up big names, among them Crow. The Grammy winner got about 40% more than her usual fee to perform last Saturday night, according to Kevin Morrow, senior vice president of entertainment for the chain.

“If you want to create the Super Bowl of club shows,” Morrow points out, “you have to pay for it.”

Sometimes the fans have to pay for it, too. At the Stones show at the Joint, for instance, the best seats in the 1,400-capacity venue sold for a hefty $400. The Dylan show at the House of Blues opening earlier this month had $150 seats.

Is that a sign of artists’ gouging the venues?

“I’m not sure if ‘gouging’ is the right word, but in the short term, yes, the cost of entertainment has gone up,” Selesner says. “But it’s not necessarily true that the ticket prices go up.”

He points to the $52 tickets for the Joel show on April 3 as an example of attractive prices for a big name in a small venue. The venue will lose money on the gig, but don’t mistake it for charity--in Las Vegas, the house always wins.

Take about 10 steps from the front door of either venue and you’ll be standing in a casino, either the sprawling gambling floor of the ritzy Mandalay Bay or the far smaller, dish-shaped gaming area of the Hard Rock, which is dotted with Jimi Hendrix and Sex Pistols slot machines.

“The business boost we get from shows like that is quite significant,” Selesner says. “There’s the potential for one player to pay for the [show’s box-office] loss. Seriously. It’s like hosting a Tyson fight. Only safer.”

For the casinos, the concert halls pull in affluent baby boomers and Generation-X music fans to join the older crowds who have long been the city’s steadiest clientele.

Las Vegas’ growth in the last decade has seen the casinos tap into broader markets--the most evident overture has been toward families by borrowing amusement park concepts--and the rock ‘n’ roll generations are among the targets.

The two venues are not the only rock shows in town, and more are coming. The 16,000-capacity MGM Grand Garden arena has twice hosted the Stones, for instance, and there’s also the Thomas & Mack Center (an 18,500-seat arena) and Sam Boyd Stadium (50,000 seats), both facilities attached to the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

The UNLV venues enjoyed a surge in bookings in the last decade, which officials attribute to the city’s population swelling past 1 million and the groundbreaking shows at casino concert halls.

“We never used to get the big stops,” says Pat Christenson, the Thomas & Mack director. “A lot of people just saw Vegas as a cheap gambling place, but now there’s more upscale, ritzier places and a bigger locals market. . . . There’s also more competition, but it’s good for the music scene.”

The competition is not a cutthroat affair, all sides insist, but the House of Blues and Hard Rock share too much history (the House of Blues was founded by a former Hard Rock partner) and common ground to be completely indifferent toward each other.

“The Hard Rock is great, but it’s different,” Morrow says. “Dylan is the perfect example of the difference between us and them. . . . He’s our kind of artist. With [the Hard Rock] it’s more about the glamour; with us it’s more about the music.”

But Dylan has played the Joint twice, shoots back Peter Morton, the entrepreneur who launched the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in 1995 and, 27 years earlier, the first Hard Rock Cafe in London. Morton also questions whether the Las Vegas edition of the House of Blues keeps true to that chain’s theme of music integrity.

“It puzzles me why they would put it in Mandalay Bay, a place that is very commercial, very corporate and designed to be a cool place for 50-year-olds,” Morton says.

Setting aside the partisan sniping, how do the actual venues stack up?

The Joint, like the entire Hard Rock resort, is uncluttered and subtle--at least by Las Vegas standards. The no-frills theater has cream-colored walls, a wide, curving floor and, when needed, rows of tethered folding chairs. Cymbals adorn the walls.

While the Joint is a centerpiece at the Hard Rock, the House of Blues is tucked into a corner of the Mandalay Bay resort, a 43-story mini-city with 3,300 rooms on the Strip’s south end.

The deep purple lights and Delta juke joint imagery of the restaurant and venue seem incongruous in the bright, brassy Mandalay Bay. But the performance hall inside is clearly state-of-the-art and, like its Sunset Strip counterpart, has a high ceiling and multiple balconies.

The venue differs from the Joint by offering permanent, fixed seating: 470 plush, opera house seats are affixed to the sloping balcony for “fans who don’t feel like moshing,” as Morrow puts it. “Because some of us rockers are getting a little old.”