Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show Audiobook (Free)

The story of how Las Vegas saved Elvis and Elvis saved NEVADA in the best musical comeback of all time.

The conventional wisdom is that Las Vegas is what destroyed Elvis Presley, launching him on a unpredictable manner of drugs, boredom, erratic stage behavior, and eventually his fatal overdose. However in Elvis in Vegas, Richard Zoglin requires an alternate look at, arguing that Vegas is certainly where the King of Stone resurrected his career, reinvented himself being a performer, and produced the most about Elvis in Vegas: The way the Ruler Reinvented the Las Vegas Show exciting display in Vegas history.

Elvis’s 1969 opening evening in Vegas was his first time back on a live stage in a lot more than eight years. His profession had opted sour—bad movies, and mediocre pop music that no more produced the charts. He’d been dismissed by most critics as over the hill. But in Vegas he performed the largest showroom in the largest hotel in the city, drawing more people for his four-week engagement than some other show in Vegas background. His performance got rave reviews, “Suspicious Minds” offered him his initial number-one strike in seven years, and Elvis became Vegas’s biggest celebrity. Over another seven years, he performed more than 600 displays there, and sold out every one.

Las Vegas was changed as well. The close night-club-style shows of the Rat Pack, who made Vegas the nation’s leading live-entertainment middle in the 1950s and ‘60s, catered largely to well-heeled old gamblers. Elvis brought a fresh kind of knowledge: an over-the-top, rock-concert-like extravaganza. He set a new bar for Vegas performers, with the largest salary, the biggest musical production, and the biggest promotion campaign the city had ever noticed. In doing so, he opened the entranceway to a fresh era of pop/rock and roll performers, and brought a new target audience to Vegas—a mass market from Middle America that Vegas depends on for its achievement to this day.

A classic return tale arranged against the setting of Todas las Vegas’s golden age, Richard Zoglin’s Elvis in Vegas can be a feel-good tale for the ages.