CasinoRock! or Stages of Grief

Wrote this article about formerly famous rock bands sustaining their careers at casinos for GQ in 2006. It got killed. Spin read it, and said they might run it, but changed their minds. GQ kindly paid me my full fee for the story (or gave me credit for the wordage, as I think I was on contract at the time). It was a lot of work and travel. It's not easy to get to Atlantic City from Oakland, for example, and I wanted to take a bus on the final leg; I thought it might be interesting to ride a Friday night bus from Philly to Atlantic City, just to see who my fellow passengers might be. I was wrong. I recall being more disappointed by the Spin rejection, I guess because it would have been so nice for a killed thing to find a life after death. I did a bunch of editing at Spin's request, but in the end, they lost interest. I had originally pitched it to GQ as a story about once-famous rock acts playing at state and county fairs. But GQ thought it would be more interesting at casinos. They were probably right, but somehow I just couldn't pull it off. The original version included an REO Speedwagon show and backstage interview. I don't remember why or when that section got dropped. Might have to do with how nice the REO guys were, and that I just couldn't find much funny to say about them. I never liked their music. Or Eddie Money or Rick Springfield, for that matter. I admit to liking Styx briefly when very young. Doobie Brothers I have liked on and off, and they are very much the sound of my childhood summers. It was humiliating for the story never to see the light of day. It involved so much travel and work that just about everyone I knew was aware that I was working on it and was excited about it and often asked me how it was going and when it would appear. On my last trip to Vegas, outside the Eddie Money show, some dude sneezed all over me and I ended up being sick for weeks. The husband of a co-worker of my wife was a huge, life-long REO fan, and so I took him with me to the show and then backstage afterwards. It was very exciting for him, which was nice, but just added to my embarrassment when the story died. Of course, magazine stories get killed for all kinds of reasons, not always to do with the quality of the writer's work. But this one was probably my fault. My original, working title was "Satan's Waiting Room." It was some kind of joke about how, if Florida is God's waiting room, and if Rock & Roll is Satanic, and if casinos are where old bands go to die, then casinos would be Satan's waiting...well, you get it.

Stages of Grief
At the Casinos with Styx, The Doobie Brothers, Eddie Money & Rick Springfield

At first, to catch their names on a state fair schedule -- Journey, Styx, Blue Oyster Cult -- seemed a kind of cosmic rock comeuppance. Finally, these bands who had blasted music back into a dark, bullshit age of meaningless rock opera pomp, who had never deserved their former fortune or fame, were getting theirs in the hellish heat of the fair.

But in my more reflective moments, a certain nagging sadness would taint my schadenfreude. Did any formerly-famous musical act really deserve this fate: forced to trudge onstage and fain the triumphant rock and roll body language of their glory years while banging out their hit songs for the millionth time before another sweaty, heat-dazed, corn-on-the-cob sucking American crowd staggering about the fairgrounds.

Well, now these former idols and two-hit wonder mainstays of the fair have come in from the heat: fairgrounds rock has taken over the glam stages of Vegas and Atlantic City and the glamour-free nightclubs of the far-flung Indian reservations. Frampton is here. Juice Newton is here. REO Speedwagon is here. Even some remnant of Queen is here.

Sooner or later they’ll all be here in rock and roll’s Indian burial ground. Indeed, the torch may already be passing to a new generation of stars: Prince has recently made a splash in Vegas. Smash Mouth has played the riverboats. Jewel has played Atlantic City. Barenaked Ladies has played the Aladdin. Bands like Velvet Revolver and Buckcherry are squeezing audiences out of the growing population in the desert.

But the long-haired princes of the Seventies dominate the casino rock scene.

Impressed and annoyed by their night-of-the living-dead resilience, and fascinated by the cruelty of a fame that lingers like the ache of a phantom limb, I set out on the casino circuit to see what it really looks like when rock and roll takes the showroom stage. I spent months taking in casino rock shows from Nevada to New Jersey. I was braced to encounter down-on-their luck remnants of classic rock bands performing before crowds of apathetic and distracted gamblers. I found some of that for sure, but I also encountered panty-throwing soccer moms, forty-five-year old growth stunted wannabe (again) head bangers, and music fans convinced that no human being has written or recorded a song worth listening to since 1982, although possibly some computers have, but more on that later.

Anger: The Doobie Brothers

Here in this black cavern of a theater at the Atlantic City Hilton, I can easily read the Doobie Brother’s lips as he beseeches the aged and listless crowd with great fire and preacherly fervor, to “Get up!” I can see him repeatedly swing his right hand up from the strings of his electric guitar and as some familiar chord he’s strummed fades into the ambivalent night, reach out toward the crowd with his fingers pointing upwards, as if promising to cup their collective balls if they would just dance.

Few respond and hard-working guitarist Tom Johnston looks angry.

Personally, I think everyone’s just too tired to rise. There are some very -- old isn’t the right word -- elderly people here, real grandmas with walkers, and some of them look a bit confused. I imagine myself thirty years on, comped to a Panic! at the Disco show, sitting in my wheelchair, confused and needing desperately to pee. I recall something Johnston had told me earlier.

“Some of these people are -- older,” he’d said. “I don’t know if they’ve lost at gambling or I don’t know why they do that, but they comp them and they send them in to these showrooms to watch whoever’s playing, and these people could care less about a band like us.”

No doubt the main attraction is and always will be gambling. Phil Juliano, Executive Vice President of Entertainment for the Atlantic City Hilton, had told me so. “But we gotta break it up in some way. We gotta give you something more than just the gambling. Our customers have said, ‘It’s just too much. How long can I last? How long can I play? So give me some entertainment.’”

What is it like for a band that had thirteen gold and eleven platinum albums to be the casino’s time-out, its humanoid version of the free drink or the shiny red car being raffled off? What’s it like when a rock and roll act becomes essentially a sensory deprivation devise.

At first, Johnston had been reluctant to talk about the casino effect. But eventually he’d said, in a flattened tone betraying a cold stew of tour-exhaustion and gloom, “I’ll be honest with you, when I first heard “casino,” I thought, well, I guess we’ve lapsed into yesteryear here. But that really wasn’t the case. Now we’ll show up at a casino and we’ll see Huey Lewis, you’ll see all these other people who have been around almost as long as you have, or some of them as long. So everybody’s playing them.”

Misery does love company.

I know mine does. Fortunately, the house is full tonight. Looking at the elderly, and watching Johnston sweat so much that his once-monochrome t-shirt begins to look tie-died, I just can’t get certain oppressive thoughts out of my mind. Echoing in my head are the words of Phil Juliano, who’d told me that, indeed, 70% of tonight’s crowd would be comped. The Doobies can keep on rockin’ down the highway if they want, but people aren’t necessarily going to drive a long way just to see them.

I begin to wonder if the casinos are a step up from the fairgrounds, after all. What could be worth the valiant fight Johnston is putting up on stage? (When the Doobies pull out “Listen to the Music” or, especially, “Black Water,” much of the crowd does finally leave its seats for a few bars.)

Ever the realist, Phil Juliano puts it all in perspective for me with a kind of casinorock parable.

“Last week we had Peter Frampton,” he says, “and at his height, what was he doing? And you know what, the music was just as good, and he was there and people still wanted to see him and you know, he needed to make a pay.”

Depression: Eddie Money

“Soon as he does that “Two Tickets to Paradise” I’m gonna get the fuck out of here,” says the big lady with the southern accent. Tonight, Eddie Money is playing the smoky Silverton Casino in Las Vegas, far, far off the Strip.

It’s NASCAR weekend in Vegas. I feel thin. Everywhere, latently suicidal racing fans cultivate their coming coronaries with Starbuck’s mochas, ice cream sundaes, cigarettes and twelve-packs of Bud Light for the scant two hours a day they’ll spend in their rooms not gambling or eating ice cream or watching car races bloodlustily.

For a break, some have come to see Eddie Money. Tonight’s music venue is a few steps outside the actual casino, under a big white tent with folding chairs lined up, like you might find at a good-sized wedding reception or, better yet, pitched over the grave site at the funeral of a civic leader.

Although there does seem to be a sense of happy anticipation among the people filing in, when the show begins, I see a guy in a Hawaiian shirt leaves his cell phone ear piece in; he appears to be talking to someone. I hear a couple behind me chatting, and one says, “Well, you gotta think there was a time when Eddie Money was playing big arenas.” That would have been brief and over twenty years ago. Now he does 150 shows a year at small theaters, county fairs, second-rate casinos where second rate gamblers congregate, smoke and howl and hit on death.

Under the tent, a restless indifference is demonstrated by a tremendous amount of mulling around even as the show begins. I’d read that Money’s substance abuse problems were under control, but tonight, as soon as he takes the stage, he head-butts the microphone.

To his everlasting credit (at least in my book), Money opens with his big hit, thus risking that the fat lady and fifty percent of the crowd will be out of here in five minutes. Also risking that the scores of casual attendees who show up a few minutes late will never get the payout they seek.

With his dark suit and long gray face, Money resembles a slovenly undertaker, or a drunken widower, perhaps, especially when he begins reminiscing about the long lost days of Gilda Radner and John Belushi, with whom he made his mild fame back in the late Seventies. He quickly launches into a song called, rather forlornly, “I Wanna Go Back,” which is also the title of his latest record, full of cover songs.

He is not alone in that sentiment. Casino rock shows are moist with a desperate retrograde energy. This is not the kind of retro that celebrates the rediscovery of something of value from the past, that freshens a revered old-fashioned look or sound with a touch of modern sensibility. No, it's a retreat, plain and simple.

The average visitor to Vegas is between forty and fifty years old. It's at an age when we become increasingly disaffected by whatever pop-cultural movements have displaced the ones we felt a part of, and when some lives seem gradually to become dominated by a perilous combination of disposable income, ennui, and the ever-more darkly looming specter of death. It seems the folks here at the Silverton have come in search of easy nostalgia and a casino money exchange to make them feel alive.

Denial: Styx

If the Doobie Brothers and Eddie Money had arrived at those classic stages of grief known as anger and depression, Styx was somewhere on a different stage altogether. Indeed, the guys in Styx, gathered in a cramped office somewhere above the gambling floor at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, are a very upbeat crew. And why not? As casino bands go, Styx is doing pretty well. Compared to the Silverton’s wedding tent or the AC Hilton’s black box, tonight’s venue is a small rock and roll paradise (a “Paradise Theater,” you might say), right in the fibrillating heart of the Strip.

I’d asked to talk to them because I wanted to know if they felt they still had something to contribute to music. Or were they simply padding their retirement funds? And if so, were they sad about it? Were they haunted by the pop music reaper?

It’s an awkward line of questioning but their positive attitudes ease the mood in the tiny room where we meet.

“The nature of this city,” says Styx bass player Ricky Phillips, “is it’s claimed by a different generation, starting back with what we consider the Rat Rack. They claimed it for probably the first 25 or 30 years. But once that petered out, rock is the music of the last half of the Twentieth Century. So it’s claimed the city. This is the place to be if you play rock music.”

So at first, in the hours before the show, I find myself struck by the band’s resilience and optimism in the face of all that is dwindling away: fame, money, crowds, time, the muse. Styx had five platinum albums between 1976 and 1980. Of course, by 1981, with their mini rock operas and melodramatic stage shows, they were already the coughing dinosaur after the meteor hit.

Their last record was a collection of needless cover versions of rock classics like “I am the Walrus” and “Manic Depression,” that sounded rather like the work of some privileged kids whose graduation present had been an afternoon at Muscle Shoals. The thing is, I understand the notion of running out of gas and still having so many miles to go. What can you do but grab the gas can, hang your head, and start walking? In the case of the casino bands, you’re a musician, music is how you feed your family, get your girls, accumulate any sense of self-worth. The casinos are now the first, best fuel you come to.

Sure, says best-known Styx member, guitarist/singer Tommy Shaw, at first, after years of mega-stardom, it was strange to play casinos, especially to find out that the night before they’d played the Aladdin, Connie Francis had covered their hit song “Fooling Yourself” on the very same stage. But now, Vegas is a “rock and roll” city. “Everybody wants to come to Las Vegas,” says Shaw.

I think about the morbid cloud of failure I’d sensed hovering over the Money and Doobie Brothers shows and walk away from our interview marveling at the profound nature of Shaw’s denial.

But then, just before the show, where the rows of slot machines spill into the ticket line, I spy Styx belt buckles and Styx t-shirts in abundance. I meet Styx-enthusiast Larry leaning on a slot machine, wearing a faded Styx tour t-shirt. He’s a little gloomy because tonight Styx won’t be doing the song “Castle Walk,” since it belongs to estranged member Dennis DeYoung. He says that he expects -- he requires for his own satisfaction -- Styx to play every guitar solo exactly like it is on the record. “Should be note-for-note every time.”

Inside the faux-honky-tonk House of Blues, I meet Chris and Mike, two 40-something guys with mullets who made the trek here from Northern California just to see Styx. They proceed to tell me everything they know about the band. And they know everything: Styx doesn’t have too many power songs; Tommy wrote “Renegade”; “Crystal Ball” has feeling and separates Styx from “all that new fucking bullshit.” Chris tells me he hates rap, and it sounds as if he believes that rap is his only musical alternative to Styx.

I ask another fan, a longtime resident of Vegas I’ve met here, if she likes it that so many Seventies and Eighties bands come through. I think she does.

“I’ve seen War, Iron Butterfly, Edgar Winter, Eddie Money, Mountain, what’s left of CCR, Santana, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Kansas, Jethro Tull, Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon. I’ve seen Tesla and The Scorpions, KISS and Aerosmith, Ozzy, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks.”

I ask her to explain the draw. “Honestly, it’s because of the quality of music. Nowadays, nobody’s writing their own, nobody’s playing their own. It’s all computer generated.”

Which may have been true for about a month in 1982, and more importantly, may have been the boast an original Styx fan would have made during that synthesizer-dominated month when “Tainted Love” topped the charts. But overall, is just flat out ignorant. I actually think she wanted to backtrack on her answer as soon as she said it, but I also think part of her believed it, or wanted to believe it, as do, I’m sure, the likes of Larry and Chris and Mike.

Like so many people, these fans seem to have shut everything down in the earliest moment of its coolness. Take Larry: his mustache worked at 15, so it stays; his blown-dry hair worked senior year, and so it will always be blown dry; he has seen the beauty of the stone-washed jean, and will be wearing them in his grave. It’s the same way I feel about Cap’n Crunch. If we retain the superficial emblems of our youth, we can retain the deeper pleasures as well: promise, energy, potency.

When Styx takes the stage, the crowd crows. I can see the keyboardist’s little rock and roll wiener outlined against his taut-fitting jeans. By the second song, both guitarists appear to have panties hanging from the necks of their instruments. Unless they have surreptitiously pulled those panties out of their own pockets, receiving the silken little gifts must be awfully gratifying to a bunch of guys in or near their fifties, almost reason enough alone to play the casinos.

Of course, I may be naive about these things, never having had a pair of panties thrown at me in anything other than disgust. Still, the worship-factor -- and the chick-factor, in particular -- should not be underestimated when trying to figure out how this rock zombie uprising could be happening at all. The money is important for sure, but those palliative panties are why the band is here.

Someone onstage begins asking us, repeatedly, the burning rock and roll question, “Are you ready? R. U. Redd-ay?”

Yes, I am ready. I understand everything. I haven’t seen a case of denial this effective since the last Dick Cheney interview on Fox News. The fans are bitch-slapping the movement of time. The band is locked in a sweaty hand-hold with its cliff-dangling glory.

When Styx launches into the sugary opening bars of “Come Sail Away,” I see Chris and Mike dancing, swirling their hands up into the air like smoke, just as they might have done thirty years ago on acid. At one point I actually think they might kiss, and if they did, it might be the most death-defying act of the night.

Bargaining: Rick Springfield

The enviably delusional guys in Styx had told me that the Indian casinos were pretty plush, that the tribes had spent a lot of money on sound systems and dressing rooms. They had praised the Indian casinos for the relative remoteness of their locations. Morongo Indian Casino is a two-hour drive southeast of Los Angeles. You could do a show here and still do another one the next night in L.A. Nice of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to have arranged it that way.

Rick Springfield is playing the reservation tonight. Springfield has dual citizenship in the celebrity world: fame as a handsome soap opera actor and as a musician with two hit songs in forty years. He has recently returned to the set of General Hospital. Dr. Noah Drake.

Tonight’s venue is pit-like, circled by three VIP balconies all illuminated in red. It’s a bit like standing inside a shiny Christmas-tree bulb. Forever. I’ve been inside this place for two hours and there are no chairs and I can’t possibly be the only one whose varicose veins are starting to throb. This is an old, mostly female crowd, many of whom have been waiting in line to see Springfield since morning -- morning.

As the wait for Springfield tarries on, I begin to wonder if we are waiting for him or if he is waiting for us. It’s a good hour since he should have gone on, and the floor is only half full.

Scanning the venue, I see a guy and his wife up near the stage wearing matching Rick Springfield t-shirts. When I approach, he seems a little embarrassed to talk to me, as if he knows what I’m thinking, which is this: There are few things less proper for a man to accompany his wife or girlfriend to than a Rick Springfield concert. Maybe a bridal show. Eventually he cops to having seen Springfield four times.

Springfield finally takes the stage and the women explode. Not literally.

Springfield’s rote performance is clearly of a kind with the wooden acting and cheap production values of a soap opera, with a similarly casual attempt at verisimilitude. Shortly he is slinging his guitar between his legs, penis-style. He’s adept at it. He really nails that bromide. When he impales a blues song with a guitar solo meant to give the women the thrill of their lifetimes, he uses all the familiar blues solo moves: eyes closed, head back, head nodding and swaying.

Semi-feral women crowding the stage keep handing up their glasses of wine to Springfield, and I’m pretty sure they’re trying to get him drunk. Springfield takes a sip from each glass offered, passes it back into the crowd randomly, and then all the ladies fight over who will get to lick Rick’s saliva from the rim. Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for arrives, and Springfield removes his jacket to reveal his hard, round, delicious biceps. Squeals ensue.

When Springfield dons a Madonna headset and leaves the stage for the bar tops, a phalanx of early-middle-aged female fans, who might otherwise have been sitting home watching a Netflix movie with their middle-school-aged children, strive desperately for his crotch. There’s an almost masculine sense of sexual aggressiveness here.

There is also energy here, and I admire Springfield for his apparently earnest conviction that he is playing to a packed Madison Square Garden, and for his clear understanding that his clean-cut good looks are the show.

Indeed, as bad as the show is musically, I’m surprised to feel a growing sense of redemption as I watch lurching gangs of desperate women belly up to the bar he’s jumped on. It hits me that, while the Doobies and Money have stayed married for the sake of the children, but can’t hide their angst, Styx and Springfield have established a separate piece. They have discovered the only way to deal with the phantom limb of faded fame: scratch it like it’s still there. I begin to wonder if maybe the guy who has seen Springfield four times isn’t just a good husband, willing to accompany his wife on her “rock and roll experience.” Like Larry and Chris and Mike, they can go home and say they’ve been to a rock show again, just like when they were young. It’s the last good time.

Looking down on us from the other side of the stage, the bands are mostly complicit. They do what it takes, running through a tired litany of rock and roll clichés in order to stay in the panty game. The panties are bigger now, and they come in smaller numbers than they used to, but still, there they are: panties and a pay.

When Springfield finally sings, along with the crowd, “Jesse’s Girl,” I see two women who no doubt wish they were Jesse’s girl dancing with each other, bonding over Rick, who is only a few sexually-arousing feet away. The husband of one of them stands stock still, hands in his pockets, petrified he’ll be asked to join in, looking like he wishes he was dead. I admire him even as I think, You and me both, pal. We’ve reached the acceptance stage, even if some lucky bastards never will.