Las Vegas grows, record labels shrink, but rock stars still emerge

Would you rather be a rock star in the era of a mature city or a mature record industry?

It wasn't a choice for either the band Slaughter or Imagine Dragons. Not like they could choose their time. Imagine's frontman Dan Reynolds was 3 years old when Slaughter's "Up All Night" charted in 1990.

And Slaughter frontman Mark Slaughter was just turning 5 when a hot Caesars Palace lounge act, Sonny Charles and The Checkmates, put "Black Pearl" on the charts in the summer of 1969.

Geography aside, it was a reminder of pop culture's endless renewal cycle to witness Imagine's "very special day," as a thrilled Reynolds called the band's main stage headline spot at downtown's Life Is Beautiful fest last weekend. He even stepped the crowd through a roll call of his grade school (Gray), middle school (Kenny Guinn) and high school (Bonanza).

Six days later and about six blocks away, Chaparral High grad Slaughter returned for a far more modest outdoor show at the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center.

On one hand, the contrast was a reminder of the inevitable flow of time and the music business. Even within Chrysalis Records, "you could feel the waning start" after the band's second album, says Dana Strum, Slaughter's Las Vegas-based member and chief spokesman.

"They were always on the lookout: 'What's the next new trend?' And we were like, 'Wait a minute, we barely got going here.' "

Chrysalis is defunct now, just another relic of the days when a label could make you and then leave you hanging without a social-media lifeline.

At the 1991 American Music Awards, Slaughter remembers telling the other band members, "Remember, this may never happen again. And for so many people in the music industry it doesn't. And for us it did not, either."

But what could be true of any two bands of two generations has a different layer here in Las Vegas.

Slaughter had a double-platinum album when it was still rare to grow up here. Strum remembers radio announcers introducing their songs along the lines of, "Here comes Slaughter from, believe it or not, Las Vegas, Nevada."

"They would almost say it kind of cheeky," Strum remembers. "Everybody thought Vegas was purely about Wayne Newton, or Sinatra or the old-school entertainers."

Clark County's population was around 709,000. The Mirage had just opened as the first new-era casino, and the housing explosion was just beginning. "Vegas was completely discounted as a place to either live or make music from," Strum says.

At least that wasn't true here in town. Las Vegas went crazy for its breakout rock stars.

But in 1969, the Clark County population was closer to 274,000. How many rock stars had it birthed by then? It was up to a couple of polished lounge acts to give the city any claim to pop currency.

The one-hit wonder Spiral Starecase hailed from Sacramento, Calif., but frontman Pat Upton wrote "More Today Than Yesterday" in his hotel room at the Flamingo, where the group was an entrenched draw (originally known as the Flydallions).

The same year brought "Black Pearl," a black-empowerment anthem that Phil Spector produced for Charles and The Checkmates, which hit No. 13 for Billboard.

"We were working at Caesars when we recorded it, flying on our days off back to L.A.," Charles recalls.

It should have excited the city to have new music breaking out of the Strip. Frank Sinatra was on the charts with "My Way" that same spring, but everyone expected it from him.

Instead, "Nobody really made anything of it here in Vegas," Charles said. "It was a big hit everywhere else. Vegas at that point was show tunes and standards and all that stuff. We were just a lounge band that did R&B."

Charles takes some of the blame, too. "We were a show group just doing cover songs. We were covering everybody else," he says. "We'd throw our song in as just one of the songs in our show. We didn't make a big deal out of doing our song. It was a big mistake. We should have done that."

Neither the Checkmates nor Starecase were Vegas born — Charles is from Indiana — and both bands considered the Strip more a workplace than a home. "If you got a record deal you became a national act, and you moved to L.A. where you could be involved in more stuff," Charles says of the path he chose.

Now? You can complain about traffic and suburban sprawl starting to spread again, but at least figure 2 million people increases the odds for more hometown heroes.

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.