Famed rock band plays 1st Las Vegas show since ’88
When Sam Reid says his band has a history in Las Vegas, you need to dig deep to find it.
Like, really deep.
“I was scared when I saw the date when we last played Las Vegas,” Reid, keyboardist for Canadian rock band Glass Tiger, says during a Zoom chat. He then holds up a poster from a show from a time when posters helped sell tickets.
“OK, I don’t know if you can see that,” Reid continues. “But we were there in 1988, in support of Moody Blues.”
That was at the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts, today’s PH Live at Planet Hollywood.
Glass Tiger is back, finally, on Friday night, headlining The Space. This might be the longest time chasm between performances in Las Vegas ever covered by this scribe. But the band can still rock the house, led by original front man Alan Frew, churning out such hits as “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)” and “Someday.”
Both of those songs reached the top 10 in the U.S. Billboard charts.
The band’s long distance between Vegas gigs was not intended. Why such a lag?
“Well, I’ve often said that we’re the hardest-working, laziest band on the planet,” Frew says, a latecomer to the Zoom party. “We just have a strange way of doing things sometimes. One of the things I think we regret was that we left that big gap of time between us and America.”
Frew was also forced from the stage when he suffered a stroke in 2015, at age 58, while he was sleeping. He was deemed fully recovered three years later, writing out the lyrics to “Don’t Forget (Me When I’m Gone)” as part of his recovery.
“When you suffer something like that, you’re never the same. You’re always the person that had the stroke,” Frew says. “I’m sure even people that have gone through cancer, or heart attacks, experience this. But you just got on with it. I worked hard, as the guys know, in my recovery. I have a couple of wee issues with my neck and my hand. But other than that, touch wood, I’m doing OK.”
Glass Tiger is probably the biggest band to play The Space. It was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1987 and has won five prestigious Juno music awards in Canada.
It’s not too late for today’s Glass Tiger to carve out a relationship in the U.S.
“We’re kind of paying the price for the gap that we’ve left. Now we’re all old and stuff,” Frew says, grinning. “But we can kind of claw our way back, and we’re willing to come down and play a club. Hopefully someone says, ‘Come back again, do another show.’ If that can happen, we’ll build it.”
John Katsilometes’ column runs daily in the A section. His “PodKats!” podcast can be found at reviewjournal.com/podcasts. Contact him at jkatsilometes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @johnnykats on X, @JohnnyKats1 on Instagram.