Viva Las Vegas rocks around the clock

“They didn’t have a name for it back then,” Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Wanda Jackson said from the stage in the same ballroom Saturday night. “It wasn’t rockabilly. It wasn’t rock ’n’ roll yet.”

There were two basic types of crowds here: older folks for whom this was the music of their youth, the sound of their high school sock hops, not a subculture. And there was the younger set, the ladies with flowers in their hair and plenty more tattooed on their arms and legs, the fellas who wore black leather jackets and thick denim even in the Saturday afternoon heat of the outdoors car show. For them, rockabilly is a way of life, plenty of them getting into the music through a punk rock filter (hence the tats, piercings and Dwarves and Misfits T-shirts spotted in the crowd).

Together, they swarmed The Orleans, where the only thing harder to find than an empty parking space was a vacant bar stool this weekend.

This bridging of generation gaps took place both on stage and off.

On Saturday at the car show, Brenda Lee, a spry 72-year-old who notched her first hit, a cover of Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” when she was but 10 years old in 1956, aired that song with elbow-throwing panache, still firmly in possession of a voice that seems much bigger than her 4-foot-9 frame would allow.

A couple of hours later in the main ballroom, an 18-year-old, Jack Sanchez, frontman for Johnny Devil & His Sins, also paid tribute to Williams, his voice sounding like Williams’ preserved in amber as his guitarist ripped leads from his knees.

The whole weekend was a mix of traditionalism and slight tweaks: Psychobilly favorite Reverend Horton Heat played a more straightforward rockabilly set than followers of the band may be accustomed to, mostly favoring smooth, fleet-fingered jams like a slick take on Ronnie Dawson’s “Rockin’ Dog” and a collaboration with Deke Dickerson on his “Mexicali Rose.” They also tore through a couple of their largely instrumental numbers, setting the stage for the band that followed, Los Straitjackets, who bobbed their luchador-masked heads in unison as they took Dick Dale’s six-string handiwork to the next exponent.

On Friday, SoCal’s Lonely Stars delivered a rockabilly take on Morrissey’s “Jack the Ripper.” The next evening, Jackson, her voice still pinprick-sharp, spun tales of where the music came from, sharing stories of hitting the road with Elvis on her first tour and making out with him at the drive-in.

“Yes, he was a good kisser,” she acknowledged before turning in a stirring rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel,” transforming The Orleans into just that for a minute or two.

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.