I've Been In Some Big Towns, and Heard Me Some Big Talk
“Vegas ain't what it used to be.” Around the poker table, at a bar, wherever you go in Las Vegas, you may run into one of these guys. “Old Vegas was much better,” they'll say. “The big companies have ruined it.”
Phooey, I say. Las Vegas is a fantasyland, a place you can't help but want to be. Old Vegas could never live up to the romance; New Vegas can.
“The buffet was five dollars,” they'll say. “The food was dirt cheap because they knew they would make it up at the tables.” So the buffet is fifteen dollars now; it's also more than three times (plus inflation) better. Everyone complained about the food in Old Vegas, but the food in New Vegas is world class, anything you want. The seafood is flown in fresh every morning from both coasts and Hawaii – where else can you find that?
“They took care of you in Old Vegas. Free food, even free rooms, if you were gambling a bit.” I've got news for you: they still do, but now you don't have enough money to qualify, so you get to see how the other half live.
I'm not old enough to remember Old Vegas first-hand, but let's be honest: Old Vegas wasn't about the food or the smoke-filled casinos. Frank Sinatra is gone; Elvis Presley is gone; Dean Martin is gone, and they're not coming back. No one is ever going to fill the void Sinatra left behind. You can find a guy who pretends to be Elvis, but it's not Elvis. You can probably find a guy who thinks he sounds like Dean Martin, but he doesn't, not really. Without the Chairman of the Board, the King, and the drunk, I'm not even sure what Old Vegas is supposed to mean.
Sure, give me a time machine, and the first place I'm going is the Sands in 1966 to see Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. Failing that, I have the recording, and that's all there is. What does it even matter whether the Sands is still there or not? There will never be another concert like that, or another performer like that.
Instead, go see Penn & Teller. Don't bother trying to replace the stuff we can't have back; Penn & Teller aren't Old Vegas, but on balance, they're better. So are the hotels, the restaurants, the bars, the staff, and the casinos you can walk through without choking on cigarette smoke – and I'll take faceless multi-national corporations like MGM Mirage over mob bosses any day.
You can ignore the generic nonsense. Every new hotel has to have an “ultra-lounge,” which I think is an invention of New Vegas: an ultra-lounge is a place where snotty, overdressed twenty-somethings can go and not be bothered by anyone interesting. But another way to look at it is that it's something that gets snotty twenty-somethings to go someplace we're not, so even that has an upside.
If you really want Old Vegas, you can still head out to Fremont Street, where the spirit of Old Vegas apparently lives on. The hookers will show themselves a good time at your expense; the bums will ask for spare change; you might step in vomit or get mugged. There are still casinos that reek of cigarette smoke, if that's what you really want, and hotels with reviews where the word “bedbugs” comes up alarmingly often. I guess I should have stayed long enough to take some pictures, but I didn't even park. Did I mention that the parking isn't free, like it is on the Strip, unless you get “validation” from one of the smoke-filled casinos, or park on streets you'd be afraid to walk down at night?
Instead, stay in a perfect hotel with great food, get one of those 100-ounce margaritas and take a walk on the Strip, see Penn & Teller, put a dollar in a slot machine, and sit around the poker tables with people of all kinds from all over the world, instead of coughing in a smoke-filled room full of old white guys and their mistresses.
The people lamenting the loss of Old Vegas are always white. If you were black, you weren't welcome in Old Vegas – unless you could sing or dance or play music, in which case you were welcome to stay out on the edge of town and commute in each night. Just make sure to use the back door. Frank Sinatra famously told Old Vegas that if Count Basie wasn't welcome to live in the same hotel, then maybe Vegas didn't need Sinatra at all. He had a bigger name than Las Vegas itself, and he used it to help end Old Vegas.
Good riddance to it.
