Vegas is a pretty unreal place. One day in and I've been pretty well buzzed since landing yesterday. This is the tackiest, most hideous thing I've ever seen in daylight, but at night, it's inhumanly beautiful... well, that is if you can look past the drunken frat boys and fanny-packers stumbling around. It's the cubic zirconia of architecture- you can build whatever the hell you want as big as you want and as flashy as you want; reservations be damned! Because in the daylight, fake is fake, and it all looks pretty awful.

But... we're experiencing Vegas slightly differently. We actually came out for the massive Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender festival, which takes over the Orleans Hotel & Casino every spring (actually- it used to take over the Gold Coast. But whatever.)

I love rockabilly music, and I love old stuff- specifically mid-century stuff. I always have. I was obsessed with early Charlie Feathers and Jerry Lee Lewis sides in my early music development period, and have been far too into classic Universal horror flicks, Polynesian restaurants, gangster movies, and 1940's comic strips since I was about 11 years old. It's a fascinating time period to me, most probably because I never lived in it.

But "Rockabilly" now takes a lot of questionable turns. It incorporates punk dudes (which is cool- I used to be one), brawlers, swing kids, tiki philes, motor heads, and everything in between. The "scene" is less about music than ever, and all about the culture- Head to toes in tattoos, decked in vintage clothing, carefully coiffed, and may not know Carl Perkins from Carl Weathers.

But I find it entertaining as hell. I have no interest in meeting much of anyone- most of the folks I've met who are way into "the scene" are wholly self absorbed with very little to say. Of course, maybe my closed mind towards the whole shtick of the thing could stem from the fact that I was pluck bald by the age of 21... And there are nice people into this stuff, for sure. We've just barely started to get out and stretch our legs. That coupled with the fact that midwest+this stuff is a rare equation to come across.

But stereotypes is stereotypes, and it's a gas walking around, crowd watching in between bands and burlesque shows. For example- seeing the above image when entering the bathroom- one old fella who's been around since Elvis first threw on a black leather jumpsuit, surrounded by a bunch of interchangeable so-cal car dudes taking a whiz.

Then there was the fully-loaded cart that went past us, stocked with close to 30 cases of PBR, only to return like this a few minutes later:



Viva, Las Vegas indeed... It looks pretty good from here.