It’s Saturday night, the grand opening of “Wasted Space” inside the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, and Gavin Rossdale is clearly not pleased with his new role as a Vegas lounge singer.
You can certainly see it on Mr. Stefani’s face as he walks onto the stage, and if you listen very closely, you can hear the sound of his soul being crushed. Tonight, as it turns out, will be an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence that says, “Your days of crooning to a stadium full of captivated 16-year-olds are over, dude.” Sure, a lot of those same girls are here for this show tonight, but their subscriptions to Tiger Beat ran out more than a while ago.
To be fair, it very well could have been Jesus on stage, beatin’ on a bongo and singing “Glycerine”, and it would have made no difference. People would have kept on talking and drinking, and that one guy would have still been yelling out and flailing his arms around in seizure-like fashion trying to get Dave Navarro’s attention from across the bar.
Now granted, in that situation, I’m fairly certain Jesus wouldn’t have stopped his set to berate the guy like Gavin did. I’m guessing he’d probably just decide to drop the big fishes and loaves thing from the encore.
The fact is; it’s a Vegas nightclub. Sure, Carey Hart’s new place bills itself an “anti-club”. And yes, shouting over deafening rock music is far better than screaming through brain-numbing hip-hop beats. But let us not forget that in Vegas, the party is the thing.
Later tonight, when Camp Freddy takes the stage and acknowledges that they are essentially the evening’s featured lounge act, and that everybody should just continue with their apathetic behavior toward the entertainment, it becomes clear that Wasted Space just became the flash-point for the Vegas ethos in the new millennium.
Because as much as it seemed even a few years ago that Ozzy and Sharon might end up here in Vegas as the new Steve and Eydie, it looks like Navarro is already well on his way to becoming our Sinatra.
Now if Gavin would only ask Wayne Newton if he ever had to tell the crowd to shut up, we can all move on and enjoy the party.
Danke Schoen.
Over the five years that the Big Dumb Show ran on the mighty X-103 in Indianapolis, we welcomed hundreds of talented people to be guests on the show.
Okay, sure the i-pod is a pretty cool way to listen to your favorite music, but had Steve Jobs and the design guru’s at Apple actually put some thought into the thing, they might have beaten the Big Dumb Show to the most revolutionary entertainment device in history, the Thigh-Fi Personal Stereo.
