The Blind Leading the Deaf Through a Desert
Las Vegas —— Right now I am no longer in Las Vegas, but listening for the first time in three days to the new Beatles album, and just any one song on it tells me more about music, rock and roll, and the recording industry than I was able to find out in two days and two nights at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, attending and speaking at the annual Bill Gavin Radio Programming Conference, the biggest, most important and influential conference held each year in the record-radio business.
Attending were at least a dozen presidents of multi-million dollar corporations — some of them representing multi-billion dollar corporate superstructures —— disc jockeys and promotion men in huge numbers and of all sorts, the programmers of the big radio stations, and so on. In general, record biz hoopla. (“Hi, my name is Dump Deegan, swing shift jock at WSHT in Baltimore and we’re just doing the underground thing late at night like we really dig it, but yuh hafta unnerstand the boss doesn’t dig the music but we’re trying to turn him on.”)
Kind Reader, forgive the first-person viewpoint, but there is simply no other way to chart this little trip —— certainly not in any logical sequence — than through the formless and shifting ego. One wants to foreswear the ego unless one happens to be as good as Norman Ego; Tom Wolfe, you were right! You must get back to Vegas just for a day to dig a new casino built since you were there: the Circus Circus Casino, an electrographic neon sign artist gone wild, not just in designing the sign, but the entire fucking casino. All three floors of it. You just have to get back.
Las Vegas is where the record-radio industry goes to have its annual Bill Gavin Convention; or it is where Bill Gavin, a radio programming consultant, chooses to have it, and it is an amiable locale to everyone. The top record companies hold their own conventions elsewhere, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Nassau, San Francisco, or in scattered parts of the country —— but the most important of them all is in Las Vegas and that’s where it’s at.
Not everyone prefers to be in Vegas, but that is where they are, nonetheless. The Hotel Riviera was mercifully free of Muzak but also totally devoid of rock and roll, the most important item on the agenda. Except for a handful of executives heavily devoted to the creative end of the record business, particularly A&R, and an even smaller handful functioning in non-business music capacities (only one or two actual performers) the conference atmosphere and approach was most like a meeting of washing machine and refrigerator distributors and manufacturers.
There were only two variations on their style: for one thing it was integrated and there was more than a fair proportion of black people, mainly disc jockeys, promotion men, middle-level record people and an occasional vice president. The other was the style itself: carefully trimmed reddish sideburns, yellow-tinted sunglasses in the wide-lens, gold-wire rim fashion, moccasins and/or buckskin jackets with fringes, all of it so neatly done.
Three other basic molds included cigar chewers and sports shirts (generally the owners of local record distribution operations and old time record men); very dignified pin-striped sports suits and white shirts (the highest executives of the biggest of companies, the ones with the fantastic amounts of personal money to spend and a corporate style based on that assumption) and the hip people, whose styles of clothes and dress ranged from the well-heeled to the not so well-heeled, all of them identifiable by the excess of their unmanicured, long or longish hair, the wildness of their eyes and their general weird and strange behavior.
I arrived on a Friday night, as the talk I was invited to give, on the FM radio panel, was scheduled for Saturday. The room I had at the Hotel Riviera where the conference was headquartered, was an orgy of plasticized antiqued pieces, done in olive green and brown drab flaked with gold; long mirrors and plastic-leafed bushes in front of royal green artificial silk curtains. The bath-room, right off a separate dressing room, contained an ice box and a wall-telephone next to the shower.
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