The father of rock ’n’ roll demanded his baby — or else you were going to pay.Chuck Berry had a thing for the Fender Dual Showman Reverb amplifier, which revved the engine on his hard-motoring sound like a 454 big block powering a muscle car.
If he showed up to a gig without one ready to go, the promoter had better start sweating — and digging into his or her pockets. Tom Ingram knows all about it.
“It was in his contract,” recalls the founder of the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend, who booked Berry in 2010. “It said that he had to have this certain type of guitar amp, and if that amp wasn’t on the stage when he got to the stage, you had to give him $2,000 to perform. I realized that all the stories about him, how he was difficult and he would demand cash before going on the stage, wasn’t a lie.”
And so Ingram got two of those Fender amps — just in case.
“He walked to the stage, he looked, and a big smile came on his face,” Ingram recalls. “He realized that we were taking him seriously.
“I remember standing at the side of the stage just watching and thinking to myself, ‘I booked Chuck Berry,’ and I couldn’t believe it,” he continues. “And he turned out to be really nice to deal with. He told us how well he felt he’d been looked after. That was a big deal for us.”
‘The big daddy of rockabilly shows’
There have been plenty more big deals for Ingram: In addition to Berry, he also booked fellow founding architects of rock ’n’ roll Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, both of whom played their last-ever Vegas shows at Viva in 2013 and 2018, respectively.
Also in 2018, he lured The Stray Cats out of retirement for their first show in nine years.
Speaking of retirement, now it’s Ingram’s turn (sort of): After nearly three decades of helming Viva Las Vegas, this will be the last year he’s overseeing the city’s longest-running music festival, having sold the event to a new owner.
But what a run he’s had: Since launching Viva in 1997 at the Gold Coast, drawing around 1,200 fans to its first outing before later relocating to The Orleans, the festival has become the biggest rockabilly event in the country, a four-day booze and pomade slicked wormhole back to the sights and sounds of the ’50s and ’60s, where both the threads and the rock ’n’ roll are strictly vintage.
The event, set for Thursday through April 12, doesn’t just take place at The Orleans, it takes over. Swallowing the off-Strip hotel-casino whole in a gaping maw of tattoos, Pabst, pompadours and pasties.
There are fashion presentations and burlesque performances in the showroom; a vintage car show in the parking lot on Saturday; dozens of acts performing in various ballrooms and in the pub where the music never stops; and pool parties during the day.
“It’s certainly the big daddy of rockabilly shows. It’s the wildest,” Eddie Angel, guitarist for long-running instrumental surf/rockabilly favorites Los Straitjackets, said in a past interview with Neon after performing at Viva on numerous occasions. “We play a lot of rockabilly festivals in Europe, and they’re good, but that’s the biggest one, that’s for sure.”
What has made Viva’s enduring success especially remarkable is that there was no local precedence for a music festival of its kind — or any other kind, really.
“When we started there was nothing,” Ingram notes. “In Vegas, the entertainment was for people in their 60s — there wasn’t entertainment for younger people. But it had 24-hour licenses, and that was a big attraction for my crowd, because if they go away for the weekend, it’s like a vacation. They want to party all night, and you can’t do that in other parts of the country.
“And then there’s hotels, there’s places to stay,” he continues. “To me, it seemed like a logical decision. And everyone was like, ‘You can’t do that; you can’t do rockabilly in Vegas.’ I said, ‘Yes, I can.’ ”
‘This is how it has to be’
There he is, standing tall on stage in a natty blue suit and shades, receiving the key to Las Vegas from then-Mayor Carolyn Goodman.
It’s April 16, 2022, aka “Tom Ingram Day,” as Goodman proclaims outside The Orleans during the 25th anniversary of Viva Las Vegas, which became front-page news in Ingram’s hometown of Portsmouth, England.
“They had photos of me around the title of the newspaper,” Ingram recalls. “My mum walked into a shop, and there’s this whole row of photos of me on this paper. She was very, very impressed.”
And understandably so, as her son had come a long way since first becoming enraptured by the sounds of the ’50s as a teenager, working as a DJ and promoter in the London rockabilly scene beginning in the late ’70s before relocating to California in 1996.
When he launched Viva Las Vegas a year later, his business plan was simple: Throw the kind of party he’d buy a ticket to experience.
“My criteria was basically to organize events that I would pay to go to,” he explains.
This meant growing Viva into a sizable gathering that’s drawn 20,000 fans some years, but never allowing it to get so big that the sense of community at the heart of the fest becomes compromised.
“Selling out all the time doesn’t mean that you need to move to a bigger place,” he says. “And so that was never on the table, because I just said, ‘This is large enough.’ ”
Ingram was also adamant about being true to the scene.
“I’ve seen other shows that have started out with rockabilly, and then they start adding other types of music, and those festivals are not around anymore,” he observes. “They failed because they alienated their initial audience, who didn’t want punk bands, didn’t want psychobilly.
“I’ve really resisted making that change,” he continues. “People have asked me all the time, and I said, ‘No, this is how it has to be.’ Some people were a bit disappointed, but you know, it’s been 29 years …”
Local love
Shanda Ratto wasn’t actually serenaded by celestial beings upon taking her initial steps into Viva Las Vegas a few decades ago — it just felt like it.
“I remember arriving and seeing it for the first time,” recalls the frontwoman for Vegas throwback rockers Shanda & the Howlers, “and I can say it was, like, heaven’s parting and the angel horns playing, like, ‘I found my people.’ ”
Andrew Himmler knows the feeling.
The Vegas guitarist first went to Viva as a teenager before co-founding nationally touring rockabilly act The Delta Bombers in 2008.
They performed at the fest’s inaugural pool party the very next year.
“We played for exactly $0,” Himmler chuckles. “But it was a great thing for our band.”
The Delta Bombers have been booked at Viva numerous times since, including appearances on the main stage at the Saturday car show.
One of Viva’s enduring legacies is the pronounced impact that the fest continues to have on the local music scene, spotlighting Vegas talent on an international stage.
“There’s so many great local acts here,” Ratto says, “and when Viva does include local bands, it’s really exciting to go and see your friends up there, you’re up there, and it’s just like, ‘This is amazing. We’re part of the club.’ I just think it brings more flavor to an already rich, diverse culture.”
As Himmler notes, Viva helped establish The Delta Bombers as one of the biggest acts of their kind ever to come from Vegas.
“It lent legitimacy to a whole lot of bands who otherwise wouldn’t have it,” he says. “Viva Las Vegas was able to put 10,000 or 20,000 people in front of a surf band or a rockabilly band that would never dream of something like that. It really gave us, The Delta Bombers, tons of legitimacy as a band, because Viva Las Vegas was a prime festival that was on everybody’s radar.
“I don’t really think a band our size was ever meant to make a career out of it,” he continues, “but because of the special community that the rockabilly and the vintage scene brought, we were really able to get away with murder. And Viva Las Vegas is a really good example of that. Everybody’s a somebody: Everybody’s got that super cool car, those super cool clothes, those super cool records. It’s just a really, really strange, amazing thing.”
‘The whole festival thing’
Now, back to the notion that he’s retiring — well, Ingram is not really having it.
While he’ll be passing the Viva torch to new owner Robbyn Bukowski, aka Audrey DeLuxe, who’s worked with Ingram for years organizing the burlesque portion of the festival and more, he intends to pivot to a new endeavor: Ivox+, an independent streaming service for film, TV and more.
“It’s going to have a lot of old movies and old TV shows, but it’s also going to have a lot of content that we make ourselves,” Ingram explains. “Interviews, documentaries — we’ve got loads of stand-up comedy, loads of music stuff. It’s going to be very different to anything else out there.”
In the meantime, Ingram can reflect on the impact that Viva has had in laying the foundation for Vegas to blossom into an unexpected destination market for music fests, which now spans multiple genres, including nü metal and hard rock (Sick New World), electronic dance music (Electric Daisy Carnival), punk and emo (Punk Rock Bowling and When We Were Young), blues (The Big Blues Bender), hitmakers galore (iHeartRadio Music Fest), reggae (Reggae in the Desert) and more.
“I’ve often felt that it was the event that started the whole festival thing in Vegas,” Ingram says. “I’m not saying that someone else wouldn’t have come up with it later — probably wouldn’t have been very long — but there weren’t people doing weekend events in America at all. There was just one rockabilly event in Denver, and that was it.”
As Ingram wraps up his Viva Las Vegas tenure, he’ll be in the house as usual, albeit with one notable difference: After nearly three decades of throwing a party that he was never fully able to partake in, he’s going to try to have a little fun this time around.
“One of my ambitions in life has actually been for me to enjoy Viva Las Vegas without having to run it,” he laughs. “I’ll still be there, but enjoying myself, making up for the last 29 years.”
Contact Jason Bracelin at [email protected] or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.
Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend
The city’s longest-running music festival returns Thursday through April 12 at The Orleans and includes dozens of bands, burlesque performances, a car show, pool parties, dance classes, a fashion show and much more. Four-day passes are $240 if purchased in advance, but single-day tickets are available (prices vary). For tickets and schedule information, visit vivalasvegas.net.