I know there would be a Sonny King without Las Vegas.

But now that he has left his final stage, I wonder whether there would be a Vegas without Sonny King.

Not the railroad town-turned-resort city. Not the million-plus metropolis brimming with so much energy and so many boomtown-related maladies.

The Vegas of the mind, the neon-festooned place where the Rat Pack once ran the streets and the boys hung out on the Q.T.

Sonny, who died Friday at age 83, helped invent the Vegas of no cover charges and two-drink minimums and over-the-top, on-till-dawn entertainment. There were some before him, some after, some with fresher jokes, many with better voices. But nobody sold the whole package like Sonny. He reminded me of a veteran pitcher with no fastball but an endless variety of curves and sliders.

Long before Las Vegas was marketed as the hook-up capital of the world, Sonny King and his contemporaries helped make Vegas the happening place in the middle of nowhere.

Of course, most often it's Sonny's man Frank Sinatra who gets top billing in the Vegas image-making department. Elvis was on the scene, too. Tony Bennett still makes it happen here. They're all important characters, but saying they made the town is too easy.

It's the Sonny Kings of the Strip lounges and opening showroom acts who pumped the energy onto Las Vegas Boulevard every night. It was the lounges of the neon Vegas -- not the showrooms -- that created a buzz all the way to sunrise. In the years Sonny was King, the lounges were the hot nightclubs of their generation.

"It was a wild town, but it was a beautiful wild town," Sonny once said with a genuine sense of reverence.

He wasn't alone, of course. Dozens of hot duos, funnymen and sexy song stylists kept the suckers awake till all hours chasing the endless party. But Sonny's amazing energy and work ethic placed him at the top, beginning with his first appearance at the Sahara's Casbar Lounge in 1955 and through all his years as the warm-up act for Jimmy Durante.

It was at the Bootlegger Bistro on the end of the Strip where they used to bury the bodies that Sonny got his second wind at an age most guys are sucking oxygen. Two nights a week, often with the zany Blackie Hunt beside him, Sonny lit up the room with jokes and reminiscences and a voice that brought old Vegas guys and dolls to tears.

"There are a million people with voices better than mine, maybe 10 million," Sonny said in an interview with me for KVBC-TV, Channel 3. "But when you get on stage, your body language extends to the audience. I learned that from Jimmy Durante."

No night at the Bootlegger was complete without a tribute to Frank and Dean. Sonny roomed with Dean and helped put him together with Jerry Lewis.

"They had a plaque on Room 616," he recalled. "That was our room at the Bryant Hotel. And the plaque said, 'This room was once occupied by Dean Martin and Sonny King, who never paid rent.' "

Sonny played a lot of hotel weddings to pay the rent.

"We had one couch, which would pull out," he recalled. "And our manager was there. And they would sleep on the couch, and I would sleep on the three pillows on the floor. The next week, Dean would sleep on the pillows and I would sleep on the couch.

"And that's why we have bad backs."

Ah-cha-cha.

That was Sonny.

Young punks called him a relic, but in the audience, you'd often see the best entertainers from the new Vegas watching the master work the audience. Clint Holmes and the Scintas often acknowledged Sonny's place in the pantheon of performers with neon in their blood.

"It's a wonderful feeling to be able to pass on what you know," Sonny said. "Because, who the hell is going to find out what you did after you're gone?"

Sonny King will be remembered whenever we talk about the inventors of Vegas.

It's just too bad he won't be available to emcee his memorial service.

No one could work a crowd better, and he always loved playing to a full house.

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0295.