When new showroom listings come in, sometimes a name jumps out from among the usual suspects.

Seeing Gino Vannelli booked at the Suncoast next weekend provoked a double-take. He hasn't been here in a long time. Or has he? How could he not have been?

You might not understand this confusion if you weren't in school when "I Just Wanna Stop" was a slow-dance hit in 1978. On the surface, the Canadian singer was the Tom Jones of the disco era. Sultry barrelhouse voice, sexy power ballads. He even had a blown-out, Godzilla version of the Tom Jones 'fro, and album covers showing his shirt all unbuttoned to display his hairy chest.

In other words, a guy who could have written his own ticket on the Strip throughout the '80s. But Vannelli says he hasn't played here since an Aladdin concert in 1979. Instead, the gigs went to contemporaries who seemed less likely at the time to become Vegas perennials: Chicago, Styx and the Moody Blues among them.

"To put a show together built on the strength of my past? No can do," says the 54-year-old singer.

"I've been asked to play, but every casino wanted me to play like an oldies show," which he defines as "a revue kind of show of my 10 most known songs (played) like the record."

Vannelli offers a refreshing account of a road less traveled, including concerts with orchestras, big bands and solo piano. He spends half the year in Oregon, half in the Netherlands and has been trying to write a novel. It makes sense for those who listen carefully. Vannelli was as much Leonard Cohen as Tom Jones. Even his big dance hit "Black Cars" was a terse metaphor for the night people who moved to it: "Black cars look better in the shade."

"I've seen artists just get down on music and down on their lives because they keep living a groundhog life," he says. "The most formidable nemesis of artists is boredom. You stay interesting and the music stays interesting."

Getting trapped on the state fair circuit would have been "a terrible prison," he says. "You've got to get yourself out of that prison before it starts, before you build that prison. It takes a little courage to say no," he adds. "Some of the offers were very tempting."

His heirs may still have hope for an inheritance. One of the innumerable ways Las Vegas -- and the larger casino circuit -- has changed since 1978 is that it can bend to almost any artist's whim. If Aaron Lewis of Staind wants to do a solo acoustic concert, power to him.

Vannelli now says he's "happy to go into Vegas in a way that I feel comfortable," with a quartet playing "the tunes they know in a way they haven't heard before."

Perhaps it will be the first of many return visits from the one Canadian who didn't conquer the Strip.

Mike Weatherford's entertainment column appears Thursdays and Sundays. Contact him at 383-0288 or e-mail him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.