Music, fashion, cars and retro fun mark Las Vegas rockabilly gathering
What’s rockabilly?
It begins, first and always, with the music. Then, it’s classic cars and retro fashions that your mother might have worn if your mother were really hip in her youth, and tattoos and pinup models and burlesque, and an attitude, a swagger, a cool that comes without even trying.
And, over the weekend, rockabilly was decidedly Vegas, too, when the 19th annual Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend played The Orleans.
From Thursday through Sunday, rockabilly enthusiasts could listen to classic tunes from Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran and other rockabilly pioneers, dance from morning until night to DJs and live bands playing classic and neo-rockabilly tunes, check out the event’s signature classic car show and attend a roster of other events that included the impossible-to-resist “Burlesque Bingo.”
And that doesn’t even cover the weekend’s more impromptu manifestations of the rockabilly lifestyle, such as the couple — he in a button-down shirt and jeans, she in a shiny dress that she might have worn to her prom — dancing, all by themselves, along a walkway near the hotel’s pool.
Newbies could check out a vendor area where exhibitors were selling T-shirts, dresses, sweaters, jewelry and other accoutrements of the rockabilly lifestyle.
Attendees could buy rockabilly classics on CD, LP or vinyl 45, and then learn what to do with their new tunes by attending a jive dance class.
So what is this thing that everybody came to celebrate? First, rockabilly is the music, an infectious, lively mix of ’50s rock ‘n’ roll, country and western, rhythm and blues, western swing and whatever else its pioneers figured they could work with.
It came to be known — not always in a complimentary way — as “rockabilly,” a mash-up of “rock” and “hillbilly.”
And from that foundation of rockabilly music, rockabilly evolved into a lifestyle that incorporates the cars, the burlesque, the pinups, the fashions and the dances.
“What happens is, the term ‘rockabilly’ now is used to describe a scene,” says Tom Ingram, the event’s organizer.
However, both the scene and the event remain rooted in the music.
“The music is first, and everything else we do falls within the boundaries of this type of music,” Ingram says. “For example, the cars at the show all have to be pre-1964 cars. So if you want to spend a fortune making a ’50s car high-tech, we’ll turn you away.”
Urla Hill of San Jose, Calif. says her introduction to the rockabilly scene began with seeing women rockabilly enthusiasts at car shows.
“I bought a ’57 Thunderbird and I started going to car shows,” she says. “I was like, ‘You guys dress like that all the time?’ All these women walking around, I couldn’t believe how beautiful they were.”
“Then I just started kind of getting into buying the clothes, and then I joined a rockabilly website on Facebook,” Hill says, and that tipped her off to Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend.
She and friend Kay Lymon of Fort Worth, Texas, attended their first weekend here in 2014, made it again this year and already have their rooms booked for next year.
Mike Wright of Salt Lake City says he’s been attending the event for about 10 years.
“We’re into the cars and the rockabilly music and the fashions, the whole lifestyle,” he says, adding that, for him, part of the appeal is that the ’50s “were, like, a simpler time.”
Even Wright’s 14-month-old son, Nash — “Like the old car” — got into the spirit, taking in the weekend in a stroller that Wright remodeled to resemble a ’50s hot rod, flashy green paint and all.
Read more from John Przybys at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com and follow @JJPrzybys on Twitter.
