Las Vegas 1971

Nowhere Confidential

Las Vegas 1971

28 September 1971. I'm 21, driving my MGB from Los Angeles to Las Vegas -- my first trip to the miraculous mirage. Caesar's Palace and Circus Circus are the only mega-resorts on The Strip.

I smoked unfiltered Camels then -- not having entered my health-conscious phase. Robert Venturi and associates were just about to publish "Learning From Las Vegas", which I would read sometime in 1972. My Vegas education was about to begin.

Lang Clay, my companion on this cross-country jaunt, took the picture. He and I had budgeted approximately $20 each for the Vegas excursion -- a genuine extravagance on this journey, which often found us spending the night on the side of the road in sleeping bags. Our long hair was not considered amusing in many parts of the country we traveled through. We wore hand-crafted lace-up Indian moccasins which we'd bought in Los Angeles. We thought we were cool . . . and we were.

I was already on the road to nowhere -- I just didn't know it at the time.

Or did I?

Lang and I checked into the Sombrero Motel upon our arrival in Las Vegas. I don't remember how we found it, but it touted itself, probably on a billboard we saw driving into town, as the cheapest motel on The Strip. It was cheap, all right -- $9.99 a night. Lang and I shared a room and split the cost. It was on Las Vegas Boulevard, but it would take thirty years for development on The Strip proper to get anywhere near the Sombrero. It's still there, renamed the Pollyanna, closed, boarded up, surrounded by barbed wire, slated for demolition no doubt. It's now within walking distance of the southernmost megaresort on The Strip, the Mandalay Bay -- though it would be a long walk in the desert heat.

Some of us still remember its days of glory, when it was a clean and economical place to stop for a night on the road to nowhere . . .

It was in this low-rent strip-mall casino that I lost most of the $11 dollars I'd set aside for gambling in Las Vegas -- playing the nickel slots. Though the casino is now gone the strip mall is still there -- it houses a gigantic souvenir shop which is reputed to be the most reliable place in Vegas to pick up hookers.

This picture was probably taken early in the course of my Vegas gambling spree -- either that or I'm taking my losses with commendable equanimity. $11 was a lot of money to me at that time. For one thing it represented two nights in a bed at a motel rather than in a sleeping bag on the cold, hard ground at a highway rest stop.

Later, on this same journey, Lang and I were roused from our slumbers just before dawn on the shoulder of a country road in Virginia by cops who felt we needed to know right then and there that what we were doing was illegal. When we told them we were in the area to visit Monticello they let us off with just a warning but stayed and watched until we drove off towards Jefferson's home, to be sure we didn't try to go back to sleep on the venerable soil of the Old Dominion State. I like to think that Jefferson would have been impressed that dropping his name could still, in 1971, beat a vagrancy rap, but offended that representatives of the state felt obliged to intervene in the case of a couple of weary travelers sleeping by the side of a road.

The northern end of The Strip on a Tuesday night in September of 1971, looking south past the (now) soon-to-be-demolished Algiers hotel, built in 1953 and one of the last bastions of well-preserved retro-chic, and the Riviera, a grand dame of Rat Pack Vegas long since remodeled into over-priced mediocrity. This part of Las Vegas Boulevard is presently jammed with traffic 24/7, and much built up in the last 30 years. You get a sense from this view of the small-town feel of Las Vegas in a vanished time.

An exercise in photo-archaeology . . .

Using enhancement tools in Photoshop, Lang Clay has gotten a closer look at one of the marquees in one of the images he took of the Las Vegas Strip on our visit there in September of 1971.

Dean Martin was playing the Riviera.

I'm almost sorry to know this, since I'd kill to have seen Dino in Vegas, though we would have had to sell the MG to raise the cash for it at the time.

An alternate scenario has me winning big at the nickel slots, dropping a few thou at the Riviera roulette tables, getting comped to the show, catching the eye of one of the leggy showgirls in Dino's act, partying afterwards with her in Dino's suite, where Dino -- bombed out of his mind . . .

But I hear the sound of my last nickel disappearing into the one-armed bandit and know it's time to head back to the Sombrero motel to get a little sleep for the drive ahead. We're on the road to nowhere, after all, and hoping to make Texas tomorrow . . .

Leaving Las Vegas -- on the road to Hoover Dam. Lang and I did indeed make it as far as Texas that day . . .

Putting some unsorted papers and souvenirs into boxes for the move to Las Vegas I ran across an old Shell Guide To America -- a kind of cheap mini road atlas, probably a hand out. I happened to look at the publication date -- 1971 -- and it occurred to me that Lang and I might have used this atlas on the epic cross-country drive. Flipping through it I came to the page above -- the only marking in the book. Took a picture of the page with my cell phone camera and zapped it off to Lang, asking if he recognized the handwriting as his own. He did -- and what's more he remembered why he had so annotated the page, for the photograph below, which he attached:

Lang was engaged at the time in a project to take or have taken a photograph of himself every day for a year. He often included a sign with the date in the pictures. This one was taken the day after we left Las Vegas, somewhere in Texas. Lang missed a few score days in his project, but the two hundred and some photographs that remain still constitute an amazing record of his 21st year on the planet, and of mine as well, since our paths so often crossed or ran together at that time.

We were in Louisiana soon after this picture was taken, staying with an eccentric Catholic priest deep in the bayou country. That visit produced the images that led eventually to the screenplay that got me to Hollywood, "The King Lives".

© William Eggleston

We then drove to Memphis and stayed with a young photographer whose name we'd been given by a friend. The friend had neglected to inform the photographer that we were coming, but he put us up anyway and showed us his work, which changed both our lives, as it would change photography itself within a few years, when Bill Eggleston became the first photographer to have a one-man show of color images at the Museum Of Modern Art. His work has only grown in importance since then. When people in the distant future want to know what America looked like in the second half of the 20th Century, and the beginning of the 21st, they will study his photographs, as we studied them in plain astonishment back in 1971.

On a bright October afternoon during our brief visit Lang and I went out with Bill and his son Little Bill on a photographing expedition. We ended up at a lawn sale -- its surreally ordinary dislocations, odd pieces of furniture sitting out in the front yard, attracted Bill's attention, as did this kid with his bike on a sidewalk. I'd almost forgotten this experience, and certainly didn't process it intellectually at the time, but it must have given me a lot of insight into Eggleston's images as I studied his work with greater and greater care in the years ahead.

The photographs Lang took on that day are precious to me, and have become extraordinary documents of Eggleston at work before the world took note of his vision.

BILL EGGLESTON SOME YEARS LATER

Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Louisiana, Memphis -- all became important way stations on the greater road to nowhere . . .

Postscripts . . .

Lang Clay and I setting off on the epic cross country drive. That's Lang on the left, Hugh McCarten on the right. Next to Lang is Jocelyn Gunnar, Hugh's girlfriend at the time, later mine after we'd all moved to New York. We're in Palo Alto here, about to head down to Los Angeles on the first leg of the journey.

In Los Angeles we spent some time driving around the gates and fences of the studio lots, peering in for a glimpse of the mysterious world within. I remember this every time I drive through the main gates of a studio with a real visitor's pass.

Lang writes about the rediscovery of the trip photos:

"It is a curious thing this reexamination. When it involves your own life at a certain distance in time there is a kind of prurient interest. Exciting in a way, maybe just for the detective aspect; like figuring out how an old house was built and then how it was later altered to suit the occupants. Then comes the question of how they lived their lives and what kind of lies they told themselves to get by. Only this time you're the occupant.

"In the South it seems this is what stories are made of. The telling and retelling until all that is left is myth. They're very good at it here. Sometimes they believe too much in the past and end up living there way past time to upgrade their operating systems. Around here the plantation mentality would be a world long gone that you could pretend still existed. It is like that Las Vegas of 1971, a mist of history but for a few grainy black&whites."

Lang standing, sleep-deprived, on the lawn at Monticello.

Me and the MGB, which I sold soon afterwards to finance my move to New York City. I still miss it.

Las Vegas Miscellany

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