Rock in Rio founder Roberto Medina says of Las Vegas: ‘This is the place’

By John Katsilometes

Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2014 | 4:34 p.m.

The acts booked for the inaugural Rock in Rio USA are contemporary superstars such as Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Metallica, No Doubt, Joss Stone, John Legend, The Deftones, Linkin Park and Ed Sheeran.

Those are the stars announced, thus far, for the event set for next May, when the event is divided between a rock weekend May 8-9 and a pop weekend May 15-16. The initial plan is to bring Rock in Rio USA to the Strip in alternating years, in ’15, again in 2017 and 2019 (ticket reservations are being accepted at the Rock in Rio USA website, with the official onsale set for January).

Thus, Rock in Rio is an extended engagement on the Strip, and this is no understated operation. Six stages will be in play during the festival, with the main acts on the Main Stage and Sunset Stage.

In the mix is a veritable county fair of kinetic activity: On that site will be a Ferris wheel, a zip line stretched across the Main Stage, several acres of artificial turf and a total of 60 little houses built into the western side of the parcel themed for the U.S., England and Brazil.

These facades will serve as stations for food and various merchandise shops. Maybe we’ll even see jugglers flinging flaming machetes, clowns spraying seltzer and Navin Johnson trying to guess your weight.

As organizers say, Rock in Rio is an amusement park of music. But how did it start? Oddly enough, the stock of this music stew is the heritage of all-time Strip faves The Rat Pack.

“In 1980, I convinced Frank Sinatra to come to Brazil, and it was the biggest concert he ever performed,” says Roberto Medina, founder and creator of Rock in Rio, after a media spectacle at the Rock in Rio site that involved dozens of dancers and musicians from Las Vegas and around the world. “He became my friend, and he helped me a lot in realizing my dream of Rock in Rio.”

Five years after that show, in 1985, Medina had conceived the idea of a massive music festival set in his home city. The help that Medina mentions is Sinatra’s presence at a press gathering in a New York City hotel suite that drew 70 members of international media. The next day, headlines from coast-to-coast trumpeted this festival in Rio being assembled by this heretofore-unknown Brazilian entrepreneur.

Within 24 hours of that announcement, representatives of such artists as Queen, Rod Stewart, AC/DC, James Taylor and The Scorpions took notice of this out-of-the-blue festival that happened to be supported by the Chairman of the Board.

“When I dreamt of this, I did not dream of 100 people, or 100,000 people, but one million people,” Medina says. “We put a million and a half people in the first one.”

That was over 10 days during the first Rock in Rio, and the festival has since expanded to Lisbon, Portugal, and Madrid, Spain. Now it’s playing Las Vegas, taking up 50 acres at MGM Resorts Festival Grounds on the southeast corner of the Strip and Sahara Avenue.

In a 30-minute conversation in one of the trailers that serves as the festival’s temporary headquarters, the silver-coiffed and easy smiling Medina said he has dreams in Las Vegas, too. There are 300,000 fans expected to party it up on the north end of the Strip come next spring.

Is that festival launch the realization of his dream for our city?

“No,” he says. “That is just where we are starting. I want to make the second day bigger than the first and each day bigger up to the sixth day. It will grow and grow.”

When asked if Las Vegas would be the exclusive site in the United States for Rock in Rio, Medina quickly said, “Yes. This is the place.”

Medina, whose background in Brazil is in corporate advertising before he embarked on mass gatherings, says this event is a great complement to the spectacles he has held in Rio four times, Lisbon five times and Madrid three times. He says he is expanding farther, too, to China and the Middle East.

The U.S. was an obvious choice, as Medina says, because “it is first in entertainment, first in singers, and when you think of enclosed events, it is the best. But for open events, it is not the best. The delivery of these open events is not good, not as good as Rock in Rio.”

Of course, Medina needed to establish a worldwide reputation before selecting a U.S. market, and Rock in Rio has flourished around the globe. For his North American outpost, he first looked along the Eastern Seaboard before meeting a key entertainment official with ties to Las Vegas: Cirque du Soleil President and CEO Daniel Lamarre.

“I was in New York, and one day I met with Daniel as I was doing research in New Jersey, to make a show there,” Medina says. “He said, ‘Why not Las Vegas?’ I started thinking, first, about a partner, and found MGM could make this investment of $25 million.”

The company is using a lot of that money on machinery, as it is in the process of moving dirt, leveling the playing field (for real) and turning the old Circus Circus RV park into the festival grounds.

Cirque also is described as an “equity” partner in Rock in Rio USA, though it is expected the company will provide artists along the self-dubbed City of Rock’s Rock Street promenades. Another lead investor is Ron Burkle of The Yukaipa Companies, which owns Fresh & Easy and Aloha Airlines.

To further fund the operation, a total of $150 million in sponsorship money is expected to stream into the event by the time May’s shows open. The opening party Monday morning was a fairly ostentatious affair. Recruited for the event were dancers and musicians from as far away as Australia and Brazil (in the form of 17-piece jazz band SpokFrevo Orquestra and Bossacucanova, which is performing with a DJ at the Brazilian area of the City of Rock).

Las Vegas musicians also were in the artistic presentation, with none other than Jerry Lopez of Santa Fe & The Fat City Horns, David Perrico of Pop Evolution and UNLV jazz instructor and Dispensary regular Uli Geissendoerfer playing for the assembled media and dignitaries.

All of this happens where, folks? Only in Vegas. One day the city might even host Rock in Rio USA annually, not just on alternating years.

But Medina, at least on this topic, is hesitant.

“My COO (Luis Justo), he wants this,” Medina says, shaking his head. “I don’t because it is crazy for me. The problem is I need time to make people aware of what is Rock in Rio. To make all of this happen, the communication campaign, that strategy, is a huge amount of work. I need to campaign here, and in Brazil, and when I am finished, there is Portugal. … We have talked about this, but I think it is more possible in two or three years.”

But he does say Las Vegas is the host city, today and long term. There is no argument about that.

“When I saw this scenario, I said, ‘This is the place,’ ” Medina says, grinning once more. “Las Vegas dreams big, and I dream big, also. It’s a good combination, this crazy guy coming into Las Vegas with Rock in Rio.”

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