Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Home means the Golden Nugget for Clint Holmes

Clint Holmes

Clint Holmes performs Tuesday and Wednesday nights at the Golden Nugget.

He’s back … not that he went anywhere. Longtime Las Vegas singer, songwriter and entertainer Clint Holmes is performing once again at the site of his first Vegas residency, the showroom at downtown’s Golden Nugget.

“I did open for Don Rickles many times there in the ’80s when I lived in Los Angeles. Whenever Don would play that room I’d come down and do a weekend with him,” says Holmes, who has now called Las Vegas home for almost 20 years. “When Steve Wynn invited to play there in 1999 was when I moved out here and moved my whole family out here, and it changed my life.”

For now, Holmes is performing Tuesday and Wednesday at 8 p.m. through Aug. 30 — find more info here — though he’s hoping the engagement will continue beyond the summer. We grabbed the Vegas veteran for a quick chat about longing for lounges, his recently released jazz album Rendezvous, and more.

What are you working on at this very moment? I’ve been working very hard on this project that’s happening in a few weeks in New York. It deals with the music of Charles Aznavour. I just did a show at Birdland [jazz club] there and I was approached by the director Will Nunziata who had this concept of doing an Aznavour piece in New York, Paris and London, where his work was appreciated. It entails me and three women representing the women in Aznavour’s life, and I’m doing a reading for potential producers [this month]. It sounds pretty pressure-packed, and I’m going in knowing none of the songs, so I’m learning them all from scratch. It’s interesting but also hard.

But Aznavour is maybe the Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen of France, not a rock guy but a storyteller. His songs all tell stories, and they’re thick and dense, not pop songs with choruses. There’s one wonderful song, “Happy Anniversary,” about how everything possible has gone wrong on this couple’s anniversary … the zipper on her dress broke, they’re too late for the show they bought tickets to go to, but walking down the street and buying a flower confirms everything they feel for each other. Of course, it takes eight verses to get there. It’s quite wonderful but very specific, and it’s the kind of thing I really enjoy because I learn and grow from doing stuff like that.

You began your new residency at the Golden Nugget on May 9. What is it about that space and you? Not only is the room very comfortable, but it’s been one of those deals when literally from the first rehearsal, it’s like, this is great. It’s kinda home. I like the intimacy of the room, and there are a lot of people from when I first worked there that are still there, techs or ushers. I really did feel like home. Harrah’s still feels that way, and the Smith Center, too.

You’ve played so many Vegas rooms on and off the Strip. How does your experience performing change from venue to venue? Well, I do what I do. In that sense, it doesn’t change, but I will always get a feel for what the room reacts to, what the clientele of the hotel is, and sometimes there is a feel to a certain room. At the Nugget, it’s a very energized room. Frankie Moreno is doing two nights a week there now, too, and he has the same feeling. Maybe it’s the low ceilings, or maybe that the first row of the audience is five feet away. But it’s a very immediate, personal, intimate room, and that’s a lot different from the big showrooms where there can be a certain separation from the audience.

That style of room, whether it’s smaller or just a more traditional showroom, is really hard to find in Las Vegas these days. It’s the venue that we’re missing. It is harder to find rooms like the Golden Nugget, with 500 to 700 seats and the acts that work best in that room. I miss the lounges, and here’s why: I was a little too young for the Louis Prima era, when there were shows that started [late] that people would line up for. What I sense from that time is that they gave the casino a certain energy that stems from music and excitement in the heart of the casino. It’s not a ticketed experience or something you’d go to the box office for and then sit a mile from the show. It’s a room you’d get in line for and hope you get a seat, and Frank Sinatra or Tom Jones or one of those guys might walk on stage — that kind of immediate energy. I wish we had more of that available. Instead they are taking those small rooms and turning them into something else, and I get it, everything has to be viable. But personally, I miss that excitement and I would be in casinos more if there was more music to see and experience on an easier level.

You’ve been working some songs from Rendezvous into your act. That album ended up being heavily influenced by your parents’ musical backgrounds, but did you plan it that way? To be honest I think it just happened that way. When I sat down with the producers, the first thing one of them, Gregg Field, asked was, “What’s your favorite song?” It’s probably “Maria” from West Side Story, so we started from there. As we built the CD, it was kind of organic. We never said, let’s do a biographical CD. It just turned out to be the songs I love, songs that hit me on an emotional level, some I like and some I wrote and some that just turned out to be personal.

Besides the Aznavour project, what’s next for you? Well it’s always great to have a home in Vegas and I’m hoping the Golden Nugget will be successful. I still have the goal of doing my own one-man theater piece and I’m constantly working on that. The goal is be on or off Broadway doing my story, which is musical, and I’m writing that all the time. Even the Aznavour piece is potentially a step toward doing my own one-man piece.

Also because of the CD I’m starting to do jazz festivals, which is something I’ve never done, Aspen, Lake Tahoe, others. It has opened up a new avenue for me and it’s become part of my musical life that I’ve never fully explored. You can’t just walk into a casino and do jazz, or at least it’s very hard. So I’m happy to have those outlets to do more of that.

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