The storyplot of how Las Vegas saved Elvis and Elvis saved Las Vegas in the best musical comeback ever.

The traditional wisdom is that Las Vegas is what ruined Elvis Presley, launching him on the downward spiral of drugs, boredom, erratic stage behavior, and eventually his fatal overdose. However in Elvis in Vegas, Richard Zoglin requires an alternate watch, arguing that Vegas is certainly where the King of Rock and Roll resurrected his career, reinvented himself like a performer, and made probably the most about Elvis in Vegas: The way the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show exciting display in Vegas history.

Elvis’s 1969 opening night in Vegas was his first time back on the live stage in more than eight years. His profession had opted sour—bad movies, and mediocre pop music that no more made the charts. He’d been dismissed by most critics as on the hill. But in Vegas he played the biggest showroom in the largest hotel in the town, drawing more people for his four-week engagement than every other display in Vegas history. His overall performance got rave reviews, “Suspicious Thoughts” offered him his 1st number-one hit in seven years, and Elvis became Vegas’s biggest celebrity. Over the next seven years, he performed a lot more than 600 displays there, and sold out every one.

NEVADA was changed as well. The intimate night-club-style shows from the Rat Pack, who produced Vegas the nation’s leading live-entertainment middle in the 1950s and ‘60s, catered generally to well-heeled old gamblers. Elvis brought a new kind of experience: an over-the-top, rock-concert-like extravaganza. He established a new club for Vegas performers, with the largest salary, the biggest musical production, and the biggest promotion campaign the city had ever seen. In doing this, he opened the door to a new era of pop/rock performers, and brought a fresh viewers to Vegas—a mass target audience from Middle America that Vegas depends on for its success even today.

A classic return tale established against the backdrop of Todas las Vegas’s golden age, Richard Zoglin’s Elvis in Vegas is definitely a feel-good tale for the age range.