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At 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, not long before my stomach gives out, MGM's Tabu still has men dancing competitively on tabletops to impress women, like some '80s John Travolta movie someone forgot to make. "The clubs are now carrying Vegas," says Cy Waits, the bar's VIP manager. "The casinos want us to bring in quality. Young people are more reckless with their money." Along with clubs, arenas and music venues have sprouted up in the hotels, replacing the crooners with major pop and hip-hop acts. "For years people thought it was where acts go to retire," says Russell Jones, general manager of House of Blues Las Vegas, where Prince, Snoop Dogg and James Brown have played this year. "That image has really changed. Now a lot of the acts come through three times a year."
The only part of the action that casinos don't control are the strip clubs, and they're trying to change that. Last year, a few hotel-casino owners quietly started a conversation about getting the gaming commission to allow them to put in strip joints. It didn't go well. So for now, they're compromising with burlesque, which is the kind of stripping Janet Jackson was supposed to do. Burlesque dancers do shows at Tangerine at TI, which opened over the July 4 weekend, and 40 Deuce, which opens at the Mandalay Bay this fall.
But most of Vegas agrees that the casinos will eventually find a way to bring the strip clubs inside. "It's guaranteed. It's just a matter of when," says Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman, 64, whose municipal duties cover just a a small part of town north of the Strip called Glitter Gulch, a technicality that does not stop him from representing everyone anywhere near Vegas. A former defense attorney for alleged mobsters, Goodman was voted in for a second term by 86% of the voters and can't believe the other 14% actually exist. In his office are a truly shocking number of different Oscar Goodman bobble-head dolls, and his walls are lined with photos in which he posed with celebrities. He has taken down one with Michael Jackson, but he can't help but show me anyway. Goodman makes me watch a tape of a Tonight Show segment he appears on, and he laughs throughout the piece. Before I leave, he gives me a poker chip with his face on it.
Goodman, a spokesman for Bombay Sapphire Gin, which sponsors monthly "martinis with the mayor" events, is a proponent of allowing strippers in the casinos as well as expanding legalized prostitution, now allowed in certain parts of Nevada. "We're the fastest-growing everything," the mayor says in his office, flipping through the endless escort section of the phone book. "We may as well be the fastest-growing escort service." His city is growing so quickly that an Internal Revenue Service building is being constructed downtown right near his office. "We'll be able to tax the IRS," he says, "which is my dream come true as a former criminal-defense lawyer."