In the late 1940s, Hawaiian guitarist Malia Ka’aihue regularly performed at the Last Frontier into the wee hours of the Las Vegas night. To this day, Ka’aihue (better known as Mary Kaye) and her musical trio are credited with being the first lounge act in Las Vegas, opening the doors for other lounge acts and creating the 24/7 lifestyle for which the city is known.
It’s a fascinating bit of history—one local Las Vegan Alex Higgins dives into on the first episode of his newish history podcast, What Happened in Vegas.
“I initially just wanted to start a podcast so I could do the audio and prove to employers that I could do it,” Higgins says. But once he began the research for the first episode, Higgins says, he was hooked.
Higgins, who plays in the Vegas-based indie rock band Tin Cup and works as a freelance mixer and sound designer for New York Magazine’s The Cut podcast, says he’s always been fascinated by Hawaiian culture’s influence and prevalence in Las Vegas. The city is often referred to by Hawaiians as the ninth island, and Higgins set out to ask why.
“It took me like a year,” he says of that first episode. “I basically rewrote it five times, because I would write it and record it and then I would either get a new piece of gear that was better for voice-over or I’d learn a new storytelling technique and completely rewrite it. So that was kind of the process of that first year—just learning how to be a journalist, essentially.”
Higgins is now working on his second episode—about the history of farming in Las Vegas—while juggling his freelance podcast gig, a band and his full-time job in information technology. He expects it to debut in June.
“I didn’t realize how much research it was going to be,” Higgins laughs. “I’ve read two dissertations and ended up talking to the archaeologist who found evidence of the first corn ever grown in the Las Vegas Valley in 350 BC.”
What Happened in Vegas is a testament to Higgins’ dedication and research, and the result is a professionally produced and educationally informative podcast about the lesser-known parts of our bustling desert town.
Though Higgins admits he once dreaded essays in high school, he’s a natural-born storyteller. “I was never interested in writing papers or anything, and now I’m forcing myself to write a 20-page research paper [every month],” he says. “But I’ve always loved stories, and I [write] music as well, so it’s been cool to get all of the parts of my creativity out there.”
A year later, Higgins did end up finding an answer to his question, and it’s all there in the first 16-minute episode of What Happened in Vegas. But it was the process of getting there that Higgins found most memorable.
“My favorite nugget of information I found from that was something I had never even heard of at all,” Higgins says. “There’s such an obvious difference in environment—the desert to a tropical paradise— but I had never heard a deep-dive explanation of how it came to be. It blew my mind.”
WHAT HAPPENED IN VEGAS whathappenedinvegas.com.
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