Music

Three questions with Joe Kendall from Las Vegas Club

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Las Vegas Club
Photo: Corlene Byrd

What’s the plan for Neon Reverb?

I’m trying to get American Gil [& The Major Dudes] to come down from California. If so, I’ll play a couple of songs with them and a few with Las Vegas people. The theme of this year has been rotating the Las Vegas Club* band as much as possible—every song, almost, played by a different group of Las Vegas musicians.

Have you ever seriously considered forming a permanent band?

The Las Vegas Club* name began as a joke, but my concept was that I just wanted to play music with people, not so much as the head of a band or anything. It was just this club. I feel a responsibility, almost, to give everybody the chance to be in Las Vegas Club*, in a sense.

So what was the original joke, and, most importantly, what’s up with the asterisk?

I bought this tie at Savers that said “Las Vegas Club” on it. I was young, and I didn’t know that there was a casino called Las Vegas Club, but these ties looked really cool. And then Jacob Smigel got one, and his brother got one, so then we all had Las Vegas Club ties around the time we started playing music together. When we were deciding what to call the band, I was like, “Dude, we already have matching ties. Las Vegas Club!”

The asterisk? The ties had little stars on either side of “Las Vegas Club.” But we just put ours on the end. It makes more sense that way.

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