Ever wish you could have seen rock legends in such a room like Elvis played in his heyday? Well, now you have a chance to! In the world-famous room in what used to be called the Las Vegas Hilton – now named the Las Vegas Hotel or LVH – where the likes of Elvis, Liberace, and Barry Manilow have graced the stage, there is a new show beginning a one-year residency.
Named Raiding the Rock Vault, it is billed as the story of classic rock. Featuring classic rock legends from some of your favorite bands. I recently had the opporunity to speak with John Payne, bassist and frontman from Asia (you started singing “Heat of the Moment” just now, didn’t you?) and he gave us the skinny on how this show came together and what the audience can expect.
Hi John! Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today! I have to tell you, as a child of the late 70s and 80s – as many of my readers are – I am SO excited for this show! How did it come together?Today is our first day of rehearsals. It’s a really exciting time. It came together because had been asked by an old manager of mine, a guy called Harry Cowell and another guy called Simon, they both managed me when I joined Asia, back in ’91. They both asked me to work on this project two years ago, the standard offer of me just getting together basically a group the best musicians I could find to go out and tour what was then deemed the greatest setlist ever, songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and we recorded as well. I got together with some great musicians, did all the backing tracks for these great songs in the studio. We decided to finish those tracks and put a tour together. Problem with that being it would just be a great band doing great songs. Kind of like the ultimate covers band. I didn’t quite want to do it that way. I kind of went back to the drawing board with it. I made it a bit more theatrical, a bit more of the history of classic rock. Fashions, all those things that happened at that date to make it a rockumentary. Make it a documentary of those eras of time. I took that to my friend David Kirschenbaum and we put the script together and it just grew into what has now become Raiding the Rock Vault, and we ended up in Vegas, quite surprisingly. It’s almost two years ago to the day that this just went down on a piece of paper in a bar. It’s kind of the right time to do this.
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