Downtown runs a rock show every Friday in October, and almost nobody outside the building seems to know it. The Showroom at the Golden Nugget takes one act a week from the first Friday to the last, five nights in a row, all of them twenty-one and over, all of them about ninety minutes, all of them in a room small enough that you can hear a pick hit the string before the amplifier gets to it. Five very different bands, one stage on Fremont Street. Here they are in the order they arrive.
October 2: The Grass Roots
The Grass Roots open the run with two songs almost everybody can sing without knowing they can. "Let's Live for Today" went top ten in 1967 and "Midnight Confessions" went higher the year after, and both of them still land the second the intro starts. Be clear about who plays them now: no founding member remains, and Rob Grill, the voice on the records, died in 2011. What you get instead is a band that has held the same core longer than most original lineups ever managed, with the guitar and keyboard chairs filled continuously since 1984. They play these songs several hundred nights a decade and it shows.
When: Friday October 2. On stage: Mark Dawson on lead vocals, with a lineup held together since the mid-eighties. Sound: sixties pop-rock with horns and hooks. Ages: twenty-one and over.
October 9: Mark Farner's American Band
Mark Farner is the closest thing on this calendar to hearing a catalog straight from the person who made it. He co-founded Grand Funk Railroad in 1969, played lead guitar, sang lead, and wrote most of what the band released. Here is the part that catches people out: the song with the band's name in it, the one every bar in America still plays, was written and sung by the drummer. Farner's songs are the other ones, the long ones, the ones that build. He hasn't been in Grand Funk Railroad for decades and that band still tours under its own name, so read the marquee before you buy.
When: Friday October 9. On stage: Mark Farner, founding guitarist and singer of Grand Funk Railroad. Sound: heavy seventies American rock. Ages: twenty-one and over.
October 16: Warrant
Warrant are the loudest thing on this list and the one with the most of its original self intact. Four of the five men who made those records are still in the band: Joey Allen and Erik Turner on guitars, Jerry Dixon on bass, Steven Sweet on drums. Robert Mason has fronted them since 2008, which is longer than Jani Lane ever did, and Lane died in 2011. "Cherry Pie" is the riff everyone shows up for. "Heaven" is the one that gets the room quiet and then very loud again. This is a Friday night crowd that came to shout.
When: Friday October 16. On stage: Robert Mason fronting four original members. Sound: late-eighties hard rock, full volume. Ages: twenty-one and over.
October 23: Tommy James and The Shondells
Tommy James wrote more number ones than almost anyone playing a room this size. The Shondells came out of Niles, Michigan in 1964, and inside five years they put "Hanky Panky" and "Crimson and Clover" at the top of the chart and "Mony Mony" and "Crystal Blue Persuasion" just under it. Those four songs have been covered, sampled and shouted at weddings for sixty years, and James is the man who sang them first. There is a whole separate story about the mob-connected label that put the records out, and he tells some of it from the stage.
When: Friday October 23. On stage: Tommy James, the original voice on the records. Sound: sixties chart pop turning psychedelic. Ages: twenty-one and over.
October 30: Lita Ford
Lita Ford closes the month the night before Halloween, which fits her better than it fits anyone else on this run. She was sixteen when The Runaways recruited her in 1975, which means she has been a working lead guitarist for longer than most of the people in the room have been alive. "Close My Eyes Forever," the duet with Ozzy Osbourne, is her highest-charting record and it still stops a room cold. "Kiss Me Deadly" does the opposite. She plays the guitar parts herself, in front of you, close enough to watch her hands.
When: Friday October 30. On stage: Lita Ford, lead guitar and vocals. Sound: hard rock with a metal edge. Ages: twenty-one and over.
How to play the run
Pick by what you want the room to do. Sing along without thinking: The Grass Roots or Tommy James, and Tommy James if you want the man who actually sang them. Watch someone play: Mark Farner or Lita Ford, both of whom carry the guitar all night. Shout yourself hoarse: Warrant. If you are downtown for more than one Friday, the tickets are separate and the room is the same, so the second one costs you nothing in planning. And the Golden Nugget's own resident act, Gordie Brown, works the same Showroom on the nights between, which makes this one of the few stages in the city where you can turn up twice in a week and see nothing alike.
