"He got better before he got worse," Richard Zoglin assures us about the subject of his book Elvis in Vegas (buy now). In other words, it wasn't all downhill from Presley's triumphant 1969 run at the International Hotel. It's an acknowledgement that when the average music fan thinks of Elvis in Vegas, it's not a pretty picture.

Live footage of his last Vegas engagement, in December 1976, shows his deterioration with painful clarity. Elvis looks bloated and is nearly immobile onstage — all the dynamic energy of his early Vegas years reduced to a little leg jiggling and half-hearted swaying to the beat. He seems distracted, depleted, simply going through the motions.

Zoglin himself acknowledges that Presley's '70s decline "is a sad, familiar story: told many times, psychoanalyzed, moralized about, recounted in books by almost everyone who had even a passing acquaintance with Elvis during his last few years." That's why Elvis in Vegas isn't really about that period, devoting just six of its 296 pages to the half-decade stretch culminating in Presley's 1977 death.

What does that leave? Well, for starters, it leaves the King's first 15 years in Sin City. As Zoglin points out, Elvis made his Vegas debut in 1956, billed as "the New Atomic Singer" in an era when hotels would host rooftop viewing parties for nuclear bomb tests in the nearby desert. His debut run at the New Frontier Hotel was hardly a smash, the comedian Shecky Greene taking over the closing slot after night one.

The fact that Elvis flopped in a Vegas showroom during his incendiary rise speaks to the place of rock and roll in pop culture at the time: as Zoglin notes, a Saturday all-ages matinee saw the kind of teen hysteria more commonly associated with Presley in that era. It also speaks to the vibe in Vegas, which was still establishing its place as a unique American entertainment institution.

Really, the book is less about Elvis in Vegas than it is about the changing relationship between popular music and a destination that became iconic for its pure distillation of the American id. Zoglin's argument, in short, is that Elvis circa 1969 became a point of reference around which all of Vegas turned, even more so than the 1960 run by the Rat Pack at its peak: Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford doing two shows a night for the four weeks they were in town filming the original Ocean's 11.

That gig epitomized the period when the Mob ran Vegas, Sinatra infamously tight with the gangsters who poured a vault of money into the city...and then extracted several vaults more. In that era, Zoglin notes, the big names who filled Vegas showrooms were regarded as loss leaders. A star like Sinatra got all the gambling credit he wanted, keeping the winnings and ignoring his debts.

Zoglin devotes considerable attention to that era, reminding readers just how foreign it now seems. Entertainers would perform with an active bar cart on stage; Martin's entire stage persona, in fact, revolved around his being drunk. Racial and ethnic gags were pervasive, homophobia and sexism was rampant, and Sinatra's temper was such that Don Rickles famously greeted him with, "Make yourself comfortable, Frank. Hit somebody."

Beyond the entitled chauvinism, there was the style of the music: the Great American Songbook. Part of the Rat Pack's perceived cool was that they were above a fad like rock and roll; so was Vegas, arguably all the way up 'til 1969. The story of Vegas in the '60s, Zoglin suggests, is that in a sense it became America's lounge; while orchestra-laden nightclub entertainment passed out of popularity in cities across the country, Vegas burnished its reputation as a town out of time, a place where "class" still meant something. Thus were born stars like Liberace and, even more inextricable from his glittering environs, Wayne Newton: Vegas celebrities who made no sense anywhere off the Strip.

By 1969, though, the town was ready for a change. Zoglin cites Tom Jones as a crucial forerunner to Elvis's Vegas show: traditional enough to appease the aesthetically conservative Vegas crowd, but with a shameless physicality you'd never expect from a Sinatra. Jones wasn't afraid to let you see him sweat; in fact, he'd wipe his forehead and throw you the rag.

Meanwhile, Presley was helping to burnish the Vegas mythos: his 1964 movie Viva Las Vegas, argues Zoglin, remains the quintessential Vegas movie, less because of the plot or characters than because of the way it showcases the glitzy setting and, especially, because of the title song. Written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, the song canonized the town's self-promotional story.

Bright light city gonna set my soul
Gonna set my soul on fire
Got a whole lot of money that's ready to burn,
So get those stakes up higher
There's a thousand pretty women waitin' out there
And they're all livin' devil may care
And I'm just the devil with love to spare
Viva Las Vegas, viva Las Vegas

Oddly, there's no evidence that Presley ever actually peformed "Viva Las Vegas" at any of his shows in town. The song that epitomizes his live-in-Vegas era at its best is "Suspicious Minds," a Mark James song that was so new to him in 1969 that it hadn't even been released. When it brought the house down, his engineers juiced the studio version up with a grand orchestra and a fake fade-out, to more closely match the way the song sounded on stage. Cheesy? Absolutely, but it worked. It became Presley's last chart-topper.

In 1968, the legendary televised "comeback special" showed that Elvis still had gas in the tank: that despite a years-long drought of chart hits, he was still one of the world's great entertainers. Even Colonel Tom Parker, who'd encouraged Elvis to stick to the silver screen (in part because international touring would have been awkward given Parker's undocumented immigrant status), agreed: it was time for the King to reclaim his crown as a live entertainer, and Vegas was the place to do it.

By all accounts, Elvis's first Vegas run was a triumph. Audiences would have been happy just to see their hero of yore live and in person; when he actually put on a strong show, they were blown away. Zoglin notes that Presley insisted on a lavish assortment of musicians — including a rock band, a house orchestra, and not one but two groups of singers to help him connect with all his influences from R&B to gospel to country. The stars came out to see the King: he gave exactly one Vegas press conference, and when asked to name a vocalist who influenced him, he was able to literally point to Fats Domino, taking a break from his own lounge show.

It was a grueling pace: two shows a night for weeks in a row, with no breaks. The rollercoaster exacerbated Presley's decline, a five-year contract guaranteeing that he'd keep returning to the stage no matter how ill-advised. After a threat on his life, Presley got paranoid and started packing heat on stage. By the end, audiences were still packing the house, but the sad spectacle of an idol in decline was all they were paying for.

Zoglin's reticence to peer too deeply into that abyss feels like a missed opportunity, as does the relatively scant coverage of Presley's increasingly outré style, with jumpsuits designed by Bill Belew, complemented with capes and shades and belt buckles the size of a small state. Zoglin's not wrong that such material has been well-documented elsewhere, but when you crack a book called Elvis in Vegas, you're probably expecting a few sequins to fall out.

The author is insightful, though, about how 1969 marked a turning point in Vegas's transition from a place with its own ecosystem to a corporate entertainment center that trades on reliable brand names. Céline Dion's Vegas show may be unlike any other, but Vegas didn't make Dion famous: she brought her brand to Sin City. The same goes for Cirque du Soleil, and the brands that increasingly adorn slot machines. When you visit Las Vegas today, you don't so much visit Vegas as you, sequentially, visit New York and Paris and Rome. If Zoglin's right — and I don't think he's wrong — that's Elvis's legacy.

In Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond insists, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." Elvis Presley was the first Vegas star who was bigger than Vegas, with a show to match...and the town's seemed a little smaller ever since.

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Tune in to The Current at 8:30 a.m. (Central) every Wednesday morning to hear Jay Gabler and Jill Riley talk about a new book. Also, find Jay's reviews online.

August 5: Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS by Maria Sherman (buy now)

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August 19: And In the End: The Last Days of the Beatles by Ken McNab

August 26: Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture by Hannah Ewens (buy now)