Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend: Loud as Ever, Now With Pabst

If you’re into hot rods, you’ve probably heard about Viva, the loudest, brawlin’est rockabilly festival there is. Music and culture are a big part of it, but the centerpiece of the 4-day event is the Shifters Car Show, which celebrates traditional rods and hardcore kustoms. In recent years, it’s also attracted some pretty colorful riffraff—drunken dirtballs have been drawn the show in droves, and lots of boozing and bruising tends to result, so much so that last year the Shifters show was all but thrown out of the Gold Coast Hotel, the place that’s hosted the event for the last 10 years. Organizers have gone to great lengths to police up their act, banning wanton burnouts and "non-traditional" junk cars so that they could return to the Gold Coast for the 2008 show on April 10-13. But we suspect that it might all be just a lot of lip service—the event is after all sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon, and if there’s one way to get rockabilly rednecks unruly, it’s to load them up with cheap beer. And besides, this year, they’re gonna have CarDomain to deal with, and cheap beer is about the only thing we like as much as hot rods. We’ll see you at the show!