Lionel Richie says the old Vegas was his ‘classroom’

Forget the Elvis jumpsuit. If you want to be cutting edge, you have to suit up like ’80s Lionel for Lionel Richie’s Planet Hollywood debut.

Richie noticed the odd little trend — “It’s almost like ‘The Rocky Horror Show,’ ” he says — at his concerts even before Jimmy Kimmel dressed up like him for February’s Grammy-affiliated MusiCares event, which honored Richie as its Person of the Year.

Search online for “Lionel Richie costume” and you can buy the “black shabba wig,” and pair it with a mustache and even, as Richie says he has spotted from the stage, the green sweater from the cover of his 1982 solo debut.

When Richie spots the faux Lionels, he says, his first thought is, “How do I get them into this show?”

That’s because, “As soon as you recognize them (from the stage), the crowd is in the show. So the next time you play a show, there’s 25 Lionel Richies in the show.”

All of this reinforces the 66-year-old hitmaker as an old-school entertainer whose Wednesday debut is sure to be a contrast to his Axis roommates, Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez.

“When you study dancers rehearsing, they rehearse in front of mirrors because they want to see what they look like,” he notes. “I go to a show to see what the crowd looks like.

“Britney does a great job; it’s just that it’s a different style,” he adds. And it’s not a style of “ ‘My next song is this. I hope you like it.’ Are you kidding me? That’s not how you get to the next song. Basically, this is going to be a night of storytelling.”

Richie’s “All the Hits” brings him back to the same concert hall he played with the Commodores in November 1978 (the old Aladdin theater was the only thing spared when the rest of the Aladdin was demolished and Planet Hollywood built all around it).

That was at the peak of the Alabama band’s early fame, when the singles “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady” were pointing the way from R&B-funk band to the mainstream pop balladeer Richie would become when he went solo three years later.

The Commodores had been hard at work touring and recording all through the ’70s. But Richie still regrets that he didn’t get to meet Elvis Presley before he died during the band’s big breakout year of 1977.

“I got a chance to hang with Mr. D,” he says of Sammy Davis Jr. “But I missed Elvis. I was too young. As I tell my kids now, ‘No, I didn’t know Abraham Lincoln.’ But Frank, Dean and Sammy I had a chance to meet and know.

“I was the kid that came to Vegas when the pressure was not on me. And I sat in the audience and studied the masters. Vegas (in the old days) was not my destinational hang; it was my classroom.

“If anybody wanted to be a great artist, a great entertainer … I learned something from Sammy. He said, ‘There are a lot of singers, kid. There are very few entertainers.’

“When you sit in that audience and watch, you know they’re going to get to their (big) songs. It’s the banter in between that makes each night special. That’s that thing called entertaining. And I studied that. It was very important that I learn how to draw the crowd in, and how do you enjoy your show night after night? It’s because you pay attention to what the crowd is doing and play off of that.

“And of course that’s what makes the show work. I draw the crowd into performing with me. They’re singing louder than I am … I want to go out the back door sweating and I want them to go out the front door sweating. That’s a great show,” he adds with a laugh.”

For years Richie was considered a Las Vegas holdout. An obvious headliner who visited only rarely for concert tour stops or to do private shows for Wynn Las Vegas executive Steve Wynn’s invited guests.

Richie now agrees that’s mostly because the era of his breakout fame — from that 1978 Aladdin concert through mid-’80s hits such as “Dancing on the Ceiling” — corresponded almost exactly to the lean years of Las Vegas.

The Aladdin’s concert hall was in fact the Strip’s only attempt to tap into the touring concert industry. The ’70s and ’80s were otherwise such a stagnant era, most younger acts considered Las Vegas an elephant’s graveyard.

But Richie notes his college-age son, Miles, and high school-age daughter, Sofia, don’t even know about all that, and urged him to sign on for a residency. “Whatever the stigma was … it’s gone. It’s not there,” he says.

Despite the “All the Hits” subtitle, Richie says his residency (which resumes for another batch of shows in September) will give him a chance to test new songs and could include recording sessions by day in Las Vegas studios.

“I really like writing,” he says. “What’s happened now is wonderful artists like Pharrell (Williams) call me all the time: ‘I want to do something with you.’

“So when you get someone who sparks you and says, ‘I want to do this. Let’s do something together,’ it now becomes interesting.

“Can I write a song by myself? Absolutely,” he adds. “But can I write a song with the now people of today? That’s the fun. When you’ve been around and you’ve done it, (it becomes a question of) what’s going to make today special the way it was back then?

“I didn’t have the chance to work with Marvin Gaye. He was there and gone by the time I was ready to do it,” he says. But now “it’s not so much the pressure of, ‘I’ve gotta have the hit record,’ but ‘Tell me what the play period is today.’ ”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.