Las Vegas 2: the concert hall that brought the Ramones to a town in Burgos is today a supermarket

The merchants have occupied the musical temple of Melgar de Fernamental (Burgos). Shoppers with carts replace the masses huddled together to listen to the Ramones and the fishmonger occupies the former stage where motorhead he blew up the nights on those tours of the 90s where he only stopped at three points in Spain: Madrid, Barcelona and Melgar. The old Las Vegas 2, an icon of live music, today is a supermarket whose false ceiling is surprising. There, almost intact and covered in dust, is the upper part of that old room, where the cabin of the DJ and the now skeletons of the bars, the booths and the carpet that reveal their lost pomp.

Javier Castro looks wistfully at those black tiles and pillars covered in small mirrors. The homesickness of this 46-year-old from Melgar, who was well acquainted with the nights of that huge joint, prompted him to immortalize those memories and that cultural legacy in a documentary that would tell the story of a room that attracted up to 10,000 people every weekend to a town of 2,500 inhabitants (now 1,500). That idea, which emerged “cubata in hand on New Year’s Eve” together with the music journalist Jorge Bobadilla, also from Melgar, has begun to materialize with the producer Jorge González, a 42-year-old from Madrid, who is also enthusiastic about the project of narrating the epic Las Vegas 2 Castro is already directing the shooting, and the team expects the film to be ready for release in spring 2023.

Sitting on some old sofas of which only the concrete of its base remains, González recalls that the property opened on New Year’s Eve 1982, the moment in which an era was inaugurated that led the town to musical stardom until 2003, when the owner, Paco Vega, closed it. That lame man “stuck to a stick”, to whom Ramoncin defined in the documentary as a “kind of Corleone”, it gave way in 2007 to a techno company that managed it until 2014. From then until 2019, when Castro took the first steps of the project, nobody entered the ship. “When I went it was exactly the same, to give a concert,” details the director, who remembers that he felt alarmed when he found out that Vega, who died shortly after being interviewed, had sold him to the supermarket chain. Then he began to move the documentary, contacted González and his producer Moussambani and managed to get the new owners of the premises to allow them to record that area, which they only use as a warehouse.

Image of the concert hall when it was in operation.

There, between the noise of the refrigeration and the piped music of the chain, Castro and González evoke the time when the chords of Ramones, Mötorhead, Helloween or Extremoduro crackled between the walls or the passion before Bertín Osborne, Alaska or Manolo Escobar. The room also hosted weddings, raffles, beauty contests and any soiree that attracted people to Melgar de Fernamental, where 20 pubs and a diverse catering industry grew to serve the spectators. Those responsible for the documentary calculate that some 500,000 people stepped on those floors during its splendor, and they direct the work, which has the collaboration of screenwriters such as Fernando Martín and Lola Mayo, as well as the film director Juanma Bajo Ulloa. At the moment they have invested around 100,000 euros and aspire to receive more financing and material from the time before its premiere. González details that they have tickets, posters, photos, drumsticks and audiovisual material secretly filmed by some spectators with primitive cameras that illustrates the gap that reigned therein. In addition, he trusts that after the production a museum can be created that exhibits those glorious years of the little town of Burgos.

To tell how that phenomenon was born and developed, those responsible for the documentary have turned to the search for anecdotes and experiences of that anonymous and in many cases long-haired audience that filled the room in its golden age. Some remember that first there was a Las Vegas, a name that Vega chose in honor of the women in his family. When that first place began to overflow due to the large influx, he opened Las Vegas 2 in a new location. Many of the attendees, as he points out in the recording the Valladolid humorist José Juan Vaquero, they arrived from Valladolid by train to Osorno (Palencia) and reached Melgar “by finger”. Even Castro’s Basque colleagues configured their weekends to leave Bilbao and travel to that musical paradise. Those secondary roads, once in worse condition than the current one, were also crossed by retinues of international artists who could have played in monumental pavilions in Australia, London or the United States before the tour took them “to the middle of nowhere”, between vast fields of yellowish cereal but with a crowd waiting for their idols and ready to leave all their energy on the track. Those passes cost about 2,000 pesetas (12 euros).

Remains of Las Vegas 2 on the false ceiling of the supermarket.
Remains of Las Vegas 2 on the false ceiling of the supermarket. Ricardo Ordonez

Artists speak fondly of Las Vegas 2. At first, some did not believe that such concerts could be held in such a small town. Everything stayed at home: Vega’s little son counted money under a table and a daytime shepherd became a nightclub bouncer at night. Rosendo indicates between laughs in the documentary that he once tried to access the room before singing with Leño, but that the guard prevented him to the sound of “Aquí many Rosendos have passedStand back and get in.” Castro, wearing a Ramones shirt for the occasion, highlights: “It was cool to be from Melgar, it was crazy until decadence came.”

Everything grew in times without internet or social networks, only pushed by Vega putting up posters around Burgos and with the producers discovering that in that town there was an ideal infrastructure for their clients. So many people got together that once, after several hours of concerts, the floodgates were opened and, from the amount of smoke that came out, since smoking was then allowed in closed spaces, the residents of Melgar thought that the building.

Exterior of the supermarket that now occupies the premises of the old concert hall.
Exterior of the supermarket that now occupies the premises of the old concert hall. Ricardo Ordonez

The passage of time has meant that the only pilgrimage experienced by Melgar de Fernamental is that of the pilgrims of the Camino de Santiago. The national highway in front of Las Vegas 2, which was shared by the trucks of the gangs with the local tractors, no longer collapses at dawn. Those times are behind in the calendar, but not in the memory. He is missed so much by those who were his faithful that many refuse to visit him again. They refuse to see that where they jumped and enjoyed so many legendary nights there are now only shelves with jam or milk.

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Las Vegas 2: the concert hall that brought the Ramones to a town in Burgos is today a supermarket