The tantalizing talent that was Joe Chavira

As a kid, I loved the NBC show "Unsolved Mysteries." 

If featured great stories that often left you with plenty of questions and an opportunity to draw your own conclusions about what happened, and how. 

I still love a good mystery, and there's an intriguing one that floated through Vegas this past winter. It's a story that didn't gain a lot of media attention and scrutiny at the time, and will likely be lost in the annals of Vegas history. But damn, it's a spectacular tale that left me with plenty of questions I cannot answer. Where's Robert Stack when I need him?

Last November I was introduced to a bizarre celebrity who had a colorful, and questionable, history. (To be fair, his celebrity status is debatable, as well.) 

He wasn't a longtime Vegas entertainer who toiled in casino lounges and turned up in variety shows up and down the strip during the glory days of Vegas. He was a longtime entertainer, allegedly, but relatively new to the Vegas scene. Yet somehow last December he was scheduled to receive a star on the Vegas version of a walk of fame. It's a thing, I feel like it's not well known, and its history seems to be as sketchy and ridiculous as the well-established version in Hollywood. (The most important criteria for both seems to be somebody's willingness to pay the inclusion fee for the celebrity being honored with a star.) 

I learned about this multi-talented sensation by reading two articles from Vegas 411. I've linked to them before, and I will do so again. Writer Sam Novak did a great job of collecting info about this new Vegas legend who had burst onto the scene and was already lined up to receive a star along the Las Vegas Boulevard sidewalk. 

Read about the legendary Joe Chavira here: Part one

And here: Part two

I won't rehash everything Sam wrote, but I will sum it up for those in a hurry. Joe was a legend in his own mind. 

He could play the guitar and piano. And the drums, too. He has had all kinds of odd success, allegedly, in his life. He was a stand out high school athlete, a military serviceman and allegedly created a cartoon character that was published in the Los Angeles Times newspaper, among others. He was a child prodigy when it came to music, and he somehow befriended Trini Lopez, a singer and actor who was most notable during the 1960s and 1970s.

Joe was a songwriter who performed regularly, or so we were told. He had big plans to promote his brand, whatever that was, upon his arrival in Vegas and he was good at dropping names of prominent people. 

And Joe seemed to be in the good graces of a widow who may have been financing his bizarre ascension to Vegas sidewalk royalty. 

Joe Chavira was a stage name, and it appears he chose a name that has a thin connection to Vegas history. How convenient. 

Sam is well plugged into the Vegas entertainment scene, and  received a lot of feedback in response to his articles about Joe's well-deserved honor. He also received comments suggesting that Joe's history was a little less than honorable, including a suggestion that Joe may have taken financial advantage of his friendship/working relationship with Trini Lopez. It's all in Sam's articles. If you didn't read them, you're missing out on great stuff. 

Joe got his star on Dec. 7, it appears. There was talk of a protest by real Vegas entertainers, but I don't think that happened. Joe has a very public Facebook page, and why shouldn't he? He's beloved and a Vegas treasure. The following photo is courtesy of that page: 

Weeks of toiling in the Las Vegas entertainment industry paid off for "Joe."

Sam stopped chronicling Joe's story prior to that memorable day in Vegas history. As he noted in his second article, ol' Joe had legal muscle that was trying to pressure Sam into removing his reporting from the Vegas 411 site. That legal muscle has failed to this point. It's almost as if facts, the truth and fair comment and criticism are difficult to suppress. 

But I was hooked. Who was this guy who had an odd history and lackluster music on YouTube? Sam embedded YouTube videos featuring Joe's music in his articles, including "Tantalize." I'm not a music critic, and I'm not a musician. In my uneducated opinion, it ain't good. But the video and production of it are on par with the music, that's for sure. 

After a December social media break to accept his prestigious award, Joe started celebrating his hard-earned Vegas star a few weeks after the fact with multiple Facebook posts. And he teased that he'd be appearing on the cover of My Vegas Magazine. He was very proud of this achievement. And why not? 

Joe, never one to shy away from dropping names or boasting about his incredible accomplishments, was not ashamed to tout that he was good friends with the publisher of My Vegas Magazine, and would be on its cover. Just a coincidence, I'm sure. 

And sure enough, he did make the cover of the magazine earlier this year, based upon pictures from the My Vegas Magazine Facebook page. (They do a real lousy job of putting a month, date or issue number on any issue the produce. And by lousy, I mean they don't appear to do it at all.)

My Vegas Magazine strikes me as a promotional vehicle that might produce copies with multiple covers. While it's hard to say definitively, photos on its Facebook page certainly suggest that's the case. They have a website, of course, and you can download PDF copies of the magazine. That's what I did, as I wanted to read the magazine's article celebrating the golden boy of Vegas entertainment. 

I'll get to that article in a moment. What I noticed first was that Joe wasn't on the cover of the PDF version of the magazine I downloaded. That only affirmed my belief that the magazine produces multiple covers for each issue. 

I eventually realized that I wasn't looking at several back issues that were available to download, I was looking at several covers for the same issue. Had I looked at the webpage for downloading the current issue, all confusion would have been cleared up immediately, as the page spells it out nicely: "CHECK OUT ALL OUR AMAZING COVER CLIENTS BELOW!"

"Cover clients," you say. Thank you, My Vegas Magazine, for removing all doubt.

As I looked through the magazine index, I didn't see a reference to Joe's story. Wouldn't a cover client be highlighted in the index? 

As I flipped through my virtual copy of the magazine I noted several things. There were a ton of contributing writers and photographers listed, but only one full-time employee for editorial or advertising, and that was a director of photography. That seemed rather odd. 

No editor, no ad director, no staff writers, no account executives. The only other "employee" I could identify was the publisher, who has a column at the beginning of each undated issue. 

The mag had sections about doctors, real estate agents, fitness, legal resources and restaurants. It was hard to determine what was an ad and what was supposed to be an article. Some pages of text had a writer listed. Others didn't. And the photos looked like publicity shots provided by the subject.

You want to talk about blurring the lines between reporting and advertising, My Vegas Magazine does a great job of it.

I finally got to the entertainment section, and there, on page 154, is our cover boy. The new star of Vegas. 

I read the article, and it read like a poorly written biography that Joe would have put together himself, featuring plenty of stunning accomplishments and incredible twists of fate. Joe was a survivor, fighter and champion who succeeded at everything he did, according to the one-page article with no writer's credit. 

Here is a screen capture of the first paragraph of his story.

Yes, that's the first two sentences of an "article" in a "magazine."

Yeah, it's that poorly written. And lacks editing. And the whole article is that way. It's not professional work, to state the obvious. 

If you haven't figured it out by now, My Vegas Magazine is not a news magazine. It's just a fancy advertising vehicle disguised as a magazine. Is there content in there that's not paid for? Perhaps, but the line between paid advertisement and actual journalistic effort does not exist. I see no evidence that the magazine attempts to denote what is paid content and what isn't. Perhaps there's no denotation necessary. Hard to know, but the articles look like text heavy ads in most instances. At least in the issue I reviewed. I didn't bother to seek journalism in any other edition. 

Are you shocked to find out Joe was profiled by this prestigious magazine? Probably not. 

But damn, Joe was mighty, mighty proud to be on the cover of this magazine. That strikes me as rather sad and pathetic when I realize what this magazine is, and more importantly, what it isn't. 

Hell, I could be on the cover of it, at least for a couple dozen copies, if I want to fork over the dough to have my seldom-used blog site highlighted as the most important voice in Vegas tourism. (I'm trademarking that phrase.) 

Recently I was reading comments on some of Joe's Facebook posts, and some of his acquaintances wanted to know where to find his My Vegas Magazine profile online. As people discussed Joe's big splash in the mag, a few people shared interesting tidbits about the mag. 

I don't need Robert Stack to solve this mystery for me. 

But there is an unsolved mystery in all of this: Who paid for Joe's big splash in My Vegas Magazine? 

I didn't see a lot of Facebook posts by Joe suggesting he was gigging around town, actually getting paid to perform for his many fans and eager tourists. How does a Vegas star make money if he's not performing night after night?

I have no idea how much Joe was earning on a daily basis selling his mediocre music or licensing his talent to film or television, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess he wasn't cashing many checks. (He claimed in an odd video interview that he had written music for one film and intended to do more of that, as well as get into acting.)

Joe's media blitz was likely funded by the same benefactor that funded his well-deserved Vegas star. I've seen no confirmation of that, but I'm at a loss to come up with a better explanation. 

Joe is an enigma. He was welcomed personally to Vegas by none other than the mayor, Carolyn Goodman, in a video Joe is proud to share on his YouTube page. His YouTube page has very few subscribers, but lots of self-promotion mixed in with an occasional song you'll likely never listen to twice. 

And he has plenty of pictures of himself with folks who are important, or at least give off the impression they are, on his Facebook page. 

And then there's his poorly maintained website that offers an outdated fan club package with a 2019 calendar. 

But a lot of people think he's swell. Really.

How do I know? Joe died March 19 at the age of 64. There's a web page dedicated to his memory, although it conveniently says little about him. Yet there are plenty of people who posted testimonies to what a great guy he was. You can find similar comments on the last post to his Facebook page. 

The guy seemed like a character from a low-budget '80s flick that went straight to VHS. Everything about Joe Chavira is so preposterous that you'd swear he is a thing of fiction. Like a good pro wrestler who sells his character both in the ring and everywhere he goes outside the ring, Joe's career seemed to be a work. 

What's real, what's fiction and who did Joe manipulate to achieve all his success and fame? Those are great questions I cannot answer. I wish Robert Stack was here to help me solve the mystery.