Mr. Entertainer

Clint holmes’ mom and dad were both vocalists, so showbiz came naturally.

- T.R. Witcher

Clint Holmes was destined to be on stage. Whether studying classical voice with his mother at the age of 10 or watching his dad perform at local jazz clubs, there was no doubt about what he’d end up doing. “When people ask me, ‘When did you decide you wanted to become a singer?’ there was never a decision,” Holmes says on the eve of his new show, Clint Holmes: Between the Lines, at The Palazzo Theatre. “It just was.”

The son of an African-American father and a white English mother, Holmes was born in the United Kingdom but raised in a small town outside Buffalo, NY. He got his start as the first African-American singer in the United States Army Chorus in the late 1960s, and in 1973 he scored a #2 Billboard hit with “Playground in My Mind.”

He later parlayed opening for comic Joan Rivers into a job as announcer and sidekick when Rivers launched the Fox Network with The Late Show in 1986. Holmes wasn’t the network’s original choice, but Rivers promised to fight for him, and she did. Holmes also served as a music correspondent for Entertainment Tonight, hosted his own Emmy award-winning talk/variety show, and cocreated the autobiographical musical Comfortable Shoes.

And through it all, Holmes has kept close ties to Vegas. He became a headliner first at the Golden Nugget, then at Harrah’s and – before his move to The Venetian and The Palazzo – The Smith Center for the Performing Arts. In 2005, he started the Clint Holmes foundation for the Performing Arts, a nonprofit that benefits children in art and music programs in the Clark County School District.