An oddity i've been interested in for a long time is the play/operetta The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, in which Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht pre-imagine Las Vegas twenty years before the killing of Bugsy Siegel. 

"Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny: a cynical tale of an imaginary boom town where absolutely anything goes—except having no money." (from the Met Opera folio)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp4lwTMiN78

I was vaguely aware of this operetta when thinking about Boomtown, but at 24-25 I couldn't wrap my head around German opera, much less wrap anybody else's head around it. Even talking about it sounded ridiculously pretentious, and so it ended up influencing us less than I actually wish, basically just the overall device of city-as-plot, and then applying kind of a lens filter of grimy and depraved Hitler-ascendant Berlin to glossy and depraved Reagan-triumphant Los Angeles--the inherent despair and the spiritual wasteland and paranoia and addictions and the fear of mass violence to come.

But talking about German opera in the music business in LA in the 1980s was a sure way of emptying a room, especially as i didn't really know what i was talking about. And also there's a huge structural difference between a multi-character opera and a single-voiced declamatory rock and roll kind of thing, so maybe influence beyond that wouldn't even really be possible... Ah well, water under the bridge either way.