High energy boosted lounge performers to fame

Best Lounge Legends

By John L. Smith
Review-Journal
     Irv Kluger was a Brooklyn boy with visions of musical greatness as a jazz drummer when he first heard the man who would become the ultimate Las Vegas lounge legend.
     "I had sent away 28 cents for a cat's whisker crystal radio," Kluger says from his Las Vegas home. "I'd scratch the crystal and hear a radio broadcast from a club up in Harlem and listen to a cat named Louis Prima playing his butt off. He had a Southern sound when he talked. He was a great jazz player and an entertainer. Louis had great energy.
     "I was with Artie Shaw's band in ¹54 when we came to Las Vegas, and I saw Louis play. He was playing great, and he had developed an act. He always had a deadpan girl who could sing. They all sang well and they were all the same. And I think he married every one of them."
     But if Prima is the brightest star in this underappreciated hall of fame, who joins him in the spotlight?
     The list is long, and we have room for only a few of the lounge legends that have managed to defy the odds and gain something akin to Las Vegas immortality.
     After all, lounge acts are the entertainment game's afterthought. At their traditional best, they offer musicians in tuxedos and handsome lead singers playing songs you can name. Musical obscurity is fine for jazz oboists, and a caustic artistic temperament might work for Streisand, but such traits mean certain death and, worse, unemployment, for the lounge performer.
     Lounge acts not only must be proficient musically, but they also must be consistent night after night.
     Then there's the magical ingredient.
     "Energy," swinging sax lounge legend Sam Butera says from somewhere on the road in Florida. At age 70, he still plays more than 270 dates a year. "You have to have energy. Making people happy takes energy. You really have to like seeing people have a good time. Now the kids are picking up on what we're doing. They're dancing, and I love it. That's what it's all about."
      Butera and his Witnesses group are among Prima's disciples, but the lounge family tree has many branches. There are the comedians who made it big, including Don Rickles and Shecky Greene. There are the sweet songbirds who made the transition to the main showroom, including Ann-Margret.
     For Kluger, a renowned drummer in lounges and main rooms who has recorded more than 30 albums with jazz greats ranging from Stan Kenton to Dizzy Gillespie, an encyclopedia won't hold all the names of the players who almost gained immortality playing in the lounges.
     "There is the guy from Philadelphia, Freddy Bell," Kluger says of the leader of the bopping Bellhops. "He swings with all the high-energy stuff. There's Kirby Stone with his musical pops. And I think Jerry Tiffe's excellent. But, remember, there was a time when Vic Damone, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae played the lounges. There were 18-piece bands in the lounges."
     That began changing in the late ¹60s. By the mid-1980s, many of the real lounges had disappeared or had been reduced to a smoky shadow of their former selves.
     If there's a lounge legend encyclopedia, it's between the ears of Gaughan family casinos entertainment maven Cork Proctor, who broke into show business as a drummer with the Kings Four. He later took his sense of timing and went solo. As a stand-up comedian, he opened more rooms than a locksmith.
     "Maybe I'm jaded because I was here during the best of the best," Proctor says. "The money is not what it was, but it's still pretty good. Working a lounge in Las Vegas is not the career move it used to be. Now it's more of a job than a ticket to something bigger."
     Proctor reels off a few of his all-time favorites machine-gun style: the Treniers, Sonny Turner, Dick Francisco, Mickey Finn, Stone, Sidro's Armada, disco diva Christine W, the Bernard Brothers, the Billy Williams Revue, Johnny Dennis and Neta Rogers, Didi and Bill, Jack Ross Quartet featuring Dick Lane, Sonny King, Nelson Sardelli, impressionist Bob Anderson and Cook E. Jarr, a perennial fan favorite among Review-Journal readers.
     "Unfortunately, Cook E. Jarr got here at the end of the reign," Proctor says. "But you can't beat him for energy. And energy is the biggest thing. The bottom line is, are you entertained when you leave the room?"
     Of course, Prima is on everyone's list. And it appears his legend may live on in the form of daughter Lena Prima, a singer who just now is rising into the spotlight.
     As long as she possesses the energy to play night after night.
     It's something that has never left Butera.
     "The only thing I know is, when I see people enjoying the kind of music we play after all these years, it's quite an inspiration," Butera says. "I get tears in my eyes. It's all about memories."
     Long may these lounge legends live.