Friday, October 18, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Making a Living

Local performers may not be headline names, but they're happy with their careers

Names and labels are at issue here.

Locals and frequent visitors alike may be familiar with Jimmy Hopper, Denise Clemente, Tony Marques and Ghalib Ghallab.

But what are they? Not stars, not really. Not yet, perhaps, in some cases. But they claim loyal followings.

And where do they perform? The easy word used to be "lounges." But that term now only applies in the broadest sense, given the unusual venues they play.

And they are becoming a rare breed, working steadily on the Strip in the face of two encroaching trends.

On one end, the casino industry's embrace of dance clubs and "cool bars" has gobbled floor space once devoted to free entertainment. Last year, the 21-year-old Forum Lounge at Caesars Palace became Shadow, home of silhouetted dancing girls.

There's also the entrepreneurial temptation of trying to speed the road to fame by sacrificing the guaranteed paycheck. Bob Anderson, Marlene Ricci and others have become promoters as well as performers, working without a guarantee for the elevated perception that a ticketed "headline" show brings.

For the time being, however, these four are right here, where fans know where to find them -- and are learning not to take a bargain for granted.

Jimmy Hopper

If judged by the company he keeps, Jimmy Hopper is already a star. When he went to play tennis with Harrah's headliner Clint Holmes, local pro Marty Hennessy raved about him to a longtime student, Tony Bennett.

Hopper had six years in Las Vegas to cultivate the lines that form outside the Bellagio's Fontana lounge, his home base for the past 2 1/2 years.

Former Rio head Tony Marnell had seen the Virginia native at a Four Seasons hotel in Southern California, where Hopper had spent most of his life. "I'm almost done with my second tower," Hopper recalls him saying, "and I'm building a room for you."

The room turned out to be the penthouse-level Voodoo Lounge. "I generated more than $1 million a month for them in that bar," Hopper says.

After a year, he says the hotel offered him "a very nice contract," but one with no "out" clause for the next 2 1/2 years. "I need to move on. I need to spread my wings," he told them.

Hopper briefly tried a ticketed show in the Luxor's Ra club. It wasn't a "four wall" deal, he says, but it was the wrong room and a bad early time slot for a ticketed show in a nightclub.

The Fontana opened with cabaret legend Michael Feinstein getting upstaged by the fountain show outside the lounge's picture windows. Hopper has fared better.

"I don't know if people want to listen to Cole Porter for 90 minutes," he says. So his song list covers everything from Led Zeppelin to Andrea Bocelli. "I think it surprises people to see this guy with Billy Idol hair doing `West Side Story.' "

He's assembled an equally diverse band. Guitarist Jimmy Crespo toured with Aerosmith, violinist David Ragsdale with Kansas.

"I'm on my way up when a lot of these (classic rock) bands are basically trying to find the next gig they can get," he says.

"My game plan is to have my own room," he admits, noting, "Everybody in the business, that's what they want to do."

But he's willing to bide his time. "I want to go home to my family every night," he says of wife Sally and two children. "And I'm in one of the nicest rooms in town, even though it's not a showroom."

Denise Clemente

When Denise Clemente heard the Bellagio had other plans for the Allegra lounge where she's been working of late, she thought, "Oh no, not again."

She's seen a lot of lounges get turned into other things since arriving, straight out of high school, in 1976 to audition for a Hacienda revue called "Sassy Class."

The New Jersey native then saw the world as one of Liberace's background singers. That gave her the cachet to settle into a busy, if somewhat unheralded career as a lounge singer and occasional opening act for headliners such as Don Rickles.

"I want to be successful but I'm into the family first," she says of husband Chuck Foley and their two boys.

It's been a tough year on that front. In January, her 11-year-old son Michael was mauled by four Great Danes he was feeding while a neighbor was out of town. He's still getting skin grafts after the highly publicized episode.

That slowed progress on a Christian album Clemente been recording in Nashville, Tenn. She also acted in a locally filmed sitcom pilot, "Happy Streets," that's being shopped to the Fox network.

Having much of the work dry up for Top-40 "human jukebox" bands has been a mixed blessing. "This year I've been doing the music I like to do," she says, "a mix of jazz, blues and pop. I've been doing an actual show, with a lot of standards."

It's getting very hard to find "new stuff that actually is a song. I ask Michael, `What's good now that I could sing?' "

Upon hearing herself say that, she adds, "I sound like an old lady."

Tony Marques

If you really want to corner a market, try being a country singer on the Las Vegas Strip.

"It catches people off guard," Tony Marques says. "I get all kinds of feedback from people saying: `We were just walking by but heard you. Thank God we found some country music. You can't find it anywhere in this town.' "

It helps that Marques and his band play outdoors at Harrah's Las Vegas Carnival Court, the unique off-sidewalk venue that makes it easy to catch the ears of pedestrians.

Harrah's is even more radical for plugging Marques into its regular rotation; what little country music there is in Las Vegas usually exists in themed boot-scootin' joints such as Gilley's.

Marques thanks the hotel for "taking a chance ... biting the bullet and maybe not doing the cool thing."

The 31-year-old singer is a longtime Las Vegan who is a 1989 graduate of Clark High School. Back then he was better known as a soccer player, but he embraced "the music thing" just as the new country movement hit its peak in 1993.

It had arguably gone bust by the time Marques spent a year in Nashville in 1998-'99.

He was financed with a $20,000 war chest to pursue music full time, but "that money goes extremely fast." And when it started running low, the pressure it created for his family "really stressed me out."

Marques heard some encouraging feedback at local songwriters' nights, but his first real nibble from a record label came just as he was loading up a U-Haul to move back to Las Vegas.

Here he knew that "financially, I could take care of my family. I booked a year of work in a week."

"I don't want to do the lounge thing the rest of my life," he adds. But he knows that it's not the right time to test the record industry waters again.

"Nobody wants to wait around" to develop new talent, he says of the record industry. "Everyone wants their money overnight."

Ghalib Ghallab

Where can you go in Las Vegas to hear an acoustic piano trio playing real-deal jazz?

Try the Terrazza Lounge at Caesars Palace. But don't be surprised if you later find the pianist clapping his hands to a synthesized beat, chanting, "There's a party over here. There's a party back there!"

"You've got to bring the music to the people here," says Ghalib Ghallab. "You've got to be very contemporary. You get an upbeat crowd here."

The Chicago jazz man has always had the versatility to swing from classical piano to synthesized keyboard funk. The latter came in more handy when he first moved here 10 years ago. "I was so surprised they paid the local talent so much money," he says.

"Nobody was playing jazz at that time, and those guys who were playing it were off the Strip."

Ghallab opened the Terrazza as an acoustic pianist three years ago, but something was missing. The area was just too, well, open. Not only did he play to the lounge, but to a "backstage" audience who would gather by a fountain in the hotel traffic area behind him.

Ghallab brought back some of his synthesizers and added his son, J.R., on drums and Blaise Sisson as bassist. He sequences rhythms in his home studio and brings them to work on his iPod.

The result is "Our Style of Jazz," as he calls his latest CD, which he recorded live at the lounge. "It still has the human feel, but also the grooves people are used to hearing on the radio."

Celebrities such as Michael Jordan and Sheryl Crow have come to check it out. The hotel plans to enlarge the stage and add another 30 chairs.

The Muslim name once served as an eye-catcher to help Ghallab stand out. Now it stands out more than he wants it to. He says Islam is "a very peaceful religion. It's almost an extension of Christianity, except that we accepted another prophet."

Ghallab just calls himself "a peaceful, loving man having a ball in Vegas."