If you happened to be in town the first week of June 1955, your lounge-hopping choices would have included the Treniers in the Starlite Lounge of the new Riviera Hotel, and jump-swing king Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five at the Sands.
The Las Vegas Sun's "On The Town" columnist Alan Jarlson wasn't so sure he liked the sudden developments: "It's impossible to hear the tinkle of glasses -- much less the conversation of your partner -- ordinarily so familiar with the tete-a-tete for which a cocktail lounge should be designed," he wrote. "All is muffled by the din caused by entertainers who insist on rivaling their vocal chords and instruments with an atomic explosion."
Everyone else seemed to favor the explosion.
"Lounge" was 40 years away from having its own designation in record stores, but it was clear that something special was taking form in these small rooms. [Louis] Prima's sidemen would later say the lounge helped him read people: That if he could see the audience, he could tell what they wanted. That, along with being a natural-born showman, allowed Prima to inject the repetitive schedule of the lounge with a sense of spontaneity, making the crowd feel as if it was seeing something different each night.
"Everything we did we found onstage -- including all the lines that Sam used to throw," [Keely] Smith says. A little-known singer when they came to Vegas, Smith's fame grew as she found her place in the stage show. The couple played upon their age and physical difference, the brash Italian lurching, gyrating and mugging while his thin wife in the Dutch boy haircut kept her distance and looked on calmly, either in amusement or in horror. It was an interplay lifted almost verbatim by Sonny & Cher for their TV show in the '70s.
"The deadpan happened because we did five forty-five minute shows, and I was up there like a half-hour each show before I even opened my mouth," Smith says. "I didn't know what to do with myself. So I used to just fold my arms, cross my legs, and lean up against the piano. And I watched everything that went on in the room, and the casino too. And then when Louis would come and pull on my skirt, he would be disrupting what I was watching, and I'd look down at him like, 'Don't bother me.' ''
Freddie Bell adds, "Nobody could pace an audience like Louis. He was the best at pacing the crowd. He had a feel for an audience. I've never seen anybody better. He made everybody around him look good, had a tremendous way of showing off his people." The small band structure that had been an economic necessity conveniently left more open space for jamming. Film footage of the band onstage shows antics such as Prima vamping to "Oh Marie," with Butera parroting every vocal phrase with a saxophone retort until Prima finally gets the better of him. "What happened? You can't play in Italian?" Prima asks.
"You will never see another lounge like the Sahara," says Sonny King, who worked there from 1955 through 1958 even while he toured with Jimmy Durante as a second banana (he remembers doing two shows with Durante at the Desert Inn, then racing over to the Sahara for his sets there). "In the corner they had a barbecue pit. You'd eat sausages and peppers on Italian bread, steak sandwiches -- in the lounge. I think the fire laws came in and took it out."
Musically, however, "Every night was a challenge," he says. "I proclaimed that if you could go and do a good show in that type of environment, then you could work in the hellhole of Calcutta." With three working bartenders in front, "You really had to perform and capture their attention. It was a good time and it was a terrible time in those years, at that stage of the game."
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