Life Is a Cabaret, Again : The Lounge Sounds of the ‘50s Make a Comeback

Play it again, Sam Butera.

Play it again, Louis and Keely.

Before the last song, please.

The time has passed, the memories hang in diminishing overtones and only the lonely remember that tarnishing Silver Age when loud was hip and pompadours were pomaded.

Lounge acts were bands of musicians who worked the big small rooms--the piano bars, the cabarets, the supper clubs--but mostly the Strips, both Vegas and Sunset.

They played 15 minutes away from fame and were the last ‘60s victims of rock ‘n’ roll.

But hold the dirges.

Banquettes are back.

Sharkskin and gold lame are in.

Whether we’re ready for it or whether lounge acts will ever be worth redeeming, the scene seems to be experiencing a comeback.

The sound of lounge comes out strongly from the 36-year-old Dresden Room on Vermont Avenue. The Treniers and their offspring still make it back to Las Vegas. And that was Keely Smith for one bright shining moment recently in Encino.

Then there’s San Francisco’s Joe Sehee, who goes by the stage name Joey Cheezhee. He and an informal cabal called the Society to Honor Lounge Cabaret (the acronym is SHLC, the pronunciation is schlock ) are taking over the Golden Monkey in Santa Monica Sunday at 8:30 p.m. to formally declare that the lounge style of small-room entertainment, old tunes and new, has returned.

Louis Prima Jr., a member of the metal group Problem Child, is scheduled to help initiate his late father into this SHLC hall of fame Sunday night. Capitol Records is joining in by giving away some Prima CDs and tapes.

Cheezhee plans a one-hour foray into the culture of traditional and now neo-lounge entertainment. His group, more sendup than serious, is called Joey Cheezhee and the Velveata Underground, and they’ll mix Guns N’ Roses with Sinatra, much as the lounge acts of the ‘50s and ‘60s mixed Cole Porter and Scott Joplin. And in the sometime outrageous tradition of some lounge performers, Cheezhee works at a certain cutting edge--astride blade skates. Seriously.

At one time Cheezhee’s group went by a somewhat different spelling. But the Kraft cheese people, obviously not lounge enthusiasts, wrote to him about the integrity of the trademark for one of their processed dairy products. Not wanting to disturb anyone’s cheese, Cheezhee complied. It was tough enough just working the blade skates.

Meanwhile, on Vermont Avenue, the Dresden Room where Marty and Elaine have been building audiences for almost 10 years, has become a heavy favorite for the young show-business crowd. Here, they experience the era when performers were close to the listeners, where intimacy really meant closeness, when all musical forms were tolerated and performed.

Kelbo’s on Pico is part of a returning “exotica” lounge scene where the music of Martin Denny is often heard.

Then there’s an occasional lounge music program on KXLU radio, “Molotov Cocktail,” that on Tuesday nights from 11 to 12 does play it again.

And like social movements everywhere, there is a newsletter, variously called Lounge Around and Lounging Around. It’s the casual work of Pat Tierney, a 33-year-old art instructor smitten with lounge lust.

Tierney occasionally organizes “expeditions into the suburbs,” looking for historic and lost lounges, the piano bars of pre-history and the cocktail “aesthetes” of blessed memory. His current discoveries include the San Franciscan and Del Conte’s, both in Torrance, both accommodating musicians who claim lineage to such diverse musicians as Lionel Hampton and Spike Jones.

“There are lots of histories out there,” he says. “The lounge acts were entertainment-based. They were not purely jazz, but maybe softened jazz. But they had real musical value. It was more than just the music, though. There was an environment to the lounges, a certain trapping, an architecture, a life style. They represented entertainment of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

“The musicians cared about what they did and how they sounded. There was real music and there was real schmaltz. And the audiences? Well, they smoked a lot. Drank a lot. And they loved so much what they heard.”

Performer Cheezhee, also in his 30s, echoes a nostalgia for a period he didn’t experience. He calls lounge music a “genre, an art form.” It was, he says, “down-front entertainment, a walk on the mild side. The musicians worked close. There was a oneness, what we call now a bonding. Prima, for example, worked better in a lounge than in a big room.”

Prima’s Las Vegas hardly exists. Most former lounge spaces are now filled with slot machines and gaming tables. Amplified rock cowboys play the glitz bars. Sam Butera and the Witnesses, a Prima break-away, occasionally performs. Veteran Dondino still appears at the downtown Four Queens.

Lounge acts were judged at the bottom line--how many people showed up, how many bottles of booze went down. Eventually, cost efficiency declared slots were a better gamble then wide-lapeled musicians.

With the rock upheaval of the ‘60s, the lounge performers lost the record companies and radio stations. Television kept their audiences home. They became the displaced persons of pop music.

Now another generation seems to be reaching out to them, if the crowds at the Dresden and the long-running Marty and Elaine say anything.

After Sunday night’s Hall of Fame ceremony, Joey Cheezhee will turn his blade skates and talents toward the documentary he wants to make on yesterday’s lounge cats and lizards. He’s in Hollywood now and so he’s talking agent. A TV show. Scripts.

He’s ready, he says, to take a walk on music’s, exotic, neo-lounge, mild side.