Success Is Relative : Family Members Find Steady Work in Les Brown’s Band of Renown

In its nearly 60-year history, Les Brown’s Band of Renown has always been a family affair.

Both of the bandleader’s brothers, Warren and Clyde (Stumpy) Brown, spent time in the band. Singer, trombonist and current band manager Stumpy, 13 years younger than the 81-year-old Les, is still active and celebrating his 50th year as a member (Warren, 74, now lives in Carlsbad).

And Brown’s son, singer-conductor Les Brown Jr., appears at all the band’s performances, sometimes taking his dad’s place in front of the orchestra, as he will on Sunday when the group appears at the Irvine Marriott.

But the most important family member, according to Stumpy, was the Browns’ father, Raymond Winfield Brown.

“You had to be a musician with dad,” Stumpy explained in a phone call from his home in Palm Desert. “He always wanted to be a professional musician, and in a way he was, conducting the town band, but never to the extent of Les’ band. Instead, he became a baker. So with him, you either had to practice your instrument or work in the bakery. And since it was easier to practice . . . “

Dad also directed Stumpy through a variety of instruments before he settled on trombone. “All my instruments were hand-me-downs,” he groused. “I started out on cornet, then he switched me to a soprano saxophone that Les had, then he switched me to a baritone horn that Warren had played.

“Then when I was 15, I had won a scholarship to a music camp and, just as I was leaving with my baritone, Dad called me over and said, ‘Where you going with that horn?’ He had a brand-new trombone that he wanted me to take to camp. I had never played trombone. I told him, ‘Dad, I got the scholarship playing the horn.’ ‘Tell them you forgot it,’ he replied.”

Two years later, after he graduated from military school, Stumpy joined the band as a trombone player. “Les never even heard me play,” said his brother.

“The band had three trombones at the time, and Dad called Les and said, ‘You need four trombones. And Stumpy needs a job.’ ” The trombonist joined the band in Chicago and has been a member ever since.

Stumpy was given a similar ultimatum, this time from his brother Les, when comedy vocalist Butch Stone (who had a hit with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”) left the band in the late ‘40s. “Les came up to me and said, ‘You’re going to sing Butch’s songs.’ And I said, ‘I don’t sing.’ And he said, ‘You do now.’ And I’ve been singing with the band ever since.”

Les Brown Jr., born in 1940, was, as he recalls, 5 or 6 when he asked his father why all the other kids’ dads went to work during the day while he went to work at night. “Why don’t you come along and find out?” was his father’s reply, Brown Jr. recalled.

“And that’s when it dawned on me what it was he did. It was such an exciting, wonderful thing, all those brass instruments and the musicians in the band and all the people there to watch. After we moved west to join Bob Hope (in Los Angeles in 1947), I’d be in the car every weekend with him, going to the Palladium to watch the band play.”

Brown Jr., who lives in the Santa Monica Mountains near Topanga Canyon, made his first appearance with the orchestra at 13, playing a clarinet duet with his father. He soon switched to drums and began traveling with the band in 1956.

“I’d take my summer vacation on the road with the band,” he said, “one-nighters on the bus with the guys in the band, playing the lake resorts and the ballrooms that remained at the tail end of the big-band era. It was the greatest.”

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Though the popular conception of life on a big-band bus is one of drinking, coarse language, dirty laundry and endless poker games, Brown Jr. says his experience was nothing like that. “There was always a healthy atmosphere on the bus. Sure there was dirty laundry and penny-ante poker, but it wasn’t outrageous by any means. My dad is a gentleman, and he set the tone for everybody else in the band.”

Stumpy remembers bus tours as downright tame. “When Doris Day was in the band (1940, ‘43-46), her little son would come over and sit on my lap. We were one big happy family.”

Most of the band members have been with Brown for several years. Some, including singer Butch Stone, drummer Jack Sperling and trumpeter Don Smith, can count their participation in decades. Les Brown himself makes most of the band’s 80 to 90 appearances a year, according to his son.

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With that many shows a year, do its members ever give credence to the claim that’s been aired since the end of World War II: Are big bands really coming back?

“Never,” Stumpy says. “For a while, when Harry Connick came out with those big-band recordings, I thought something must be happening. But he turned out to be just another finger-snapper. We’ll never see anything like when I was a kid and there were bands all over. I used to sit in awe watching groups like the Dorsey brothers. To me, they looked like gods.”

“It’s so cost-prohibitive to take a band of this size out on the road,” Brown Jr. adds. “But there is definitely a resurgence of the music. This music carries a universal appeal that just will not go away. A lot of the baby boomers remember it as what their parents listened to when they were growing up and have adopted it as their own. It’s a very comforting, very comfortable type of music, not necessarily rebellious, but certainly romantic.”

Les Brown’s role in that music, both Brown Jr. and Stumpy agree, is an important one.

“The consistency of the music over this almost 60-year period--that sticks out more than anything,” Brown Jr. said. “This band was always the cleanest, most precise band around. You knew whenever it played, it would be good.”

And what will Les Brown, who lives in Santa Monica, be doing when his band appears in Irvine? Said Stumpy: “He likes to spend Sundays watching golf on television.”

* The Les Brown Band of Renown, directed by Les Brown Jr., will appear Sunday at 6 p.m. in the Rendezvous Ballroom, Irvine Marriott hotel, 18000 Von Karman Ave., Irvine. $25. (714) 553-9449.