A late-bloomer finds his bliss with a song and a stage

Karaoke clubs provoke a question that’s rarely answered: Why that song? What made you want to sing “Candle in the Wind” in front of a bunch of strangers? What deep-seated pull does “King of the Road” exert on your soul? Just how personally do you mean “I Will Survive”?

And why, most perplexingly, is that 75-year-old man with dark-rimmed glasses and long white sideburns taking the microphone at 11 on a Saturday night in West Los Angeles and singing in a commanding high baritone:

Nessun dorma!

Nessun dorma!

Tu pure, o Principessa,

Nella tua fredda stanza

guardi le stelle ...

His name is Art Himmel. He’s the guy with his own custom-karaoke CD of that famous aria from Puccini’s “Turandot.” He’s the guy who waits willingly through performances by a dozen other karaoke singers, many of them a third his age, most of them singing pop songs he doesn’t know or can’t stand. He’s the guy who has spent a couple of nights a week in karaoke clubs for the last 11 years.

“I’m a late bloomer,” he jokes in a still-distinctive New York City accent. “I didn’t find out I could sing until I was 64.”

Actually, Himmel always knew he could sing. He just didn’t try it in public until he was 64. What’s happened since is a tribute to the way the karaoke subculture offers solace to the wannabe-performer subculture.

It started with a party in 1991. Himmel’s wife, Esther, had met a man whose daughter was a former Broadway star. The woman began inviting the Himmels to their parties. There was piano music, and one night a guest got up to sing.

“I could do that,” Himmel whispered to his wife. “I do that in the shower.” And she knew, from hearing him sing around the house, that he could -- with great fervor. He’d sung at home since he was a boy, accompanying his mother, who had show business aspirations but was barred by her parents from following them. “She had a voice like a bell. Perfect pitch. Range, power, unbelievable.”

Himmel, who was a teleprompter operator at NBC and CBS in the ‘50s and ‘60s, was provoked enough to make a cassette tape. At the next party, he gave it to an acquaintance of the hostess, who gave it to the hostess, who privately auditioned Himmel at her home and arranged for him to sing at her future parties.

Himmel loved the attention, the way his voice held people, and he wanted more.

“After a while, my son says, ‘Why don’t you try karaoke?’ I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ He explained it. So I started to go. I know there had been piano bars around longer than that, but it never occurred to me to go.”

He started with old favorites like “My Way,” “Old Man River” and “Ebb Tide.” Over time he figures he has performed 60 different songs. These days his two favorite hangouts are the Brass Monkey in Koreatown, where he’s sung for nine years, and the Boardwalk, a year-old karaoke club a few miles from his West L.A. apartment that saves a regular table for him.

He sings everything with an operatic vibrato that contrasts dramatically with the young people who athletically belt out “Welcome to the Jungle” or “Saving All My Love for You.” They shake and sway. Himmel often sits on a stool while he’s singing, unless he’s in a mood to ham it up and move from table to table, offering young women his hand.

There is a price to be paid in the world of karaoke: You get to sing only one song at a time. That can mean only two or three appearances at the mike some nights. Himmel decided to make one of his shots more memorable by adding Puccini.

“As a kid in New York, I was always fascinated by the opera. I used to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on radio every Saturday afternoon,” he said on a recent Friday night at the Brass Monkey while someone on stage was trying to sing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”

“So now I thought, what’s the most familiar aria? Probably ‘Nessun Dorma’ because the Three Tenors did it.” He went shopping at a karaoke store, picked out a CD arrangement, went home and started rehearsing on his home karaoke machine. Today’s models allow the singer to change the key of a CD, and once Himmel figured that out and learned the Italian phonetically, he was set.

Performing the aria brought many curious people to his bar table to inquire: Who was this? Why was he singing here? Had he once sung on Broadway? No, he’d joke, I sold pencils. How long had he been singing? Just a few years, he’d tell them, and sometimes he’d tell them the whole story.

Himmel has made up business cards with his photo, has had head shots taken, and has auditioned (unsuccessfully) for CBS’ new “Star Search.” He boasts that all his friends are in their 20s, 30s and 40s. He’s started on an autobiography about his life behind the scenes in the early days of network TV. One thing just leads to another, he likes to say, and indeed there are moments that he can trace back to the moment he felt goaded into making that tape of himself singing.

If he’d never made the tape, he’d never have started singing at parties, never have wandered into a karaoke club, and never have met a customer a few years back who asked him for a favor: Telephone her dying mother and sing her a song -- any song he liked. Awhile later he ran into the daughter shopping in Santa Monica.

“She told me, ‘Art, for the first time since that woman was sick, when you sang to her, she smiled.’ ”