Played Out on the Strip

The Rise and Fall of Las Vegas Casino Bands

Janis L. McKay

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781943859030
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

From 1940 to 1989, nearly every hotel on the Las Vegas Strip employed a full-time band or orchestra. After the late 1980s, when control of the casinos changed hands from independent owners to corporations, almost all of these musicians found themselves unemployed. Played Out on the Strip traces this major shift in the music industry through extensive interviews with former musicians.In 1989, these soon-to-be unemployed musicians went on strike. Janis McKay charts the factors behind this strike, which was precipitated by several corporate hotel owners moving to replace live musicians with synthesizers and taped music, a strategic decision made in order to save money. The results of this transitional period in Las Vegas history were both long-lasting and far-reaching for the entertainment industry. With its numerous oral history interviews and personal perspectives from the era, this book will appeal to readers interested in Las Vegas history, music history, and labor issues.

CHAPTER ONE

1900–1950: From Sawdust Floors to Carpet Joints

Every night is New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas!¹

1930s Saying

[You were fine] as long as you were what they would call a ‘stand up’ guy. . . . I never signed a contract.

JOHNNY HAIG, Musician and Contractor

MUSIC HAS BEEN A PART of Las Vegas life for over a century. Founded in 1905 and incorporated in 1911, Las Vegas is often billed as the “Entertainment Capital of the World.” The town of Las Vegas began as a rest stop on the Old Spanish Trail. By the early 1900s it was “little more than a sleepy whistle-stop servicing a railroad.”² Nevertheless, there was music to be found there. The Las Vegas Age, a weekly newspaper published from 1905 until 1924, mentioned the existence of a Las Vegas Symphony Orchestra (most likely a dance band) as early as 1907.³ One of the earliest editions of the paper, in 1905, included a program for an evening of music celebrating Christmas. Other editions advertised dances with music performed by various bands and orchestras, music teachers for hire, and concerts by local or touring musicians.

The first casino opened in 1906. Shortly thereafter, a fancier casino called the Arizona Club was one of the first to offer music, and employed three pianists.⁴ The Arizona Club was located on notorious Block 16, an area originally designated for drinking, prostitution, and gambling. Early casinos appear to have hired musicians mostly to provide background music to the main entertainments of drinking and gambling. A 1912 photograph of the Arizona Club pictures a typical scene, featuring a banjo player and a violinist seated in the middle of the barroom floor while the patrons go about their business. Ed Von Tobel, an early and longtime resident, noted, “We lived on North 3rd Street and quite often in the night time we could hear rink-a-dink piano playing.”⁵

Typical hotel saloon entertainment from that time included piano players, “cowboy” singers, dance bands, and small instrumental groups. The Overland Hotel advertised “good music which will add to the enjoyment of the patrons every afternoon and evening” in 1909.⁶ The Vegas Park Plunge and Pavilion, a “delightful resort,” advertised music for dancing on Wednesday and Saturday evenings.⁷ In 1909 the Opera House opened on the second floor of the Thomas Department Store; it served as a performance venue for traveling opera and vaudeville companies and as a center for social and cultural activities.⁸ In 1912 or 1913 the Opera House was renamed the Majestic Theater and continued to feature vaudeville acts as well as movies. These types of entertainments were offered through the 1920s and 1930s as Las Vegas grew. In 1924, violin and cornet player J. R. Garehime was persuaded to stay in Las Vegas, and he opened a music and jewelry store on Fremont Street, selling upright pianos, sheet music, and wind-up gramophones.⁹ Anyone who could afford to do so could now have music at home.

Nevada legalized gambling in 1931 specifically to attract both long-term investors and tourists to the state. Though Las Vegas had catered to travelers since its beginning, the resort business did not become the dominant industry until the 1940s.¹⁰ Prior to that decade, a number of different industries had helped to build the city, starting with the railroads. The railroad shops were lost after Las Vegas workers joined a large national strike. Union Pacific moved the repair shops to Caliente in an action that many believed to be in retaliation against the strongly pro-union town.¹¹ Residents tried to attract other businesses in the early 1920s, and tourism was just one of the industries they considered.

Even before the railroad yards were gone, there were early attempts to market Las Vegas as a resort city because of the red-light district clubs on Blocks 16 and 17.¹² The resort idea gained more initiative when the Hoover Dam project was approved in 1928 and then when gambling was legalized in 1931. The construction of the Hoover Dam helped turn Fremont Street and other parts of Las Vegas into tourist centers.¹³ According to historian Eugene P. Moehring, “75 percent of those visiting the Hoover Dam also stopped in Las Vegas and these totals grew every year.”¹⁴

Soon, casinos like the Meadows Club were offering gambling and entertainment, catering to both dam workers and tourists. Built in 1931 on Boulder Highway by the Cornero Brothers, the Meadows provided a more refined option for nightclub entertainment than the Wild West bars and brothels on Block 16. The brothers invested $31,000 building thirty hotel rooms that had running water, plus a nightclub with its own house band. Judy Garland appeared there as a nine-year-old singer in a trio called the Gumm Sisters.¹⁵ Jack Laughlin was hired to produce the “Meadows Revue” in the showroom with music provided by a Los Angeles band.¹⁶

Once tourism had been established as a viable option for Las Vegas business, the race was on to build the nicest hotel, casino, or nightclub, and owners competed to provide the best entertainment—a competition that has never stopped. All the new entertainment options available in the 1930s inspired the saying, “Every night is New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas.”¹⁷

In addition to the regularly hired touring performers and groups, each location that provided musical entertainment usually hired a regular house band that provided both music for featured entertainers and music for dinner and dancing. The growth of tourism thus coincided with the beginnings of the golden age of the casino hotel bands and lounge acts. The Musicians Union was chartered in 1931, the same year that Nevada legalized gambling. The first president was a pianist named Jack Tenny, who composed the popular song “Mexicali Rose” in 1923.¹⁸

Until around 1934 most of the union members were working regularly and making good wages in the smaller clubs, but this changed when the Hoover Dam construction boom ended. By 1936 many people who had come to Las Vegas and Boulder City to work on the dam were unemployed, and the smaller clubs were no longer able to afford to hire as many musicians. After this, the union reorganized and began to get more serious about seeking to provide a living wage for its members.¹⁹

In the 1930s and early 1940s some musicians called Las Vegas “the elephant’s graveyard.” Many of the first players were road musicians with “alcohol problems, personality problems, every other kind of problem you could think of,” said Las Vegas musician and contractor Johnny Haig. Most of these early musicians played for dances and provided background music. Once the tourism industry began to take hold in Las Vegas, the hotel owners sought to out-do each other and the need for quality musicians grew. The union musicians were in a perfect position to capitalize on the growth of the resort entertainment industry.

In 1941 Tom Hull built the El Rancho Vegas, considered by most historians to be the first true resort-casino on the Las Vegas Strip, or Highway 91.²⁰ His sister Sally Stewart was the first entertainment director, and she sought to hire the best performers that were available to serve as a draw for the new casino.²¹ The El Rancho had two main entertainment venues: the dinner theater that accommodated three hundred (called the Round-Up Room until 1951, then the Opera House), and Nugget Nell’s Cocktail Lounge.²² Touring headliners Peggy Lee and Sammy Davis Jr. both made their Las Vegas debuts here in 1946.²³ The El Rancho dinner theater also had a regular house entertainment group—Frank Fay and the El Rancho Starlets, backed by the Garwood Van Orchestra.²⁴ Through the years, various orchestras served as the house band for the El Rancho, including the Carlton Hayes Orchestra, the Al Jahns Orchestra, the Chick Floyd Orchestra, the Sterling Young Orchestra, the Ted Fio Rito Orchestra, the Bob Ellis Orchestra, and the Dick Rice Orchestra, among others.²⁵

Also on the Highway 91 Strip, the old Pair-O-Dice Nightclub was replaced in 1942 with a new resort property called the Last Frontier. While the Pair-O-Dice had offered live music like many of the small nightclubs, the owner of the Last Frontier, R. E. Griffith, wanted his entertainment to be as good as or better than what the El Rancho was offering. On a visit to Los Angeles, he heard a talented singer named Maxine Lewis. At his request, Lewis moved to Las Vegas in 1942 to become the entertainment director of the Last Frontier. Lewis later said Griffith hired her because “I knew most everybody in show business.” At that time, said Lewis, there were no sidewalks on the Strip—everything was dirt. The customers for the showrooms were still mostly locals, dressed in Western attire. Still, the Last Frontier was a much nicer club than the Pair-O-Dice or the Meadows and it competed directly with the El Rancho for business. Lewis recalled, “We thought it was so gorgeous! And the public thought that.”²⁶ The Last Frontier also hired a regular house band, Gus Martell and his 5th Avenue Orchestra. Its showroom, the Ramona Room, could seat six hundred guests. Lewis was given a large budget and a free hand.²⁷

To fill the showroom, Lewis ran advertisements all over the country and traveled to cities like New York and Chicago to see talent agents for new acts. She was the first booker in Las Vegas to hire Liberace. His original contract was for $750 per week, but Lewis thought so much of his act that she doubled his salary to $1,500 per week after his first show.²⁸ “He was such a great artist. . . . Lovely boy, nice boy.”²⁹

In addition to its star room, sometime in the early 1950s The Last Frontier opened what was possibly the first true lounge with musical entertainment. Some historians place the birth of the lounge act in Las Vegas in 1953, but longtime Las Vegas resident and entertainment writer Bill Willard said that he knew there was lounge entertainment as early as 1951 because he saw it himself.³⁰ Nevertheless, the Mary Kaye Trio was the first act to play in the lounge of the Last Frontier. The jazz trio had just ended a successful run in the main showroom, and the owner did not want them to leave. There was already another act booked in the main room for the following two weeks, though. Mary Kaye suggested that a stage be built in the bar area, essentially inventing the entire concept of lounge music. Norman Kaye said, “We were the first lounge group advertised as such. . . . It was a marvelous career for all of us.”³¹ After that, most hotels included lounges with free entertainment; many hotels still offer free lounge music.

Many of the earliest owners and investors in Las Vegas came from California during and after the late 1930s, when the California state government cracked down on illegal gambling. They saw opportunities to run legitimate businesses in Nevada, where gambling was legal. The 91 Club, the Pioneer Club, the Frontier Club, the El Cortez, and the El Rancho were all owned by men with previous connections to gambling in California. By 1946 the crime syndicate members from the East Coast began to infiltrate the casino business, beginning with Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Soon, the eastern mob controlled virtually all of the sports betting in town.³² Susan Berman, daughter of mobster and Flamingo executive Dave Berman, remembered that most of the gangsters were happy to have a place where they could live a more normal and settled life. “Life was to be enjoyed with major events, orchestrated perfectly, planned to the smallest detail, no expense spared. And because the gangster/mobsters and their wives were so happy at last to have a place to throw...