Vegas, Baby!

Wild, Cool & Swingin'; Louis Prima, Keely Smith and Sam Butera and The Witnesses

Mom has often talked about one of our neighbor’s kids, D. H., who, after college, got hooked up with a job that offered him many opportunities to travel. In fact, the job took him to all fifty states. Mom said that each time D. visited a state for the first time, he would send himself a postcard. There must have been enormous satisfaction when he tacked that last postcard on the bulletin board.

I loved my apartment in San Antonio, Texas. It was on the top floor of the Casino Club Building, right across the Riverwalk from the Hyatt Place, home of Jim Cullum’s Landing. The apartment was, essentially, a single room, with a twenty-foot high ceiling and a loft. It had three floor to ceiling windows that looked to the west, affording me a view to many a Texas sunset. From November of 2002 until April of 2003, I lived like a poor king in my hip digs in the sky.

Throughout those six months, I had plenty of work, but no regular job. I had the freedom to move wherever and whenever I wanted, but the right set of circumstances didn’t present themselves. Then, when the last week in April came, that top floor apartment started to heat up. I knew that there was no way I’d survive that place in the summer.

On the first of May, my friend A. D. called me and said, “The piano player position opened up in Sam Butera’s band. I can’t help but think that you would be perfect for the job.” Who do I talk to? “I’ll give you the number.” Okay. … By the way, who’s Sam Butera? I immediately received a crash course in Butera-lore.

Sam served as arranger, saxophonist and bandleader for Louis Prima and Keely Smith starting in 1956 and staying with Prima clear up into the 1970’s. Mr. Prima had formed a big band in 1940 and, little by little, had developed its own distinctive sound by instilling a recognizable shuffle beat in the rhythm. When Louis gave up the big band in the early 1950’s and started working in Las Vegas, he hired Sam to pick up some musicians and join him at The Sahara. Bringing the shuffle rhythm along from the big band, Louis Prima, Keely Smith and Sam Butera and the Witnesses rocked the room at the casino and almost single handedly invented the Las Vegas lounge act.

As Paul Schaffer to Prima’s David Letterman, Sam would wisecrack with Louis, play outrageous saxophone during the instrumental breaks in the songs and sing a few songs on his own like “Next Time” and “Chantilly Lace”. But the best thing Sam did for Louisa Prima was to write those awesome, hard-swinging arrangements of “Just A Gigolo”, “That Old Black Magic”, “When You’re Smiling” and the great “Jump, Jive and Wail”. It’s almost a certain guarantee that nobody will play “Gigolo” and “Wail” any differently than the way that Sam penned them for Prima.

Sam still lived in Las Vegas in 2003. We made arrangements for me to rent a room in the Vegas home of the guy who played drums for Sam. I parted ways with my princely pad in the Casino Club Building in San Antonio and hit the road bound for Vegas, baby, Vegas.

I really didn’t know what to think. In all of my dreams of traveling all over the world, not once did I ever feel the lure to visit Las Vegas, let alone move there. The very essence of the city is diametrically opposed to my nature. I count as flawed the reasoning of one who sets out to tangle with a vice … with the intention of losing.

Well, I decided to put a more positive spin on the ordeal by doing the following: First, I filled up with gas on the Arizona side of the Hoover Dam. Next, I drove up the strip, scoffing at the excess, deriding its purpose and mocking the casino owners … who, by the way, would never, never, never glean one single dime from my Dockers. Finally, I drove to the drummer's house, and by virtue of opening the door of my Durango, placing the sole of my Merrell’s on the one-hundred ten degree tarmac, extending my hand and saying, Hi, I’m Erik Apland. I’m your new piano player, – I stepped into my fiftieth state.

Credits: To Jim Cullum, for keeping an era of jazz alive. I love your band, old friend.