Lounge pioneers recall good ol’ days

There’s a lingering fascination with the golden age of Vegas, but not much talk about the morning after.

From its roaring start in the early ’50s well until the Woodstock era, the original lounge scene started a party on the Strip that still burns bright in memory. “Nobody thought about (the future),” says veteran comedian Pete Barbutti. “Nobody had any plans or anything. It was just going from one gig to the next.

“You think it’s going to go forever,” he adds. “Although you’re terrified that it’s going to end tomorrow, you really subconsciously think it’s going to go on forever.”

The Mary Kaye Trio, which pioneered “lounge” in both place and form, was splitting $15,000 per week at its peak. Good money now, amazing back then.

But the trio broke up in 1966. “None of them got along,” Barbutti says. “They probably thought each of them could do it on their own.” And they didn’t know it was the beginning of the end for the lounges.

Nostalgia for the era now obscures the fact that the lounges died slowly, of starvation. The cultural shift into the rock era colluded with the casino economics of slot machines overtaking table games. The entertainers who put Vegas on the map soldiered on, but they weren’t retro cool. They were has-beens.

Norman Kaye moved into a lucrative real estate business. Friends say a bitter divorce crippled the empire, but Kaye rode the boom-and-bust cycles of real estate through the 1980s.

Kaye has been a man of humble means in the past few years. Barbutti now plans to take part in today’s “Enormous Norm-A-Thon.” The noon concert at The Orleans gathers about 30 entertainers trying to raise money for Kaye’s medical costs after a stroke.

Don Hill says he will be there, too. The 86-year-old saxophonist is the last member of The Treniers, which shared the limelight with the Mary Kaye Trio back in the day. Claude Trenier, the group’s frontman who died in 2003, lived out his final years in a modest apartment near the Las Vegas Convention Center, and said he left most of his fortunes in various keno parlors over the years.

“He didn’t have anything else to do,” says Hill. “Me, I played golf and did a lot of other stuff to keep me busy.” Now Hill says he’s comfortable. “I didn’t make as much money as (Claude) did, so the little I have, I used it wisely. I don’t have any bills.”

Barbutti also counts himself lucky that “I got married young and had kids young,” inspiring a prudent budget and some lucky real estate buys. “I always drove an old car and still do,” he says.

But those who live to remember the good old days know where their road could have led.

Mike Weatherford’s entertainment column appears Thursdays and Sundays. Contact him at 702-383-0288 or e-mail him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.