That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (4 page)

The latter would become especially important to Louis Prima. Armstrong blazed a trail of jazz–popular song fusion (and, later, comedy) that Prima traveled enthusiastically. Both men would be ridiculed and even dismissed by some critics for straying off the jazz reservation into pure entertainment territory. While this sometimes angered Armstrong, Prima couldn’t care less, and pleasing his audience without worrying about aesthetics became his North Star.

That Armstrong was changing the substance and to some extent the face of American music in the early to mid-1920s was perfect timing for Prima. Back in New Orleans, Angelina’s insistence that her children not go to work so that they could concentrate on school and homework and classical music led, ironically, to Leon and Louis having more time than most youngsters to roam the streets to seek out the hottest music and the best performers in the French Quarter and other neighborhoods. The brothers, in their early teens, could not get into the nightclubs, but they could catch glimpses of the stage through doorways, and many times it was enough to stand outside and listen.

For two impressionable adolescents, the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Bach could not possibly compete with the sounds of homegrown Dixieland jazz being altered and energized by African American blues and gospel. Despite his shy demeanor, Louis was a restless youngster, and the music simply made him feel that he wanted to dance and that he could connect to others through music. A violin just wasn’t going to do that for him. And, he couldn’t help but notice, women went wild over horn players.

Leon was the first to defy Angelina. He told his mother that he would no longer take piano lessons. Worse, he was going to learn how to play the cornet. That is what Armstrong and Bechet and Oliver played, and audiences loved them. Piano was fine for ragtime, but that music was out and jazz was in. Angelina was aghast, but Leon was adamant. Papa Anthony most likely had no opinion on the matter and just wanted peace in his house.

Soon after, Louis made the same declaration. This time, however, Angelina prevailed over the wishes of her less-stubborn younger son, and Louis continued with the violin, or what he preferred to call a fiddle. Though his heart wasn’t in it, he did want to please his mother, and he couldn’t help trying to be a very good musician. He became head of the class band at Jesuit Junior High School, and in 1921, at age ten, he won the ten-dollar top prize in a fiddle contest.

By the time Leon was sixteen, he had gotten so accomplished as a cornet player that he began to be hired to play with bands in local nightclubs. It only increased Louis’s envy and frustration when he listened to Leon practice in the St. Peter Street house, then snuck off to see his older brother perform in the same clubs where he had gotten looks at his idols, who were black, white, and everything in between. Louis was twelve years old and feeling left behind.

The following year, in 1923, Leon, though still a schoolboy, spent seventy-five dollars on a new horn, a trumpet. That his old cornet sat idle in Leon’s closet or under his bed had to feel to Louis like a large bag of uneaten candy just going to waste. The next summer, when he was thirteen, a golden opportunity presented itself. Angelina went away for several days to visit relatives, and Leon was on tour with a band.

“When I went on the road, I left an old trumpet at home and stayed out about a year or so, and when I came home, Louis was blowing the trumpet,” Leon recalled. “And he was blowing it real good.”

It is not known exactly how Angelina reacted when she returned home to find Louis, immediately addicted, learning to make a different kind of music. That summer, however, Louis was put to work in his mother’s small shop selling flavored ice shavings and on his father’s horse-drawn wagon delivering Jumbo Soda Pop. If the plan was to dissuade Louis from playing the horn, it failed. The combination of playing jazz and puberty was too powerful for the boy to resist. In the summer of 1924, Louis Prima was transformed.

The retiring Papa Anthony personality was gone—or at least it retreated inward—and the flamboyant Angelina side emerged and took lifelong control. At thirteen, Louis Prima became a bandleader, and with a few early exceptions he remained one for fifty-one years.

The group of six classmates (plus himself) that Louis pulled together was called—directly and sensibly—Prima’s Kid Band. He was clearly the leader when they played on street corners and at special events, as he was the one out front singing and dancing. His initial efforts were pure imitations of the performers he admired, especially Armstrong, but as the months went on his act became more of an improvisation—he moved the way the music moved him. At the same time his technical skill as a horn player improved. He wore a colorful vest and parted his dark hair in the middle, a style he wore into the 1940s, or as long as he had enough hair.

“Everybody kept telling me how good he was,” Leon told writer Garry Boulard in 1984 about the period after he returned to New Orleans from the tour. “So the next time he played, I went to see him, and, I gotta tell you, he was good. He was jumping all over, and the audience loved it.”

His new career made school even more boring by comparison. Louis attended Jesuit High School, but that wasn’t working out, so he transferred to Warren Easton High School when he was fifteen. A reconstituted band he formed there had another unsurprising name, the Eastonites.

School took more of a backseat as Louis led his band from one street to another, performing wherever they found a good place to set up. He also tried to book the band into French Quarter clubs, but such gigs were rare because of the ages of the band members and Angelina’s objection that he would fall under unwholesome influences. Finally, at seventeen, in the spring of 1928, Louis left school. The closest he ever got to college was forming a group called the Little Collegiates that played in neighborhood theaters and could command as much as two dollars a night.

It was time to stop pretending. Louis was not going to take over his father’s soda distribution business or become a local laborer or start up any kind of business, and sure enough he wasn’t going to have an academic career. He had been bitten by the jazz bug, and it was time to devote himself to being a professional musician.

Louis Prima became a professional musician when he joined the musicians’ union in 1928. The union in New Orleans was all about trying to get gigs, and this meant primarily playing some theaters like the Saenger on Canal Street. The problem was, if you wanted to play jazz you might find yourself a little out of place in some of these theater pit orchestras.

But Louis didn’t worry about that; he just wanted to play, and the more the merrier. Radios in New Orleans were tuned to the national networks NBC and CBS, which broadcasted the music of full orchestras. Local musicians knew that performers like Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and others were now members of such orchestras or were in the process of forming their own. Orchestras formed elsewhere—such as those led by Guy Lombardo, Paul Whiteman, and Duke Ellington—were beginning to put New Orleans on their tour itineraries or at least were being heard on the radio stations. To keep up, the city had to spawn its own orchestras, which was good news for a young man in the Roaring Twenties looking for work and plenty of it.

Ellis Stratakos hired Prima when he was only eighteen to play trumpet in his orchestra. This could have been a terrific opportunity for a teenager, but alas, the orchestra wasn’t that good. When it tried its fortunes on a trip to Florida, few people showed up to listen and dance. The orchestra disbanded, leaving Louis and the guitarist Frank Federico, a former schoolmate, stranded. The two friends subsisted on the citrus fruits that littered the roadsides as they hitched their way back to New Orleans.

Like Armstrong, Prima found a break by being signed aboard a steamship. The steamship
Capital
was berthed on Canal Street, and Louis became part of its band. This too didn’t last very long, and it resulted in another relationship that was not destined to be an enduring one.

Louise Polizzi and her girlfriends liked to dance to the band on the ship, and Louis liked to watch Louise dance. They began to see each other off the ship and dated for six months.

“He was very different,” she told Boulard in a 1984 interview. “He wasn’t like people thought. He wasn’t always happy and dancing around. Sometimes he’d be very sad. He’d cry very easily if something was bothering him.” She added an observation that would be repeated for the rest of Louis’s life: “He didn’t even have very many close friends, although he knew a lot of people.”

Louise and Louis were married on June 25, 1929, possibly on the sly, because the ceremony was performed in Jefferson Parish by a justice of the peace. Apparently accepting the fact of it, even though her youngest son was still only eighteen, Angelina orchestrated a more official ceremony at St. Ann’s. The newlyweds took up residence in the Prima household, which meant that Louise too came under Angelina’s jurisdiction.

Shortly before his next birthday, Louis, now with a wife to support, was hired by Joseph Cherniavsky to play trumpet in his orchestra, which had an ongoing engagement at a gambling house in a suburb of New Orleans. Even better news was that Louis was encouraged to play to the audience and improvise. The bad news was that he became so good at it that audiences wanted to see and hear more of him and less of the rest of the orchestra.

“I happened to be one of the extra reed men that they wanted in there,” recalled Dave Winstein, a friend of Prima’s. “And Louis was one of the trumpets. But Cherniavsky never did like Louis’s style of playing, so he gave Louis the regular two weeks’ notice that is required, and this young man was practically in tears when he said one of these days this guy is going to feel sorry. He said, ‘I’m going to make it. He fired me, but he’s going to be sorry he fired me. I’ll be bigger than he was.’ “ That, of course, became a huge understatement.

Prima had no trouble finding other gigs. The arrival of the Depression did not mean that New Orleans would lose its music. In the city, orchestras and new venues kept springing up. It helped too that his brother, Leon, was also becoming successful. He put together the Prima-Sharkey Orchestra, one of the most popular big bands in New Orleans. Apparently because of its popularity, it was able to get away with including both black and white musicians, though that was against Louisiana’s segregation laws. Leon also opened a dance pavilion and after that the Avalon nightclub. Louis frequently played there when he found himself between jobs.

Louis’s increasingly vibrant performances caught the attention of Lou Forbes, who led the orchestra at the Saenger Theatre. He hired the nineteen-year-old in 1930. The Saenger was also known as the Florentine Palace, and it showed movies all afternoon and evening. Between films the orchestra played, with some of the members jumping out to dance in colorful costumes. This was a golden opportunity for an irrepressible young man.

“He showed you everything there was to know,” said drummer Godfrey Hirsch about Forbes in
Louis Prima—The Chief,
a 1983 documentary produced by WYES-TV in New Orleans. “He did the same thing for Louis.”

“I got a lot of my knowledge and picked up a lot of pointers from Lou,” Prima said in the 1970 interview. “He was quite a showman.”

In addition to blowing the trumpet, Prima played a variety of roles in musical-comedy skits that Forbes choreographed—a policeman, a hick from the sticks, even a chicken. He began to be reviewed favorably in the city’s newspapers as someone who played a mean trumpet and had an anything-goes stage persona. (Angelina clipped the reviews out and put them on display for family members.) By the spring of 1932, he was billed second only to Forbes himself.

According to bandleader Woody Herman in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!,
“When I first arrived in New Orleans in 1932, I was a saxophonist with the Tom Gerun Band of San Francisco. One of the new young people who was making a big impression locally was Louis Prima. He was a new kind of entertainer. Lots of energy. And he could turn a word and get a laugh anytime he wanted.”

One of Prima’s more popular engagements outside of the Saenger Theatre was at the Beverly Gardens on River Road, and it involved a black youngster named Earl Palmer. Palmer later became a drummer who worked in and led bands in New Orleans. After moving to Los Angeles he became the studio drummer on dozens of seminal rock ‘n’ roll hits, including Sam Cooke’s “Shake,” Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba,” Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime,” and most of the hits by Little Richard and Fats Domino. Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones and Max Weinberg of the E Street Band are among the many drummers who have cited Palmer as a powerful influence.

But in 1932 he was only seven years old and trying to survive by singing and dancing on street corners. Prima hired him for five dollars a night plus tips for a short skit: while Prima paused between songs to talk to the audience, Palmer wandered out and pulled on his jacket.

“Go away, boy, you’re bothering me,” Prima said. “I’m trying to talk.”

Palmer continued to pull on Prima’s jacket until, exasperated, he shouted down at the child, “What do you want?”

“Daddy, Mama wants you on the telephone!”

In
Backbeat,
his autobiography, Palmer wrote, “Of course, the crowd roared. Prima says out of the side of his mouth, ‘Here, kid, take this and beat it.’ Slips me five or ten, like he doesn’t want the people to know.”

Unlike some residents of New Orleans who were feeling the impact of the Depression, Prima seemed set for years. He could expect his local fame to grow, along with his salary, which was sixty-five dollars a week at the Saenger. He supplemented that with late-night gigs in clubs. The money allowed him to dress like something of a dandy, begin a lifelong obsession with horse racing, and provide for a pregnant Louise.

But after the birth of his daughter Joyce in 1933, Louis became restless. New Orleans was a pretty big pond, but he envied the fish in bigger ponds. The airwaves were carrying new bands formed by Benny Goodman, Guy Lombardo, and the Dorsey Brothers in addition to the established orchestras broadcasting from New York and Chicago. There were also the examples of Armstrong, Morton, Oliver, and others who, it was believed, were enjoying fame and fortune in the bigger venues.