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Casino Connection Atlantic City
Vol. 5, No. 8, August 2008
Cover Story
Music Appreciation
Atlantic City is seeing a resurgence in live music. Here’s a front-row look at local musicians, where they’re playing, and what they have to say about the local music scene.
by Marjorie Preston
From the ’70s to the early ’80s, any guitarist or trumpet player with a few well-rehearsed licks could get a gig in and around Atlantic City. Within a few years, the ascendance of synthesized tracks during the mid-1980s made purists fear that living, breathing musicians were an endangered species, at least in the casinos.
Today, as Atlantic City positions itself as an entertainment capital to rival Vegas and New York, the pendulum is swinging back. At the casinos, live music is again in vogue. Especially now, with the summer beach bars at full throttle, great live performance is available most nights of the week.
The bar scene’s thriving too. From Sandy Hook to Cape May, almost every shore town has a bar or club jumping with live jazz, blues, rock and roll, or alternative music (a broad label that encompasses punk, rock, hardcore, metal, the remnants of grunge, and anything loud enough to induce hearing loss by the age of 30).
“I think it goes in cycles, honestly,” says singer Gina Roché, whose Brazilian sound and samba beat have made her band, the Gina Roché Quartet, a popular attraction around town. “I’ve gotten more gigs this summer than I normally do, and the beach bars are everywhere, with rock and roll or pop groups all playing live instead of playing a track. It’s a great thing.”
Roché has been around long enough to recall the rise of live music in the early heyday of casinos, and its fall.
“Back in the ’80s, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing a fabulous band,” she says. “From morning till night, every casino had different rooms playing live music. That changed drastically for a while. They started to close down all the lounges, and a lot of people stopped working. Now we’re on an upswing.”
“It’s really great for bands right now,” agrees guitarist Fran Vuotto of the band Eddie’s Garage. “There was a time when the bars only wanted DJs and karaoke, but live music is coming around again.”
Singer-songwriter Patty Blee gives credit to Borgata for helping to reignite live music at Atlantic City’s casinos.
“Borgata created a big shift in the way casinos looked at their (entertainment) venues,” Blee says. “The Gypsy Bar became a big showcase for full-size bands. Then everybody decided to compete at that level.”
Blee and her occasional partner, Patty Balbo (as a duo, they’re Patty and Patty) have played just about every casino in town—Showboat, the Hilton, Resorts—and appear regularly at the Forum Lounge at Caesars. With a laid-back mix of covers (Shawn Colvin, Sheryl Crow) as well as original music, the self-described “country-folk-rock” artists prove there’s more to casino music than hip hop, thumping house music, straight-ahead rock or the much-parodied “lounge lizard” soft pop genre.
LAND OF OPPORTUNITY
Working musicians who spoke for this article agree that live music is back. That doesn’t mean that those interested in bill-paying can rule out the occasional day job.
“I’ve worked the front desk at Borgata to keep it all together,” Blee says. “You’ve gotta find ways to do what you love.”
That sentiment is echoed by Danny Eyer, who started working the casinos shortly after Resorts International opened in 1978. The multi-intrumentalist once sold instruments at a Nashville music store, works behind the scenes as a sound engineer, composes jingles, and plays a number of styles. That diversity, he says, keeps him busy almost non-stop.
“As versatile as you are (determines) how easy it is for you to work,” Eyer says. “I’m an old soul guy. I love classic rock, standard jazz things—that’s kind of where I’m at. But if a musician wants to be a full-timer, you do what it takes. If the phone rings and it’s Ed calling from the polka band, or Steve calling with a wedding, you pick up the phone and say, ‘Yes.’ Then you put on the tuxedo and go to the gala ball.”
Opportunities that were once plentiful for larger ensembles have largely gone by the wayside, he adds. “When I first came into the casinos, you could have five, six pieces or more and they wouldn’t blink an eye, whereas now if you have more than three people in most places, forget it.” As a result, Eyer coaxes a big, bluesy sound from a trio, and plays plenty of local venues (the Deck at Trump Marina, the Ocean City Boardwalk, restaurants like Mangia and the Tuckahoe Inn). Along the way, he’s accompanied superstar performers like Johnny Winter at Trump Marina, ZZ Top at Trump Taj Mahal, and B.B. King at the House of Blues. He thinks talented musicians can always find a stage in the Atlantic City area.
“It’s a great place to play,” Eyer says. “If you are any kind of musician, there’s lots of opportunity here.”
REMEMBER WHEN
The resurgence of live music didn’t come soon enough to save some of the shore’s legendary clubs. Take Tony Mart’s, for decades one of the East Coast’s hottest nightclubs. With its landmark blazing neon arrow, the Somers Point trolley stop-turned-rathskeller-turned-swingin’-hot-spot once had six bars, more than 30 bartenders and bouncers, and two stages for live music.
In the 1960s, Levon and the Hawks (later The Band) played there. And in 1982, the rock-and-roll coming-of-age movie Eddie and the Cruisers was filmed at Tony Mart’s, which closed shortly thereafter.
Gone too are Crilley’s Circle Tavern in Brigantine, which hosted scores of young rock bands until the mid-1990s, and the Bubba Mac Shack, which lasted about seven years in Somers Point (and later, in Ocean City) before owner Herb “Bubba” Birch closed the doors.
Birch knows well the vagaries of the music business. He created the Mid-Atlantic Blues and Music Festival, held at Bernie Robbins Stadium in September 2007, with an eye toward making it an annual event. Unfortunately, the first festival, with a lineup that included New Orleans’ Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Johnny Lee Hooker Jr. and the Legends of Chicago Blues, coincided with an occurrence as rare as the aurora borealis in the lower 48.
“It was the only time the Phillies ever made the playoffs,” says Birch ruefully. “The show was great, everybody loved it, but it just didn’t draw enough.” He now calls music “my favorite hobby,” and, like so many others, prefers to simply play the circuit with his ensemble, the Bubba Mac Blues Band.
“We’re at Trump Marina’s Deck every Monday—a great spot with a serious sound system; we opened for Three Dog Night in front of the Hilton (in July). That was fun too. We play on the boardwalk in Ocean City every week. Everyone knows Bubba.”
COVER ME
Another rabidly popular party band in South Jersey is Don’t Call Me Francis, which plays regularly at the Marina Deck. With its goofy name, manic front man Frank Orsini, lots of brass and a repertoire of crowd-rousing covers (“Let’s Groove Tonight,” “Smooth,” “Brick House”), the nine-piece ensemble, around since 1991, has succeeded by recreating, with absolute fidelity, the best Top 40 dance, funk and rock tunes of the past three decades.
“We rock with the best, we dance with the best, we cha-cha with the best,” says Orsini. “We are a straight-ahead, high-energy, smash-mouth non-stop dance party band, and knock wood, we seem to have captured the essence of Atlantic City. We get an extraordinary turnout.”
Though music snobs sometimes sneer at cover bands, Orsini’s level of musicianship and showmanship is high; former band members have gone on to work with the likes of Gloria Estefan, Jay Z and Chicago.
“Presentation is the whole thing,” says the trumpeter, who grew up listening to Maynard Ferguson and Harry James. “I’ve seen bands with loose arrangements who are not executing well, who are just going through the motions. That’s not the way. When I’m onstage, I don’t sing, I holler. I don’t dance, I stomp. I don’t play, I blow.”
To anyone who discounts cover bands as also-rans, Trump Marina’s director of entertainment Bill Schmal has a reminder: “The Beatles were a cover band before they were the Beatles. They played cover tunes when they were teenagers” and later recorded many songs written and recorded by others (the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love,” Carl Perkins’ “Honey Don’t,” and even the ballad “Till There Was You” from The Music Man).
“That’s how you work,” says Schmal. “That’s how you find your legs when you’re figuring out the music business.”
For musicians here, Schmal is an important man to know. He presides over entertainment at the Deck, which may be the most popular place in the city for live cover bands delivering “party, rock, and old-school dance tunes.
“The environment, with its backdrop of million-dollar yachts, is more appropriate to Miami’s South Beach,” Schmal says. “It’s spectacular.”
To the great view, add a friendly party atmosphere that attracts up to 1,000 patrons a night for popular, been-around-forever bands including Francis, Louie Louie, Bubba Mac, John Eddie, the Usual Suspects and LeCompt. Tuesday is Country Night, Wednesday, Island Night. Cover bands all. All in huge demand.
“All the casinos want cover bands,” says Bill Borenstein, regional director of entertainment for the Harrah’s properties. “So do the beach bars. So do the bars in Point Pleasant and Bellmawr. To play, you have to be willing to do covers. Then you try to sneak in one or two originals.”
PLAYING AROUND
Some artists, like vocalist Terri Showers, prefer a more intimate setting, and Dante Hall Theater of the Arts—capacity about 250—fills that bill.
“It’s beautiful,” says Showers. “When I look at those stained glass windows, I get an old-time feeling.”
And no wonder. Showers, whose grandmother, Rozelia Cobb, was choirmaster at Macedonia United Methodist Church in Ocean City, started singing on Sunday mornings in church. She later won several competitions at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem, and has backed up name performers like Patti LaBelle and James Ingram.
Fronting the Terri Showers Blues Band, she will bring her own brand of blues, R&B, funk and jazz to Dante Hall August 9, and thanks the venue for providing a stage for a broad range of acts—from opera to comedy to big band music, as well as many local artists who might not have what she calls “the look” of a casino act.
“Image is very important when it comes to show business, but I think Atlantic City, especially Dante Hall, is kind of breaking the trend of being pencil thin, and being more about the art of singing,” Showers says. “If the norm is thin and absolutely gorgeous, I’m not what they are necessarily looking for. I just do what I do from the heart.”
Her band plays original compositions along with some “pure blues, like ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ and ‘Who’s Making Love’ by Johnny Taylor, some Chaka Khan, some Aretha Franklin—even Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time.’ I do a nice jazz acoustic version of that.”
Michele Giampaolo, who performs with the Doug Murdock Meistersingers, agrees that Dante Hall is a vital resource for area performers, and a boon for lovers of the performing arts.
“There is such a lot of local talent that’s just tremendous, and it’s really important to find the venues and opportunities to perform. For us, Dante Hall is perfect. We sold out there.”
MAKING IT
Many bands today sell themselves and their music through free social websites like youtube and myspace, but nothing takes the place being onstage to develop an act and build a fan base.
In an age of instant celebrity via TV shows like American Idol, “some people forget that Bruce Springsteen began at local bars in the middle of nowhere,” says Borenstein. “You can be on youtube, but you still have to pay your dues and build a fan base. The one thing (casinos) look for is bands that have a following.”
Some young musicians in town gripe that the casinos do little to get local talent onstage. On occasion, the House of Blues at Showboat enlists unknown talent to open for incoming name bands; the eager prospects—groups from Jersey and elsewhere—are winnowed out by Borenstein and his staff, who receive countless CDs from unknowns.
“We review everything,” Borenstein says. “Everyone will get at least a response that says, ‘Hey, we got it and we will call you.’ But it’s tough. The toughest part is that there’s only a limited amount of (opportunities) for local openers. But we try to accommodate them, and sometimes I will say to my guys, ‘Go out and see (a certain band).’”
If a band gets that gig—the chance to open for a star, that toehold in the business—it also gets an opportunity to play some original material.
“They won’t get paid a lot of money,” warns Borenstein. “They get the opportunity to perform in front of a national act in a professional venue.”
And the rest is up to them.
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