“We’re Gonna PLAAAY Now. . .!”

By Gary Topping–

Like our blogger-in chief, Mike O’Brien, I have lots of memories of Las Vegas.  Unlike his, most of mine are negative: the noise, the lights, the water-wasting fountains in the desert (actually, those fountains waste very little), the abundant opportunities to lose your shirt, and the guys all along The Strip pressing into your hands the business cards of “escorts” (prostitution is illegal in Clark County, but “escort services” are not).

But I have some positive ones as well.

Sometime in the 1970s Abe Nole, a much-beloved and respected trombonist in the casino orchestras, died suddenly, leaving few resources behind and his wife and kids almost destitute.  Other Vegas trombonists sprang to the family’s rescue.  On the side, Abe had created a trombone ensemble, the Boneheads (the organization still exists), and the arrangements they had played—many of them quite difficult—were available.  Why not invite trombonists from all over the country to come to the Hamm Auditorium at UNLV and prepare an annual benefit concert for the Nole family?  Abe had written an arrangement of Meredith Willson’s “76 Trombones” from “The Music Man” which started out as a classical march, then suddenly shifted to several improvised jazz choruses.  Maybe they could get some famous jazz trombonist to play the jazz choruses, and maybe they could attract as many as seventy-six other trombonists to make it authentic.

The first year, eighty trombonists showed up, so in subsequent years it was known as the “76+4” concert.

Sometime after the year 2000 I had gotten back in touch with a fellow trombonist, Alan Charlesworth, with whom I had played in the U.S. Naval Training Center band in San Diego some forty years earlier.  Alan loaned me a fine trombone with which I could get my chops back into shape (no small project!) and he and his wife Shelley began meeting my wife Marianna and me in Vegas to play the 76+4 concert every November.  Before long, I bought my own horn, a beautiful Yamaha orchestral-bore instrument which I got at a shop in Chicago to modify highly to my specifications (some of the guys in that shop still think I’ve earned a spot in trombone hell for that!).  I was in business!

By then, the 76+4 concert had gotten to be a big thing.  One of the first years I played it, there were ninety-five trombonists on stage!  We would rehearse for several hours on Saturday afternoon, then play a two-hour concert on Sunday afternoon.  To me, it wasn’t much fun musically: I was never a happy section player, I hated rehearsals, and for an individualist, I felt just submerged in the midst of a huge thundering herd.  But some of the arrangements were interesting and challenging, and best of all, I got to meet some really terrific trombonists, sitting by them in rehearsal and chatting with them on stage during breaks.  Dick McGee, Kevin Stout, Bobby Shew—you’ve never have heard of any of them,  But if you have been to any Vegas show, you’ve heard their playing, and those guys can play anything!  I used to share my music stand with Dick Helms, a big-band trombonist from the 1940s who had played with the Glenn Miller band and its successor, the Tex Benecke Orchestra, among many others.

I most enjoyed meeting Art Sares, a friend and disciple of Tommy Dorsey who used to play a medley of Tommy’s greatest hits—using Tommy’s own trombone!  Art’s high range was incredible, probably greater even than Tommy’s, whose range was his hallmark.  After one concert, my friend Alan asked Art, “I’ll bet some of the notes you played this afternoon never came out of that horn when Tommy was playing it.”  But Art said, “Oh, he could play that high; he just preferred not to take the risk.”  (The photo accompanying this posting shows, Alan, Art and me after one of the concerts, with Tommy Dorsey’s trombone case on the table in front of us.)

The highlight of the concert for me was the emcee, Cork Proctor, a Vegas standup comedian and sort of a tall, lanky Don Rickles.  Once, after we had missed a year, I told Cork backstage that we hadn’t been there the previous year so he could use any of his material and it would be original for us.  “Material?” he retorted.  “I don’t use material.”  Meaning that he made up everything he said on his way from backstage after every song.

Cork was at his funniest one year when he started teasing Si Zentner, a famous big-band leader and trombonist who had a big hit in the 1950s on “Up a Lazy River.”  He was humbly occupying a chair in the second trombone section at the edge of the stage.  Cork bantered about how old Si was and how good life must be in the nursing home:

“It must be great—weekly proctological exams.”

“We’ll get you back there soon, Si. Remember the nurse with the big hooters”?  (Cork kept his jokes barely within the family-friendly realm.)

Finally, as he was leaving the stage, Cork got up really close to Si’s chair and said, in a very loud voice as though addressing a deaf person, “We’re gonna PLAAY now!”  Si just shook his head and made the sign of the cross.

By the time I started playing the concerts, the Nole family had gotten on their feet and no longer needed the concert proceeds, so the funds from our concerts went to subsidize a music scholarship at UNLV, which has a very fine music program.  Eventually though, the proceeds from the concert struck the university administration as low enough that they did not justify the university donating the lights and the sound system, so the program ended.

But the music didn’t.  I still enjoy playing with Marianna’s beautiful piano. How do we decide when we’re going to play?

“We’re gonna PLAAAY now”!

*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian