Dope MC's have faith that their act—humorous stage personae mixed with a serious re-creation of '80s popular hip-hop—will eventually catch on in Vegas, building a larger and larger following. And while every musical group in town, from regular lounge acts to garage rockers, embarks on their careers with the same hope, these guys have something extra in their corner.
Telemarketing and Top Ramen
Dope MC's have every reason to be optimistic because backing them up is Perfect World Entertainment, a Las Vegas company that has produced nearly 30 acts, most of which are playing every weekend both here and around the country.
Those bands include:
Boogie Knights
The Afrodisiacs
Disco Inferno (in LA, Ohio and Florida)
Grooveline
Knight Fever
Le Freak
Metal Shop (three, including one in Dallas and one in Oklahoma City)
Metal Godz
The Valley Dolls
Dr. Funkenstein
The Spazmatics (here, Cleveland, San Francisco, Seattle, Utah and Texas)
Rocket Science
M-80s
Rockstar Live Karaoke
The Zoot Suit Revue
Platinum Groove
Anthem
In total, Perfect World is supplying perfectly good gigs (and incomes) to about 140 musicians, according to co-founder and original Boogie Knights member Jamie Brown, with people earning between $5,000 and $350,000 a year, depending on how hard they work at it. It's not a bad deal all around, especially considering it all started in a less-than-serious vein about 18 years ago.
The seed was planted in 1988, when Brown was the lead singer in a North Hollywood band called Roxanne, consisting of John Butler on guitar, Doug McRoy on bass and Robbie Schwyzer on drums. Signed to CBS, the group put out a record but had little success. That is, except for a single of "Play That Funky Music." Their rendition of Wild Cherry's one-hit wonder climbed to 63 on the Billboard magazine singles chart.
Roxanne's fortunes didn't change, however.
"I was living off of telemarketing and Top Ramen. ... There were four of us living in a house where we had to make $400 a month apiece to survive, and we'd just barely make it every month," recalls Brown, on the phone from Los Angeles, having performed that weekend here in Vegas. "We needed to book another gig, or we needed three more to make that $400 apiece by the end of the month."
Four years of Top Ramen later, Brown and his friends had a Halloween gig lined up. As a joke, they decided to dress up in '70s-era costumes and reprise "Funky Music," along with other period songs.
"It was funny and we had fun and people liked it, and it just took off from there," says Brown.
Playing around Los Angeles, with occasional forays to Las Vegas' Shark Club, Roxanne hit upon the idea of using their joke band Boogie Knights as their own opening act, changing from their disco/hippie/lizard-king outfits to their normal clothes backstage. It wasn't long afterward that the joke eclipsed the serious band.
Not Your Father's Karaoke
This is possibly the last place in Las Vegas where it's acceptable for a man to wear leather pants. The reason behind the fashion choice is that he's launching into a flawless "Welcome to the Jungle," and you can't do Axl on the Crossroads stage while wearing khakis. Behind him are Jimmy Oleson on guitar, Tony Santoro on bass and Johnny Fedevich on drums, making this the only karaoke show in town that supplies spotlight-thirsty amateur singers with their own professional band.
Rockstar Karaoke is another Perfect World success story. First opening up on Monday nights in late October 2004, the show now occupies both Mondays and Tuesdays, filling the 500-seat restaurant and bar both nights. Within an hour of the doors opening at 10 p.m., three full sets of 12 songs each are filled, names and songs collected by emcee Olivia Polanco. A girl who looks so much like Paris Hilton that even I—who has seen Paris in person so many times that I should probably have her on my Christmas card list—am doing a double-take, pouts when told she probably won't get to perform unless someone drops out. And with even the back bar three or four people deep, that doesn't seem likely.
If Vegas' nightclubs are playgrounds for the Beautiful People and the locals' bars are populated by hipsters and the disaffected, then Rockstar Karaoke is for the demos, the musical market square where concerns about fashion and whether you've altered your body with silicone or ink are pushed aside. Everyone is here for one reason, and that's to have fun. If the hundreds of people aren't vying to get onstage and do their best to honor Billy Idol and Joan Jett, then they're on the dance floor, beers in the air, singing along and gyrating to "Jessie's Girl." And you haven't lived until you've seen men who used to be high-school linebackers singing "I've been funny, I've been cool with the lines/Ain't that the way love's supposed to be?" without the slightest hint of postmodern irony.
In short, Rockstar Karaoke is a party.
The Golden RabbitBoogie Knights stayed on at the Shark Club for two years, according to Brown, before being approached by the Rio. They landed a five-year-long gig in the hotel's Copacabana Showroom, playing Wednesday nights. At the same time, the band moved from the Shark Club to the newly opened Drink and Eat Too, which was another five-year stint. Those jobs were followed by short contracts at C2K, the Beach and the Suncoast. They then moved to the House of Blues about five years ago and show no signs of leaving any time soon, still pulling in hundreds a night after more than a decade of disco.
As well as playing in Vegas, they were also getting offers for work in LA, and they soon began to feel the pressures of success, slightly different but no less pressing than those of poverty.
"It got so popular that we weren't able to do all the shows people were asking us to do," says Brown. "And then I got the idea if I don't do it, somebody else is going to do it and before you know it, we're going to have a bunch of competition."
Rather than have somebody else come along with a second golden goose, Brown decided to clone his. He gathered all of his musician friends together and got them to learn the show. The final touch was to give each band a different name.
"It would be like, ‘Oh, The Boogie Knights aren't available but Disco Inferno can do it, or The Afrodisiacs can do it,'" he says.
The shows, gigs and offers kept coming in, though. It must have seemed like instead of cloning a golden goose, Brown had cloned a fast-breeding golden rabbit.
"When I ran out of friends, we ran ads and then it was friends of friends," Brown recalls. "And then we started recruiting from other states, because we had other states that wanted it, and it didn't make sense to fly in, so I got some people to move from LA. I moved some people from LA to Texas, to Florida, to Ohio and to Chicago. And then they recruited other people from those areas. So we had multiple acts in those states, as well."
Understandably, the logistics of running all of these groups is more complicated than managing a single band. "When I had it up to about eight or nine groups with about 45 guys or something like that, I brought in a friend of mine, Roger Sause," says Brown. Sause was the keyboard player in Roxanne, having previously been Kenny G's musical director for five years and toured with Christian rocker Michael W. Smith.
Sause was the go-to guy whenever Brown needed new taped tracks for the various bands (while the bands play live, putting keyboards on tape saves Perfect World from having to hire a fifth member for the groups as well as frees the bands from lugging the extra equipment). "I asked him if he'd like to get in on the other side of the business," says Brown, "and he was living in Portland at the time, so he got the Portland and Seattle stuff situated, got that started and realized it was a good idea, and moved down to LA. So he is my partner and co-owner in the business."
Along with his business partner Sause, Brown has Dave Hewitt, Jessica Martinez and Randi McCarty helping run the operations, which are run in both LA and Vegas.
Audience in Their Palms
The Spazmatics are nerd-cool personified. While Perfect World's other groups play Crossroads, this quartet and two go-go dancers pack the House of Blues' main room every Friday, with the beautiful DJ L1 spinning between sets. The band—The Kevin, Rusty A. Wussmier, Curtis and Syd Sonic—take to the stage for their second set with a roar from the crowd. Lead singer Kevin wears a neck brace and thick-rimmed glasses. Rusty on guitar looks like a gawky preppie but for the sweatband across his forehead and fake buck teeth. Bass player Curtis has a full-on pocket protector while Syd, the drummer, makes do with glasses and a tie. Oh, and an afro wig.
As the band launches into A-ha's "Take on Me," the dancers on either side start gyrating in their tiny plaid skirts and white half-tank tops. When Kevin starts hopping up and down on stage to Devo's "Whip It" and exhorts the crowd to dance along, the entire sweaty mob begins hopping. Next comes Frankie Goes to Hollywood's classic about premature ejaculation, "Relax." A tough-looking guy dressed all in black begins to squeal like a preteen girl, pumping his fist into the air. People who were likely 4 or 5 years old when these songs first came out are on the floor or dancing by the bars.
Three groupies are front and center, beaming up to Kevin, with one of them yelling "I love you!" When they turn their backs to the stage for a photo, Kevin lays on the stage, striking his own beefcake pose. You'd be hard-pressed to find any band anywhere, large or small, who so clearly enjoy performing for their fans. Even Bruce Springsteen back in the day had to rely on a young Courtney Cox to "volunteer" to be brought up onstage for his "Dancing in the Dark" video. Not The Spazmatics, though.
With a nod of his head, Kevin okays the all-black-wearing tough guy to join them. He comes out of the wings to the cheers of his friends (and everyone else) and hops up on the drummer's raised platform. Completely ignoring the impossibly buxom go-go dancer to his right, he begins air-drumming to Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell." Hell, he even gets his own air-drum solo.
Saluting Anthem Rock
The Spazmatics came about as Brown started thinking about what the next spoofable genre would be and settled on the '80s. Starting with one lineup called The M-80s, they branched off into The Spazmatics and Rocket Science, and soon Perfect World had multiple versions of those bands in different states, as well. After that, the gloves came off.
"We thought, ‘Okay, let's just do a bunch of genres,'" Brown says. A funk show, Dr. Funkenstein, emerged and played 18 months at the Rio as well as other locations. Then came The Atomic Dogs, with a heavier funk along the lines of Parliament and Funkadelic. Next, Brown turned his sights on '80s hair metal and produced Metal Shop, which also had a successful run at the House of Blues. But the latest project seems to be the one Brown is most excited about. Called Anthem, it takes a serious approach to its theme of '70s anthem rock, such songs as Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."
"All these gigantic, difficult songs," as Brown describes them. The show's performers won't be in costume, though they all bear a resemblance to musicians from the period. It will run with a video synch, with images playing in time with the live music. Anthem will also be unique in that the band members won't be playing characters with fake names on stage. But the aliases aren't to hide the shame any "real" musicians might feel at playing in a cover band. Far from it, according to Brown.
"You know, it's weird at first," says Brown. "Some guys will go, ‘Ha ha! I'm not going to play a cover band. I'm going to write my own songs. I'm going to play my own music.' But when they find it's a choice between working that telemarketing job during the day to pursue their original career or play a couple nights a week and be doing music, actually earning a living with what their art is, they usually change their mind and come around.
"It's actually provided a great opportunity for guys to hone their craft and still pursue their original career."
And for some of those guys, the cover-band job becomes the real thing. According to Brown, a lot of the musicians working for him have bought cars and houses and raised families with earnings made solely from Perfect World Entertainment.
Getting Down With ItWhile Boogie Knights are playing a smaller room than The Spazmatics occupied the previous night, they do have one thing that the other groups lack—fans in costume. These aren't people who are simply wearing old outfits picked up at Opportunity Village. We're talking about full-on afro wigs on men, a woman in a checkered white-and-black dress and cap straight out of Austin Powers, a couple of guys with shirts open to mid-sternum to show off gold medallions, another woman in a green plastic dress with white go-go boots and Jackie O-style sunglasses.
On stage is a quartet, with Brown at the microphone in a long brown leather jacket and long hair, the guitarist wearing an afro wig, the drummer looking like a cross between Saturday Night Fever's John Travolta and Scarface's Al Pacino and the bass player in a floral-print shirt nearly as loud as the band's rendition of "Stayin' Alive."
As tight as any of the other groups, Boogie Knights rocks through "Funky Town," "Best of My Love," "Get Down Tonight" and any other song KC & The Sunshine Band ever recorded.
Later, they call for the women in the audience to join them onstage for "Brick House." One little blonde, who's also a little tipsy and wearing a little purple two-piece halter top and skirt and matching boa, clambers up. After the song is over and the other women have left, she stays put. After some banter, Lauri Morrissey grabs the mic stand and starts belting out "I Will Survive." And though she starts a couple of bars late, she does such an amazing job that I and likely everyone else in the house are sure she's a ringer. But nope, she's here for her birthday.
Chalk it up to the many years that Boogie Knights have been a presence on the Vegas scene or the sheer fun of the music, but there's no question that this is one little piece of the '70s that won't be fading into history.
Bright Future
Between sets, Brown, the rest of the band and some friends take a break in the green room. Getting up behind the mic is a bit of déjà vu for Brown, returning to something he had been forced to give up years ago as the business grew.
"I was killing myself trying to talk on the phone and make any sense to anybody during the day and be up all night singing in the band—so I got somebody to be in the band for a couple years," he says. Once Perfect World reached a stage where it was "kind of running itself," Brown says he got back into singing and has been center stage for the last four years, only now phasing himself back out as he splits his time between LA and Vegas, where he has been a full-time resident since 2004.
But don't take any of that to mean that either Perfect World or Brown are slowing down. They continue to develop new acts such as Anthem, further establish themselves in Vegas with plans to get between 14 and 16 shows a week here, and branch off into new cities using their unique, grass-roots approach.
"Somebody might see [a friend of a friend] at a show and go, ‘Hey, I'd love to get involved, and who do I call?' And then if they send me a package and it's a good one, I'll send somebody out to see him or I'll go see him," Brown explains. "And we're always looking for new, young guys, because if you do the math, and we've been doing it for 14 years," Brown pauses to laugh, "I don't know if we've got another 14 in us."