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How The Treniers Helped Invent Vegas and Rock and Roll By: Joey Kantor / Vegas Retrospective Rockin’ Is Our Bizness, Rocking On Sunday Night, It Rocks! It Rolls! These were the songs that The Treniers played in Vegas lounges as early as the late 1940s. This music was swing, was jump blues, was R&B, but wait... Legendary disc jockey Alan Freed popularized the term rock and roll in 1951. So that was what Vegas was seeing. “We had no tags,” said Skip Trenier, a late addition, joining the band in 1959. He is one of the last surviving members of this classic Vegas and national act whose members must be counted among the fathers of rock and roll itself. Sonny Charles of Checkmates Ltd. said the group’s energy gave birth to the Vegas style. He was at the show where Louis Prima, arguably the most famous Vegas lounge performer of all time, credited The Treniers with being a major influence on his act. You can tell that Trenier enjoys his life and enjoys looking back. He is 81 with a young man’s look in his eye. He sang and danced. It was a family band with various talented outsiders. “The twins,” Claude and Cliff, the founders of the band in 1947, were his uncles and the creative force that guided that energy. They worked off of each other, taking their eight-man act on the road and to the small and large screens over the years. The Treniers inhabited a wild zone of comedic banter while riding on a rockin’ and swingin’ musical wave. There really wasn’t anything more that you needed on a Saturday night in Vegas if you were out for a good time. Rock and roll is said to have been first introduced to a national audience in 1954 through The Treniers’ performance on The Colgate Comedy Hour hosted by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The footage of that performance is a must-see classic as Lewis attempts, in his inimitable way, to play off of the Trenier energy. He reportedly said that Cliff Trenier was the funniest man he’d ever seen. “The chemistry between the twins onstage was hysterical,” said Trenier. “With The Treniers they say you don’t know who to watch. It’s a three-ring circus.” The group recorded for Mercury Records. Go! Go! Go! reached number ten on the R&B charts in 1951. The favorite on myriad television performances was a cover of Rag Mop, another Claude and Cliff masterfully choreographed zinger. Trenier obviously felt blessed to have had the career that he had. He loved the Vegas he knew, the people he’d met along the way who helped him and taught him: Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Sammy Davis Jr. (who took him into his home when he was sick) and even Louis Armstrong. “The fame is going to be fleeting but do it as long as you can and as good as you can. I never forgot that,” Trenier remembers Armstrong telling him. His heart seemed to expand when he thought of the performers he’d known over the years, performers who are now written into the annals of history. He is the elder performer now, the one with the wisdom to impart. “God bless entertainers around the world, live performers. Learn your trade!” Joey Kantor is a journalist and novelist. He writes fiction under the name Fargo Kantrowitz. His Las Vegas based novel, Babybirds, is available at Lulu.com. Sonny Charles, Dondino and Skip Trenier 16 August 2018
Doo Wop By: Yvonne Cloutier / Musical Moments Doo wop style was one of the most poporiented rhythm and blues styles of the time. It featured vocal group harmony, nonsense syllables, simple music and beat, sometimes little or no instrumentation, with a strong, swing-like, syncopated beat. It developed with the high tenor singing the lead and a bass singer reciting the lyrics in the middle of the song; called top and bottom format. Lyrics echoed love relationships. The close 4-part harmony is reminiscent of barber shop quartets such as in the Mills Brothers. Doo Wop had sacred roots as early as 1909 featuring the Fisk University Jubilee Singers quartet solo lead and harmony as in Swing Low Sweet Chariot (As a side note, while researching my book, Scott Joplin, King of Ragtime, I did a performance at Fisk University). Doo Wop came of age in the 1930s with the vocal group The Ink Spots. Their songs, such as If I Didn’t Care, featured Bill Kenny’s high tenor lead, with a vocal range of four octaves; having bell-like vocal clarity and impeccable diction. Also featured in this group was Hoppy Jones’s basso profundo that drifted into a lengthy spoken section. Doo Wop gradually developed in other African-American communities of the 1940s, progressing in location such as New York, Detroit and Los Angeles. Its peak popularity was during the 1950s. In the late 50s, many Italian-American groups contributed a significant part in the doo wop scene, peaking in 1961. The first record Bill Kenny - The godfather of doo wop to use the doo wop syllables was the 1961 Turbans in When You Dance. Amongst the many groups: Tony Williams of The Platters, The Four Seasons with Franki Valli, The Beach Boys and The Supremes. Bill Kenny (1914-1978,) was born in British Columbia, Canada and is considered the Godfather of Doo Wop. Kenny was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yvonne Cloutier, a former teacher/principal, with a music background, specializes in ragtime piano. She reports about music on SCA-TV.com/Anthem Alive! You can contact her at www. mytimeisragtime.com. 17
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