Where Has All the Cool Gone?

Like most people my age, I first knew Louis Prima not as a Las Vegas lounge act, or as a big band leader, but as a monkey.

King of the Swingers

Image (c) Disney

When Prima was cast as the voice of King Louis in The Jungle Book, he probably didn't count on generations of kids associating his smooth, hep cat voice and improvisional stylings with an overweight orangutan. Today, that's probably how most people know him, singing that Ooobee Doo, I Wanna Be Like You-oo-ooo.

Of course, if you go looking for Louis Prima the man, you'll find one of the most refreshingly cool performers of all time, ever.

Prima was billed as "The Wildest." Along with his buddy Sam Butera, their band, The Witnesses, and his fourth wife, Keely Smith, Louis defined Las Vegas entertainment in the fifties. While Sinatra and the Rat Pack were performing their antics at the Sands, Prima was knocking them dead in the lounge at the Sahara.

It's a shame that there isn't the kind of cool today that Louis Prima created for his audiences forty years ago. Sadder still is that there are so few of his performances available for those who go looking.

Louis Prima was famous for singing "I'm Just a Gigilo." And for as fun as that little number can be, I've never regarded it as the throwaway that David Lee Roth tried to spin it into years later. There's a little bit of sadness and a little bit of truth in those lines:

When the end comes I know, they'll say 'Just a Gigilo.'

Life goes on without me.

We're all just hustlers, looking to get paid for our own little dance. Best we can do is do it like Louis. Classy and cool.