Lisa McDonald is back again, this time with an in-depth interview with Canadian R&B legend, Grant Smith. Lisa knows what questions to ask, and brokers a lively interview with whoever she has in her sights. Please feel free to add your comments after you read this interview, Lisa will appreciate the feedback. The Grant Smith Interview is running for 4 consecutive days. This is the second installment. Part One, in case you missed it, can be found here.

GRANT SMITH HAS BEEN IN THE ENTERTAINMENT BUSINESS for more than 45 years.  Starting out in 1964 as a rock and roll drummer with The Missing Links, it wasn’t long before Smith found himself fronting his own band, a 7-piece R&B act called The Power.  Grant Smith and the Power ripped up Toronto’s club circuit with their high energy sold-out shows throughout the years of 1967-1970.  By the middle of the decade, Smith had rubbed shoulders with many of the iconic 60s rock stars known to all of us today.  Along with securing an MGM recording contract, Smith starred, directed and co-produced Red White and Hot!, a Vegas-style variety show featured at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.  With a life-long talent for painting, this multi-media artist produced and acted in television movies, hosted the Miss Teen Canada Pageant and Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy telethon, and made several appearances on everything from the Tommy Hunter Show to the Juno Awards.  Spending considerable time in Las Vegas, Mr. Smith has worked as a singer for jingle writers, as a choreographer and as an entertainer landing him numerous return engagements to Caesars Palace.  Currently, Grant Smith has been on double duty writing his first novel and wrapping up his latest film project, a documentary exploring the phenomenon of the Elvis Presley fan.  Mr. Smith joins me now to discuss not only his upcoming Soul’d Out show at the Estonia House on Nov 14^th, but to tell me fascinating and often hilarious stories of all the celebrities he met along the way….

The Grant Smith Interview continues…

Tom Jones? Really?

I was brought to Vegas to be introduced as Tom Jones’ bright new star, ya know?  But Tom Jones was the biggest prick I’d ever met in my life.  I think he has short man’s syndrome.  He was the epitome of it.  He never had anyone taller than himself stand beside him.  And I’ve never seen anyone ruder to his fans.  He was rude to me.  He was rude to everyone.  Jones didn’t like introducing me and he didn’t like having me go places with him.  So I ended up telling him to fuck off in the middle of a Connie Stevens show.

Connie Stevens!

Connie Stevens would do late night shows for the staff.  It was about two o’clock in the morning when Tom Jones and his entourage, including myself arrived at the show.  Coming through the audience, the spotlight fell on us and Stevens introduced him.  But much to my surprise, I also got introduced!  Jones did not like it.  And then it got worse.   Jones thought I was trying to steal his chick!  His chick was this gorgeous Cuban showgirl, who Jones and Rocky (Jones’ bodyguard), got drunk on champagne before the Connie show.  This chick couldn’t speak any English but she was so excited and so beside herself to be in the presence of Tom Jones, and he was nothing but rude to her.  Both Jones and his bodyguard made ignorant jokes knowing she couldn’t understand.  And then when we got to the Stevens show, Jones kept fluffing her off when she leaned over and said in her thick Cuban accent, “I’m going to be sick… please, I’m going to be sick”.  They had really got her drunk on champagne.  I was sitting on her other side and thought, “uh oh, I don’t want her to vomit on me! I got my good stuff on!” (laughs)  But she was obviously in distress and Jones was ignoring her so, I stood up and started to help her out.

With two thousand people in the room looking on, Rocky gets up and yells, “where are you going with her?!” Both Tom Jones and Rocky treated me rudely from day one and this was embarrassing, so I completely lost it!  I was just trying to help the girl out after all.  So I told them both to fuck off and stormed out of the show!  Well, let me tell ya, the next morning, I couldn’t believe what I saw.

There was a big article in the Hollywood Reporter, eight inches long, two columns wide, which basically read, “ Tom Jones extends hand to welcome Canadian superstar who immediately tells him to **** off.”  I thought, “Oh no, my career’s over!”

The guys in my band were all pissed off and Mathers, who originally brought me to Vegas, was incensed.  Mathers called me over to his house and when I got there, he was livid.  I kept telling him, “I didn’t do anything! I wasn’t trying to steal his woman.  I was just trying to help her out.  Give me a break!”  Every word between us was really bad language, so I don’t think I should tell this on tape (laughs) but, basically Mathers shouted, “IN THIS BUSINESS YOU KISS EVERYBODY’S ASS!  YOU KISS EVERYBODY’S ASS UNTIL YOU’RE ON TOP AND THEN…. EVERYBODY WILL KISS YOUR ASS!”

When Mathers finished yelling, I turned to him and said, “Well ya know what? YOU KISS MY ASS!” (laughs). I come from a family of real people, ya know?   And this just didn’t compute. But back at the hotel, nobody would talk to me. I was like a piranha, totally shunned.  The band kept saying, “We’re fired.  I heard we were fired!”  And I kept telling them, “until you hear it from me, we go on at 10:00.”  We were playing Nero’s Nook, a classy 300-seat lounge, and you know what?  When I came down at twenty minutes to ten, there was a line-up of people there to see me!  People who thought it was great that somebody told Tom Jones to fuck off (laughs!).  I never heard another word about it after that.  In Las Vegas if there’s bums in the seats, nothing else matters.

Ha, what a great story!

But ya know, I didn’t really want to work Vegas after that.  I was disillusioned.  I finished my contract and went back one more time, but I just didn’t like it anymore.

This was the time of the Rat Pack, right?

Back then it was the end of the mafia era.  All the big casinos were basically owned or operated by organized crime figures.  And there were no black people. Sammy Davis Jr. was black and Billy Daniels was half black, and there were a few other black acts, but they didn’t stay at the casinos.  They stayed elsewhere.  The only other black people you saw besides the performers were the cleaning staff or the support and service staff.  And these were the times when, as long as you were gambling, even if it was nickel slots, you got free booze, free food and all kinds of giveaways.

By the second time I went to Vegas, things started to change.  Las Vegas was eaten up by large corporations concerned with social responsibility.  Booze was still offered for free, but only if you were playing craps or 21, and the drinks got smaller.  Eventually, the free booze stopped altogether and the demographic began to change.  Slowly there were a lot more black people on the streets and in the casinos.   I also started seeing more Asian people.  It became family-oriented.  Places like Circus Circus were built and the original Las Vegas lost its cache.

Hollywood loved to glamorize Las Vegas.  Did Vegas really look the way it did in the original Oceans 11 movie?

It did. It was like that.  When I first started working the Strip, it was a highway, just a blacktop highway with gravel shoulders.  All the big casinos on the Strip had a mile or so of desert between them.  There were no sidewalks, just these individual structures.  Then the road got paved into 6-lanes with big wide sidewalks and now every space is filled with Orange Julius souvenir stores, little mini gambling casinos and everything else.  You can walk for blocks and blocks and it feels like you’re walking down Yonge Street. It really lost its cache.  My wife has never been to Vegas and she would like to go, but I’m reticent now.  I was down there with a convention about five years ago, and I couldn’t wait to leave.  It was like being at the CNE.

But back in your day it was real show biz.  Even the term show biz is rarely used anymore.

Show business is all a facade.  The audience sees the sex, the glamour and the glitz, but when you’re inside it looking out, you see the backs of everything.  You see the sticks and props and things that hold everything up.  From the front you see a gorgeous million dollar pipe organ for instance, with all these beautiful pipes, but from the back it’s just a cheap formed plastic thing.  That’s show biz.  From the front, it’s beauty.  It’s magic.

The curtain is pulled back to expose the Wizard.

Yes, a perfect metaphor.  It did have the glamour you mention.  But it was a forbidden place.  It was sin city.  It was like an episode from a gritty cop drama.  Prostitutes were everywhere, but the ones inside the casinos were the girls who made the cut.  All other prostitutes were escorted out.  And if they came back, the cops would take them to the desert, rough ‘em up and leave them there, pointing “Los Angeles is that way”.  And that’s if they got off lightly.  The cops had tight control of Vegas because there was so much money involved.  To work as an entertainer there, not only did you have to get your visa to work in the States, but when you worked in Clark County which is where Vegas is, you had to go in for mug shots, fingerprints and always carry a sheriff’s card with your picture on it.  People would come into the shows and ask to see your sheriff’s card.  If you didn’t have it, you got the cuffs.

The Ocean’s 11 guys might get away with it!

That’s the movies.  I’ll tell ya, the security in those hotels was amazing. People would get lost in the world of chandeliers and mirrored ceilings.  But what they didn’t realize was standing over the mirrored ceiling, on a catwalk, were guys walking back and forth watching the pit bosses.  The pit bosses watched the dealers and the floor people watch the customers.  The security was unbelievable.

I’d like to hear more about Sammy Davis Jr.  Why was he the best entertainer you ever met?

I watched Sammy perform a number of times and it was never the same show.  He never had a rehearsed show.  He had the same opener and the same closer but other than that, it was an entirely different show each time.  Whatever his audience called out for, he did.  Behind him there’d be 26 or so musicians with a light on their music stands, so the audience could sort of see them, right?  Sammy would start to talk about something or other and Howard, his musical director, would sense what was coming and direct the orchestra to turn the sheets to the right arrangement.  But then someone in the audience would spontaneously call out for Candy Man or something and you’d see the band start whipping the pages furiously back again trying to find Candy Man.  It was so funny. The band never knew.  You could actually hear the flutter when they all tried to get on the same page.  Sammy was great.  He could read an audience.  He knew exactly when to eat a heckler or make something big and special for that certain someone.  He knew how to personalize his show.  He was such a small guy but he was a big entertainer.  That was Sammy.  The only other one that impressed me similarly would be Liberace.

Liberace!  Now there’s a showman!

I worked with Liberace at Caesars.  He was the kindest man.  In Vegas, the main dressing rooms consisted of an outer room with a bar and a couple of couches and then there’s the dressing room where you actually showered and changed clothes.  Most artists would always close the door to the social part of their dressing room.  It was normal to want privacy with your friends and families after a show, right?  But Liberace always left his dressing room door open.

After the show there’d be a lineup of little old ladies, some younger but mostly little old ladies and Liberace would talk to each and every one of them individually, until there was no one left in the line to talk to.  He would be wearing a smoking jacket or a robe, but after everyone left, he would shower and change and head over to the Caesars Palace restaurant.  He’d go around to all the tables in the restaurant and talk with everyone there.  And he was a generous man.

Liberace would buy all kinds of watches for people.  He gave me a watch!  Where Tom Jones was a rude prick to his fans, Liberace’s fans meant everything to him.  Liberace would write nice little notes and give gifts to the gaffers and to the lowest of the crew.  And as far as his shows went, they were always terrific.  Liberace was an internationally renowned concert pianist before he came into show business. And I never saw anyone do quicker changes than him.  He’d be out there with a gold lame tuxedo, finish the number, go back stage and in seconds be back in a blue suit, blue socks, and blue shoes.  Literally seconds! He had it down to a science.  Liberace would go into the audience and show women his rings.  And then he’d look at their rings and say, “oooh, aahh, that’s a lovely one! But I didn’t have to do what you did!”  (laughs)  Liberace was so obviously gay. And people just loved it.

Yet Liberace went to such extremes to deny he was gay.  I guess the denial stemmed from the generation he came from.

All through my career, people thought I was gay.  People still think so today.  One of my most popular songs was called My Wife the Dancer.  (singing) “I met a girl who told me she was a dancer…  a prettier girl I have never seen before… I went to the theatre to see her… what a shock (boom) when I opened up the door! (boom sha ka boom sha ka boom) She was doing the bump, the bump, the bumpity bump…” The guy in the song thought he met a real dancer but she turns out to be a stripper. So I would do this whole strip routine with a boa.  I could be very feminine because I never worried about what people thought.  And I would pick the guy in the audience who hated me the most, and go over and sit on his knee.  I’m part English and there’s a theatrical tradition in Britain where men dress up like women in farce musical comedy, like Dame Edith.

And Benny Hill?

Yes. I like upsetting people’s sensibilities and my wife gets a big laugh out of it too.  I don’t care if people think I’m gay.  I have friends who are gay.  My family knows what I am.  I know who I am.

Before your time in Vegas, Grant Smith and the Power played places like Toronto’s Hawk’s Nest, the Broom and Stone in Scarborough and the Jubilee Auditorium in Oshawa.  Tell me about those days.

Guys like George Olliver and I started out playing high school dances for two thousand kids.  We made really great money playing high schools.  Student council presidents booked us because they wanted a good dance.  And we gave it to them.  It didn’t take long before we realized how to make money.  Rather than argue with high schools about getting $500 as opposed to $300, we’d offer to play for $250 with 70% of the gate.  If we got 2,000 kids at $4 a head, 70% of that was a pretty good pay day.  We did this all over Ontario.  But by the end of the 60s, everything changed.  The rock festival phenomenon happened.  Kids in parts of Ontario, particularly in Toronto, could now see performers like Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, Country Joe and the Fish…

All on the same bill.

For ten dollars!   Kids could see several bands for twelve drug-fuelled hours at a time, for only ten dollars.  This really changed the market.  So high schools were out and I started working night clubs.  I’ve always been fortunate to have a good following and Toronto was full of great venues.  Le Coq’dor, Friar’s Tavern, the Savern, the Hook and Ladder; professional rooms that brought name acts in from the States.  I started playing them and did very well in them.  I’m a good entertainer and I have no compunction in saying that, because I am.  I have a dynamite show.  People like to watch me.  I’m in the moment all the time.  And I do outrageous things occasionally, but not in a negative way.  I’m a funny guy.  I was an entertainer before I was a singer.  When I became a front man, I really couldn’t sing too well.  But I moved and danced so much, it really didn’t matter.  I developed the facility to yell.  I wasn’t as good at singing as I was at controlled yelling.  But as I kept doing it, I became a better singer.  I felt confident calling myself a singer after enough people told me I was.  At some point I had to believe them, but I’m never completely satisfied with my work.

A perfectionist rarely is.  But as an athletic front man who turned a room into an excited dance hall with your boyish sex appeal, I still can’t help wondering about your role models.  I can’t seem to get the image out of my mind of little Grant Smith learning how to do it from watching Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show.

I always thought Elvis was good.  I thought a lot of performers were good.  And I loved James Brown.  But those who have role models, often want to be them. When I was learning a song, I’d sing along with the record like everyone else, right?  But I didn’t consciously try and copy the singers.  I always had a strong sense of self.  I mean, a lot of these acts I’d never seen.  I only just heard them.

Oh yea, I guess that’s true.

When I was young, my mother listened to Nat King Cole and would pick me up and dance me around the house. And my father was a soldier in an infantry unit with the best marching band in Canada.  I became enamored with the drums.  But there was one fateful night in particular that changed everything.  I heard rhythm and blues for the very first time.  It was after my older brother moved out and I inherited his bedroom.   Along with inheriting his bedroom, I also inherited his silver toned record player and a bunch of Bill Haley and the Comets records.  On this night while lying in bed, I could hear music, faintly, fainter than that (my kitchen radio).  Just the high end of the music, but it didn’t seem to go away.  I was probably in grade 7 at the time.  I got up and stuck my head out the window.  Being summertime, the window was wide open, but the sound wasn’t coming from out there. And it wasn’t coming from downstairs either, because no one was awake.  It took me a while to realize the record player was still on.  And what it was doing was picking up radio signals.  The record player had a metal tone arm and when I picked it up, the sound came in more clearly.  I thought this was really neat.  Within a night or two, I had it all figured out.  I got a piece of wire and after wrapping it around the cartridge, I would lay in bed with the other end of the wire in my mouth. I discovered that if the wire was wet, I was a better antenna!  With this wire in my mouth, I heard the Righteous Brothers for the first time on WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee!

What young boys don’t get up to in their bedrooms late at night!

WLAC would come in and out, and the dj talked like a real southern guy.  It all came together for me listening to this radio station.  Unlike the way rock and roll was mixed at the time, R&B had a strong back beat and a strong drum presence in the music.  Rock and roll drums were not mixed for the front of the music, like R&B was.

Do you remember what that first song was coming through the wire in your mouth?

Ooh Ooh Ba Doo by the Righteous Brothers.  It was also the first time I heard Sam and Dave, Bo Diddley….

But you still had no idea what these bands looked like?

Nope.  I would only have been 12.  It was such a generic happening.  I had no knowledge of the existence of rhythm and blues before this.

And you owe it all to your brother for moving out of the house! (laughs)

I owe it all to my mother for kicking my brother out of the house! (laughs)

Continued in Part Three…

About Lisa McDonald: “I’m a city girl. A vegetarian who enjoys yoga, pilates, and cycles to keep active but live music is my real passion. All things music really, and I’ve been known to write about it.. I value a strong work ethic and good manners, but what really turns me on is confidence and experience.”