Celebrity Story: Norman Luboff Tour

• Posted on 22nd March 2016
• in celebrity books, celebrity stories online, celebrity story, Entertainment, entertainment books, Hollywood books
• by Ben

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Here’s a

celebrity story

excerpt from Three Stages, Chapter Six: Sin City and the Road (Vegas/USA/San Francisco 1962-1964)

“From the 1950s through the ‘70s the Norman Luboff Choir was a record selling machine. During that period the group recorded more than seventy-five albums. … Luboff and his choir won the 1961 Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Chorus.

“In the fall of 1963 Norman was mounting his first tour of the USA doing live performances. I auditioned and was hired as the tenor soloist.

“The group comprised twenty-eight singers, a pianist and a drummer plus Norman. I knew three or four of the other singers from gigs with Bill Hall [my old roommate and founder of the William Hall Chorale], the rest were strangers but all seemed to be damn good.

“Norman was a delight, easy going and friendly but exacting when it came to the music. His recordings had mostly been popular music arranged (by Norman) and delivered in his distinctive style. For the tour, however, the first half of the program was baroque and classical. The usual composers, Bach, Tchaikovsky et al and one or two lesser known guys such as a piece from Pergolesi’s Magnificat.

“The tour was eleven weeks of one nighters and we were to travel on a bus while Norman, often accompanied by his wife, drove his Jaguar sedan. After three weeks of rehearsal we hit the road. …

“Since this was Norman’s first tour his manager had booked concerts for seventy-four of the seventy-seven days. … If memory serves correctly we were in the same hotel on two consecutive nights only twice (maybe three times) during the entire eleven weeks. It was exhausting. …

“… Our inaugural major venue was in San Francisco, the fourth or fifth concert and we worked our way up the coast in smaller towns to break in the show, as it were.

“About half an hour before the first gig, Norman pulled me and Paul Bergen, the baritone soloist, aside and said, in an embarrassed whisper, ‘I just realized I’ve never done this before in front of an audience. What the hell do I do?’ Both of us had done scores of live concerts so we filled him in on the standard protocols and launched him into the sea of live performance.

“And to continue that metaphor, he took to it like a fish to water. A naturally charming fellow, he was immediately comfortable before the crowd and he got better with every performance.

“Our routine was simple: We’d arrive in a city usually with barely enough time to check into our hotel and grab a quick meal. Then we’d get to the venue – sometimes an auditorium, sometimes a gym – unload the risers from the bus and set them up, put on our tuxedos, the women their white gowns – and sing for an hour and a half. We’d then reverse that process and crash in our hotel, after rinsing out our wash and wear tux shirts. The next morning we were back on the bus by between 7:00 and 9:00 AM, depending on how far we had to travel. How we survived this for seventy-seven days I’ll never know. But all of us did.

…

“There were three black singers in the group (more about Rosalie later) and we had a banner on the side of the bus proclaiming, ‘Norman Luboff Choir National Tour’. I suppose that the state troupers in Louisiana couldn’t read because they pulled us over and hassled us for fifteen minutes about being Freedom Riders.”

There are many stories about the Norman Luboff tour and other showbiz adventures to read when you click here to get Three Stages.

Tags: Norman Luboff Choir