Lounge-O-Leers

PARTY LIKE IT’S THE SWINGIN’ ‘60s!

Bathing in the festive glow of colored tiki lights, experience The Lounge-O-Leers’ brand of “Music to Live By” -- described by Time Out New York as “…swinging bachelor pad music from a couple of cool retronerds…[who] manage to keep lounge music funny without resorting to cheesy excess.” Playing a melange of bachelor pad sounds in their trademark deadpan style, The Lounge-O-Leers present a living soundtrack expressly for the entertainment of the subconscious mind.
Their repertoire includes everything from classic lounge tunes, to TV and movie themes, to the history of modern top-forty transported to the land of lounge — from The Doors to ABBA to Nirvana to Britney Spears to Eminem...and everyone in between. The sounds of The Lounge-O-Leers make the mundane soundtrack of our lives undeniably fresh and new. It’s the songs rattling in your head that you swore you'd never want to hear again morphed beyond belief. Twists… Mambos… Frugs… Cha Chas… Cool Jazz Stylings… and more. In the words of a CitySearchNY reviewer, “You’ll be humming along, you know all the words, but what song IS that they’re playing?”
The Lounge-O-Leers have appeared widely throughout New York City, and beyond — from Caroline’s Comedy Club to Carnegie Hall to Irving Plaza; from The Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to The Encounter Bar and Restaurant at Los Angeles International Airport; and from the cafeteria at State University of NY at Purchase to society functions produced by Colin Cowie.
The boys have received accolades from a full spectrum of sources — including pop music god Les Paul; New York’s legendary standards station, WQEW Radio; San Francisco alternative newspaper, SF Weekly; CitySearch New York and New York Press, who have both voted them “best local New York City band” in their audience polls; and Japan’s Oggi Magazine.
The heppest cats around are buzzing about The Lounge-O-Leers... and word is getting out about the insanity that is The Lounge-O-Leers. Ricky and Hot Rod raid the poppiest chart hits of the last five decades and transform them into a living soundtrack for the grooviest party since the Summer of Love!

THE LOUNGE-O-LEERS MYTHOLOGY
In Their Own Words

We've been asked by many of our fans for details about our background as well as our legendary celebrity relationships. Suffice it to say that we've always just let our music speak for us. There's really no need to know more than this — we came only to spread our own brand of grooviosity to all our brothers and sisters on this lovely blue planet. And, yes, along the way, we've been thrilled to count many of the planet Earth's most fabulous creatures among our dear friends and fans.
We initially hit the musical scene in the early ‘60s, when we got a gig playing the weekly ballroom dance mixer held in the Oddfellows Hall in lovely Dexter, New Mexico. We quickly found ourselves in great demand, being hired to play ballroom dancing events throughout the southwest...and eventually becoming the band of choice for the Southwest region of The American Ballroom Association.
It was during this time that, in conjunction with the Association, we released the first of our recordings, a 45-rpm single of "The Magnificent Seven Cha Cha", backed with our vocal recording of "Sway". Our recording turned into an instant hit and came to attention of Howard Brennan Johnson, himself a keen ballroom dancer, who hired us to play in the lounges at his huge Howard Johnson empire and the rest is, as they say, history.
We spent our early years playing exclusively in Howard Johnson lounges throughout the country, which, of course, was THE meeting spot for the hip and happening in each berg. While rubbing elbows with the cognoscente, we were quickly introduced to the wonders of pop music, and just as quickly introduced our versions of those pop hits into our playlist. It was this, more than anything, that brought us instant notoriety and made wherever we played a gathering spot for those that were in-the-know.
Along the way, we gathered an exciting celeb fan base... everyone from Claudine Longet (who Ricky encouraged to record "Bang, Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down", and who later made the song come true in real life by shooting the dreamy Spider Sabich dead); to Herb Alpert (who was inspired by our birthday cake for him to create the iconic "Whipped Cream" album cover); to Donovan (introduced to us by our bud John Lennon, and whose friends constantly offered us some sort of herb cigarettes); to the ultimate Lounge God, Mel Torme.
And, of course, to this day we continue on our mission to bring happiness to the inhabitants of this great planet... and we expect to go on, and on, and on until every man, woman and child on the planet succumbs to our vision of the ultimate in grooviosity.

THE VILLAGE VOICE SEZ

Almost Famous: The Lounge-O-Leers transform boring top 40 tunes into bizarre classics.
At 10:30 my friend finally shows up and orders a black Russian. He sneers at the Emerald. It's a nice enough little bar, equal parts émigré bartenders, plastic gingham tablecloths, and a Bon Jovi-only jukebox.
"These guys are fantastic," I cry, pointing to the back of the barroom. The live act is bedizened in white tuxedos. At the keyboards is the shaggy, Charles Nelson Riley-esque Ricky Ritzel, and accompanying him on vocals, a brash cymbal, and some other drums is Aaron "Hot Rod" Morishita, who strikingly resembles a young Yoshiro Mori, braided ponytail and all.
"Oh, yes. The Lounge-O-Leers. Don't tell me you've never heard of them," he laughs. "Aren't you sick of this stuff by now, all of this 'Oh, ha, ha, kitsch, yoom, bernab, loo, loo, loo'?! "
The kitschy pop duo is indeed one of the most tedious hazards in modern New York City music: all of those empty and unfunny references to slightly celebrated, forgotten jazz ages; the evasion of any clear statement, even a happy-go-lucky one, in favor of infallible coyness; all that bullcrap.
And yet what the Lounge-O-Leers offer is different; they aren't pretending to be anything but a couple of weird guys playing weird music. Their tunes provoke a cocked head and a grin, but the covers aren't just funny. They're actually good.
They rework extremely familiar songs to sound unsettlingly fresh, such as "Mrs. Robinson," laden with artificial vibraphone and Zooma zooma zoom's (or Zoom zoom zooma's, I can't read my notes) from Hot Rod.
Or try the inevitable barroom dose of "Love Shack." I thought it would take an utter torturing of that song to keep me from puking. These guys brutalized it with a rumba beat and left me grinning. The same is true of the strongest songs in the set—songs that seem to have been created to annoy. "Flagpolesitta!," "Walking on the Sun," "Smooth," and "Thong Song," just to name a few, are covered to the edge of intelligibility. "Karma Chameleon" resounds with greasy electro keyboards. "Oops! . . . I Did It Again" lives and breathes like the Word of God. The Lounge-O-Leers rephrase boring songs into bizarre classics.
The most depressing and yet wonderful thing about the group is the seemingly endless list of songs—not to mention scores of commercial jingles and television theme songs—numbing the nation that they can recombine and revive.
"Do you guys know New Order's 'Blue Monday'?" I ask after thumbing their black binder of songs in search of my favorite secret pleasure. It took me a minute of intense, self-conscious reflection to ask.
Hot Rod grins and takes out a pen to write it down. "No, but that's a great idea. We would have a good time with that one!"

THE LOUNGE-O-LEERS ARE...

Ricky Ritzel.
The recipient of an unprecedented number of awards (more than a dozen) from the Manhattan Association of Cabarets and Clubs, Ricky has worked steadily as an entertainer for more than 25 years. Ricky is one of the most popular piano bar personalities in New York City, as well as a seasoned performer, director, accompanist and musical director. Ricky has created a wide variety of critically-acclaimed shows which he has taken to music rooms, cabarets and clubs throughout the country -- including his celebrated performance as, and tribute to, Jimmy Durante; and 1938, a musical entertainment consisting of 38 songs either written or popularized in the year 1938, developed and performed in conjunction with noted jazz artist Spider Saloff. A highly sought-after musical director and accompanist, Ricky has worked with an eclectic cross-section of top-notch performers — ranging from Sandra Bernhard to downtown performance diva, Varla Jean Merman, to Nanette Fabray. As an actor, Ricky‘s most widely recognized appearance is as ”scary man“ in the cult classic film, Trick.
Aaron ”Hot Rod“ Morishita.
Prior to joining Ricky to form The Lounge-O-Leers, Aaron appeared in a variety of venues across the country as a singer, dancer and actor. Since his first professional theatrical role as Prince Chululongkorn opposite John Cullum in The King and I, Aaron has been seen Off-Broadway at The New York Shakespeare Festival, Playwright’s Horizons and in the 1984 revival of Pacific Overtures. Stock and regional theater appearances include Godspell, Spoon River Anthology, Thurio in the McDermot-Guare version of Two Gentlemen from Verona, the Street Singer in The Threepenny Opera, dance captain in Gypsy, directed and choreographed by Tony Tanner — and more performances than anyone should endure as Ito in Mame. As a singer, Aaron has appeared at clubs throughout New York City (where BackStage calls him “a standard against which other vocalists must measure themselves”) as well as in a variety of events coast-to-coast, from the Mabel Mercer Cabaret Convention in NYC to appearing as a guest artist at the annual J-Town Review in San Francisco. moshi template 1.3