Longtime LV lounge singer Bell, 76, dies

Freddie Bell, one of the first singers to ring in Las Vegas' legendary swinging '50s lounge scene and one of the last to still perform, died Sunday of lung cancer. He was 76.

Bell died at Valley Hospital, where he was first admitted for cancer-related surgery and where he had remained hospitalized for more than 25 days, said Norm Johnson, Bell's longtime friend and former publicist.

Bell and his Bellboys first came to town as rock 'n' rollers in the 1950s. As Bell often told the story, Elvis Presley was inspired to record "Hound Dog" after hearing the Bellboys perform it during Presley's 1956 stint at the New Frontier.

But when he finally quit performing at the Bootlegger Bistro last year, Bell long had epitomized the last-of-the-breed lounge singer. He worked in rotation with Louis Prima and Don Rickles in the Sahara's fabled Casbar lounge, and played the Sands in both the year it opened, 1953, and the year it closed, 1996.

Bell reshaped his image over the years, performing as a duo act with two successive spouses, Roberta Linn in the 1960s and Patti York in the '70s and '80s.

The Philadelphia native was born Ferdinando Dominico Bello on Sept. 29, 1931. He sang and played several musical instruments by the time he graduated from high school, and soon formed his own band. Bell and the Bellboys became a sensation in the Philadelphia area, with their own regional recording of "Hound Dog" in 1955, three years after the first recording by Big Mama Thornton.

The group played the Sands in 1953, a year before the lounge scene hit full stride with Prima and the Mary Kaye Trio. B-movie producer Sam Katzman was a frequent Las Vegas gambler and cast Bell's band in the breakthrough rock 'n' roll movie "Rock Around the Clock." Bell and the Bellboys serenaded about 500 local teens from the back of a flatbed truck when the movie opened at the Fremont Theater in 1956.

Bell maintained that Presley first heard "Hound Dog" performed by the Bellboys. During Presley's time on the Strip that April, "He asked me if I would mind if he recorded the song," the singer recalled in 1987. "I even gave him a copy of my record." Presley's manager Tom Parker, universally known as "The Colonel," "promised me that if I would give him the song, the next time Elvis went out on tour, I would be the opening act for him -- which never happened."

By 1959, Bell had reinvented himself for a long career on the Strip. "I was never a rock 'n' roller. We were thrust into that by Columbia Pictures. We were more of a nightclub act than a rock 'n' roll band," he noted in the 1990s.

Bell married his second wife, Linn, a former Lawrence Welk "Champagne Girl," in October 1961. When Prima and Keely Smith decided to test their drawing power in the main showroom, Bell and Linn replaced them in the Sahara lounge. The two recorded "The Bells are Swinging" album in 1964 and appeared in the movie "Get Yourself A College Girl" that year.

When the Las Vegas lounge scene faded in the late 1960s, the couple launched a supper club in Newport Beach, Calif. But the club did not last and the marriage did not survive the stress.

Bell returned to Las Vegas, teaming with York to create a new lounge act and marrying her in 1974. They divorced in 1977 but remarried in 1983 before separating again two years later. Bell remarried again in 1989 to Angela Bell, who survives him.

Bell kept working the diminishing Las Vegas lounge scene into the 1990s, playing casinos such as the Tropicana, Aladdin, Marina, Mint and Frontier. In a full-circle turn, he was one of the final acts to close the Sands' lounge in June 1996.

Bell found a haven at the Bootlegger Bistro, performing alongside fellow lounge veterans such as the late Sonny King and Charles "Blackie" Hunt in recent years, and continuing through last summer.

As for the Strip, "We've been replaced by big buildings," Bell noted in November 2002, when he and the Treniers received one last moment in the showroom spotlight at The Orleans.

Still, he reflected, "48 years isn't a bad run at all."

He is survived by six children and a stepson. Services are pending at Palm Mortuary, 7600 Eastern Ave.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0288.