Friday, Dec. 21, 2001 | 9:30 a.m.
Jerry Fink's lounge column appears on Fridays. Reach him at jerry@ lasvegassun.com or 259-4058.
Tommy Rocker isn't your normal lounge entertainer, out there pitching his talents to bar owners all over town, hoping to get a gig here and there.
Rocker owns the venues where he usually performs.
"I can't get fired," quipped the 52-year-old local pop-rock star, well-known for his Jimmy Buffett tribute band, Conched Out.
Since settling in Las Vegas in 1984, Rocker (his legal name is Greenough) has opened three restaurants, two of which have lounges where he entertains regularly.
His first venture into the chancy world of the restaurant business was Tommy Rocker's Cantina & Grill, 4275 Industrial Road. He performs there Friday and Saturday nights. His second business was the Black Mountain Grill, 11021 S. Eastern Ave., which has no entertainment and a little finer dining environment.
In September Rocker opened his third restaurant, Tommy Rocker's Southside Grill, 10050 S. Eastern Ave., where he performs on Sunday nights, often joined by musicians who drop by to jam.
"It's fun for me," Rocker said. "Since my name's on the wall, I wanted to have some kind of entertainment here."
Rocker says he has the best of both worlds. He entertains three nights a week, instead of the seven nights he used to work, and he has a nice "sideline" with the restaurants -- which he expects will bring in $7 million in food sales next year.
Rocker has come a long way since he was a Fighting Seagull, a Duck and a popular performer for Eskimos and miners in the outback of Alaska.
Rocker is a native of Oregon. He graduated from high school in Seaside (home of the Fighting Seagulls) and then attended the University of Oregon (home of the Ducks) in Eugene. After college, Rocker attended the university's law school.
"My last year of law school I worked for the city of Springfield prosecuting stray dogs and stop-sign violators," Rocker said. "That was the extent of my work experience as a lawyer."
Through most of his academic career, Rocker played in bands at fraternity parties and in local nightclubs to help pay for his education.
After passing his bar exam, he decided he liked performing in barrooms more than courtrooms.
"I stayed in Eugene, playing in bands there for several years, and then migrated to California for a while," Rocker said.
In 1983, near the end of the construction of the oil pipeline in Alaska, a friend suggested he head north and jump into the money pool that everyone was swimming in up there.
Rocker spent a full year in Alaska, before making Las Vegas his base of operation.
"I played everywhere, but the main place was this great bar in Anchorage called Chilkoot Charlies," Rocker said. "It was a huge nightclub, the biggest in Alaska.
"I played there for 12 years, off and on. I played all the little towns all over Alaska, practically in igloos.
"I've been up above the Arctic Circle. Three years in a row I played on the Fourth of July at the Red Dog Mine, out in the middle of nowhere. They'd fly me in, but it'd take hours to get there. We'd land on a gravel landing strip and I'd play in a gravel parking lot and all these natives from the area would come in ... plus the people that worked at the mine."
Sometimes, Rocker had to use some ingenuity to make sure the show went on.
"One year the sound system broke down," he said. "I ended up playing through somebody's stereo. I was outdoors, it was so funny, but it just didn't matter."
Mixed in with gigs in Alaska, Rocker traveled the country performing for a chain of restaurants called Carlos Murphy's. He regularly performed at the Carlos Murphy's that was on South Maryland Parkway, across from UNLV, before it became Moose McGillycuddy's in 1989.
That year Rocker opened his own establishment.
"I just saw an opportunity," he said. "It's been a really good market for me here."
And Rocker plans to continue to expand that market.
"We have a bunch of different concepts (for restaurants)," he said. "I like to do something a little different in each place. I have a pipeline of concepts, and this is really a great town to do them in. It's booming. It's a great business environment. People are buying in areas five years out because they know the city is going to be there."
The lawyer-businessman-rocker isn't giving up his Jimmy Buffett tribute band, which performs at corporate events throughout the year and at The Orleans' poolside parties in the summer.
"We've played Key West (Florida) for the annual Jimmy Buffett festival," Rocker said. "He (Buffett) almost came into our club one time. Some of the guys from his band sometimes come in and play with us and this one night he came in to hear them. His limo drove up, he came to the front door and was met by 500 drunken parrot heads. He just said, 'Tell them I was here,' and left.
"That's the closest we ever got to him."
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