Friday, Feb. 15, 2002 | 9:51 a.m.
Jerry Fink's lounge column appears on Fridays. Reach him at [email protected] at (702) 259-4058.
Jerome Robinson sings the blues and tells great stories.
The 52-year-old native of Washington, Ga. (between Athens and Augusta), jams at the Double Down Saloon and Kitchen Cafe, works security for his apartment complex and has other odd jobs that help make ends meet while working on a blues CD.
"I once performed for the Ku Klux Klan," Robinson, who is black, said.
It was in the mid-'80s, atop a mountain in Southern California.
"A friend of mine asked me to do this gig with him for a volunteer fire department picnic," Robinson said.
Members of the KKK (sans sheets) were also having a picnic nearby.
"I did a lot of Johnny Cash and Elvis impersonations," Robinson said. "Before it was over the Klan was having a good time, yelling and screaming, and at the end they asked me if I would come back and play their picnic again next year. I said sure, and they gave me a card that said I was an honorary Klan member."
Robinson says he has wanted to be a performer since age 5, when he took to the stage for the first time to recite a poem in front of the congregation at the Springfield Baptist Church in Washington.
"Everybody applauded, and my mom rewarded me with a lemon ice cream cone, and I knew from then on I wanted to be an entertainer," he said.
Robinson lived with his mother, his aunt and other relatives in an old house in a town where restored antebellum mansions were popular tourist attractions. The house he grew up in had a cafe attached.
"It was a little catfish restaurant, a little juke joint down South," He said. "My aunt taught me how to cook, and I was cooking in the cafe when I was 9.
"Old men used to come around on Saturdays and set up card tables in the corner, and we would cook fried chicken or catfish. One man used to come and play the guitar, and he would sit in a corner and play the blues, and someone else would be beating on a lard can. I thought it was the most fascinating thing in the world."
In 1967 Robinson joined the Navy, did a tour of duty in Vietnam and then was stationed in San Diego.
"My friends and I used to go to the Hollywood Palace Burlesque Theatre. This lady came out -- her name was Bobbi, from Texas -- and she had these tassels and she could make one move and the other stop," Robinson said. "It was the funniest thing I had ever seen in my life."
Robinson laughed so hard he attracted the attention of owner Bob Johnson, who got caught up in the moment and asked Robinson to get onstage and sing.
With half-naked women in the background, Robinson was a hit and performed at the theater on his days off until transferred to the Seattle area, where he was discharged.
He ended up back in San Diego, where he met a guy shooting pool, and they decided to take two girls they had just met to Tijuana.
"On the way down we started singing, and once we got to Tijuana we got up onstage at this place called Mike's A-Go-Go," Robinson said. "They really liked us, so we decided when we got back to San Diego to start a group called Soul Exclusive. We got booked into the Powwow Club, where a guy heard us and said we should go to L.A. and he would help us out. We stopped everything and went to L.A., and the guy doesn't have anything.
"He wanted to give us a job selling AfroSheen."
The band broke up, but Robinson stayed in Los Angeles.
"I just wanted to sing," he said. "That's all I wanted to do."
Robinson married a white keyboardist and they played the nightclub circuit in the San Fernando Valley for a few years and then began touring. They found themselves in McCook, Neb.
"There were no blacks in this town," he said.
Robinson said the club owners were stunned when they saw that he was black. And when his white wife walked in, there was no way the band was going to get to fulfill a two-week gig that had been arranged by the group's booking agent.
"They said they would pay us for a month if we would leave town right then," Robinson said.
Eventually he divorced and ended up in Las Vegas, where he performed at the Maxim, Four Queens and other venues.
"I used to open for the Platters and the Coasters," Robinson said.
In 1984 Robinson and a new wife moved back to his hometown where he became a police officer and she managed a department store.
"I'd been working so long, I just wanted to get away awhile," Robinson said.
He became known as the Singing Cop.
"There was a festival on a plantation outside Washington called 'Mule Days,' " Robinson said. "A country band was playing and I walked up and asked if I could sing. Everyone started whooping and hollering and all of a sudden I'm being invited to sing at the local Kiwanis Club, where blacks were never allowed to go before, and at the mayor's house."
Eventually, he divorced again and moved to Phoenix with his son from a previous marriage and started a country band called Rockin' Rodeo. He sang country music for several years, until he noticed that blues singers were becoming popular, and then he switched to that genre.
"I moved back to Vegas two years ago and went to the veterans hospital for a check-up, and they found out I had prostate cancer," Robinson said.
He had been performing at the Kitchen Cafe, where he made a lot of friends who had a benefit for him to raise enough money to pay his bills while he went to the veterans hospital in Long Beach, Calif., for treatment.
"Whoever said Vegas doesn't have a heart is crazy," Robinson said.
Robinson's cancer is in remission, and now he is focused on the blues and resurrecting his career.
"What I want to do is, I want to do my blues. I want to sing. I want to dance. That magic is still there."
Lounging around
Blues guitarist Larry McCray will perform Thursday as part of the Boulder Blues series at Boulder Station's Railhead.
Nils Lofgren, who sometimes performs at his namesake Guitar Bar at Fiesta Henderson, will be at Sunset Station's Club Madrid at 8 p.m. Saturday.
Saxophonist Rocky Gordon and The Killer Groove Band perform 11 a.m.-3 p.m.. Sundays at the Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant for the venue's new Oasis Sunday Jazz Brunch, sponsored by KOAS 105.7-FM.
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