One Cool Customer: Confident Hopper draws SRO crowds to Fontana Lounge

By Jerry Fink

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 | 8:26 a.m.

Jimmy Hopper is hip.

With his neatly trimmed Jefferson Davis goatee, glitter sprinkled sparingly around his eyes, closely cropped and thinning hair, designer glasses and fashionable clothes, Hopper is the epitome of coolness.

Jimmy Cool isn't all show, however. He's mostly talent, sitting on a singing career that is ticking like a time bomb, at any moment ready to launch him into another universe.

But for now Hopper's world is the elegant Fontana Lounge at the posh Bellagio, where he charms standing-room-only crowds with his four-octave range and perfect pitch, singing everything from Elton John to Jim Croce to Andrea Bocelli to the Goo Goo Dolls to Neil Diamond.

Hopper does not care for the word lounge, but then neither did Louis Prima and he was king of the lounge entertainers in Vegas. Prima insisted that every lounge he performed in be dubbed a showroom.

Maybe playing in a lounge isn't cool.

"The Fontana is a great room, the prettiest cabaret in town," said Hopper, who exudes a passion for life, for his wife Sally, for their 2-year-old daughter Priscilla Rain and for the art that consumes him. "It's nicer than some of the showrooms around Vegas."

One wall of the Fontana is glass, through which the audience can see the outdoor seating on the patio and the Bellagio water show that takes place beyond that.

Hopper doesn't find much fault with the room that has been his professional home for the past two years, since shortly after he left the Luxor's Showroom at Ra. Prior to that he enjoyed a highly successful gig in the VooDoo Lounge at The Rio.

Hopper went to The Rio in 1997 from the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, invited down to open the VooDoo by Rio executives.

"The St. Francis is a beautiful hotel," he said. "I had a 350-seat showroom at the top. I was supposed to be there for three months, but stayed 15. We charged $25 admission."

Admission is one criticism Hopper has about the Fontana there isn't any. He would prefer that folks be charged to see him perform, as they did at both VooDoo and Showroom at Ra. Ticket prices would elevate Hopper's standing as a professional.

"The executives here at the Bellagio know people would pay to see us," Hopper said. "But we are doing so well, they offer the show as a gesture of goodwill to the people staying in the hotel."

However, he says, there is some discussion under way about making his a ticketed show. If it doesn't happen at Bellagio, then it may happen elsewhere.

"My mission is to get into my own ticketed showroom, and that's going to happen," Hopper said with the self-confidence that has guided him throughout his career. "We've already got two properties looking at us. We're just waiting for the right opportunity to build a show.

"Who knows? We might be able to do something right here at the Bellagio -- maybe change the Fontana into a showroom. They have been very good to me here."

They should be. Not too many entertainers with the breadth of talent of Hopper (seven-time Male Vocalist champion of TV's "Star Search") are working in a lounge, albeit one of the city's more sophisticated ones.

"I don't think anybody does what Jimmy Hopper does," Hopper said, referring to himself in third person. "We do rock, opera, classical."

And he performs them with style.

Onstage he often wears a smart-looking, knee-length black coat (open down the front) that slowly billows from air forced upward by a fan discreetly placed on the floor, giving the illusion that Hopper is singing and dancing in a gentle breeze.

Cool.

Adding to Hopper's air of confidence is his newly acquired manager, Bernie Yuman.

Yuman -- who is cool, too, dressing in expensive suits and cowboy boots -- manages Siegfried & Roy.

With Yuman on board, the sound of Hopper's ticking time bomb has grown a little louder.

Hopper's lawyers are negotiating a contract with Brookhurst Records which, if and when a deal is struck, could be the final tick of the clock.

"Brookhurst is affiliated with RCA," Hopper said. "They have made a lot of people big stars, but they don't want any of my songs. They want their own writers, people who have written hit songs for other artists."

Although he is a composer and songwriter, Hopper can accept singing other people's songs, which he does almost every night at the Fontana.

"It doesn't offend me to have someone come in and write a hit song for me," he said. "I'm actually quite flattered that they want to bring in the heavy hitters.

"My original music is good, but I don't know if it's worthy of Sting and Elton John. I do better interpreting songs that other people have written, putting my own interpretation on it."

Hopper says early in his career he decided he would not concentrate solely on writing.

"I had to make a choice," he said. "Am I going to try to make it as an artist who writes his own music and possibly struggles to survive? I decided to make a living singing covers, putting together shows, working in bars or cabarets, but continue writing on the side."

How would a recording contract affect Hopper?

"I've given that a lot of thought," he said. "I want to continue doing what I'm doing, but if we were to get a hit record there would be a lot of work ahead of me."

Including concert tours, international travel, weeks and months away from home.

"I don't know how I feel about that yet," Hopper said. "It only takes one hit song and everything could change.

"But if I got the hit, I could come back and maybe walk into any showroom in Las Vegas."

Until Hopper gets the hit and the showroom, he will continue doing what he has been doing for years -- working with one of the best backup bands in the city, and being cool.

"We're on a mission and we believe we are going to get there," Hopper said. "But until we do, there are worse places I could be than the Fontana room."