The Swing Book (6 page)

What made the swing scene take off as a certified cultural movement, however, was when musicians began looking back to swing’s
hardest-driving music. In London in the early eighties, swing, or more correctly, swingin’ jump blues, experienced its first
modern-day comeback.
Ray Gelato,
as part of the Chevalier Brothers, and Joe Jackson, who released a before-its-time album of Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway
material called
Jumpin’ Jive
in 1981, started to bring back the best of the jump blues sound. London’s scene was a harbinger of today’s swing craze. “There
were swing dance nights and a lot of bands playing the music over in England, and they used to wear the zoot suits and the
two-toned shoes. I think there was a big cross-pollination with American people coming over and seeing the thing here,” says
Gelato. (For more information on Gelato and other neoswing musicians highlighted in bold print in this chapter, see individual
entries in chapter 5.)

While swing’s popularity in London eventually died down, the Brits were certainly out there before anyone else. But can they
or any handful of people really be credited with reviving swing? Today everyone and his daddy-o likes to lay claim to that
distinction. Almost every band points out how long they’ve been around (1989, 1991, or even 1993 are considered far-back years
in the history of the revival). Answering the question, however, is as tough and controversial as saying who invented jazz
in the first place. No one owns the music and the dance. Nevertheless, the musicians like to think they made it popular and
new again, while the dancers believe that they get short shrift from the music side, which wouldn’t have become so big without
them. The Europeans, meanwhile, feel overlooked by the Americans for their contribution. And in many ways all of them are
right. But two people truly do stand out as the greatest modern-day, Goodman-style popularizers of swing. Appropriately, one
of them, the
Royal Crown Revue’s
Eddie Nichols, is from the music world, while the other, Frankie Manning, hails from the dance side. The pair couldn’t be
any more different.

The founder of the influential band Royal Crown Revue, Eddie Nichols is one of the few neoswingers who can use old-time lingo and be taken seriously. “That guy’s got a thousand-yard stare” he says of one hard-luck friend. Nichols himself could have ended up the same way. A singer and percussionist who grew up in New York City, Nichols moved out to Los Angeles in 1984 and quickly fell into the city’s thriving hard-core punk rock scene. At one point he was unemployed and lived on the streets. He did find a job, cleaning toilets at a filthy punk club called the Cathay de Grande. In the late eighties he started playing in a rockabilly band, but he also started abusing heroin around the same time, a habit he didn’t kick for almost a decade. All in all, he was one of the most unlikely people you’d ever imagine being drawn to “Geritol” music. “I was truly ignorant of the whole thing when I started doing it,” says Nichols, who claims he stumbled onto the sound by just jamming and playing around with chord changes. Suddenly he realized the music sounded retro, really retro.

Nichols and the other founding members of the group—who also included the Stern brothers from the punk band Youth Brigade—began listening to the jump blues of Louis Prima and Louis Jordan, just like the Brits had done. “You couldn’t go out and buy the complete works of Louis Prima on Rhino back then,” says RCR’s guitarist James Achor. “I would buy 78s from this Goodwill for a nickel apiece. I would buy them one hundred, two hundred at a time and I’d go home and listen to them. It wasn’t like I went to the record store. I had to get the shovel out and dig for it. It was archaeology of all this American music. For some reason it had been lost. As a kid you didn’t hear about Louis Jordan or Louis Prima.”

For them and for other early swing musicians—part of a generation that had been raised solely on rock—it was as if they were hearing this music for the first time. By the late eighties, the great pioneer Louis Jordan was far from a household name. In fact, he’d almost been forgotten. Many of these musicians were newcomers to jazz and refugees from the raw, aggressive punk scene (Scotty Morris, founder of
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
, and Vise Grip of San Francisco’s Ambassadors of Swing were both ex-punkers). They were, however, becoming increasingly disenchanted with rock, with both the late-eighties hair-metal-guitar bands like Guns n’ Roses and the developing grunge movement. Remarkably, they found something in swing that spoke to their punk sensibilities. “Here was this music and it rocks just as much but with a little more refined energy,” says RCR trumpeter Scott Steen.
Eddie Reed
, a member of the LA rockabilly scene and later the founder of the popular Eddie Reed Big Band, remembers being bowled over the first time he listened to Artie Shaw. “I heard an eighteen-year-old Buddy Rich slamming the drums at breakneck speed and shouting like some punk rocker in the background exhorting Artie Shaw into this pyrotechnic clarinet solo,” he says. The music that really turned on the scene, adds Steve Lucky of the neoswing
Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums
, was “the really hard-swinging, gut-punching, jumping stuff.” If your main exposure to the big band era was a song like “Stardust,” then the fact that this ferociously spontaneous music existed at all was a revelation.

The wild showman Cab Calloway, the bluesy Count Basie, and, of course, Prima and Jordan became the guiding inspirations of the new scene. By contrast, at this point in the revival the more traditional big band leaders, such as Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and, pointedly, Glenn Miller, were not. Looking back, it’s easy to see why. For ears attuned to rock but yearning to get back in touch with America’s musical roots, jump blues was the natural entry point. “The late forties is the most entertaining period to me,” says Nichols. “It was like a crossroads where there are aspects of jazz and rock and rhythm and blues. It’s when there were still a lot of interesting chord changes but the beat started rocking too.”

These revivalists, while searching for the roots of rock, found swing unexpectedly. And in the process they began to question whether the supposed great divide between the two genres is
really as enormous as most of us have been taught, the idea that before rock came on the scene nothing else cool ever existed.
They began to discover that not only did jazz have an influence on early rock but also swing music could be just as wild and
energetic. Instead of focusing on the differences between swing and rock, they began to hear similarities and see progressions.
To today’s ears, bands like Bill Haley and the Comets have begun to sound very swing. The distance between Lionel Hampton’s
1946 hit “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop” and Gene Vincent’s 1956 hit “Be-Bop-A-Lula” doesn’t really seem so far. “To me, swing encompasses
band, jump blues, and the beginnings of rock and roll. The current term
swing
has become a convention for talking about retro dance music in general,” says Carmen Getit, vocalist and guitarist with Steve
Lucky and the Rhumba Bums.

Intriguingly, the rockabilly revival of the late seventies and eighties had taken modern musicians back to the sound of the
fifties and tantalizingly close to the brink of jump blues. Inspired by such rebellious rockin’ fifties singers as Jerry Lee
Lewis, Gene Vincent, and Eddie Cochran, early eighties bands like the Blasters and Brian Setzer’s Stray Cats made hits of
such songs as Little Richard’s “Keep A-Knockin’” and “Rock This Town,” respectively. The rockabilly rebirth helped bring back
partner dancing too. “That’s when kids started couples dancing. They were doing the jitterbug, which is like a fifties mishmash.
I called it sling dancing. It was just grab your girl and spin her around,” says Reed.

By the late eighties and on into the early nineties, the rockabilly scene in Los Angeles had become a vibrant “roots” music
movement. Centered around such clubs as the King King and the Palomino, the roots scene included musicians looking back toward
traditional country, western swing, and even Louis Jordan. “It was a great crossroads moment. It was very diverse,” says Royal
Crown Revue guitarist James Achor, who recalls going to performances by Chris Isaak, Dwight Yoakum, the rockabilly and Western
swing band Big Sandy and his Fly-Rite Boys, and a ska-type band fronted by Joey Altruda. “They were the first band I really
saw do a Jordan song,” says Achor. Exploring the musical past was suddenly hip. “Once kids started getting into vintage Americana,”
says Nichols, “there was more of a tendency to enjoy other styles like swing and rhythm and blues.”

From all this inspirational ferment, Royal Crown Revue—which officially formed in 1989—created a sound they call “hard-boiled
swing,” or “gangster bop.” The Stern brothers and Achor brought their punk attitude to the music. Nichols brought in his experiences
in both punk and rockabilly, while the band’s saxophonist, Mando Dorame, had grown up listening to the doo-wop and blues albums
of his sax-playing father. They tracked down and met Sam Butera, Prima’s colorful saxophonist and arranger. The band members
were all watching old film noir movies and reading gangster novels. Everything went into the jazz and rock stew, purists be
damned. “What would happen if Duke Ellington had had James Brown and the Sex Pistols to listen to? Who knows what he would
have sounded like,” says RCR trumpet player Scott Steen. Adds Nichols, “I thought, let’s try to put something a little newer,
a different energy into it and make the lyrics a little darker. When I started the band though, I thought, Well, maybe we’ll
just play for grandmas. I didn’t know who the hell was going to go to our shows. And all of a sudden there were these young
kids getting into it.”

Granted, Royal Crown Revue wasn’t the only band exploring the swing and jump blues era at this time. Groups such as the
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies
in Oregon, the
Senders
in Minneapolis, and Beat Positive, an early incarnation of New York’s
Jet Set Six,
were starting to jump too. Steve Lucky even had a jump blues band back in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the early eighties. The
Roomful of Blues, an influential Rhode Island band that started playing jump material in the early seventies, was perhaps
the earliest harbinger of the swing revival. Clearly this was in the air—everywhere. “A lot of bands, mostly within the same
age group, started around the same time, and none of them had any idea that anybody else besides themselves was trying this
kind of music,” says Michael Moss, the publisher of San Francisco’s
Swing Time
magazine, the first periodical devoted to neoswing. “Something was going on in the culture where hundreds of young musicians
started gravitating toward this swing idea.”

Royal Crown Revue’s film noir-influenced CD cover art.
(W
ARNER
B
ROS
. R
ECORDS
)

What made Royal Crown Revue stand out? Their sound was undeniably new. Instead of just covering past hits, they were writing
original material such as “Hey Pachuco!” a tribute to early Hispanic zoot-suiters, and the explosive “Zip Gun Bop.” “Royal
Crown was the first band to give it a punk edge and give it a raw energy that could translate into a new younger generation,”
says Max Young, co-owner of San Francisco’s swing club the Hi-Ball Lounge. “They said, ‘This isn’t the swing that your grandfather
listened to. This is stuff that’s gonna hit you in the head.’” Nichols began wearing zoots early too. “Walking around in LA
in a zoot suit would get my ass kicked almost as much as being a punk rocker would,” says Nichols. The band’s look became
a striking mix of gangster, greaser, and Hispanic cholo styles; their album art played up the film noir attitude.

But most important, Royal Crown Revue got themselves seen and heard. From the beginning they toured relentlessly. “They’d
head out across the country in this broken-down Winnebago that they called the Death Wagon,” says Eddie Reed, who has known
Nichols since the pair were part of LA’s rockabilly scene. On the road, the band made a conscious decision to pursue gigs
at rock clubs, not jazz spots, “We invented this kind of music for ourselves and we wanted to play it for our peers,” says
Achor. “We wanted to go where people our age go and hang out. So we played with grunge bands. Or we’d play punk clubs. Or
heavy metal places.” RCR began priming a whole new audience to connect with jazz in a different way. Later other bands—like
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, which formed in Ventura, California, in the early nineties and had a similar rock-meets-swing approach
to the music—also sought to get their music heard on the traditional rock circuit. “We started to create a place to make it
happen. There weren’t any swing clubs then. We would play anywhere,” recalls trumpeter Glen Marhevka of BBVD. Adds Achor,
“If somebody hadn’t done that, there would have been no other reason for it to become a part of popular culture.” Along the
way, Royal Crown Revue began inspiring other musicians to start their own groups. Their fired-up jump blues sound defined
the direction of the early neo-swing movement. The band struck a nerve with the kind of people—you may have been one yourself—who’ve
always loved swing music but who somehow felt they were born in the wrong half of the century. “People just resigned themselves,”
says Achor, “saying, ‘There’s just never going to be anybody like-minded at all ever anywhere like me. I’m the loneliest guy
in the world with my Frank Sinatra records.’”