The Swing Book (8 page)

That the dance and music revivals both happened independently of each other is odd (swing is, after all, a dance-based music)
but also understandable (bebop had severed the link between the Lindy and jazz music in the forties). “Just three years ago,”
promoter Lee Sobel recalls of the early swing music scene in New York, “I saw the Blues Jumpers play at Louisiana Bar and
Grill and there was not one person dancing. There was not even a place to dance. The dance floor was all tables.” At early
swing music concerts in California, people danced, but it would have been a stretch to call it the Lindy. “It was like a cross
between a mosh pit and dancing,” says Nancy Myers of the speakeasy parties that took place around 1991 and 1992.

By 1993 that all began to change. While clubs with swing nights had opened in San Francisco, Los Angeles still didn’t have
a spot of its own. That April a new club opened that would become the most famous swing place of all. Located in a gorgeous
building once occupied by the famous Brown Derby club, the Derby was a nostalgia lovers’ dream. It still had its original
domed ceiling with an art deco-style wood diamond pattern on it, constructed in 1929 by Cecil B. DeMille. “It was a huge hangout
out for stars like Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Carole Lombard, and Buster Keaton. It had a beautiful oval bar that had been
used in the movie
Mildred Pierce
in 1945,” says the club’s co-owner Tammi Gower, who restored the club and opened it with the idea of promoting both swing
music and dancing. “It was really in decline and had become a pretty downscale steak and Italian place,” she says. “The great
ceiling had been covered with a nine-foot drop ceiling. But I walked in and thought, This would make an incredible club. Believe
me, everybody tried to talk me out of it.” For the first two years the Derby booked the Royal Crown Revue every Wednesday
night. The club also made a point of bringing in swing dance instructors to give lessons. “By about the third month, men started
coming in in zoot suits and women in rayon dresses. It was pretty much a hit from there on out,” says Gower.

Also in 1993, two more dance-oriented and increasingly popular bands, the
Bill Elliott Orchestra
and the Eddie Reed Big Band, played their first gigs in the Los Angeles area. Influenced little by rock, both musicians had
consciously modeled their groups after big band leader Artie Shaw’s more traditional swing orchestra of the late 1930s. Elliott
soon began performing regularly for swing dances at Erin Stevens’s Pasadena Ballroom Dance Association. Dancing also began
to take off in San Francisco around this time; the local Lindy group Work That Skirt came together in 1994. And dancers began
to meet up with musicians in even more out-of-the-way places like Ventura, California. Terri and Lee Moore (who had learned
swing dancing at the Pasadena Ballroom), of the now world-renowned aerials troupe the Flyin’ Lindy Hoppers, moved to Ventura
in 1994 and heard some jumping swing music in a small local club called Nicholby’s. “Here was Big Bad Voodoo Daddy on this
stage and everyone was sitting and watching. No one was dancing and they were like ‘This is freakin’ wrong,’” says Terri’s
twin sister, Flyin’ Lindy Hopper Tammy Finocchiaro. “They came out and Lee just pointed at me,” says BBVD’s Scotty Morris.
“They lit the house on fire and we were like, Where did you learn that? We had never seen swing dancers before.”

The scene had now fully formed, with the style, music, and dance all together. But even by then, it was still relatively underground.
“For the first four or five years, it was only San Francisco and Los Angeles. Both cities had a ton of bands and we’d just
send them back and forth,” says Michael Moss. The original scene at the Deluxe had been thirty or forty people. Each time
the crowds grew, from two hundred people to six hundred people to more than a thousand, the pioneers of the swing revival
would end up slack-jawed at its rising popularity. At the Derby, where Big Bad Voodoo Daddy eventually took over the Wednesday
slot from Royal Crown Revue, lines soon snaked around the block. “There was a line starting at 7:00
P.M.
and it was there until one in the morning,” says BBVD’s Glen Marhevka. “People would order pizza in line and have it delivered.”
The more swing grew, the more wonderfully unbelievable it was to the people at its core. But even this popularity turned out
to be just the tip of the iceberg. Swing was about to be discovered nationally and picked up by the media. It would never
be the same.

The mainstream swing snowball—fueled also by the popularity of the revived cocktail culture—began rolling with the release
of the Jim Carrey movie
The Mask
in 1994. Featuring a zoot-suited Carrey dancing with Cameron Diaz to the Royal Crown Revue’s “Hey Pachuco!” at a forties-style
nightclub, the movie was the first to demonstrate neoswing’s crossover appeal. Soon newspaper and magazine stories began to
cover the phenomenon, usually taking an incredulous approach to the fact that swing had returned and treating it like just
the latest pop culture novelty trend. Some fad. In 1996 the hot indie film
Swingers
premiered, starring Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn. It featured Big Bad Voodoo Daddy performing their original song “You and
Me and the Bottle Makes Three Tonight (Baby),” a snazzy collection of retro clothes, and some scenes of spot-on dancing. A
year later the
Squirrel Nut Zippers
—a band that’s been lumped in with the swing revival though their sound is more of a twenties hot jazz vibe—saw their 1996
single “Hell” become a hit on alternative rock stations, a surprising development that was credited with opening the radio
waves to even more retro music. Benefiting from that entrée in 1998 were “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail”—a cover of Louis Prima’s classic
by the
Brian Setzer Orchestra
(which the former Stray Cat had put together in Los Angeles in 1993)—and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ original song “Zoot
Suit Riot.” Both singles not only became huge radio hits, but also had videos in heavy rotation on MTV. “This is the most
awesome thing I’ve ever been in front of,” said Setzer at the time. In particular, Setzer’s video, which featured such hard-core
dancers as LA’s Sylvia Sky-lar and San Francisco’s Cari Seiss, slickly captured the style, dancing, and music of the scene
all in three minutes. Ska bands, who with their emphasis on horns were another early influence on the revival, now started
morphing into swing bands. “Kids that drove Vespas and wore porkpie hats are now putting on zoot suits and playing Benny Goodman,”
says Jay Siegan, a manager of such swing bands as the New Morty Show and Blue Plate Special. Venues like the Lawrence Welk
Resort Center in Branson, Missouri, started jumping on the swing bandwagon, promoting their forties-revue shows as part of
the new craze. Vintage prices went through the roof. Pretty soon Setzer’s third album,
The Dirty Boogie,
had sold two million copies, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (even without a radio hit) and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies each sold
a million records. Within the course of six months, swing, the music that people started doing again simply because they loved
it, was big business. “It was an impossible dream. Who would ever have thought that a band could make money playing swing
music on MTV? No way. Forget about it,” says Michael Moss.