To the average alternative-rock station listener, it means cool new songs he or she can dance to. To the Cherry Poppin' Daddies--a Eugene band that labored in obscurity for eight years until the title track to its latest album, Zoot Suit Riot (Mojo), recently began climbing the charts--swing means fame and, quite possibly, fortune. But to discerning music fans, the alternative nation's lionization of new swing is a form of retro shtick that undermines the advance of popular culture. What foundation does this latter group have for scorning a band like the Daddies? Here in its home state and elsewhere, some accuse the veteran ensemble of a calculated attempt to capitalize on the mainstream's new fervor for a dormant genre. Sean Flannery, a tenor saxophonist who joined the Daddies three years ago when they were barely known outside this region, says this isn't the case. In a phone interview from Hawaii last week, with his band about to open a two-night stand for No Doubt, Flannery points out that the Daddies have played swing--as well as ska, punk and rock--from their inception. The idea for Zoot Suit Riot, which collects the swing compositions from three previous Daddies albums and adds four new originals, including the title track, came from manager Howard Libes. "He would be at shows selling merchandise with us," Flannery says of Libes, "and a common question from people would be, 'What has the most swing stuff on it?' He'd explain that there was a little swing stuff on the past three albums. Then he suggested we make a swing album." In essence, the band was attempting to please its audience. Founder, guitarist and vocalist Steve Perry, Flannery and their fellow players didn't expect Zoot Suit Riot to catapult the Daddies to stardom, but the album--originally released on the band's Space Age Bachelor Pad label in March 1997 and picked up by New York-based Mojo in July--is about to go gold. The Daddies now have a video in rotation on MTV, they played on Barbara Walters' daytime program The View last month, and they'll tour the U.S., Europe, Japan and Australia between now and January 1999. It's plausible that they'll surpass Everclear as the most successful band ever to spring from Oregon. Though only the cold-hearted would begrudge the hard-working and enduring Daddies their newfound popularity, the circumstances surrounding their rise point to a troubling development in pop culture. As recently as 1990, music listeners embraced innovators more strongly than imitators. Nirvana became a breakthrough band not by aping a bygone type of sound, but by crafting a passionate blend of rock, punk and pop into something entirely distinctive. It was a lesson Kurt Cobain learned from the Beatles, Bob Dylan and R.E.M. When bands like Bush and Everclear offered a sly rehash of Nirvana's style a few years later and sold millions of records, it signaled a new level of ridiculousness. Copycat bands are nothing new, but their extreme popularity is elbowing out the innovators like never before. Rather than creating something new, the most direct route to success is to write slight variations of past hits. For the Daddies, such a scenario has its costs. Though the band derives pleasure in leapfrogging from ska to punk to swing to rock, the status of "Zoot Suit Riot" brings limitations along with rewards. Radio programmers are unlikely to dip into the Daddies' back catalog to find non-swing songs that highlight the group's diversity, and record labels would surely scoff if Perry decided to follow with a collection of straightforward rock songs. "We're trying to keep ourselves playing music that we want to play," says Flannery. "That's tough to do. The industry really wants to pigeonhole you. That's what we're fighting against right now." Fans attending the Daddies' performances are similarly unyielding. Flannery says that between every song, audience members scream requests for the current hit, which the band is beholden to play sooner or later. "That's definitely the time of the show when we feel most ridiculous," he says of their nightly recitations of "Zoot Suit Riot." "It's almost like we're mimicking ourselves." Despite the musical progress of the past 67 years, Duke Ellington's declaration has taken on an eerie resonance. |
