Decoder Ring | Jump, Jive and Fail: The ’90s Swing Craze

Summary

Slow Burn Season 10, Episode: Decoder Ring | Jump, Jive and Fail: The ’90s Swing Craze

Host: Willa Paskin | Release Date: January 29, 2025

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Introduction to the ’90s Swing Revival

In this episode of Decoder Ring, host Willa Paskin delves into the vibrant yet fleeting resurgence of swing music in the 1990s. Often dismissed as corny or a mere fad, the swing revival was a complex phenomenon that saw underground subcultures merge with mainstream media, leading to both explosive popularity and swift decline.

Origins and Key Figures

Royal Crown Revue and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

The revival's roots trace back to passionate musicians like Mondo Dorame of Royal Crown Revue and Scotty Morris of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. These artists, inspired by classics from the late 1920s to the 1950s, sought to infuse swing with punk rock energy and a modern twist.

• Mondo Dorame: Grew up immersed in old jazz and blues, influenced by his father’s musical tastes.
• Scotty Morris: Combined his love for jazz and punk, forming Big Bad Voodoo Daddy to create a unique sound that blended swing with high-energy performances.

Scotty Morris [07:06]: "I definitely knew I was different, but in a way, I didn't mind it. I embraced it."

Squirrel Nut Zippers and Cherry Poppin' Daddies

Parallel to the California-based bands, Tom Maxwell of Squirrel Nut Zippers and Steve Perry of Cherry Poppin' Daddies were cultivating their distinct sounds in places like Chapel Hill and Eugene, Oregon. These bands were not directly influenced by their Californian counterparts but contributed to the broader swing revival movement.

Tom Maxwell [15:02]: "The Club Deluxe is a bar that had never changed since the 40s. Completely art deco on the inside. Absolutely magnificent."

The Role of Media and Commercialization

The Gap Commercial Phenomenon

A pivotal moment in the swing revival was the Gap’s 1997 television commercial, which featured meticulous swing dancing choreographed by Travis Payne and performed by Christian Perry. The commercial, inspired by the 1941 film Hellzapoppin', utilized the groundbreaking "bullet time" effect and showcased authentic swing moves, igniting widespread interest.

Jack (Carl Bird) [43:10]: "We went hard on. Let's find music that makes us feel something. If we can make people feel something about the Gap, they're gonna go to the store."

The ad's success catapulted swing into mainstream consciousness, leading to increased visibility for swing bands and a surge in demand for swing music and dancing.

Swing in "Swingers" and Chart-Topping Hits

The indie film "Swingers" (1996), featuring songs like "Hey Pachuco" by Royal Crown Revue and "Zoot Suit Riot" by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, played a significant role in cementing swing’s popularity. The latter became a top 40 hit, propelling neo swing into the limelight.

John Bunkley [31:59]: "Zoot Suit Riot was a top 40 hit... the surrealist music video became one of MTV's most played of 1998."

Mainstream Breakthrough and Overexposure

By the late 1990s, swing had permeated various facets of popular culture—from TV commercials and movie soundtracks to radio stations and dance clubs. However, this rapid commercialization diluted the genre's authenticity, leading to oversaturation.

Michael Moss [55:35]: "The scene was dead, was dead. You couldn't get a show. You said swing. It became a dirty word."

Reasons for Swing’s Sudden Decline

Several factors contributed to the swift downfall of the swing revival:

1. Commercial Exploitation: The overuse of swing music in advertising and media transformed it into a marketing tool, stripping it of its original rebellious and authentic essence.

2. Lack of Depth in Talent Pool: The influx of numerous swing bands stretched the talent thin, resulting in a decline in musical quality as labels prioritized quantity over craftsmanship.

3. Cultural Appropriation and Disconnect: Originally a black-led genre, the predominantly white neo swing scene overlooked its roots, leading to criticisms of cultural appropriation and a lack of genuine engagement with swing's heritage.

4. Shift in Public Perception: What began as a fresh and energetic movement quickly became seen as a caricature, with oversized suits and cliched aesthetics overshadowing the music and dance's true spirit.

Scotty Morris [35:44]: "Everybody took it like it was a party. It's a party. Let's put a zoot suit on and go out there and have fun and dance. And it wasn't about that."

Reflection on Neo Swing’s Legacy

Decades later, neo swing is often mocked or viewed as a cringe-worthy moment in musical history. However, this perspective overlooks the genuine passion and artistic effort that fueled the revival. The episode argues that the swift transformation from underground to mainstream perfection made it difficult to sustain, leading to its eventual caricature.

Willa Paskin [58:14]: "Why of all our flings with fads, our trysts with trends, does this one seem so doofy in hindsight?"

Despite its decline, swing music and dance continue to thrive in dedicated communities worldwide, untainted by the commercialization that marred its 90s revival.

Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of a Swing Fad

The 1990s swing revival serves as a case study in how underground movements can be co-opted by mainstream media, leading to both explosive success and rapid decline. While the revival's mainstream embrace showcased swing’s enduring appeal, it also highlighted the challenges of maintaining authenticity amidst commercialization. Today, swing persists in niche circles, celebrated for its rich history and vibrant energy, free from the constraints of fleeting trends.

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Notable Quotes with Speaker Attribution

• Scotty Morris [07:06]: "I definitely knew I was different, but in a way, I didn't mind it. I embraced it."
• Tom Maxwell [15:02]: "The Club Deluxe is a bar that had never changed since the 40s. Completely art deco on the inside. Absolutely magnificent."
• John Bunkley [31:59]: "Zoot Suit Riot was a top 40 hit... the surrealist music video became one of MTV's most played of 1998."
• Michael Moss [55:35]: "The scene was dead, was dead. You couldn't get a show. You said swing. It became a dirty word."
• Scotty Morris [35:44]: "Everybody took it like it was a party. It's a party. Let's put a zoot suit on and go out there and have fun and dance. And it wasn't about that."
• Willa Paskin [58:14]: "Why of all our flings with fads, our trysts with trends, does this one seem so doofy in hindsight?"

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Key Takeaways

• The 1990s swing revival was a vibrant, albeit short-lived, movement that saw swing music and dancing gain mainstream popularity.
• Royal Crown Revue, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Cherry Poppin' Daddies were central to this resurgence, each bringing their unique twist to traditional swing.
• Media interventions, particularly the Gap commercial and the film "Swingers," played significant roles in propelling swing into the spotlight.
• Commercial overexposure, cultural disconnect, and a diluted talent pool contributed to the swift decline of the swing revival.
• Today, swing continues to thrive in dedicated communities, appreciated for its rich history and dynamic energy, separate from its brief mainstream flirtation.

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Transcript excerpts and timestamps have been selectively included to highlight key discussions and insights presented throughout the episode.

Transcript

[Willa Paskin]

What's the best time of day to get a deal?

[Jack]

All day with Jack in the box's.

[Willa Paskin]

All day big deal meal.

[Jack]

You get to choose from four entrees like the supreme croissant and five tasty sides plus a drink starting at $5.

[Willa Paskin]

So hurry in or take your time. You've got all day at Jack. Every bite's a big deal. Um, I think I just won my taxes. Yeah, I just switched to H and R Block in about one minute. All I had to is drag and drop last year's return into H and R Block and bam. My information is automatically there so I don't have to go digging around for all my old papers to switch. Nope. Sounds like we just leveled up our tax game. Switching to H and R block is easy.

[Mondo Dorame]

Just drag and drop your last return.

[Michael Moss]

It's better with block.

[Willa Paskin]

Just a heads up before we begin this episode contains adult Language Super Bowl 33 3, Denver 7, Atlanta 3212 Left in the first in 1999, the Super bowl took place in Miami, Florida and was a face off between the underdog Atlanta Falcons and the Denver Broncos, led by their legendary quarterback, John Elway.

[Scotty Morris]

Elway going deep and he's got Rob.

[Steve Perry]

Smith and Smith's gone.

[Willa Paskin]

As the teams headed into the locker rooms at the end of the second quarter, the Broncos were leading the Falcons 17 6, and there was little doubt that Denver was on its way to victory. But there is a part of this super bowl that remains a little mysterious, even a little confusing, and it was just about to begin.

[Steve Perry]

The National Football League and Radio City.

[Willa Paskin]

Entertainment proudly present today's Progressive Auto Insurance Super Bowl 33 halftime show as fireworks erupted from the stadium's walls, the camera, broadcasting out to 80 million people, opened on a tight shot of a man in a fedora hat jamming on a saxophone, only to expand out to reveal a stage full of musicians also wearing fedoras and vintage suits, and a field full of swing dancers. The 33rd Super bowl halftime show starred not all, only the musical legend Stevie Wonder and Gloria Stefan, but also a neo swing band called Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was at the super bowl as an emissary of a musical craze that had lately swept the nation, the so called swing radio revival. In a short period leading up to the super bowl, retro sounding songs, dance moves, vintage suits and cocktails had become inescapable. Swing music was all over the radio and the Billboard charts, in movies, TV and advertising. And so was swing dancing, which was packing classes and clubs all over the country with newly minted Lindy Hoppers. And now swing was at the super bowl jamming alongside Stevie Wonder. Get y'all Big Bad Blue Daddy. And yet, almost immediately after Big Bad Voodoo Daddy got down at the bowl, the whole swing thing disappeared. This was an extremely high profile last hurrah. And people were just about to start asking the question that has dogged this whole moment ever since. Why did that happen? This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin, and there's something a little unusual about this episode. I didn't really want to make it. When we first started talking about the swing revival of the late 1990s, my initial knee jerk reaction was just no. I lived through it. And I remember it as being so incredibly corny. And I know it's not just me. In fact, insofar as the swing revival persists in the cultural memory, it's usually as a punchline or a head scratcher, as a particularly odd seeming fad. But here's the thing. I usually like thinking about fads. What was it about the swing revival I found so off putting? So we started to dig in. To my surprise, the story of swing in the 90s is longer, more involved and more interesting than I ever imagined. It's about an underground scene that went above ground in a major way, and how that level of success can obscure what's happening while it's happening, but also long after it's over. So today on Decoder ring, how did 90s swing music swing from cool to uncool so quickly? The start of a new year is the perfect time to get organized and set goals like financial wellness. Thanks to Rocket Money, those goals feel achievable. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills. You can grow your savings, see all of your subscriptions in one place, and know exactly where your money is going. For subscriptions you don't want anymore, Rocket Money can help you cancel them. Rocket Money will even try to negotiate lower bills for you. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's premium features. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster. With Rocket Money, go to RocketMoney.com decoder today. That's RocketMoney.com decoder RocketMoney.com decoder so if you say swing revival to people, if they know what you're talking about at all. They're going to conjure up the moment we just laid out when corporate America, the National football league, top 40 radio, and the American public all seem to somewhat inexplicably come down with swing fever. But every fever starts with a germ, if you will, and this one began germinating in the late 1980s with people far from the mainstream.

[Scotty Morris]

I definitely knew I was different, but in a way, I didn't mind it. I embraced it. So I knew playing a saxophone was different.

[Willa Paskin]

Mano Dorame grew up in South Central and East la, and he still lives in the city. I could see the jukebox in his living room, and he was pulling off a brown fedora. Mondo got into the saxophone from watching his father.

[Scotty Morris]

When I was about three or four years old, he would take his saxophone out of the closet and I would just light up.

[Willa Paskin]

His dad played him old jazz and blues records and started taking him to small clubs and bars around la, where fading rhythm and blues greats were playing sets in relative obscurity.

[Scotty Morris]

And I used to go sit in with him. My dad would take me to these places, and I was playing with him when I was like, 14.

[Willa Paskin]

Mondo was into more than just old music. He loved old gangster movies and the clothing from that era.

[Scotty Morris]

I just loved the style. And so I would go to Goodwill stores and I would find suits that looked like they were kind of from the 40s or 50s or whatever, and I would go and play these gigs. Everyone used to tell me, why you play that old grandpa music for, you know? But I always thought, how cool would it be if my peers would be into this kind of music and would dress up and put a suit on? I was kind of like living in my own little world, I guess, you know.

[Willa Paskin]

For most of high school, Mondo's fascination with the past made him feel like a loner. But then his dad's tattoo artist told him there were some guys he should.

[Scotty Morris]

Meet, and these guys felt the same way.

[Willa Paskin]

A few had been members of Youth Brigade, a hardcore punk band, it seems, more and more. But now they were doing something different, immersing themselves in the looks and sounds of another era, throwing themselves into 50s rockabilly and scouring secondhand stores for vintage clothes.

[Scotty Morris]

I thought, wow, these guys are kind of like me, you know, they were living it like I was living it. We immediately hit it off. Everybody was saying, where'd you find that saxophone player?

[Willa Paskin]

Wow, man.

[Scotty Morris]

Where's he from? And they're like, oh, yeah, he's this cholo Guy from the neighborhood, we just met him. We kind of knew we had something.

[Willa Paskin]

Not long after, an artist named Michael Moss was sitting at a club in San Francisco called the Deluxe.

[Tom Maxwell]

The Club Deluxe is a bar that had never changed since the 40s. Completely art deco on the inside. Absolutely magnificent.

[Willa Paskin]

Michael hung out at the Deluxe all the time, but this night was different.

[Tom Maxwell]

I'm sitting there and out of Nowhere comes like seven, eight guys dressed in 1940s zoot suits with wide brim fedoras. I'd never seen a fedora as big as these. They were huge, almost cartoonish. Holy crap, it's a band.

[Willa Paskin]

It was Mondo and his friends, now called Royal Crown Review, who are widely considered to be the very first neo swing band.

[Tom Maxwell]

This band starts to play and my God, I never heard anything like it.

[Scotty Morris]

We were the most different band. I mean, this is very far away from what was on the radio at that time.

[Tom Maxwell]

This is the era of fucking hair metal.

[Willa Paskin]

Swinging all day with these cats. Royal Crown Review's sound came from another era. A mix of rhythm and blues and rockabilly and swing, but all with a twist.

[Scotty Morris]

We couldn't just show up and do Count Basie songs. We had to, like, spin it our way.

[Tom Maxwell]

It was songs about we're going through with souped up punk rock energy. So it wasn't nostalgia for something that we didn't even experience. I mean, it was just so fresh. That's the only thing I could think of. This is the freshest thing I've ever heard. The next day I bought my first suit.

[Scotty Morris]

We were just trying to be a great band, man, this band was unique.

[Willa Paskin]

What Mondo didn't yet know is that right around the same time, not too far away, someone else was dreaming up a group along pretty similar lines.

[Steve Perry]

My vision was like a. A really wild cartoon come to life. Like, that was my vision of the band.

[Willa Paskin]

Scotty Morris grew up 60 miles northwest of LA in Oxnard, California. We spoke on Zoom. He was wearing a wide brimmed hat and he told me that he too had gotten into jazz as a kid thanks to Saturday morning cartoons.

[Steve Perry]

It was Tom and Jerry cartoons and Betty Boop cartoons. And I was hearing that wild, crazy jazz music when I heard Louis Armstrong. When I hear New Orleans jazz music, it makes me feel a certain way. And I just started devouring as much as I could.

[Willa Paskin]

He started playing the trumpet, but then, like some of the guys in Royal Crown Review, he got into punk. In fact, he spent the 80s touring with his hardcore band, False Confession. That's not Yet. But by the early 90s, Scottie was still dreaming of forming a group that could combine his musical loves.

[Steve Perry]

This hybrid like swing thing that's kind of bigger than life and wild and has punk rock energy. I could see the songs, I could see the look of the band in my head. I could see how I wanted the horn section to be free. And all over the stage, I could see this, this movie playing in my head.

[Willa Paskin]

Scotty was able to find enough musical kin to get a band together. They called themselves Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. And in 1993, when they put on suits and played their first show at a friend's backyard birthday party, the crowd responded right away and everybody went bananas.

[Steve Perry]

They just loved it. They yelled, more, more, more. And we didn't have any more. So we just played the songs in.

[Willa Paskin]

A different order, like Royal Crown Review. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was playing music that people of all ages knew, even if they didn't know how. Maybe their parents had listened, maybe their grandparents, maybe they'd heard it in a cartoon. And now here it was in front of them, but with a new brash spirit. Everywhere These bands played, L.A. san Francisco, and all the small clubs in between, an eclectic scene was growing.

[Scotty Morris]

People were getting dressed up. There's people like jiving.

[Steve Perry]

It was college kids, it was punk rock kids, it was alternative E. Just real loose fun.

[Scotty Morris]

You see punks bringing their parents to these shows. And I'm saying, well, yeah, that's, that's a trip.

[Tom Maxwell]

It was awesome, man. We just show up fucking five, six vintage cars out front, all of us dappered up, tipping our caps sideways at a rackish angle and just go in and have too much fun.

[Willa Paskin]

Was there dancing at these early shows?

[Tom Maxwell]

Almost none.

[Steve Perry]

No swing dancing. It was all just sardines, like a band was playing and everybody was bumped up against the stage to see them. And it was too fast to dance to, really, because like a punk rock band, we were just mowing through these tunes.

[Willa Paskin]

When I first heard about the absence of swing dancing at these early shows, I was surprised. The swing revival is remembered for the dancing as much as anything, and we're going to get to it. In the meantime, it felt like something unique was happening. Musically, this was a vibrant yet selective scene, and a specifically Californian scene at that. And then Scotty Morris, a Big Bad Voodoo daddy, was at a record store in Santa Barbara and he got a tip that the retro big band sound was even larger than he knew.

[Steve Perry]

Some guy that worked at the record store said, hey, have you heard about this band called The Squirrel Nut Zippers. And I'm like, no. And he's like, you gotta listen to this band. They're not doing what you're doing, but they're doing what you're doing in another way.

[Mondo Dorame]

The thing that you need to know is that Chapel Hill was a fiercely indie scene and a DIY scene.

[Willa Paskin]

Tom Maxwell was a guitarist for Squirrel Nut Zippers who came not from California or even the west coast, but North Carolina.

[Mondo Dorame]

Everybody was in a band. No band sounded like anybody else. That was the least cool thing you could do. You might as well jump off a cliff, you know, you might as well, like, go and become a accountant. Why would you do that?

[Willa Paskin]

And so when Squirrel Nut zippers formed in 1993, they were not trying to emulate Royal Crown Review. They didn't even know the California bands existed. They also weren't trying to emulate what had by now replaced hair metal all over the radio.

[Mondo Dorame]

Grunge hit like a tidal wave. Grunge was a lot of cool bands coming out of the Pacific Northwest who all of a sudden were being lumped into this thing that was being commodified into a trend. And it got really stupid really quick. And I was like, no, thank you, I don't want this. Because what that does is it stamps a sell by date on your ass.

[Willa Paskin]

Instead, they drew from Fats Waller and Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. They swapped overdrive pedals for acoustic instruments. Instead of flannel shirts, they were going to put on tuxedos with black tails.

[Mondo Dorame]

Because I think it was such a relief dressing up. You stood a little straighter. You carried yourself differently. Instead of the sort of hunt shouldered, you know, I'm a loser stuff, which was getting really old.

[John Bunkley]

Broadway really ain't quite the same since.

[Willa Paskin]

You and I found Lovers Lane. And just like with the California bands, the audiences seemed ready for it.

[Mondo Dorame]

It was like 12 year olds were coming to the shows, their parents were coming to the shows, and their parents were coming to the shows. And I was like, we can long haul this. This music is in our DNA as a culture. And we can just keep doing this and we can put our spin on it and do something really cool and just keep going.

[Willa Paskin]

But exactly what music is, Tom, talking about the music that's part of America's cultural DNA. Pretty soon everyone would be calling it swing. But is that quite right? The original swing music emerged in the late 1920s and 30s when black jazz musicians developed a new sound in the ballrooms and dance halls of Kansas City, Chicago and Harlem. It was the depths of the Depression. And the popularity of this big music. And the energetic, thrilling, also originally black dancing that started to go with it is often understood as a response to the desperation of regular life. The music quickly spread via big bands led by musical giants like Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Count Basie, as well as Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, the last two being white bandleaders who made it a commercial crossover sensation that lasted through World War II. But this original swing music, it's not what Squirrel Nut Zippers or Royal Crown Review saw themselves as playing.

[Scotty Morris]

People started calling it swing, and we never thought that was what we were. We never claimed to be a swing band. I never even liked the word.

[Willa Paskin]

There's so much other music that was just as important to their individual sounds. The proto rock and roll jump blues of Louis Jord. The gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt. Delta Blues, 1950s R&B rockabilly, calypso. Think of it like, have you ever been to a Renaissance fair? There's this huge mishmash of looks, both historical and imaginary, elves and crusaders and Vikings and fairies and monks. And they have nothing to do with each other or the Renaissance, except that hundreds of years later, everything from the past, real or imagined, seems like it's related. And that's basically how the word swing, which does have a certain ring to it, would come to operate in the 90s as an umbrella term for an eclectic ahistorical blend of anything that looked or sounded retro. And the bands who knew their specific musical influences were not wild about it. Tom Maxwell remembers the first time he heard the term being used. It was on the Squirrel Nut Zipper's first trip out to San Francisco, when they didn't think of themselves as part of any particular genre or any larger scene.

[Mondo Dorame]

I'd never been to California, and we get on and it's packed and all the people know all the lyrics to our songs. And I'm like, what is happening? This is weird. Great. Super fun, but really weird. And then that night, this guy collars my bandmate in an after party in somebody's apartment. He's like, the swing thing is going to be huge. You guys are really well positioned to take advantage of the swing movement.

[Tom Maxwell]

I just knew that this was a major international youth movement.

[Willa Paskin]

That's Michael Moss. He's the guy who bought a suit immediately after seeing Royal Crown Review. And he was also the guy at the party. He told Squirrel Nut Zippers he wanted to start a magazine called Swing Time to chronicle what he saw as a remarkable phenomenon.

[Tom Maxwell]

How do People the same age all around the world start fucking swing bands at the same moment in history without any knowledge of each other whatsoever. That's zeitgeist.

[Mondo Dorame]

And we just laughed. What the fuck are you talking about? You know, what are you talking about?

[Willa Paskin]

Well, as it turns out, Michael Moss was talking about the very near future because the nascent swing scene was not just heating up, it was about to get spoken. Have you heard about Double Nomics? It's okay if you haven't. It's extremely niche and practiced by Discover. Here's an example of doublenomics. Discover automatically doubles the cash back earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with Cash Back match. That means with Discover you could turn $150 cash back to $300. It pays to Discover see [e-mail] credit card this new year, why not let Audible expand your life by listening? Explore over 1 million audiobooks, podcasts and exclusive Audible originals that'll inspire and motivate you.

[Jack]

You.

[Willa Paskin]

I've been listening to Wesley Morris's energetic the Wonder of Stevie all about Stevie Wonder, and I'm sure there's something you'll like too. Just open the app and tap into your well being with advice and insight from leading influencers, experts and professionals. Whatever your focus or interest, there's a listen for it on Audible. You'll find titles on health, relationships, career, finance, and so much more. Let Audible help you reach the goals you set for yourself. Start listening today when you sign up for a free 30 day trial at audible.com decoder. New members can try Audible now free for 30 days with your first audiobook included. Visit audible.com decoder or text decoder to 500. 500. That's audible.com decoder or Text decoder to 500. 500. So the whole swing scene is on the precipice of a breakthrough. But we've only been talking about the music. Now we have to bring in the dancing.

[Sylvia Schuyler]

Many a swing dancer start off in either, you know, like punk rock goth.

[Willa Paskin]

Kid and I was a goth in the mid-1990s. Sylvia Schuyler was just 20 years old and the first time she got dragged to a swing class, it was not her thing.

[Sylvia Schuyler]

Everybody was just so nice. We were goths. I mean, they were all so much older than us. I kind of liked the dancing. I thought it was kind of fun, but I was like, I just. These people like it was not our crowd at all.

[Willa Paskin]

But then a friend invited her out to a club in Long beach where a suave Crooner was playing with a live band.

[Sylvia Schuyler]

The hair and the blue pinstripe navy suit. And everyone there was dressed to the nines. 1940s vintage cars, like, the women all had the amazing hair. And there was a cigar lounge attached to it. So all the guys were outside smoking cigars. And then I was like, okay, this I can get into.

[Willa Paskin]

Soon Sylvia was hooked on swing dancing. She jettisoned the whole goth thing and was trekking around Southern California from the Viper Room to deep Orange county supper clubs looking for places to dance. And she was not alone.

[Tom Maxwell]

We would drive all over Los Angeles and Orange county just trying to find a live band.

[Willa Paskin]

Christian Perry was working at a Cheesecake factory when some girls invited him to a swing class. He'd never danced before, and he knew so little about swing, he thought the class was X rated. But he too fell in love. Soon he was part of a group of friends who lived swing 24 7, dancing all the time, trawling secondhand stores for zoot suits and scouring video stores for every old movie they could find.

[Tom Maxwell]

Back then, there was no social media, right? There's no YouTube. It was who's got the latest VHS tape that was gold? Whoever would have it would study it, and they would be like the golden child because they had the newest moves that they just picked off the video.

[Willa Paskin]

Christian and Sylvia and their friends and partners practiced acrobatic aerial moves they gleaned from the past, injecting ballroom swing with energy and creating an improvisational style they called street swing. It was a phenomenon that was growing alongside the music scene, but not in lockstep with it.

[Sylvia Schuyler]

They were really separate. It was totally understood that they really didn't want us there. They just wanted a room full of audience members. And then all these dancers come in, and it really does detract from the.

[Steve Perry]

Show, you know, the complication was that the dancers started to try to dictate how you were gonna play your music, and they were gonna not come to you if you played too fast. And it started to become us against them.

[Willa Paskin]

But Sylvia and Scotty Morris of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy also agreed that there was one place where the music and the dancing were mixing, commingling, building on and with each other. A nightclub that was becoming the epicenter of the swing outbreak.

[Steve Perry]

Perhaps the most famous restaurant in all.

[Willa Paskin]

The world is the Brown Derby, grotesque symbol of a fantastic land of make believe Hollywood. Founded in the 1920s, the Brown Derby had been a Los Angeles restaurant chain popular with golden age Hollywood stars. Some of the locations were even Shaped like actual brown derby hats. By the 1990s, the chain had closed. One of the old locations in Los Feliz was converted into a nightclub called simply the Derby.

[Sylvia Schuyler]

So the inside is this gorgeous vaulted round ceiling, like 20ft high. And it was so moody and so, you know, there was brass and there was mahogany and everything was uplit and the stage was uplit and the booths were uplit and they had, you know, velvet curtains that you could appear in. And it was just the happening spot.

[Willa Paskin]

And the most happening night was Wednesday's because that was the night Royal Crown Revue played.

[Scotty Morris]

You couldn't even get in there. There was a line literally around the block. And if you seen the place, that's a pretty long line.

[Willa Paskin]

The line included a listers and upscale seamsters and swing dancers like Christian who had to sneak in because he was underage.

[Tom Maxwell]

Whoever showed up didn't know, but they were in for a show. Cuz we would constantly just let it rip. As soon as the music comes on, dance floor was full of all of us.

[Sylvia Schuyler]

Everyone be like, jam circle, jam circle. And everyone would run. All the good dancers would run, run from the back to the front.

[Scotty Morris]

The dancing was punk rock, man. Like they were just as crazy as the band, even crazier.

[Willa Paskin]

Everybody's cheering and it's crazy.

[Sylvia Schuyler]

Girls are flying and everything.

[Willa Paskin]

Soon the Derby started offering lessons to wannabe swing dancers in its bigger back room. Sylvia Schuyler became a teacher there and going night after night, she could tell that people were really taking notice.

[Sylvia Schuyler]

There was always news crews there and there was always people taping for whatever. There was always scouts there. Like they would tap us on the shoulder after we did a jam circle and say always. Oh, you guys are so cute. You guys are such good dancers. We're doing an audition for whatever, or do you want to just come be in our thing?

[Willa Paskin]

And these scouts spotted bands too and offered to put them in front of a much larger audience.

[Scotty Morris]

We got to get in this movie, the Mask.

[Willa Paskin]

Somebody stop me. The Mask is like a live action Looney Tunes starring Cameron Diaz in her first big role in Jim Carrey, the year he became a movie star. In a pivotal scene set in a retro nightclub, Diaz and Carey feverishly danced the song hey Pachuco, which Mondo wrote.

[Scotty Morris]

We showed up to the studio and then there's Jim Carrey and he had a yellow zoot suit on.

[Willa Paskin]

Let's rock this joint. After the mass release in 1994, Royal Crown review became the first neo swing band to sign a record deal with a major label and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy took over at the Derby.

[Steve Perry]

I walked in, she was waiting, and it was all the cool kids. It was a hipsters parade for sure.

[Willa Paskin]

Bruce Springsteen, Quincy Jones, Robert Downey Jr. And the cast of Friends were coming through. But there were also scores of regulars, including a guy named Jon Favreau.

[Steve Perry]

I had no idea he was an actor. I had no idea of any of it. And one day Jon said, hey, I wrote a movie and I want you guys to be in it.

[Willa Paskin]

The movie is about a group of guys enmeshed in LA's swing scene and also co stars a then unknown Vince Vaughn. Baby, you are so money and you don't even know it.

[Scotty Morris]

Look T, girls don't go for me.

[Willa Paskin]

The way they go for you. In its culminating scene, Favreau's character finally gets his confidence back by swing dancing at the Derby as Big Bad Voodoo Daddy plays Go Daddy O. The movie, of course, was Swingers. It was released in 1996 as a low budget independent film, but it became a surprise sleeper hit.

[Steve Perry]

It was a launching point and it gave us a sort of legitimate that I think is what we were hoping for.

[Willa Paskin]

Around the same time, a song would legitimize the subculture even further. The melody came to Tom Maxwell of the Squirrel Nut Zippers as he was driving around Chapel Hill.

[Mondo Dorame]

I came to a stoplight and the head riff just popped into my head fully formed. I'm like, okay, cool. Well, now all I have to do is write the lyrics.

[John Bunkley]

In the afterlife, you could be headed.

[Willa Paskin]

For the serious strike.

[John Bunkley]

Now you make the scene all day.

[Scotty Morris]

But tomorrow there'll be hell to pay.

[Willa Paskin]

Tom titled the song Hell, and it wasn't intended as a single. It was just part of the band's album Hot. Then in early 1997, to the band's surprise, the big LA radio station Kroc started to play it anyway and it took off.

[Mondo Dorame]

The phones lit up, everybody flipped. They were like, oh, shit.

[Willa Paskin]

The song blew up on alternative radio nationwide and the album went platinum.

[Mondo Dorame]

Did you have our record? God bless you.

[Willa Paskin]

I did not. I didn't.

[Mondo Dorame]

You did not have the record? Fuck you.

[Willa Paskin]

Like I said, swing was never really my thing. But at this moment, in early 1997, it was starting to be more people's thing than ever before. What had started as a number of disparate bands reacting against the musical status quo had built itself into a distinctive, robust underground scene all about live music, dancing, drinking, flirting and looking nice. The whole thing was bigger and closer to the mainstream than most people had ever imagined it would be. But it was about to get closer to the mainstream still, thanks to a song called Zoot Suit Riot.

[John Bunkley]

Who's that whispering in the trees? It's two sailors and they're only pipes and chains and swinging hands who's your daddy? Yes, I am.

[Willa Paskin]

Zoot Suit Riot was not an alt radio hit. Like hell it was a top 40 hit. Like the kind of song you know the words to, whether you've ever listened to it on purpose or music not. And amazingly, it became a huge hit, despite being written by a band with the majestically off putting name, the Cherry Poppin Daddies.

[John Bunkley]

It was a way of saying you.

[Willa Paskin]

Steve Perry is the lead singer, songwriter and guitarist for Cherry Poppin Daddies.

[John Bunkley]

After our first show, we were banned from just about every place to play.

[Willa Paskin]

Just the name alone was like, we're not booking it.

[John Bunkley]

Just the name.

[Willa Paskin]

The Daddies, if you're feeling polite, got together in Eugene, Oregon, also in the early 1990s. And they were not, strictly speaking, a swing band. If anything, they were known as a ska punk band. But really their first three albums were stylistically all over the place.

[John Bunkley]

We'd have swinging songs, but then it would transition into like a metal song, which would transition to a psychedelic song, which would transition into a ska song. I really saw the Daddies as a kind of a multi pronged thing, an art band.

[Willa Paskin]

Over the years though, it had become clear that a lot of their fans liked their swing songs best. They'd ask which record had the most swing songs on it. So with Swing in the Air, their manager made a suggestion.

[John Bunkley]

Hey, if you put all those swing songs together, put them on the same record. He said, if you do that, I bet you I could sell those. Because people like that the most.

[Willa Paskin]

They needed to come up with four new songs to fill out the compilation. For the lyrics to the opener, Steve turned to a little known historical atrocity, the Zoot Suit Riots. A series of clashes that took place in the summer of 1943 in East LA. American servicemen began violently attacking young Mexican Americans known as Pachucos, who they identified by their zoot suits.

[John Bunkley]

I saw the history of the American 20th century as kind of mythic Americana that haunts us to this day. And I still feel that way, you know. So my thought was, this can be an anthem for all of us. You know, we're the Zooters, right? We're the swing. This is our music.

[Willa Paskin]

Did you have a sense that people, anyone other than you, like how many people knew that, that it was referring to a real historical Event that was.

[John Bunkley]

I don't. I don't think like that. I wanted the ambiguity in there. I didn't want to have to explain it. And if people got it, they got it.

[Willa Paskin]

The lyrics make almost no reference to the riots themselves beyond the title. And the song is oddly upbeat. It was released as a single in the fall of 1997. Soon after, Steve started getting frantic phone calls from the label saying they'd better leave Oregon and drive down to California, right, right away, because they had a hit on their hands.

[John Bunkley]

And we get there and there's like fucking people everywhere, you know, like out in front, like were the Beatles or something. It was like weird, you know.

[Willa Paskin]

The song made Billboard's Hot 100 chart, helped the album sell 2 million copies, and was even parodied by Weird Al. The surrealist music video became one of MTV's most played of 1998 and was nominated for a Video Musical Award.

[John Bunkley]

Did not expect it at all. I mean, no one thought that a swing song could be popular on the radio, you know, at all. So it was just a giant mistake in the time space continuum, really.

[Willa Paskin]

What'd you make of Zoot Suit Riot, the song?

[Scotty Morris]

Well, I wasn't a fan of it.

[Willa Paskin]

Let's just say that Mondo Dorame of Royal Crown Review grew up hearing about the Zoot Suit riots from his grandfather, who'd worn a zoot suit himself.

[Scotty Morris]

It was a pride thing for Mexican people, people for Chicano people. And I thought I could probably pull it off because I'm half Mexican and I was probably the first guy to do it, to dress like a Zoot Suitor.

[Willa Paskin]

Over time, Mondo started to get a little weirded out about the preponderance of the Zoot suit in the scene. He was also unsettled by the reaction to his own song about the riots. Hey Pachuco. The one Royal Crown Review performed in the Mask. Hey Pachuco. Its lyrics are a little more explicit than Zoot Suit Riot. Even so, Mondo felt like the audience just didn't get it.

[Scotty Morris]

Everybody took it like it was a party. It's a party. Let's put a zoot suit on and go out there and have fun and dance. And it wasn't about that. I was trying to tell a story for my family.

[Willa Paskin]

Neo swing was built around fun and cutting loose. And in the Colorblind 1990s, Mondo's lyrics and the complicated meaning of the Zoot Suit drew little notice. Another unremarked upon aspect of swing at the time was that the music and Dancing at the heart of this genre had originally been created by black artists, but the scene was very white.

[Michael Moss]

Yeah, it was, and it sounds like it.

[Willa Paskin]

That's John Bunkley in the 1990s. He was well known in Detroit for his ska band Gangster Fun, which had started the decade before. They'd played with the Beastie Boys, Bad Brains and Fugazi. But then John had gotten tired of the ska scene and what it was becoming this genre.

[Michael Moss]

Get top billing over the band Ska Night. Then you have five ska bands with ska in their name. Jimmy Scafa and Scapulopodis.

[Willa Paskin]

He quit music for a while, but then in 1996 he became the frontman for a swing band called the Atomic Fireballs. And he wasn't worried about sounding like any of the bands that already existed.

[Michael Moss]

I feel like their music was basically not as black as my music, you know, just to be blunt, their music was just not as blues inspired. It felt like a bunch of people from the suburbs of la, you know, with a too big suit like all.

[Willa Paskin]

The other bands you've heard about from the Atomic Fireball's very first show. People loved them live. They started playing around the upper Midwest where even at this late date, swing was not that escape established. The crowd was still a mix of punk and college radio kids and full of dancers doing whatever they wanted. Who all responded to John's distinctive singing style, raspy and powerful, which explicitly drew a line back to classic blues shouters like Wiononi Harris.

[Michael Moss]

That's what the black people would say. The white people would say Tom Waits.

[Willa Paskin]

Fair enough. That's probably more what I was thinking, to be honest.

[Steve Perry]

Go ahead, pop your gum, go ahead, pow.

[Willa Paskin]

Your lips say the heat of the.

[Michael Moss]

Sun has really got you whipped.

[Willa Paskin]

Go ahead, use your chop. If race came up in the context of neo swing at all, it was when various band members name checked their influences, the black artists they adored and knew they had been inspired by.

[Mondo Dorame]

For me, I was sitting at the feet of the masters, Tom Maxwell, but my stupid record shifted platinum.

[Willa Paskin]

Tom knows that his hit song Hell earned a lot more money than the Trinidadian calypso artists who inspired it ever did. And that that echoes a long history.

[Mondo Dorame]

The history of popular music is the history of exploitation. It was the pretty white boys that sold all the records always. And all of the actual creators from the marginalized communities continued to languish.

[Willa Paskin]

Were you thinking about any of this then?

[Mondo Dorame]

No.

[Willa Paskin]

In 1998, nobody was publicly asking questions about any of this as a song like Zoot Suit Riot was bringing swing to the masses. Please welcome Cherry Poppin Daddy.

[John Bunkley]

Please give a nice welcome to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

[Tom Maxwell]

That was the year everybody was coming in crushing because everybody got signed up within a few months.

[Michael Moss]

We were playing these big shows, festivals with like Foo Fighters and we did the Warp tour. We were getting a lot of attention.

[Steve Perry]

We were now not on the Peripheral. We were now in Centerview. Swing was making a dent in the music business.

[Scotty Morris]

One day we just felt like, man, everybody knows what it is now. Everybody gets it now.

[Mondo Dorame]

Part of me, the 14 year old was like, oh yeah, give the baby his bottle. Yes, immortality. And then the rest of me was like, what's the other shoe that's going to drop?

[Willa Paskin]

Tom's instincts, it turns out, were right on. It just wasn't a shoe that dropped. It was a pair of pants.

[Michael Moss]

When the Gap commercial came, it's done.

[Willa Paskin]

It's this podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

[Michael Moss]

Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers.

[Jack]

Who switch their car insurance to Progressive.

[Michael Moss]

And save hundreds because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more.

[Willa Paskin]

Plus, you can count on their great.

[Michael Moss]

Customer service to help you when you need it.

[Willa Paskin]

So your dollar goes a long way.

[Michael Moss]

Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

[Willa Paskin]

Potential savings will vary.

[Michael Moss]

Not available in all states and situations. We're so done with New Year, new you this year it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Geminis because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want and you know what? We love that for you, someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

[Willa Paskin]

When Carl Bird graduated from college in the early 1990s with a degree in graphic design, he headed to San Francisco hoping to get a job at the Gap.

[Jack]

I started in the store at the Gap. I was folding T shirts and by like 1998, I was the art director.

[Willa Paskin]

The Gap at the time was basically dressing America.

[Jack]

It was the destination for T shirts and jeans and dress shirts and pocket tees in 20 colors, right? We used to put a movie star in a Gap pocket tee or supermodel in a white button down and it looked like a million bucks.

[Willa Paskin]

The Gap had long advertised their stylish basics in print and increasingly on television. One day in 1997, Carl and the rest of the Gap's in house advertising team were informed they needed to come up with a new TV spot that would infuse some cool into a dowdy material.

[Jack]

Now we have to do khakis. And we're like, oh, shit, what do we do?

[Willa Paskin]

Khaki conjured images of schlumpy grownups and casual Fridays. They needed something with zhuzh. And they were stumped until Carl's boss and the Gap's then creative director, a woman named Lisa Prisco, walked into the office brandishing a videotape.

[Jack]

And she goes, I was watching Daddy Long Legs with Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, and there's a scene in the middle of the movie with Leslie Caron and Fred Astaire start dancing in front of a wall of people in khaki suits and dress. And that was the idea. She's like, I think it's dancing. We had heard that there were kids, young people going and doing swing dancing at the derby. And I think Lisa had gone once. But it wasn't like we were swing dancers. It was like, hey, people at the derby in LA are swing dancing again. Maybe we should do swing dancing. It was kind of like that.

[Willa Paskin]

The ad was directed by Matthew Ralston, who's made hundreds of music videos, including for Beyonce and tlc. He wanted to use a new fangled technique he'd seen in a European Smirnoff Ice commercial where the subject is frozen mid air as the camera appears to spin around them. You know this effect because it would become extraordinarily famous the next year as bullet time. And it was used in the Matrix trinity. But this was the first time American audiences were going to see it in the service of some incredible swing dancing overseen by the accomplished choreographer Travis Payne, who had a particular dance reference in mind.

[Jack]

This cult film called Hells a Poppin.

[Willa Paskin]

Everywhere. Hellsa Poppin is an almost unclassified, undeniably anarchic comedy from 1941 that jumps wildly between different vignettes, vaudeville style.

[Jack]

And there's this dance number in the middle that's African American dancers doing Lindy Hop, like flipping and jumping and swirling around.

[Willa Paskin]

The dancers were all part of the black dance troupe Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, the group that introduced lifts, jumps, flips to swing. It's some of the most awe inspiring, high flying dancing ever committed to celluloid. That's what the commercial was going to be based on. And they needed dancers who could do it. Did you guys ever watch Hellza Poppin?

[Tom Maxwell]

Of course. Hellsa Poppins, Great. Yep, those are Whitey's Lindy Hoppers.

[Willa Paskin]

Remember Christian Perry? He's one of the swing dancers you heard from earlier who would pour over old movies with his friends looking for swing moves. He auditioned and got cast as one of the four principal dancers and Travis.

[Tom Maxwell]

Payne allowed me to do my thing. So that's what you saw. Raw jitterbugging in the ad.

[Willa Paskin]

Christian's got chin length black hair parted in the middle, and he's wearing khaki pants and a blue button down shirt that's flapping open. He and his partner, a brunette with a pixie cut, also wearing khakis, emerged from a wall of other khaki clad models. At one point, he jumps over his partner's head and freezes there and the camera spins around him. That bullet time effect as an extraordinarily catchy song plays. Baby, baby, it looks like it's gonna hail.

[Jack]

We went hard on. Let's find music that makes us feel something. If we can make people feel something about the Gap, they're gonna go to the store.

[Willa Paskin]

The song Carl Bird and the rest of the Gap team, selected out of dozens, was the 1956 recording of Jump Jive and Whale by Louis Prima.

[Jack]

It was just like magical. We knew it. There was a giant field meeting with hundreds and hundreds of store managers and executives. They played that commercial and people went nuts. People stood on their chairs like standing ovation the first time they saw that commercial.

[Tom Maxwell]

I think my mom called. Christian, is that you on tv? You're dancing all over the place. You're everywhere.

[Jack]

We put it on national television, on every single network, everywhere in America in prime time. The khakis were flying out the door.

[Willa Paskin]

The commercial is fun, joyful, and infectious. It became a. A water cooler advertisement so popular that when the Brian Setzer Orchestra released a cover of the song in the ad, it became the biggest swing song yet. And the members of the swing scene itself all seemed to know that the commercial had changed something for better or worse, including Michael Moss, the editor of Swing Time magazine.

[Tom Maxwell]

I mean, it was exciting. You know, we wanted to succeed. We wanted to show people how awesome what we were doing was. But there's not a single person at a swing concert would be caught dead in a pair of fucking khakis.

[Sylvia Schuyler]

There was one real swing dancer in the commercial, and we all gave him the hardest time. Christian. We were just like, you sell out.

[Tom Maxwell]

I think I pissed a lot of swing dancers off.

[Mondo Dorame]

Yeah, I'm sitting on my couch and there's the Gap ad, and there's all these kids throwing themselves around doing the Lindy Hop and I'm like, that's the end of swing.

[Willa Paskin]

Or at least the end of a phase of swing. Remember, the musicians in particular had started making this music because they wanted to be different, an alternative to the mainstream. Whether that was hair metal or grunge.

[Scotty Morris]

That was the whole thing. We all wanted to, you know, do something different. And now we're feeling like, yeah, we're, we're not different anymore.

[Willa Paskin]

In fact, in mixing and matching the genres of America's musical past, they had actually created a sound that was familiar, accessible and non threatening to just about every American. They had made the perfect soundtrack for selling stuff.

[Steve Perry]

It opened up Madison Avenue. It made everybody, you know, want to use swing and make it a thing.

[Willa Paskin]

There was no stopping it. Now the craziest part of the swing craze was on. Well, swing music is hip, it is.

[Michael Moss]

Happening, it is off the hook.

[Tom Maxwell]

The swing dance world quadrupled. Clubs are just popping up everywhere. Everywhere.

[Willa Paskin]

Working on this episode, we heard multiple stories from friends and colleagues who, right after the Gap ad aired, hired a swing band for their wedding. And it wasn't just weddings. Swing bands were showing up anywhere and everywhere. You might need a band and plenty you didn't. They were at award shows. And unlike every single movie soundtrack and there was a Broadway show in the works, they were on the radio and the charts with swing albums selling in the millions and record labels still signing up swing bands as fast as they could form. And it's at this stage of saturation that we come back to where we started to swing at the Super Bowl. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

[Steve Perry]

I'm in a sky booth watching the game with K D Lang and Kiss. I mean, come on. And Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, please. So we just took it. We're like, all right, this is great, whatever.

[Tom Maxwell]

They did that wicked duet with Stevie Wonder and all that. I mean, how do you not be proud for your boys? How do you not be proud for your fucking boys? That's the pinnacle. It's the pinnacle. They made it to the top right there.

[Willa Paskin]

They were there.

[Tom Maxwell]

The whole world saw them.

[Willa Paskin]

If you were going to stop the story right here, the question you might have is simply why? Why did swing resonate so much at this time? This comes up a lot when you're looking into neo swing. And one of the most common answers has to do with the national mood. The early 1990s had been hard. There was an economic depression and the first Iraq war, and it was the height of the AIDS crisis. And so by the late 1990s, that period of Clintonian optimism and the dawning of a new millennium, people were ready to party like it was 1999. And musically, buoyancy was big. Whether it was swing or whatever was on MTV's Total Request Live, hip hop tricked out with giant melodic hooks and teen pop. But explanations like this always feel a little tidy to me. And the more I've learned about neo swing, the less I think you need some national vibes based explanation. Explanation. It might have looked like swing was strange or came on like a fever, but really, as with so much music that breaks through, it was part of a subculture with deep roots that got the attention of tastemakers and record companies, advertising agencies and entertainment conglomerates. If the explosion that followed was outsized relative to the size of the scene, again, that's not because swing was weird. It's because it was familiar and accessible to the maximal number of Americans. The perfect fit for the Super Bowl. But after the super bowl, swing did not keep climbing. Which brings us to the next question. Not why swing caught on, but why it fell out of favor so fast. There were by now structural flaws in in the whole trend. For one thing, with new bands popping up every day, the talent was stretched thin and the music itself was getting worse.

[Michael Moss]

Really bad bands started coming out.

[Mondo Dorame]

No weirdness, no just kind of an aesthetic straight jacket.

[Michael Moss]

It was just going to see, like Disney on Ice, very traditional.

[Steve Perry]

I wanted to see the music live and thrive in the here and now and future.

[Willa Paskin]

The two biggest swing songs of all by now were the German musician Lou Bega's Mambo no. 5, which was not connected with American swing, but was lumped in with it all the same. And the COVID of the song from the Gap ad, which is to say, not a neo swing song at all, just classic swing. And the problem wasn't only with the music. Music by this point wasn't even the face of swing anymore, so much as a backing track to a highly over the top aesthetic rife with cliched fedoras and martini glasses and Bettie Page haircuts. Scotty Morris may have started Big Bad Voodoo Daddy with a vision of it being a cartoon come to life, but neo swing was now beyond cartoonish. It had become caricature.

[Steve Perry]

We were on the Roseanne Barr show and I said to them, I don't want zoot suited swing dancers with big feathers in their hats wearing shiny zoot suits because it just looked silly to me. And they were like, oh, absolutely, no problem, no problem at all. And we get up and we start playing and all of a Sudden, these zoot suited swing dancers with shiny suits and feathers in their hats were dancing in front of us. And it was just like, that is not what I signed up for.

[Michael Moss]

And then we played like the Miss USA Pageant during the swimsuit competition. You got your swing dancers and you got the women walking past me in their bikinis and there's Donald Trump. It's the cheesiest thing you would ever see.

[Mondo Dorame]

I don't think I belong in this universe. Like, I don't. Like this doesn't make any sense to me.

[Willa Paskin]

And not long after the super bowl stop making sense to almost everyone else too. Michael Moss, the founder of Swing Time magazine, could see it. He had a giant map of America on his wall with pins stuck all over it, each representing a swing club.

[Tom Maxwell]

And in the beginning of 99 is when I start to see the pins disappearing off of the map. And it starts in the center of the country and it moves towards the coast. So I know the end is coming.

[Michael Moss]

The scene was dead, was dead. You couldn't get a show. You said swing. It became a dirty word.

[Mondo Dorame]

The mentality of the major label record industry of the late 1990s was like, inflate the balloon until it pops and then just get another balloon.

[Steve Perry]

Once they're done with it, once they don't see dollar signs anymore, out it goes.

[Willa Paskin]

When Big Bad Voodoo Daddy released their Next album in 1999, just a few months after the super bowl and a follow up to a record that had gone platinum, the response was worse than indifference.

[Steve Perry]

I can't even get over like, it got such terrible reviews and it was like swing was completely out of fashion and this record was garbage. And don't give this band a second look.

[Willa Paskin]

How did that feel?

[Steve Perry]

It made me sad. It hurt. It hurt my feelings so much it's unbelievable because I put my heart and soul into this.

[Willa Paskin]

And unfortunately, neo swing's reputation was only going to get worse. Tom Maxwell parted ways with Squirrel Nut Zippers in June of 1999.

[Mondo Dorame]

I just couldn't do it anymore. I was, I quit the band.

[Willa Paskin]

Three years later, with swing music still fresh in the grave, he put out his first solo record and booked an interview on the long running prestigious NPR show Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross. Tom Maxwell is a former member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, one of the most popular bands behind what has been described as the neo swing movement.

[Mondo Dorame]

Terry Gross, Legend and her whole thing is, why? Why does this swing movement suck so hard?

[Willa Paskin]

One of the problems I have with the kind of retro approach to jazz is that it requires dressing up. So it becomes so much about like a costume party instead of just about music.

[Mondo Dorame]

Yeah. And almost. She gave me a hard time. She gave me hard. It's the only reason she had me on the show. And I'm like, what? I just don't want to. I don't want to fucking talk about that.

[Willa Paskin]

Terry Gross may have been one of the first, but she has not been the last.

[Mondo Dorame]

Every four years, I have to read another shit ass article about how much the swing movement sucked.

[Willa Paskin]

It's true. There are articles and there are random digs on sitcoms and stand up sets and SNL sketches.

[John Bunkley]

They're all wearing giant oversized suits. I don't even know what style that is.

[Willa Paskin]

Slow your roll, Rover.

[Scotty Morris]

We're a swing revival. Revival band.

[Willa Paskin]

The eye roll is so widespread that it's even extended to the people who made it all happen.

[Steve Perry]

I like looked back and I was like, God, was it just clowny? Like, I just thought, you know, did I fool myself into thinking it was cool?

[John Bunkley]

It was just too earnest. The whole scene is kind of corny, you know.

[Michael Moss]

Oh, it is so corny. I hope every singer has been like, so bluntness on, like how like L7 square a lot of it is. But it didn't start off that way.

[Sylvia Schuyler]

It was so cool. And it was cool. Like, that's the weird thing. Like, my first lesson, I thought it was corny, but when we got into the whole derby scene, it wasn't corny. I'm telling you, it only felt corny when the other people were doing it. And then as it petered out, it felt cornier again.

[Willa Paskin]

At this point, I have to admit I have been convinced that swing was once cool. And then, yes, the whole thing became a cynical cash grab. The musical talent pool, nowhere big or deep enough to sustain it. And it all turned into martinis and sequin boas and a handful of airsat songs you couldn't escape on the radio. But this trajectory I just outlined, it's normal. Trends often start somewhere specific and then get overblown and cringy. So this raises what, to me is the juiciest question about NIO swing. Why of all our flings with fads, our trysts with trends, does this one seem so doofy in hindsight? Why aren't we more gentle with it? I think the answer also hinges on cool. Not what's cool in any moment, but how cool ages, how it looks after the fact. The people involved in swing cared about fun and they put in effort to have it. They attended to presentation and skill, to their sound, their dance moves, their look. But then the whole context around swing shifted. Effort and fun stopped being legible as jabs against the sloppy, depressing musical status quo. Unlike punk, goth, grunge, even subcultures that also had their own codes and costumes, you couldn't see the rebellion in swing anymore. You couldn't see the punk in it because what was left looked very theatrical, very try hard, a little unoriginal, even a little small C conservative and grandparent approved. Whatever had been cool about it just couldn't get through anymore. Side by side Charleston don't get me wrong, it hasn't stopped swing from soldiering on. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is still together and selling out performing arts centers. Swing dancing still has a vibrant international scene. One of our producers went to people doing it in person in San Francisco and everyone there was having so much fun, free from the tyranny of cool. I'd rather be doing this than any other activity, honestly. But we're not all so enlightened. Not even the people originally involved with Neo swing who cared about cool themselves and surely thought at the time that what they were doing was. Maybe that's another reason why Neo Swing, a fairly innocuous, relatively short lived scene, keeps getting dinged all these decades later. It's not just that it's something goofy we once did. It's proof that though we don't like to think about it, we're surely doing something goofy right now. Foreign this is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. Thank you to our listeners Lorraine Denman and Alex Friendly for originally asking us about the 90s swing revival. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us@decoder ringlate.com also new and exciting, you can now call us at our new Decoder Ring hotline. The number is 347-460-7281. Please call us. We'd love to hear from you. And if you are or want to become a Slate plus listener, and you should, you can stick around and listen to a longer version of my conversation with John Bunkley from the Italian comic Fireballs. Believe it or not, there actually is more to say about all of this. Not just about the swing revival and John's fascinating life, but also about swing's connection to the ska revival, the swing scene.

[Michael Moss]

Without knowing it, read the Playbook of Ska. It's like, oh, this is how we get to generalize something and make it suck.

[Willa Paskin]

This episode was reported by Sophie Kodner and me, Willa Paskin. It was written and produced by me, Sophie and Evan Chung, with some mix help from Max Friedman. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Evan, Max and Katie Shepherd. Derek John is executive producer. Merit Jacob is senior technical director. I'd like to thank Kristin Emhoff, Tom Bryan, Stephanie Landwehr and Ken Partridge, whose conversation and book Hell of a Hat the rise of 90s ska and swing was extremely helpful. We'll link to it on our show page. We'll see you in two weeks. Have you heard about Double Nomics? It's okay if you haven't. It's extremely niche and practiced by Discovery. Here's an example of Double Nomics. Discover automatically doubles the cash back earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with Cash Back match. That means with Discover you could turn $150 cash back to $300. It pays to discover see [e-mail] creditcard.

[Michael Moss]

Hi, it's Carvel from Slate's how to podcast. Are you ready for a fresh start in 2025? To celebrate the new year, Slate is offering an extended free trial of Slate plus, exclusively on Apple Podcasts. As a Slate plus member, you'll get ad free listening on every Slate show. Solve life's toughest problems on how to get advice you actually want to follow on Dear Prudence, keep your pulse on the zeitgeist with Culture Gabfest and navigate the big questions of life with death, sex, and money all uninterrupted. Plus, starting this month, Howto is releasing bi weekly bonus episodes exclusively for Slate plus members. That means more advice, more experts, and more stories to help you tackle life's challenges head on. Don't miss out. Try Slate plus for free now on Apple Podcasts, or visit slate.com howtoplus to get access wherever you listen.