When kids turn 21, no matter how mentally incapacitated they are on the night, we call them adults – when bands turn 21 it marks them as elder statesmen.
When kids turn 21, no matter how mentally incapacitated they are on the night, we call them adults – when bands turn 21 it marks them as elder statesmen. And so it is we will welcome elder statesmen of the swing revival scene Cherry Poppin’ Daddies out to Australia on their 21st celebration tour, and a party it will be.
There is going to be a lot of girls there,” front man, vocalist and founding member Steve Perry confidently states of the gig. “One good thing about swing music is that it is not a sausage party. There will be lots of chicks that are dolled up, good dancing, it will be high energy but it won’t be too sanitised and cheesy. That’s not what we do.”
The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies formed in 1989 in the Pacific North-west of the good ol’ U.S. of A, Eugene Oregon to be precise, as a reaction to the fledgling grunge movement. “At the beginning I sold this drum kit I had to buy this jazz banjo because I wanted to try and write songs that had a jazz sound with a punk-rock feel to it,” Steve says of the band’s inception. “We came out of punk rock and our idea was “What is our next sound going to be?” I wanted to merge swing music and punk-rock but have it in the context of a big stage show, à la Frank Zappa kinda thing. We wanted to get the energy of punk rock into swing music. I would say 60, maybe 70 precent of our early music was swing and we also screwed around with a few other genres like ska and hard rock, a couple of funk tracks.”
The band was named in last minute desperation, needing something to put on a gig poster, and they have been living with innuendo every day since. “It was the era of Butthole Surfers and that kinda thing,’ Perry explains. “Our friends and all the people we knew were in punk rock bands, so we weren’t thinking about any sort of mainstream anything. We were just thinking, ‘Our friends are in alternative bands and this is something subtle and ironic that they would get,’ we didn’t expect my mom to listen to it.”
Of that original line-up, only Perry, Dan Schmid on bass guitar and Dana Heitman on trumpet remain. “We didn’t really strive to be a long lasting band,” confesses Perry. “We all just enjoy what we are doing and are still interested in making records and performing. I really don’t know if we would have made it but we had some success in the middle part of our career that helped. But just in general, we are still screwing around with songs and chord progressions and stuff, so it is the same as we have always been.”
For those that remember the 90s, in 1996 a little independent movie called Swingers came out, in all its cocktail swillin’, swing-infused soundtrack glory, and swing was in baby. So when the Daddies released Zoot Suit Riot the next year, it went big and took the band along with it. “It was good and bad,” Perry reflects on that career defining moment. “On the plus side, we could actually make a living for the first time and by “a living” I mean we could eat something other than ramen noodles.
While the band is off the ramen noodles the ongoing financial concerns of a band this size are still a concern. “I would love to play more than we do. We don’t play as much as we ought to actually,” Perry laments. “Part of the problem with a big band is it’s hard to do something like fly a bunch of people to Australia, it costs a lot of money.”
While their forthcoming album remains nameless, it does have direction. “It is the closest thing to Zoot Suit Riot since Zoot Suit Riot, I’d say,” Perry proudly boasts. It’s mostly swing but I’d say half of it has a psychobilly-ish sound to it, well our version of it, anyway!”
The CHERRY POPPIN’ DADDIES will be swingin’ and swiggin’ through their 21st Birthday gig at the Corner Hotel on April 9. Tickets from cornerhotel.com
