The Swing Book

by Degen Pener

  Royal Crown Revue’s film noir-influenced CD cover art.

  (WARNER BROS. RECORDS)

  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.’”

  But there was one town that got turned on by Royal Crown Revue like no other. The city was San Francisco, and when the band first played there, they helped take the swing renaissance to a whole new level.

  SCENESTER CENTRAL

  What the Royal Crown Revue happened upon in the Bay Area was a nascent and wildly enthusiastic retro scene congregating in the most surprising of places. Housed in a one-time gay bar right near the corner of former hippie central, Haight and Ashbury, the Club Deluxe opened in 1989, coincidentally the same year that RCR came together. The art deco-style bar was populated with a cast of characters right out of an old-time variety show. The colorfully named Vise Grip was the doorman. Lounge acts like Mr. Lucky—who had an act called the Mr. Lucky Experience that performed Martin Denny-esque covers of Tears for Fears songs and disco versions of “The Girl from Ipanema” — and Connie Champagne and Her Tiny Bubbles would sing there regularly. Another former punk named Timmie Hesla, who had started a Basie-and-Ellington-influenced swing band back in 1985, played gigs there as well. And a twenty-one-year-old Morty Okin, the short but irrepressible trumpet player who would go on to form the rockin’ swing band the New Morty Show, showed up at the club soon after moving away from Michigan. “It was very, very underground,” says Okin. “There was basically a suit-and-tie dress code. It was like walking into a time warp. And everyone was basically drinking like fish and having a great time.”

  On the club’s tiny stage, in front of the spot’s even tinier dance floor, a small group of jazz musicians played standards on open-mike Sundays. Vise and Morty used to sit in with them, and in 1991 Vise started his own swing band, inspired mostly by Cab Calloway, called St. Vitus Dance. Pretty soon retro music shows began happening elsewhere around town. In 1991 Lavay Smith, a more straight-ahead jazz singer who’s now a star of the swing movement, became a regular performer at the new Café du Nord. And the historic Bimbo’s 365, a grand art deco nightclub from the thirties that had once hosted such greats as Prima, Ellington, and Buddy Rich, reopened and started holding semiregular swing nights too. There were also a series of after-hours garage parties. Modeled after speakeasies, the events occasionally had invites that were just matchbooks with location information printed on the inside. “They’d start around midnight and go until about seven in the morning in a big warehouse space. There wasn’t as much of a division as there is now between swing and rockabilly. It was all one big crowd,” says Nancy Myers, who threw many of them.

  San Francisco differed from Los Angeles, however, in that from the start the clothing was almost as important as the music. The Bay Area went mad for retro threads. Forties straight-skirt dresses, double-breasted pinstripe suits, fedoras, and wide ties began making appearances, alongside fifties rockabilly jeans and ducktails and sixties sharkskin jackets. “People used to show up in real vintage clothes because that’s what they could afford. It was cheap. It didn’t matter if there was a stain on it,” says Myers. “I have a great photograph that to me describes the whole scene at the time. It has a woman in the background with a mohawk and a big pin on her jacket that says ‘Bitch,’ and a couple of girls on the other side that look more rockabilly that are swing dancing, and then there’s a couple of other people dressed in their forties suits.”

  Wearing retro clothes, however, also became a form of rebellion for the group, no matter how oxymoronic the concept seems. As the edges of modern fashion swung ever more extreme—to multiple piercings and tattoos—wearing a swing-era outfit was a way of being surprisingly different. And the more the Club Deluxe crowd learned about the old clothes, the more they fell in love with their style, their quality, and their timelessness. Aficionados soon became experts, knowing, for instance, to look for “Union Made” labels and figuring out what distinguishes a 1942 suit from a 1947 piece. “It started off as a culture that was based around this concept of America,” says Swing Time publisher Michael Moss. “A lot of people were gathering together and sharing these Americana discoveries, be it music or salt and pepper shakers from the thirties or old cars or movies or books or old clothes. It formed this retro community that wasn’t defined. It was just as much a forties thing as a fifties rockabilly thing as a sixties lounge thing. All these different subcultures were forming around the Deluxe around 1991.”

  Into this retro crowd stumbled the Royal Crown Revue. “It was surprising. Here was this bunch of people who were into the music and had all the clothes, who were living it real hard-core, and yet they didn’t have a band in the scene,” remembers RCR’s Achor. The band’s first shows in San Francisco galvanized, electrified, and inspired the Deluxe crowd. “Seeing the Royal Crown was definitely my most memorable night. They really had everything down, from the music to the suits to the matching guitars. They were just awesome,” recalls Okin. Adds Johnny Boyd, lead singer of the hugely popular band Indigo Swing, “The whole thing started for me when I saw them at the Deluxe.”

  “That was the moment when it started to be a swing culture,” says Swing Time’s Moss. “Suddenly there was a band that fit the scene perfectly.” Overnight, San Francisco became the epicenter of the swing revival, eventually becoming the city with the best vintage stores, the home of Swing Time, and the place where the first book on swing, V. Vale’s jam-packed Swing! The New Retro Renaissance, was published. All the pieces of the revival were in place, except one: the dancing.

  BEGINNING THE BEGUINE — AGAIN

/>   In the early eighties the original spirit of the Savoy was a distant memory. The dance that had swept the country in the thirties with its originality and exuberance had by the fifties become a white-bread mishmash of Lindy moves known only as the jitterbug. “The Lindy Hop was an extinct word. Nobody said that word,” says Erin Stevens of the Pasadena Ballroom Dance Association. And by the latter part of the century, that American Bandstand-style swing had been diluted even further, the dance taught in the majority of ballrooms a pale shadow of the original Lindy Hop. “There was no kind of understanding that black people had any involvement in it,” says Ryan Francois, a champion dancer and teacher who began Lindy Hopping in London in the early eighties. “Media culture had taught me that all this stuff happened in the fifties with white bobby-soxers and in the forties with the GIs.” A black man himself, Francois, like many who rediscovered the Lindy, first glimpsed the dance’s African-American origins watching old movies like Hellzapoppiri’ and A Day at the Races, which had scenes of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers in action. “I remember thinking not only did black people do this stuff, I had never seen it done that well,” he adds. Another now-world-famous teacher, Jonathan Bixby, remembers staying up late on the phone with his partner Sylvia Sykes to watch the movie Buck Privates, an Abbott and Costello movie with one dance sequence in it. “This was before VCRs and we’d be up at three in the morning to catch this one snippet of dancing. It was brilliant. And I’d be like, ‘Okay, you watch their feet. I’ll watch the top. Okay. Bye,’” he says. But ultimately, watching flicks wasn’t enough. “After a while,” says Bixby, “we knew we had to find some people.”

  And just as the musicians would soon do themselves, a handful of dancers from a score of different cities searched for the roots of swing. Their quest led them all back to the same place, the original city where the dance was created, New York. While swing music had been recorded on thousands of vinyl records, the Savoy-style Lindy was preserved in only a handful of old movies. Yet it still lived in a far more vibrant, if less accessible, way. A loose network of former Savoy dancers, including some members of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, was spread across New York, and these new swing enthusiasts were about to find them. “New York was where the history was, that’s where you could research it,” says Francois.

  In 1982 a country-western bar in Greenwich Village called City Limits started booking a swing band occasionally, which attracted a group of dancers who went on to form the New York Swing Dance Society. “It became this real hub of activity,” says Teddy Kern, who was part of the scene at the time and is now co-owner of New York’s Dance Manhattan studio. “And some of the black dancers who had been Savoy dancers found out about it and started showing up there.” Among them was George Lloyd, a former Savoy regular and master aerialist (he’d competed in the Harvest Moon Ball back in the day). “He wasn’t a show person. He was just an awesome social dancer,” says Kern, who recalls the respect and excitement the old-time dancers generated. “We had never seen them before. And we just had this love affair on the dance floor, all of us. They became celebrities to our little group.

  “Then they began to tell us about this place uptown,” she continues, “an old club that had been revived called Small’s Paradise on 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. The Al Cobb Big Band was playing there in the back room, the Queen of Sheba room, which was fabulous. It had pink sconces and gold curlicues on the walls and a dance floor like butter. Like butter. You just couldn’t sit down. And all of us from City Limits migrated uptown every Monday night. It was like a religion. And they welcomed us. We were white kids from downtown, most of whom didn’t know diddley-squat about swing dancing.”

  More luminaries from the Savoy days began making appearances at Small’s Paradise by 1983. There was Al Minns, one of the original members of Whitey’s performance troupe. Norma Miller, another dancer in the group and the only one to go on to a lifetime career in show business, showed up full of stories and her trademark saucy humor. On the scene too was Ernie Smith, who wasn’t a dancer but who had done important research on the dance, which included tracking down hard-to-find movies with Lindy scenes. Seemingly out of nowhere, a group of surprisingly accomplished Lindy Hoppers from Sweden, who had formed the Swedish Swing Society in 1978, also showed up in New York. And eventually a reluctant Frankie Manning, the former head choreographer for Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers and the man who would go on to promote the revival of the dance like no one else, set foot inside the club. “Norma brought Frankie there. And from what she said she had to drag him there,” says Kern. While Manning would occasionally turn up at the club and dance, it was Minns—already a teacher at the downtown Sandra Cameron Dance Center—who was the real deacon of the scene at that time. “Everyone idolized Al. He was the hero,” says Teddy Kern. Soon the Swedes had brought Minns over to Stockholm to teach them the dance. Norma Miller, meanwhile, was choreographing a Lindy show at the downtown jazz club, the Village Gate. The Lindy was coming back to life.

  Sadly, Minns died suddenly in 1984. And Small’s Paradise soon shut its doors too. But the dancing didn’t end. In 1985 twelve swingers banded together and formed the New York Swing Dance Society in Minns’s memory, convincing a now-defunct downtown venue called the Cat Club to host a swing dance once every two weeks. “We got the idea from the Swedes to have our own swing dance society,” says NYSDS cofounder Margaret Batiuchok. Dawn Hampton, a terrific social dancer and a former member of the swing band Duke Hampton and His Family Band, remembers how skeptical she was when she first heard about the club. “My neighbor kept telling me, ‘They are dancing over there.’ I thought that meant disco dancing, which I didn’t go for. I didn’t think anybody was swing dancing any more.”

  It was at these swing nights that Manning—in Minns’s stead—took on the role of mentor to the dancers. The nightclub soon became the nexus for several extraordinarily fortuitous meetings between swing dancers from around the world. “We pretty much all descended there almost at the same time,” recalls Ryan Francois, who showed up at the Cat Club one night as part of a British group called the Jiving Lindy Hoppers. There he encountered not only the New York dancers and the Savoy originators (more veterans, such as Charlie Mead, Sonny Allen, and Willamae Ricker, were surfacing at the club) but also two pairs of ultimately influential dancers from California. The four—partners Bixby and Sykes from Santa Barbara and Erin Stevens and Steven Mitchell from the Pasadena Ballroom Dance Association—have been credited more than anyone else with reintroducing swing dancing to the West Coast. “We all had gone looking for Frankie Manning and the original Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. We went and found him and said, ‘Teach us. Show us stuff,’” says Francois. “But what was amazing was that we all pretty much descended on the Cat Club at the same time. For some reason, we had the same idea at the same moment and none of us knew each other. That was the providence of it. For three straight nights we jammed and got to know each other. It was the wildest event that ever truly happened. All these people from different places met each other with the same objective, and we just gave each other respect. There was no plan for it. And I think that’s what kept us going for the next ten years. That was the beginning of the nucleus and it just grew out from there.” Adds Erin Stevens, “We knew we had to go to New York to find the roots of swing. And so did all these people from other parts of the world. It was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

  Soon Stevens and Mitchell convinced Manning, who had worked at the post office for the last three decades, to begin teaching professionally. Suddenly Manning had a new life, traveling to Sweden, Los Angeles, Washington, and countless other places. With his infectiously warm spirit, his authority, his simply wonderful dancing, and his longevity (the idea soon gained currency that a lifetime of swing dancing will keep you as agile, healthy, and good-natured as the octagenarian Manning is), Manning spread the gospel of Lindy well. Once the music began to take off a few years later, the groundwork had already been laid for the dance to join in.

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  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.