The Swing Book by Degen Pener

novels. Everything went into the jazz and rock stew, purists be
     damned. “What would happen if Duke Ellington had had James Brown and the Sex Pistols to listen to? Who knows what he would
     have sounded like,” says RCR trumpet player Scott Steen. Adds Nichols, “I thought, let’s try to put something a little newer,
     a different energy into it and make the lyrics a little darker. When I started the band though, I thought, Well, maybe we’ll
     just play for grandmas. I didn’t know who the hell was going to go to our shows. And all of a sudden there were these young
     kids getting into it.”
    Granted, Royal Crown Revue wasn’t the only band exploring the swing and jump blues era at this time. Groups such as the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies in Oregon, the Senders in Minneapolis, and Beat Positive, an early incarnation of New York’s Jet Set Six, were starting to jump too. Steve Lucky even had a jump blues band back in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the early eighties. The
     Roomful of Blues, an influential Rhode Island band that started playing jump material in the early seventies, was perhaps
     the earliest harbinger of the swing revival. Clearly this was in the air—everywhere. “A lot of bands, mostly within the same
     age group, started around the same time, and none of them had any idea that anybody else besides themselves was trying this
     kind of music,” says Michael Moss, the publisher of San Francisco’s
Swing Time
magazine, the first periodical devoted to neoswing. “Something was going on in the culture where hundreds of young musicians
     started gravitating toward this swing idea.”

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

(W ARNER B ROS . R ECORDS )
    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.