The Swing Book by Degen Pener Read Free Book Online Page A

wouldn’t have become so big without
     them. The Europeans, meanwhile, feel overlooked by the Americans for their contribution. And in many ways all of them are
     right. But two people truly do stand out as the greatest modern-day, Goodman-style popularizers of swing. Appropriately, one
     of them, the Royal Crown Revue’s Eddie Nichols, is from the music world, while the other, Frankie Manning, hails from the dance side. The pair couldn’t be
     any more different.
A MUSICAL REDISCOVERY
    The founder of the influential band Royal Crown Revue, Eddie Nichols is one of the few neoswingers who can use old-time lingo and be taken seriously. “That guy’s got a thousand-yard stare” he says of one hard-luck friend. Nichols himself could have ended up the same way. A singer and percussionist who grew up in New York City, Nichols moved out to Los Angeles in 1984 and quickly fell into the city’s thriving hard-core punk rock scene. At one point he was unemployed and lived on the streets. He did find a job, cleaning toilets at a filthy punk club called the Cathay de Grande. In the late eighties he started playing in a rockabilly band, but he also started abusing heroin around the same time, a habit he didn’t kick for almost a decade. All in all, he was one of the most unlikely people you’d ever imagine being drawn to “Geritol” music. “I was truly ignorant of the whole thing when I started doing it,” says Nichols, who claims he stumbled onto the sound by just jamming and playing around with chord changes. Suddenly he realized the music sounded retro, really retro.
    Nichols and the other founding members of the group—who also included the Stern brothers from the punk band Youth Brigade—began listening to the jump blues of Louis Prima and Louis Jordan, just like the Brits had done. “You couldn’t go out and buy the complete works of Louis Prima on Rhino back then,” says RCR’s guitarist James Achor. “I would buy 78s from this Goodwill for a nickel apiece. I would buy them one hundred, two hundred at a time and I’d go home and listen to them. It wasn’t like I went to the record store. I had to get the shovel out and dig for it. It was archaeology of all this American music. For some reason it had been lost. As a kid you didn’t hear about Louis Jordan or Louis Prima.”
    For them and for other early swing musicians—part of a generation that had been raised solely on rock—it was as if they were hearing this music for the first time. By the late eighties, the great pioneer Louis Jordan was far from a household name. In fact, he’d almost been forgotten. Many of these musicians were newcomers to jazz and refugees from the raw, aggressive punk scene (Scotty Morris, founder of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy , and Vise Grip of San Francisco’s Ambassadors of Swing were both ex-punkers). They were, however, becoming increasingly disenchanted with rock, with both the late-eighties hair-metal-guitar bands like Guns n’ Roses and the developing grunge movement. Remarkably, they found something in swing that spoke to their punk sensibilities. “Here was this music and it rocks just as much but with a little more refined energy,” says RCR trumpeter Scott Steen. Eddie Reed , a member of the LA rockabilly scene and later the founder of the popular Eddie Reed Big Band, remembers being bowled over the first time he listened to Artie Shaw. “I heard an eighteen-year-old Buddy Rich slamming the drums at breakneck speed and shouting like some punk rocker in the background exhorting Artie Shaw into this pyrotechnic clarinet solo,” he says. The music that really turned on the scene, adds Steve Lucky of the neoswing Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums , was “the really hard-swinging, gut-punching, jumping stuff.” If your main exposure to the big band era was a song like “Stardust,” then the fact that this ferociously spontaneous music existed at all was a revelation.
    The wild showman Cab Calloway, the bluesy Count Basie,