FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| MUSIC Big Bad Voodoo Daddy Usually, they put you in the movies after you're famous. It was the other way around for Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Here was a band full of punks and jazzers playing around L.A., doing their house gig at The Derby when regular Jon Favreau decided to bring in a camera for his indie hit Swingers. "They came in and shot it on a Wednesday night during our regular show. Pretty much what you see on the screen was just regular dancers who were at the club," says the band's baritone sax player Andy Rowley. "He wanted to capture that whole feeling with that one scene. They brought in one camera, got down on the dancefloor and shot from there." But it's quite possible that scene with those regular dancers on that regular night helped launch the whole revival of swing. What was L.A.'s little secret would soon become a whole resurgence of dance, style and music. "There was us and a bunch of other bands out there playing the music but bringing a younger viewpoint to it, making it legit for the young people who had never been exposed to it," says Rowley. Being legit is a big thing for Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. They got the suits, the hats, the songs about Swingin', the songs about drinkin', but Rowley insists it's not entirely retro. "We're not trying to rehash that style of music. You can't do it any better than what's been done. We're just trying to put our own spin on it." To the members of the band, swing never went away, it went underground and hovered around their parents' and grandparents' record collections. Rowley calls swing a melting pot of American music; in it you can find Gypsy music, Southern work songs, Dixieland and jazz. What makes Big Bad Voodoo Daddy work is that they are adding to the pot with some more recent ingredients. "We're picking up where it left off, adding punk, rock, Hendrix and Zep and everything we grew up on and throwing it into the pot." Maybe the biggest ingredient and the thing that drives Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is the whole addition of punk to swing. Band leader and chief songwriter Scotty Morris grew up playing in Orange County's punk scene in the '80s, playing with bands called Aggression, Ill Repute, and False Confession. Take a few more punks, add some guys with serious jazz chops, an ex-Tonight Show horn arranger and Brad Benedict, the producer behind Capitol's Ultra-Lounge series, and you get Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. No wonder the audience is a diverse one. "That's what's neat about it for us. We'll have kids moshing at a show, stage diving, there's swing dance pits here and there and parents and grandparents in the back just sort of listening." But with the popularity of the swing invasion comes the threat of a swing aversion. "It's everywhere, the Gap commercial, Brian Setzer's doing that song, the Louis Prima tune. I know it almost seems like it's being overplayed sometimes, but by the same token, maybe it means people are ready for it. It's fresh, it's something that hasn't really been turned on for 50 years." In the meantime, you can't find a vintage suit or a spot in a dance class anywhere. Even Entertainment Weekly ran an "exposé" titled Swing is King (again). What will give it legs, says Rowley, is people putting the musical style before the lifestyle. "People are really into the lifestyle and trying to make everyone think that you have to live that kind of lifestyle and be dudded up. They think the scene is all about zoot suits, Betty Page hairdos, and I think a lot of that hammering at the scene is gonna kill it rather than focusing on the music itself," says Rowley. "That's the important thing, you can swing as hard as anything and be naked. No matter what you wear, it's the music and trying to be real about it." |