Luckily, no bombs were ever detonated and Perry managed to retain his gonads, but the left-wing fascism of the day only made the Daddies fight that much harder for a foothold. It seems logical now that the resurgence of punk and ska would eventually lead modern-day listeners back even further in time and spark the first big, mainstream interest in swing since the original era. It's common knowledge that the majority of the hottest swing players today started out as punk bands. And the horn-intensive big band sound coming from, among others, the Crown, the Voodoo and the Daddies, seems to bare as much affinity to old and new ska as it does to old swing.

What distinguishes the Daddies from the horde of contenders trying to fight for their piece of the new swing turf? It's Perry's powerful combination of intelligent social commentary delivered in sexually charged hepcat jive worthy of the "race" records that influenced him early on. Couple that with a tight, road-honed band capable of making sophisticated arrangements truly rock, and you're in hitsville, baby - MTV, national radio, swimmin' pools, movie stars. Well, perhaps the self-professed 'art nerds' from Eugene won't go to quite those extremes, but after nine years of bomb threats, angry dames, flashy duds, crazy dancing and overtly sexual music, they can rest easy in the knowledge that they've been instrumental (no pun intended) in bringing back the edge that made swing the punk music of its day. And ours.

Lo-Fi: Tell me a little about your background as a musician. Was your family musical?

Steve Perry: My mom and dad both played piano, but it was the "Autumn Leaves" kinda variety. I was blessed with pre-hippie, Kingston Trio-type parents. 1960 was going on with my parents. They are actually good musicians in as far as they play with a lot of heart. But the stuff they played was not that inspiring for me. Then I was encouraged to take up stuff. I took dance lessons as a child - tap, jazz and ballet. I was one of those kinds of kids until my friends in school found out. Then they beat my ass. It was tragic. Growing up I didn't play that much. I played hookey from piano lessons. I didn't care. I really didn't become a "musician" until I was in college.

I moved out to the West Coast and started playing guitar in college. It was during the days of early punk rock and the West Coast hard-core scene-bands like Black Flag, X, Fear and Circle Jerks. I decided I liked drinking beer and going to punk rock shows better than going to college. My parents didn't like it of course, and they disowned me. Everything ceased. My dad actually told me that he'd pay for a year of college. I pretty much lasted a year and that was it. I wasn't into it.

Lo-Fi: Were you out of control?

SP: I wasn't exactly a youth gone wild. It was that typical young man trip - I read On the Road and I just wanted to hitch around and find myself and that kind of shit. I wasn't a total poser/loser. At times I could be that way. I shaved my head at points.

Lo-Fi: So you went from the Kingston Trio to the Circle Jerks. Do you have any other influences?

SP: When I was a kid I watched a lot of TV like we all did. I used to watch "Soul Train" and "American Bandstand" and I remember liking that. I didn't really listen to rock radio. I didn't like Led Zeppelin in high school. I liked Elvis Costello and the Clash when punk rock started to happen. And that seemed to be a new element. I hadn't heard music that was the truth. That was what it seemed like to me. Then the punk rock thing happened and I was a young man trying to meet girls and find myself and play guitar - the whole thing.

Lo-Fi: How did the band get started?

SP: I was in punk rock bands pretty much up until 1987 or so. By that point, punk rock didn't interest me as much musically anymore. I'd done it and I started listening to other stuff and playing more interesting chords on the guitar. My mother bought me the Smithsonian Collection of Jazz - a six CD collection. They would send me Christmas gifts and try to bribe me to do what they thought I should be doing. I started listening to that collection and it opened my mind up.

I also hung out at this one café in Eugene. Eugene is a post-hippie town. Kesey lives here, the Merry Pranksters live here. They were more beatniks, really, with a literary bent. They were interested in lots of different stuff. There was this place called Lenny Nosh Bar and the jukebox had everything from Janis Joplin and Otis Redding to Bunny Berrigan and Harry James. Black Flag was on there and the Skatellites. The guy who was in charge of the jukebox was one of those beatniks, for lack of a better word. It was a really colorful place. After it closed - it was open until 4:00am - I didn't have anything to do. I barely had a job. We'd go back to his place and smoke a bunch of pot and listen to all these records I've never heard - the first Tom Waits stuff, all these 'race' records, weird shit. I was going through a young person's phase of learning. It opened my mind a lot, and it didn't make me genre specific. I wasn't like, "Oh, I've got to play swing." It was just a realization that there was all this cool, rootsy music with soul.

I think that combination of things pushed me towards doing a band with horns. I tried to marry the energy of punk rock with swing in some was that wasn't a nostalgia trip. I wanted it to be modern. My definition of early punk rock, defined by the Meat Puppets or Saccharine Trust, those SST bands, it wasn't so much the political flag-waving as a sense of collective experimentation. You either were a punk rocker or not. There was a psychological profile as opposed to some sort of clothes you had to wear. I was influenced by a lot of things, but I wanted to make it new from the get go. They would have laughed at me if it was just a fashion show. I didn't want to do that.

So alternative music came out of this period of real vapidity in the music scene. There were the hair bands. Hardcore had pretty much gone away and there was a question of what to do next. Most of the people in the Northwest responded by playing this alternative grunge rock. And my response was just to start the Daddies.

Lo-Fi: How'd that happen?

SP: One of my friends played in a soul band and he was a great saxophone player. I wrote some of our early songs and I had him come over one night to play some of the lines for me. He really liked it. The next day he called me up and said he'd found a trumpet player and we got all excited because horn players don't get a chance to play cool, hard-to-play lines. They generally have to play more run-of-the-mill stuff. So this was a big opportunity for them to play what they really liked. We tried to figure out how to swing.

Lo-Fi: Did you start playing in an early incarnation?

SP: We started playing right away. Zoot Suit Riot's a collection of the first three records we made over the years. The records weren't all swing. Our live show was mostly swing, but from our point of view there was no chance that we'd ever be signed or be a major band. There was no pressure to create a band identity or any sort of marketable concept. When we got into the studio, we wanted to have fun and write different kinds of material. So, basically, we made the White Album three times. I'm really into country music and soul and all sorts of things other than swing. Our live show's always been heavily swing-based - that was our 'thing.' We didn't want the records to be like that. What happened was people would come to our shows asking which of our records had the most swing on it. Our merch guy didn't know what to tell them. He suggested we put all our swing on one record because that's what they wanted.

I was like, "That's ridiculous. We're an independent band. We can't put out a greatest hits record." But he convinced me to record some new stuff. We recorded Zoot Suit Riot and a bunch of other tunes and made a swing record. As soon as we did that people started to buy it like crazy. Suddenly we were marketable.

Lo-Fi: How long was Zoot Suit out before it got picked up?

SP: About four months.

Lo-Fi: You had a lot of problems with your name at first and with the music being so radically different. Who was against you and why did they have such a strong reaction?

SP: I think it was the time. We started in the late 80s, and if you remember what happened on the college campuses, the left kind of imploded; it moved way far left. I think it was Noam Chomsky, but I don't know. One of those guys decided the way to change culture, the way to get rid of all prejudice, sexism and racism, is to change the language. Instead of being crippled now you're "other-abled."

Lo-Fi: It was the beginning of the Politically Correct Era.

SP: This was before the word was coined. So you can imagine it was really gnarly. It was this academic idea that was carried into the streets by college graduates. Unfortunately, we started a band called the Cherry Poppin' Daddies in Eugene, which is a real hotbed of the 80's semiotics-marching, goose-stepping, postmodern, post-feminist communism. We walked right into the teeth of this. I'd listened to a lot of 'race' records, like Bullmoose Jackson's "Big Ten Inch Record" and Lalo Guerrero's "Marijuana Boogie." I was into the racy double-entendre R&B music. So the title was like the Butthole Surfers. It was dirty and filthy and bad and it was funny and it swung, too. It was kinda like one of those 3-D postcards of Christ - it moved when you tried to focus. I liked it.

Lo-Fi: Was that the time when the Dead Kennedys were having all that trouble with their Geiger album cover?

SP: It was around that time.

Lo-Fi: So if the Northwest was such a difficult place to thrive artistically, did you ever think of leaving?

SP: Yeah, I did. The Northwest is an island, too. I thought this was the way it was everywhere. When we had the reaction from the community it shocked me. I didn't expect it. I probably wasn't paying attention. It was just stupid. People were calling in bomb threats to the bars we were playing. I walked down the street one time and some woman threw a cup of hot coffee in my face.

Lo-Fi: Unbelievable.

SP: It was a sign of the times. Before that I'd traveled with a leftist mentality, but this happening really soured me on any solidarity with the Left. Not that my politics aren't still left of Mao Tse Tung, but I didn't feel a part of it anymore. They didn't want me.

Lo-Fi: Simon Chardiet wrote a great punk song called "Left Wing Fascist" about that very thing.

SP: This point of view destroyed what had previously been a sense of community. It broke apart. It was as if Reagan had come in and planted it. It couldn't have been better planned. At the same time I thought I was doing experimental punk rock, like the Meat Puppets, or any band that was considered a punk rock band but didn't necessarily play by-the-numbers-distorted-guitar-with-the-mowhawk kinda punk rock. That was the time the Northwest tried to work towards getting its regional identity, which turned out to be grunge. There was a big media campaign for [the Northwest] which really disappointed me too, because it became a uniform. They pegged themselves for power.

Lo-Fi: But did you ever think of leaving?

SP: It made me dig in harder. As far as leaving was concerned, I only thought of it when we started touring a lot. Then it was like, "Oh, I see, people don't act this way everywhere." It was a regional phenomenon. When I started moving around I realized every place wasn't as small and white bread as the Northwest. I won't live here very much longer. My favorite American city is San Francisco.

Lo-Fi: You had an audience back then. You said the people who came to your shows were "uncool." Do you think they were actually progressive and ahead of their time?

SP: They were just thinking with their bodies more than with their heads. They were that kind of people. I tie all this stuff in with one big movement - the Sonic Youth kind of irony/grunge/pc, winky-winky, hate my sexuality, we're all in on the joke kinda thing. I think the people who came to see us were either a) not aware of that, which made them dupes to the pavement-listening people, or b) they wanted to go dance and have fun. They didn't count.

Lo-Fi: So you got a reputation as a dance band.

SP: Yeah, which was an anathema to everything that could possibly be cool in the Northwest. People didn't do that.

Lo-Fi: What role do you think the Royal Crown Revue played in the swing evolution?

SP: They started about the same time we did. I remember going down to L.A. and playing with them at the Palomino in '91 or '92. They had a really small following, but it was there. It was real. They had a swing scene in Los Angeles. San Francisco had one, too. It's sort of the same story with us, but coming from L.A. and having clubs like the Derby around, they were more in the twenty-something crowd, like "Swingers." They would play at these swing bars for more sort of grown-ups. We played the all-ages shows with rock bands at first. Then later on, when the third wave of ska started, promoters would say, "Hey you guys have horns and they have horns. You should play shows together." More and more we'd be hooked with ska bands, which ended up influencing us as well. RCR was more on the swing/rockabilly side of things and were a little older demographic - the middle 20s demographic - which is what the people basically think of as the swing movement right now. Those are the people who buy the classic cars and the clothes. But the kids - our audience - just started picking it up and they generally can't afford the trappings of the swing lifestyle.

Lo-Fi: Which other bands do you feel are part of this right now? Who's with you?

SP: I think they're all with us. There are different takes on it. I don't put us in this but I think a lot of the West Coast stuff is jump blues. Like the Royal Crown Revue and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. In fact, a lot of what we're calling swing right now is jump blues. Then there's the Squirrel Nut Zippers, obviously. They're playing more of a hot jazz type thing. I think everybody's in it together, because swing is just swing. I'm worried about it becoming... A friend of mine has this saying: "So how was so and so's band? Eh, same songs, different suits." Everybody's playing the Louis Prima-Louis Jordan-Cab Calloway-type thing. Nobody's really writing much that's worth a damn in my opinion. I'd like to encourage people to try different things. I'm really interested more in big charts as opposed to the 12-bar blues with a horn solo.

Lo-Fi: What is it about the music that appeals to kids?

SP: There's definitely something in the guitar rock of the past 30 years that hasn't been supplied to kids. Swing dancing is something you do with another person. It's more interactive as opposed to looking cool or dancing by yourself, which is more alienated. I can only speculate as to why people dig it, especially girls. That's who's firing it to me. I'm not a girl, I don't know. I have three sisters and they'd always dance to songs and swing each other around, whereas guys don't do that. There's a gender thing going on there that I'm not exactly sure of.

Lo-Fi: So tell me a bit about getting picked up by Mojo/Universal.

SP: We did a tour with Reel Big Fish, one of their bands. We had a good following nationally on our own. Then I met the head of Mojo records and he asked us how we do. And I said, "Well, it's kinda frustrating because we do really well but we can't get our records into stores." We call up and tell [stores] we're going to play their town and ask if they want to carry our CD. They'd go, "Sorry, never heard of you." They basically only deal with labels. We pretty much hit the glass ceiling on our own.

Lo-Fi: You talk about how a band this size really has to have strong leadership.

SP: You can imagine. A lot of trained musicians are used to playing with conductors. It's dissonance if you don't. Once you get past four people, if they start throwing ideas in democratically it's just a nightmare. Nothing ever gets done. Basically somebody has to lead in this situation. It doesn't make you as many friends, but I've got to be content with being thought of as the asshole.

Lo-Fi: Well, are you?

SP: I don't think so. I've got a real defined sense of what I want, plus I write everything, so I can control it.

Lo-Fi: Do you have favorite big band leaders or arrangers?

SP: Well, arrangers I really like are from the mid-sixties-Quincy Jones-George Rhodes-type people - the huge swaggering charts. I really, really love that stuff. As far as leaders are concerned, Jimmy Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson Band, Count Basie. I like some of the Buddy Rich big band stuff. There's a lot I like.

Lo-Fi: The single, Zoot Suit Riot, is currently on heavy rotation on ["alternative music" monolith] KROQ in LA and MTV. Which came first and how'd it happen?

SP: It was pretty weird. There's a guy at KROQ, Kevin Weatherly, who liked our sound. I think he saw us somewhere in LA. Then MTV picked us up later on, after we'd made a video.

Lo-Fi: I saw it on TV the other day in a pizza parlor in New York.

SP: It's weird. All of this was very unexpected.

Lo-Fi: When you first started out, did you ever dream you'd be doing the things you're doing now, or that this particular musical hybrid would become as popular as it is?

SP: No, not at all. In fact, when they suggested we put a single out to radio, coming from our own label and all, I thought it was chasing good money after bad. I said, "Don't do it." Listen to the radio for chrissake! I was making frantic phone calls to them trying to stop it because I thought they were gonna spend the money putting the record out and no one would buy it and I'd be out $20,000 or something. They basically told me to take a valium and relax and it'd be fine.

Lo-Fi: Who is they? Is it Mojo/Universal?

SP: Yeah. I thought, "You're gonna print up all these CDs as singles to give them to the radio stations and what if they don't play 'em?" It didn't seem like anybody would play it. I'd never heard anything like that on modern rock radio, and I just thought they wouldn't play it.

Lo-Fi: When did that happen?

SP: I'm guessing September or October.

Lo-Fi: Do you think when the media hype dies down that the trendiness of swing will die down too?

SP: Yeah, possibly. I don't know. I'm not really aware of how trendy it is. It's probably pretty damn trendy. The Gap ad is trendy. That made me realize, "Oh, it's trendy."

Lo-Fi: It happened awfully fast.

SP: It didn't really from where I'm standing. I knew it was gathering steam a long time ago. We'd play a show in LA, in Riverside or someplace like that, and a bunch of 16, 17-year-old kids would be swing dancing through the entire thing. I was like, "Holy shit!" If they're doing it in LA, the next step is people are going to be doing it in Peoria.

Lo-Fi: In one of your press clips you claim how exciting it is that boys and girls are learning to dance touching one another. What is it about that kind of touching that people would benefit from today?

SP: We played in Atlanta at one point and most of our audience was ska on the cusp of swing. It was a big hall and before the show they gave swing lessons. I saw a lot of the ska kids looking, but the person giving the lessons was being really pushy. He was saying, "OK, pick a partner, come on!" He pushed them together. They'd do a couple of steps and then he'd make everyone change partners. It was like a junior high dance or something. But you could feel the relief and the fun people were having. Instead of going to a rock show and trying to look tough and stand in your little space, you could feel the tension in the hall go down. Everyone was relaxed and excited at the same time because of course you're touching girls and stuff. It was awesome. It felt great. And by the time we came on it just exploded. People were so excited.

I'm used to going to these rock shows where the color of your socks is really important and you're dancing in your little space in your little way. And people looking at other people going, "Oh, that person can't do the boo-boo boo-boo," or whatever. It is so alienating and so lame. The purpose of going out should be to interact with your fellow human beings, not to somehow try to impress and alienate them because you've got on a better pair of shoes.

Lo-Fi: The dark edges you put on your songs - what do they signify to you? The past, the present, or both? And can kids handle those lyrics?

SP: I throw in phrases that would be from film noir, but that's my take on the world. I grew up in Binghamton, NY, which is this kinda Springsteen town. I saw a lot of people struggle in the lower middle class. A lot of what I'm trying to get at is a sense of struggling against something and transcending it. It's not a pose or posture. It's just what I find interesting. It's not about the jazzy touches. It's more about the story.

Lo-Fi: But do you think talking about adultery and alcoholism and bums is OK for kids?

SP: That's what the world is. I think kids are way more sophisticated than people give them credit for. I don't think there's a problem there. Look at TV. Everything's pretty heavy duty on TV. It's not like I'm doing anything that anybody else isn't. Mentioning Otto Dix, the German painter, is an extreme reference. My point is to stretch the limits a bit. Look at all the music of the sixties that was really literary based. Those kids were no older than the kids today and the world was a lot more naïve then too.

Lo-Fi: You said something about the role of the music business as defining the identity of young people.

SP: Rock and roll is about defining yourself against your parents. The industry is really about that. I find that defining yourself as this opposed to that is positive on the one hand. It helps you to become something other than your parents. But it makes you have to draw the line around yourself and other people - the Mods and the Rockers. But at the end of "Quadrophenia," the scooter goes off the cliff. He gives up on the fashion.

Lo-Fi: The giant penis on wheels. What's up with that?

SP: The Dildorado? I had this idea about this character to play onstage - the crazy inventor. I had this baseball cap with the brim cut off and I put TV antennas on top of it that went about three feet into the air. I had tape on my glasses and I would drive around in the Dildorado, which is this amazing riding lawn mower that's been adapted. It's this penis that gets big and angles up and shoots salvos of genetic material into the audience. I mean, it's really stupid-but it's really amazing. It's like "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" except it's...you know. So I would ride around and we actually did it a few times - during this song we have called "The Centurions of Rome" - and would ride it around on the stage doing this soliloquy about conquest. Kind of a Russ Meyer kinda thing: "Thrusting its massive bulk skyward."

Lo-Fi: Did you bring this on tour with you?

SP: It's too huge to bring on tour, but we did play in the Northwest with it. I would really like to bring it back. I have other ideas for other inventions that I would bring out onstage that are ludicrous but amazing. That's the stuff I like.

Lo-Fi: So you had to drive this thing to a show?

SP: No. It's the size of a riding lawn mower, except with a giant penis on it. You can drive it. I took out the gas engine and put an electric starter motor in it.

Lo-Fi: How did you get it to a gig?

SP: We put it in the back of a van. It's funny and amazing and also really, really juvenile. It fulfilled the big three. That's entertainment to me, man.

Lo-Fi: That's great.

SP: You brought that one on yourself by asking me.

Lo-Fi: I'm not done yet either. Given the content of your songs, and now given this Dildorado revelation, are you guys prodigiously horny or are you just average?

SP: I think we're averagely horny. But it's not about being horny. The reason why the Dildorado is funny is because it's hyper-juvenile. It explodes the juvenile.

Lo-Fi: Can you tell me briefly what the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 were about?

SP: It was about racism. Basically, LA was a big port city and during the Pacific theater, the sailors would go out on the town and have a time and get drunk. There were textile shortages at the time. The Pachucos, the Latino swing hipsters, would wear zoot suits - which are the big draped coats and pants with about three times as much material as you need with the crotch hanging down. They looked very stylish and extreme. The sailors saw these suits and perceived it as anti-American. It was like punk rockers stepping on the flag. It was a six-night riot, and it probably started with one fight between a sailor and one Pachuco. The sailor then brought his buddies and it escalated every night. The MPs couldn't control it and the cops couldn't control it. There were hundreds of sailors swarming the streets trying to find Hispanics to beat up. It happened for six days in the summer of 1943. It was a touchstone in Latino-American history and people don't really know about it. It's pretty much been glossed over.

Lo-Fi: Now, it's been a while here, so you gotta help me out. Is popping a cherry taking someone's virginity or is it just giving someone an orgasm?

SP: Who knows? I don't know. I don't know what the hell's going on. I think it's taking someone's virginity. What we were trying to do was just to ask, "What's wrong with being sexy?" That kind of thing.

Lo-Fi: Or, "What's wrong with this picture?" Because the first thing you want to think it is is "The Finger Poppin' Daddies."

SP: That's right. We screwed up. Cherry Poppin' Daddies is the pejorative hipster jive, meaning "daddies," not father. That's where we got into our first ass-kicking from what you call the left wing fascists.

Lo-Fi: What's the road ahead looking like for you?

SP: Looks like a lot of road. We're doing a U.S. tour for a month and then we're doing the Warped Tour. Then the Warped in Europe and Australia and Japan. Then hopefully in March of next year we're going to be heading down to South America. I just finished singing Zoot Suit Riot in Spanish. We toured with Los Fabulosos Cadillacs in the States and they're going to return the favor down there. We're just going world-wide!

Lo-Fi: Do you have any final words to say about Frank?

SP: Frank Sinatra sang with heart. There are a lot of soulful people, but heart is less glamorous than soul. To me Sinatra's music, especially the more swaggering stuff, is the sound of American music-that post-war, can-do attitude with a little bit of swagger, but with innocence and vulnerability and just a huge sound. He really typified that sensibility, which to me was the sound of the young country. I wish there was the sense of that now. You don't hear anyone delivering a song like that anymore. They can't. People laugh at you.