If that new-wave gent in the big suit hadn't already used "Stop Making Sense," the phrase would flat-out belong to Steve Perry of Eugene's Cherry Poppin' Daddies.

Not that Perry isn't a sensible guy: He is, as well as a songwriter, lyricist and arranger, a fine singer, a compelling performer and an accomplished businessman.

After an arduous, decade-long regional apprenticeship, things are starting to make sense for the eight-piece band, too: The Cherry Poppin' Daddies have songs on the soundtracks of "BASEketball" and Disney's upcoming "Home for Christmas," videos on MTV, and a world tour thanks to the platinum success of "Zoot Suit Riot." But this band is much more than the flavor of the month, largely because of Perry's cheerfully subversive sense of humor and skewed worldview. These things should keep the Daddies vital long after the current swing revival has swung its last.

That's good news because it'd be too easy to dismiss the red-hot group as a mere beneficiary of that revival instead of one of its unwitting architects. A natural suspicion attaches to anything that seems trendy. But the band has charted its own idiosyncratic course for a decade, winning audiences throughout the West with a melodic, insistent, often ferocious blend of swing, ska and punk.

When trumpeter Dana Heitman says this is the first time in 20 years when horn players haven't been looked down upon as hopeless geeks, he reminds us that the band first cranked it up 10 years ago when guitar-driven angst was all the rage.

Some compromises have been made since the band signed with Mojo Records last year, admits Perry. The band troops onstage in natty suits these days instead of the cheerful sartorial chaos of the old days, when the often cross-dressing band leader urged the audience to greater heights of lunacy. And yes, "Zoot Suit Riot" is an all-swing compilation album in deference to the current craze. The other elements of a Daddies record - the off-the-wall country number, the sci-fi rocker such as "Trapped Inside the Planet of the Roller-Skating Bees" - are missing.

But not to worry. The band is working on the next album, possibly titled "Soul Cadillac," and it won't be an all-swing follow-up to "Riot." That would make entirely too much sense for the 34-year-old Perry to contemplate even briefly.

This is the guy who came up with works by Duke Ellington, Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys, the Meat Puppets and Randy Newman's "Davy the Fat Boy" when Spin magazine asked for a list of his favorite songs.

This is the guy who wants to "expand the parameters of swing by playing fast, talking dirty and using theremins," he says, referring to the granddaddy - and the most otherworldly - of electronic instruments. (You remember the sound from the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations.")

This is the guy who fondly sees a time when the Daddies return to their beginnings as a sort of punk/ska/swing theater troupe in which Perry occasionally drove on stage aboard a heroically endowed riding lawnmower.

"I love the experimental aspect of the band," says Perry. "Now we wear suits and stand and deliver, but I see a return to the theatrical aspect of the band ... like Zappa but without the bad attitude. And more confusing. Maybe it's like Zappa, but without reaching any conclusions. I'd love to be awe-inspiring but weirdly empty."

Scant surprise, that Perry is a fan of Monty Python and the late comic actor Andy Kaufman. Sitting on the porch of Gung-Ho, the rural Eugene studio where the band has recorded for all its career, Perry laughs at the memory of Kaufman's famously elliptical routine, when he opened a Saturday Night Live episode wearing a garish jumpsuit and singing lame lounge songs.

He'd just seen this tremendous artist in Vegas, Kaufman explained, and he was so impressed that he was doing a tribute tour. But who was this guy, wondered the baffled audience. Eventually the onion peeled down to the ironic heart of Kaufman's humor - his character was impersonating a second-rate Elvis impersonator, so Kaufman was playing the only person in America who didn't know of the real Elvis.

"It's perfect that people didn't get it," says Perry, sipping at a Starbucks cup while hawks circle above the neighboring field of tall, sere grass. Even though he'll be sitting inside the studio for hours, he is dressed for the boulevard: Slicked-back black hair, a brown batik surfer shirt, pleated chinos, leather belt with embossed eight balls and a pair of patent-leather-and-leopard wingtips.

"The less everyone gets it, the longer it goes, the more it transcends the merely funny, the more it edges into the car-wreck zone where you can't take your eyes off it." The world is not about to take its eyes off the Daddies, it seems. The band just released "Brown Derby Jump," the second video and single from "Zoot Suit Riot." They would've released it earlier, says Perry, except that many radio stations can't seem to take "Zoot Suit Riot," the first single, out of their CD players.

And the video from that single could win the Daddies the "Best New Band" category at the upcoming MTV Music Awards on Sept. 10, competing against four other groups, including Fastball and rapper Mase.

The unabated success of the album - which consists of cuts from three previous albums plus two songs from the band's first demo tape - has been a complete surprise to all in the organization. Friend and business manager Howard Libes urged the band to do an all-swing compilation after selling merchandise at the shows and increasingly fielding the question, "Which album has the most swing tunes?"

"The swing thing was definitely building," Libes says. "Six months earlier, kids didn't even know what swing was."

"Riot" immediately began selling 4,000 copies a week when the band released it through its own Space Age Bachelor Pad Records in the spring of 1997, a number that helped convince Mojo Records to sign the Cherry Poppin' Daddies and re-release "Riot" with mainstream distribution in July 1997.

"Steve and I decided if we sold 50,000 or 100,000, we'd be happy. We completely underestimated."

Indeed - 1.4 million copies of "Riot" shipped as of June 1998. Libes and Perry were as certain that there were no singles on the CD. The Daddies were recording a new album when Mojo yanked them out of the studio and told them to hit the road in support of "Riot."

"This kind of success is definitely surreal," Libes says. "Everyone is still in shock, I think. Each day is something new - one morning you wake up to find you're No. 2 in the Rolling Stone Readers' Poll. But it hasn't really changed our lives, except for working harder. We've sold a warehouse full of CDs, but we've just seen the numbers. When the checks come in, then it'll be real."

In the meantime, it's real busy. The Daddies are back in the studio to re-record the swaggering swing tune "Here Comes the Snake." They'll speed it up and add theremin parts to the intro for release as their third video and single. After playing a triumphant homecoming show in Eugene in mid-August, the band continues the Vans Warped Tour in Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand (where "Zoot Suit Riot" has gone gold, as it has in Canada) and in South America in early 1999.

Even Christmas isn't safe from the Daddies. While Perry chats on the studio porch, the horn section is inside buffing "Cool Yule," which will play over the opening credits of Disney's "Home for Christmas" this holiday season. "I knew of the band for quite a while and suggested them to the director," says Julie Glaze Houlihan, a film music specialist based in Los Angeles. As trumpeter Heitman nails a solo that ends on a high, silvery note - and sounds as if Satchmo himself might've played it - Houlihan talks about how the Daddies stand apart from the swing craze.

"There are a lot of swing bands out there now, but these guys have the edge. Steve is the best singer in swing, and he creates a different atmosphere with each song." "We've never really been a part of any scene," Perry agrees, "whether it was the Eugene scene or the swing revival."

When Perry wrote his first couple of swing tunes in the late 1980s, swing was definitely not the thing. Nor was he a sharply suited young modern. Perry was a punk-rocker, a dropout from chemistry classes at the University of Oregon and hitchhiking up and down the coast "to feel what life was like" - a time he still remembers fondly. He grew up among the shoe factories and brick streets of Binghamton, New York.

"It was a Bruce Springsteen kind of town," he says. "I love the West, but I was real fortunate to grow up on the East Coast and to have lived in a real neighborhood. A lot of the songs I write are about my old neighborhood and the vivid characters who lived there. I miss that, but I never could have started the Cherry Poppin' Daddies back East - people just aren't as accepting as they are in Eugene."

He, Heitman and bassist Dana Schmid started the band after Perry served his punk apprenticeship in bands such as the Jazz Greats and St. Huck. When Perry wrote his first couple of swing tunes, he realized that he either had the basis for a musical or a band. He seems happy with the choice, even if people don't listen as closely as he'd like. "I always concentrate on the lyrics, so I wish the physicality of dancing and the reflectiveness of listening could somehow co-exist. People think that the minute you start tapping your feet that you have to unplug all meaning."

But that's life as the leader of one of the hippest dance bands around.

Besides, there's that new theremin to play with. He shows off the instrument - a control panel in a briefcase with two shiny loops jutting out. Perry will control the pitch and volume by waving his hands through the electronic fields surrounding the loops, coaxing forth the theremin's unearthly voice without ever touching it.

"I don't even know how to play it yet, and we're going to use it onstage soon. It'll be chaos at first," he grins, "but good chaos."