INTERVIEW: Cherry Poppin' Daddies
- Al Muzer
A stylish breath of cool, fresh, reet-petite air in the middle of the blistering, no-holds-barred, mosh 'til ya drop hardcore, punk and ska barrage powering this year's Van's Warped Tour - Eugene, Ore., by way of Binghamton, NY, resident Steve Perry, 34, and his Cherry Poppin' Daddies have been on the cutting edge for so long they've finally become fashionable.
A ragtag group of punks with horns when Perry formed the band back in 1989, it's taken 10 years, a few changing faces, lots of patience and three self-released, mostly-ignored albums bursting with huge slabs of Bob Willis-style country-tonk, a raw, punkish, percolated energy, ultra-loud guitars and a swaggering, pre-WWII, ska-based pseudo-swing to get where Cherry Poppin' Daddies are today:
Prominently featured covering Harry Belafonte's "Jump In Line" on South Park creators' Matt Stone's and Trey Parker's BASEketball movie soundtrack; in heavy rotation on MTV and VH1; appearing on ABC's In Concert, Jay Leno's late-nite gab fest and MTV's 12 Angry Viewers program; already booked for a September date at England's Reading Festival; and (go ahead, do a quick scan of your FM dial - okay, find it?) playing on a radio station somewhere near you at this very moment.
An "overnight success" thanks, in part, to door-opening, ska-friendly acts such as No Doubt, Reel Big Fish, Goldfinger, Less Than Jake and Sublime, what eventually came out as Zoot Suit Riot (which includes songs recorded in 1990, '94 and '96) was originally put together by Perry as a fan-fueled, swing-based compilation taken from Kids On The Street, Ferociously Stoned and Rapid City Muscle Car, his band's first three records.
Selling an astonishing 10,000-plus copies at shows across the nation, the group's home-made "best of" tape got the attention (thanks to Mighty Mighty Bosstone pal Dickie Barrett) of Mojo president Jake Rifkin and signed, spruced-up and re-released with four brand new tracks ("No Mercy For Swine," "When I Change Your Mind," "Brown Derby Jump" and the title tune) added for good luck, Zoot Suit Riot hit the racks in the summer of 1997.
Nothing happened. At first.
Years of patiently explaining to metal-fried booking agents what type of music his band played, sitting around talking with enthusiastic new fans hours after the club closed, taking a ton of shit for his choice in band names ("I've had hot coffee thrown on me," Perry notes), dealing with punk, ska and swing purists who refused to accept his wiggy bastardization of all three musical genres and spending (practically) the last year-and-a-half on the road eventually paid off for Perry and his band.
"Zoot Suit Riot" somehow managed to jazzbo-jump its way past the Third Eye Blind sound-a-likes and multiple Creeds on Billboard's Modern Rock Airplay chart to land smack-dab in the middle of the Top 20 list a year to the day after its initial release.
"I was thinking, 'God, it'd be great if we could sell 100,000 records,' you know?" Perry laughs during a recent phone call. "That was the top number I could conceive of - and it was hard to even allow myself to think that! Uhm, we now have ourselves a platinum record."
"We knew that, independently, there was only so much we could do out there on our own," he explains when asked about the Mojo hookup. "We had hit the fuckin' ceiling, you know? We'd call a Mom & Pop store in, like, Richmond and say, 'Hey, we're gonna be playing in your town next month, do you wanna take some CD's from us and sell 'em?' 'No!' (laughs ruefully) 'Never heard of ya! Sorry.' Click! After awhile it's, like, 'Okay - how many more years like this can I go through? How much longer can I do this?' It sort'a came down to either 'get signed' or 'stop' and so, we did."
"Now, how people react to what we do is their own thing," the Louis Prima-, Fletcher Henderson-, Cab Calloway-, Count Basie-, Louis Jordan-, Specials- influenced musician begins. "And, while I can't make people like our music, I'll like it better if I keep trying to make really good records that I like."
"We've always tried to make ourselves happy [musically] by doing lots of different things," he says of the stylistic diversity found in abundance on the group's three Space Age Bachelor Pad releases, hinted at on Zoot Suit Riot and trotted out in full, pressed 'n' pleated glory on Warped Tour stages. "And I think we probably made a lot of that [early] music just for ourselves [laughs] because we never thought that we'd ever be signed, or even viewed as marketable enough to be signed!"
"Our vision, as a band, is much wider, actually, than what Zoot Suit Riot would indicate," the former University of Oregon chemistry major offers. "We wanted to include more country and soul stuff - which we have on our earlier records, you know? Lots of different stuff. But...", he sighs and tails off as if the word "business" had actually been spoken.
"I do wanna do more Western Swing kind'a stuff the next time out," Perry declares as he stops to consider the last few whirlwind months and looks forward to at least two more Mojo releases, "and a couple of ballad-type things, too. I have one ready now that'll, hopefully, be on the next record. Also, I really wanna get into different kinds of harder ska."
"The next record'll be mostly swing," he chuckles, "but, you know - there'll be lots of other oddball stuff goin' on."
