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"When it's a scene out there in Los Angeles, some people feel alienated," he says. Nichols sees himself as more of a populist. They're into drinking martinis and looking good, and that's about it." "Between you and me," he says, "a lot of that lounge thing seems like people that aren't really into the music. "There's a real big dance scene out there now," Nichols confides.Įverywhere they go, the Royal Crown Revue is met by clusters of curiosity-seeking scenesters in lounge wear, though Nichols doesn't see his group as having too much in common with the neo-lounge folks.
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In Lake Tahoe, for instance, they play to punks and snow boarders, while in San Francisco, they play to clubs full of ultra-dressed-up devotees of what sounds like a burgeoning California swing craze. Audiences vary drastically from town to town, even around the Revue's home state.
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It's for the benefit of the audience."Ī barely publicized show at the Velvet Elvis earlier this month was the first Houston appearance for the band, which is in the habit of playing 200 plus road dates a year. We're trying to do entertainment like they used to do, essentially. "They go 'uhhh' for a few songs, and then they just get elated. It's something they haven't seen in ages, or it's something they've never seen before," says Nichols.
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"When an audience sees us, the first couple of songs they stand there, and they stare. Together, the Revue plays an amalgam of everything mentioned above while dressed in cool clothes, and then throws in some R&B stage-show acrobatics for maximum bang. Nichols, for one, bought his first Sex Pistols record in 1978 and started delving into swing music only "after the punk thing died out for me personally."
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Individually, Revue members had been doing Sinatra-crooning gigs, or bebop gigs, or ska gigs, or Afro-Cuban jazz gigs, and with a median band age hovering in the late twenties, it's all filtered through a healthy layer of punk attitude. Nichols, Dorame and guitarist James Achor are the three band members held over from the early days Bill Ungerman (baritone sax), Scott Steen (trumpet), Veikko Lepisto (bass) and Daniel Glass (drums) round out the jumpy septet. So I met him, and we just took off from there." He'd been playing the bars in Watts and East L.A., playing honking saxophone rhythm and blues. "But that fell apart, and I finally got introduced to this guy named Mando Dorame. "It was like a burlesque band or something, ya know? I was playing guitar, I didn't have any horns it was like this weird swingy skiffle," he says. Nichols and early incarnations of the Revue have been batting around the City of Angels for eight years, even if the present, two-year-old lineup is the one he calls "the real version." In proto-versions, he admits, "the musicianship was much lower." So what do we have here? Just another loungy, fly-by-night band(wagon) from L.A.? According to Nichols, the scene was written around the band after the movie's director saw a Revue performance. His Revue wears zoot suits and immaculate coifs, covers Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea" and Willie Dixon's "I Love the Life I Live" and appeared as a dance band playing their own "Hey Pachuco" in Jim Carrey's The Mask. Nichols is 30 and, yes, he's from New York, though he's lived in Los Angeles for almost 11 years. It's a mix-and-match of American music styles from back then." We might pull some bebop out we might combine some swing with some rhythm and blues, or a little more of a rock and roll beat, but with more horns on the traditional side. "We take styles from the '40s, '50s, '30s, even early '60s. "There's roots in big bands, but it's difficult to describe what we do," says Nichols, who contributes vocals to the Revue. The last is particularly appropriate Nichols, after all, sings for the Royal Crown Revue, whose key selling point is swing, though the seven-piece band isn't the least bit restrictive in its crossbreeding. In conversation, Eddie Nichols flaunts the exaggerated syntactical swagger of Brooklyn, New York, conjuring visions of gangsters, hepcats and, not coincidentally, traveling swing bands.