Back in the Swing of Things

NEW YORK —  Among the nearly 3,000 fans who have packed the Hammerstein Ballroom in midtown Manhattan to watch the Brian Setzer Orchestra perform is a 72-year-old man whose grandson bought him tickets.

The gray-haired fellow had never heard of Setzer before, and has no knowledge of the Stray Cats, the neo-rockabilly outfit that the singer-guitarist led to fame in the early ‘80s. “That was after my time,” the septuagenarian says with a chuckle. “But I hear he plays swing now. That’s the sort of music I grew up on.”

For others in the predominantly under-35 crowd, listening to Setzer’s orchestra--a traditional big band, with five saxophones, four trombones, four trumpets and a rhythm section, fronted in a modern twist by Setzer’s electric guitar--seems to inspire nostalgia for a time they can’t even remember.

“I think Brian’s a bit of a throwback to Louis Prima,” muses one young man wearing a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt.

“He plays music the way Glenn Miller would have--only with a really rad guitar,” adds a woman in her mid-20s. “I loved the Stray Cats when I was, like, 11, but I really love what [Setzer’s] doing now. He’s updating older music for a new generation.”

Indeed, by injecting his virtuosic, blues-based guitar style into big-band arrangements, Setzer, 39, appears to have introduced a successful second act to a career that until recently seemed to have run out of gas.

His current album, “The Dirty Boogie,” has been among the Top 10 sellers in Southern California since its release in June, and has climbed to No. 28 on the national album chart. Setzer leads his orchestra through both original and outside material that rocks and swings with equal force. Among the songs is a frisky new version of Prima’s 1956 hit “Jump Jive an’ Wail” that is currently a rising hit on Top 40 radio, with an accompanying video that’s getting intensive support from VH1.

The band’s rendition of the song draws a particularly enthusiastic reaction at the concert. Some fans swing-dance in the aisles, while others cheer Setzer’s Chuck Berry-inspired, guitar-wielding strut and applaud the horn players as they raise and lower their instruments in perfect unison.

“I think it’s natural,” Setzer says, offering his hypothesis on the younger audience’s attraction to a form of music associated with the World War II generation. “Maybe it’s in our genes. It’s part of our culture.”

Setzer brings his group to the Greek Theatre for a sold-out concert on Saturday, part of a swinging week in L.A. that also includes the Squirrel Nut Zippers at the Palace on Tuesday and the Royal Crown Revue opening for the B-52’s-Pretenders bill tonight at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre and Tuesday and Wednesday nights at Universal Amphitheatre.

The guitarist sees his foray into swing as just another byproduct of the same obsession with roots music that led him to form the Stray Cats with bassist Slim Jim Phantom and drummer Lee Rocker back in 1979. The group produced such rockabilly-flavored hits as 1982’s “Rock This Town” and 1983’s “Sexy + 17.”

“It’s all American music,” he continues. “I consider the blues to be the grandma and grandpa of it all. It all sprang from that--swing, rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll, country, jazz. It’s all the same to me.

“Someone told me a story once. He was listening to ‘Sing Sing Sing’--the classic by Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa, written by Prima-- and suddenly a kid comes up and says, ‘I heard that in a Rice Krispies commercial!’ ”

Setzer shakes his head and laughs.

“That music is so inbred in us that we can’t escape it. Sometimes it goes under the surface, but it never disappears.”

Waiting to make a promotional radio appearance on the afternoon of the show, Setzer sips coffee in a small conference room at the station. His trademark bleached-blond pompadour intact and his tattooed arms poised as if to grab his beloved Gretsch guitar and improvise a riff, the singer still has all the spry enthusiasm of the boy from Long Island who became the new-wave era’s answer to Eddie Cochran.

Despite a hectic schedule of concert and television dates, in fact, Setzer is fairly buzzing with energy as he rocks back and forth in his swivel chair. One minute he’s making a joyful attempt to sing a favorite horn interlude; the next he’s laughing as he describes the environment of “pizza crusts and dirty underwear” in which he and his musicians and road team exist.

“I like to work,” he stresses. “Up until now, I couldn’t tour as much as I wanted to with this band, and it’s been frustrating. Now I can play bigger places and pay everyone. And I have to say that I like being the boss. It makes things easier.”

If there is a sense of personal vindication in Setzer’s words and manner, it’s appropriate. After the Stray Cats broke up in 1984, he struggled as a solo artist, releasing two albums on EMI Records, 1986’s “The Knife Feels Like Justice” and 1988’s “Live Nude Guitars,” and also lending his talents to more visible studio projects with stars such as Bob Dylan and Robert Plant. The Stray Cats reunited in 1986 and put out four more albums, none of them hits, before splitting for good in 1992. Around this time, the singer planted the first seed for what would become the Brian Setzer Orchestra.

“I had had the idea in the back of my head of putting a big band behind me on electric guitar,” Setzer says. “Then a guy who lived down the block invited me to play with some horn players he had over. He put some sheet music in front of me, thinking I was just a rock guy and I couldn’t read it. But I read it, and we played, and then I put my idea across to him.”

The first incarnation of Setzer’s orchestra--whose current lineup features musicians who have been with him from two to six years (not including the leader’s aforementioned neighbor)--released “The Brian Setzer Orchestra” on Hollywood Records in 1994. “Guitar Slinger” followed in 1996, after Setzer had moved to Interscope Records. Neither album was a commercial success.

“In the beginning, it was very difficult to even find a record deal,” says Setzer’s manager, Dave Kaplan. “Everybody thought it was just one of Brian’s whims. We were asked, ‘How are you gonna tour with this? How are you gonna market it?’ . . . The band really had to be built brick by brick and exposed fan by fan, because of the lack of national media and radio and video [airplay] in the early days. The people who became supporters were just moved on a very instinctual level.”

Then the 1996 film “Swingers,” a romantic comedy set in L.A.’s swing-revival nightclubs, became a cult success, and slowly a resurgence in swing music began, making visible a new crop of bands including Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Royal Crown Revue and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies (see reviews below).

At first, the trend was predominantly a West Coast phenomenon, with registration for swing-dancing classes and sales at vintage-clothing stores booming throughout California. Setzer, who is based in Santa Monica, says that even now he plays to “three or four times as many people out West as I do in New York.”

Slowly but surely, though, swing fever is becoming a national affliction. And Setzer, notably the only artist in the new pack who leads a full big band, is once again at the forefront of a retro music craze.

Interscope Records President Tom Whalley, who signed Setzer in 1995, says that while he always had faith in the artist’s ability to make a comeback, he was surprised by the extent to which his new music has captured fans too young to even recall the Stray Cats, let alone Glenn Miller.

“What’s incredible is that there are high-school kids who are into it,” says Whalley. “The music is fun, there’s dancing that goes along with it, and it’s something you can do with a date. . . . You never know how long a trend is gonna last. But people thought rap wasn’t gonna last, and that’s been around for a pretty long time.”

David Wild, a senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine based in Los Angeles, sees Setzer’s renewed success and the growing neo-swing movement in general as signs of the times.

“We’re at such a weird time in popular music, where there really is no direction,” Wild says. “It’s sort of the [Marilyn] Manson-Hanson era. I think there is a vacuum, and maybe it’s better if they fill it with classic material and a classic sound. . . . Sinatra, the guy who attacked rock ‘n’ roll, was lauded by every rock magazine. The fact is that music of that era is eternally cool, you know?”

When he’s not on the road, Setzer spends as much time as possible with his two children: an 11-year-old son named Cody from his first marriage, and a 1-year-old daughter, Dane, from his current marriage to Christine Setzer, a former record-company employee.

Much of his time is spent on the demanding task of orchestrating for his big band. More than half of the tracks on “The Dirty Boogie” were co-arranged by Setzer and Mark Jones, a trombonist in his orchestra. Setzer says that learning to write and craft instrumental charts has helped him grow as a musician.

“I think I’ve come quite a ways by playing with the big band,” says Setzer, who cites Gene Krupa, Count Basie and Bobby Darin (in big-band mode) as his main inspirations. “At first, I could read and write music, but not to the point where I could figure out charts. . . . Just writing the charts, being aware of everything like that, is challenging. It’s major-league.”

In keeping with his image, the singer collects old cars. His set currently includes a 1960 Cadillac, a 1957 Dodge and a 1932 Ford that he and a friend restored themselves, in Setzer’s garage.

“There are guys who live in the ‘50s,” Setzer says. “I’m not that extreme. But something about the fashion and the attitude of that era has always attracted me. Maybe you could say I was born at the wrong time. . . . But if you even look at modern high-fashion design, they use things from the ‘40s and ‘50s. It’s just good stuff that should still be around.”

Keeping good old stuff around appears to be serving Setzer well at the moment, both commercially and in terms of maintaining the respect of his fellow musicians. E Street Band alumni Steven Van Zandt and Max Weinberg and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich were on hand for Setzer’s New York performance, and Robert Plant called Setzer before the gig to wish him well.

“I have never seen so much support for an artist,” says his manager Kaplan. “There are so many people rallying around Brian and so happy for his success, because they feel he deserves it so much. You don’t see it happen often where somebody has it twice in a career. He’s come up with two ideas and both of them worked.”

For Setzer himself, retro-pop glory is plainly twice as sweet the second time around.

“When the Stray Cats faded out, I thought, ‘This isn’t right,’ ” he says. “I said, ‘I deserve to have another record get out there and sell a million copies.’ It looks like I might be getting my wish. And I’m glad it’s happening now, because I think I’ve made a really good record. I don’t know if I’ll get another shot, but I think this time I’ve nailed it.”

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The Brian Setzer Orchestra plays Saturday at the Greek Theatre, 2700 Vermont Canyon Road, 8 p.m. Sold out. (213) 480-3232.

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JUMP TO IT

Is the swing thing just another flash in the pan or a genre with real legs? Page 85

Rating CDs by the new swing kings. Page 85