The group's live acts were becoming something of a sensation and a small group of young Los Angeles music fans were beginning to dig out their granddad's old zoot suits and bury themselves in the style.
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The album featured early versions of two songs that would be forever tied to the group: Hey, Pachuco! and Zip Gun Bop.
The album sold very well in southern California and received just a touch of play on such stations as KROQ. The independent label, as such labels often are, was willing to take a risk on a new sound, and it rather paid off. Kings of Gangster Bop was released on BYO Records in 1991.
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Perhaps some of their popularity was found in the fact that they were playing something completely different than everyone else the scene was mostly full of tired hair metal bands and unskilled punk groups. The group became a popular fixture of the Los Angeles club scene in 1990, playing some raucous shows at various music venues in the city of angels. The lineup was very much in flux in the early days, but the core of the group remained Eddie and Mando. Traditional swing was a big part of it, but punk, rockabilly, and doo wop were all part of the mix, essentially grafting the music of 1950 onto some elements of post- punk rock. Dorame got ahold of a few classically trained musicians he knew while Eddie looked up some of his punk acquaintances, and the group began jamming in late 1989 to an eclectic mix of sounds. Eddie was a big fan of earlier sounds and times and spent his time listening to records by early rockabilly artists and swing bands and watching films like A Streetcar Named Desire.Įddie knew tenor saxophonist Mando Dorame from his days in the Los Angeles club scene and knew that the man could tear up a mean solo that would fit perfectly right in the middle of a Louis Prima record, so he called up Dorame and pitched him on the idea: swing music with a modern bent. Eddie was a down-and-out punk musician from southern California who had grown tired of the hair bands and the soon-to-break-out grunge. The band formed in 1989, the direct brainchild of Eddie Nichols. It all started with The Mask, though, and the song in that scene was Hey, Pachuco! and the band was Royal Crown Revue. Yet by the end of the decade, three distinct bands capitalizing on that neo-swing sound would crack the top ten, introducing the music of Louis Prima to the modern world. Yet like the rest of the movie, there was a sense of something very modern inside and along with all of the retro sound, a catchy little infectious hook that stuck in the back of the minds of millions of moviegoers as they walked out of that film, humming a song that, sadly, most of them would never hear again.
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The scene in that movie that really stuck with me was the one in which Cameron and Jim danced together to an excellent swing song, using the steps that my grandpa used to use with grandma back in the day. Remember the 1994 movie The Mask? The one with Jim Carrey in the ridiculous yellow suit and green mask, acting as over the top as he possibly could? Remember the impossibly young Cameron Diaz in that movie, her first big break, still with the glow of youth around her? and in that one moment, it was Royal Crown Revue playing in the background. Most people say that the explosion of the revival of swing music of the late 1990s can be traced back to one moment. The unheralded fathers of the swing revival.