Jump, Jive an’ Fail: How My Friends and I Posed as a Swing Band in 1998
The Strange and Wonderful Tale of Johnny Wanker and His Fabulous El Camino Fireball Orchestra
People got into the ’90s swing revival for a lot of different reasons. If you were a hipster in L.A. or San Francisco in the early part of the decade, you probably dug the clothes and the cocktails and the swankiness of it all. Maybe you felt like modern American society was a letdown—a drab parade of shapeless fiberglass cars driven by dowdy squares hopped up on Starbucks.
Swing was bright, sharp, sexy, and rooted in a bygone time when art and culture weren’t so homogenized.
If you were a certain type of suburban kid in 1998—the kind not yet hip to Swingers on VHS—you probably discovered neo-swing via a commercial for pants. You know the one: the Gap’s famous “Khakis Swing” spot, wherein young pretty people in casual wear twirl around to Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive & Wail.” Every time one of the dancers flies into the air, the camera does the stop-and-rotate “bullet time” thing that would be popularized by The Matrix the following year and parodied to death soon after.
“Khakis Swing” was the perfect commercial for 1998, the midpoint of Clinton’s second term, a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The kids in those Gap pants were so giddy they could no longer be held down by the law of gravity. They weren’t the only ones.
The commercial was a mixed blessing in the Gap’s home base of San Francisco, where retro-swing had been flourishing as an underground countercultural phenomenon for nearly a decade. “The Gap and khaki was the exact opposite of what we were about,” says local scene kingpin and Swing Time magazine founder Michael Moss, whom I interviewed for my forthcoming book Hell of a Hat: The Rise of ’90s Ska and Swing. “Some of our friends are in those videos, the dancers. It was kind of a mixed bag, because on one side, you’re like, ‘Hey look, we got a commercial.’ But it’s khakis and wow [laughs].”
The impact of “Khakis Swing” in the rest of America was seismic. At my high school in Manchester, Connecticut, the commercial’s effectiveness was made apparent when five of my knucklehead friends and I convinced the white-baseball-cap-wearing popular kids at the Student Activities (SA) office to let us form a band and create a “swing-themed” senior class float for the 1998 homecoming parade.
By the fall of ’98, my friends and I had been hardcore ska fans for about three years. We’d watched the genre explode and then contract. We still loved that music, but we were branching off into other sounds. The Specials had led me to the Clash, who’d hipped me to rockabilly. Stray Cats were greaser gods to me, so I was naturally receptive to the Brian Setzer Orchestra’s 1998 breakthrough The Dirty Boogie, a bright, exuberant album (complete with a version of “Jump, Jive & Wail”) that couldn’t have been better suited for the late Clinton years. A 17-piece band in his economy? You bet your sweet ass.
I also dug Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Royal Crown Revue, and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, who I’d seen on the Come Out Swingin’ Tour with Let’s Go Bowling and Reel Big Fish at the beginning of my sophomore year in 1996. I left that show with a cassette copy of CPD’s Kids On the Street, a genre grab bag that confused the hell out of me. It’s only now, with the maturity of age, that I’m able to appreciate songs like the organ-drenched surf-garage romp “Trapped Inside the Planet of the Roller-Skating Bees.”
In any event, swing was ascendant. I don’t remember who came up with the idea of making a float for the homecoming parade, but in the immediate aftermath of “Khakis Swing,” there was little or no pushback from the cool-kid gatekeepers. Everything we pitched evidently sounded perfectly reasonable.
There was, of course, one problem. Nobody in this band—an ensemble we named Johnny Wanker and His Fabulous El Camino Fireball Orchestra—could play swing music. With the exception of Bob, our shredding lead guitarist, barely anyone could play any music. Still, it was a dream team of semi- and non-musicians.
On bass, we had Dan, a secretly brilliant B student whose real weapon of choice was not the Ibanez four-string, but rather the potato cannon he built using PVC pipe from Home Depot. Over on rhythm guitar, there was Geoff, my best friend, who owned 80% of the gear we needed, including the drum kit he used for his ska band, Jimmie Scooter.
Our lead singer, Ryan, was a gifted Elvis impersonator and all-state cross-country runner who went on to become a Catholic priest. Our sixth member was Jesse, aka Johnny Wanker himself, our backup singer, hypeman, and spiritual guru. That left me on drums, even though I had zero percussion experience outside of Hit Stix.
You’ll notice I didn’t mention any horn players. There were none. Swing was never going to be on the menu. There was some element of “screw the popular kids” driving this adventure, though the six of us were hardly misfit troublemakers. Some of us were friends with some of those popular kids. And yet we were just punk enough to promise the in-crowd a swing show and deliver something entirely different.
The plan was to do retro as best we could. Our setlist consisted of two Stray Cats tunes, the Clash’s version of Vince Taylor’s U.K. rockabilly chestnut “Brand New Cadillac,” and “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles, our requisite nod to the parade scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. To round out the random set, we played a couple of Rancid tunes. (Did I mention it was 1998?)
After two weeks of rehearsal in my basement, the big day arrived. We six Wankers squeezed ourselves and our instruments onto a tiny flatbed trailer decorated with the slogan “Swing into ’99.” All around us, the SA kids were primed to jitterbug in their khakis and white T-shirts. We also made room on the float for a life-sized cardboard cutout of James Dean, decorated with a mesh Super Mario Bros. baseball cap atop his head. Dean’s shit-eating grin pretty much said it all.
What we lacked in musical ability we made up for in sheer audacious style. We rocked suits and ties and greased our hair with Royal Crown brand pomade. Geoff and Dan wore cowboy hats bigger than their heads. I completed my look with a pair of Buddy Holly–style safety glasses someone had swiped from the Manchester High metal shop.
What did we give the assembled masses on Main Street that day? There’s blurry Zapruder-grade camcorder footage somewhere in my storage locker, but it’s better to draw from unreliable memories. We realized pretty quickly that “Twist and Shout” was our best song, so we played it over and over for the benefit of the spectators and judges along the mile-and-change parade route. The SA kids in the Gap ’fits twisted along dutifully, unbothered by the fact we’d leapfrogged the swing era and landed somewhere closer to swinging London.
On the strength of Bob’s guitar heroics, we mostly held it together, and the tiny generator powering our instruments somehow rendered everything audible. This was all thanks to the father of one of the popular girls whose truck pulled us along. Both the girl and her dad were extremely nice and accommodating during setup in the afternoon, which made me feel more than a little guilty about the faux-swing ruse.
I now realize the conflict between White Caps and Wankers was more in our heads than it was in theirs. It’s like John Cusack says in Grosse Pointe Blank, when he’s trying to pacify the bully who’s wanted to kick his ass since high school: “Do you really believe there’s some stored-up conflict between us? We do not exist.”
The parade ended in the high school parking lot, where we did “Brand New Cadillac” and “Twist and Shout” one last time for a decent crowd of Gap cosplayers and bemused onlookers. I distinctly remember flubbing the “Brand New Cadillac” drum fill right after Bob’s ripping guitar solo and coming in a beat late. It still haunts me to this day.
Perhaps due to my botched fill, the senior class did not win the prize for best float. Johnny Wanker and His Fabulous El Camino Fireball Orchestra were neither a flaming dumpster nor a raging inferno of awesomeness. Nobody felt cheated or charmed by our non-swing performance. We simply made a noise, packed up our gear, and went home. It was fun yet anticlimactic—just like the swing revival must’ve seemed to the general population.
That wasn’t the end for the Wankers. We reunited and staged an even more extravagant live show for the school’s graduation party in June. (Can you believe they fucking invited us back?) By then, a year had passed since the Gap ad, and swing was yesterday’s papers. We ditched all of the parade songs, outfitted ourselves with Hawaiian shirts, recruited some new players, and learned a fresh repertoire that included Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” the Police’s “Message In a Bottle,” the Clash’s “London Calling,” Rancid’s “Time Bomb,” and Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet’s “Having an Average Weekend,” aka the Kids in the Hall theme. This time, I was on bass, and I hit most of the relevant notes.
At that graduation gig, everything was different. Instead of swingin’ into ’99, we were fumbling toward 2000 and a decade of fear and uncertainty we couldn’t have imagined. The world would get colder and darker. Cars and clothes would become even uglier. None of the pants commercials would make us want to dance.
For more great stories about ’90s ska and swing, check out my book Hell of a Hat: The Rise of ’90s Ska and Swing, due out September 21, 2021, on Penn State University Press. Preorder here. If you’re in New York City on Tuesday, September 28, join me for a Hell of a Hat launch party at Mama Tried in Brooklyn. DJ Ryan Midnight will be spinning all your ’90s favorites, and because it runs from 7 to 9 p.m., you don’t even have to stay up late!