Robbed hit of the week 4/26/21 - Cherry Poppin' Daddies' "Zoot Suit Riot"...

 

 

"Zoot Suit Riot" - Cherry Poppin' Daddies

from the album Zoot Suit Riot: The Swingin' Hits of the Cherry Poppin' Daddies (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart

Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #41

 

This week's robbed hit comes from the neo-swing band Cherry Poppin' Daddies, who came together in Oregon in the late 1980s by lead singer/guitarist Steve Perry (no not that one) and bassist Dan Schmid as collegemates. Originally a ska-punk outfit, which fit in with the likes of the then-hot Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Fishbone, they also sported a horn section including trumpet player Dana Heitman. After releasing four independent albums in the first half of the 1990s, the large outfit went to a number of lineup changes, with the duo of Perry and Heitman the only constant by 1997. The band's sound had evolved as well, as the burgeoning "swing revival" was starting in California, and their concerts were drawing bigger and bigger crowds. They revamped version of the Daddies released a collection of their swing numbers that were popular under the title "Zoot Suit Riot". Selling thousands of copies on their own, they got a deal with Mojo Records to distribute the set nationally. The title track from the set, "Zoot Suit Riot", was a clean and honest throwback to the 1940s, and suddenly mainstream radio came on board and was starting to play the track. Written and produced by Perry, the song truly seems pulled from time before, and the stunning redone music video, which combined the swing dancers which are athletically amazing combined with punkers and scenes from the occult enthralled the young watchers of MTV, and eventually granting them their biggest (and only) radio success...

Since "Zoot Suit Riot" wasn't released as a commercially-available single, it wasn't able to place on Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart. However the song got enough radio love to just miss the top-40 of the airplay component of the tally by one notch in May of 1998. The song also climbed to #15 on Billboard's Alternative Rock radio chart, and #16 on their older-skewing Adult Top-40 format list, spending 25 weeks on each. The Zoot Suit Riot collection, originally put on by the band in March and re-released by Mojo Record in July, went to #17 on the Billboard 200 sales list, spending a year on the chart and going on to sell over two million copies. 

Despite the reception for the song, the band wasn't able to keep the momentum going, as radio treated it as a one-off, and the Neo-Swing fad had already started to wane. Their second and final album for Mojo, Soul Caddy, was reviled both by naive critics and their label itself, as it was reverting back to their broad range of styles in music centering on the ska-punk ideal. Since then the group, which saw Schmid return after that, have released five albums independently, including another swing set in 2014. Their most recent album, Bigger Life, arrived in 2019. 

(10/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

There was a low-budget original video made for the song that also had the band in front of a dancing crowd, but it was received very badly (and shot pretty poorly to boot)...

Next up, the Daddies appearing live on Letterman in 1998 as it was getting hot...

and lastly, in concert at the House of Blues in 1998...