Swing Revival

For about two years, I worked the door at the Eagles Club, a dingy franchise of one of the lesser fraternal orders, just southeast of downtown Minneapolis. (One of the city’s many traditional wood-paneled dives offering meat raffles, bingo, and pull tabs.) I took the job on the vague promise of someday being trained to join the aging punks and ponytailed stepdads who ran sound for the shows there. But the door work was too easy. Like a seabird or a dolphin, I could get by with half my brain asleep, slapping on the waxy bracelets, stuffing money into the microphone case, settling up with the musicians at the end of the night before enjoying my one free beer, known as a “shifty.” There were plenty of shows to work. The club hosted weekly country line dancing (queer and straight), Latin and tango, malodorous punk bills, Caucasian folk revues, thin crowds bobbing to midlife-crisis electronica, and swing nights.

My wife’s uncle Charlie led the swing nights. He was the one who set me up with the job. He’d fronted a semifamous band called Little Black Book during the swing revival of the nineties, one of popular music’s stranger detours, off-road into a land of bowling shirts and victory rolls. They had opened for the Brian Setzer Orchestra and a band with perhaps the worst name of all time, the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Charlie had a beautiful voice, much richer than during the low height of his musical career now that it had shed its nasal gloss and pitched down a few steps. He still had his big actor face and the old pompadour, going gray and waning in volume, as well as the charm that seems to both cause and arise from a degree of fame.