Fade in: a grimy North Beach alley, where clotheslines sag with tattered panties, torn shirts, and a pair of star-spangled tights. Spilling down a flight of cement stairs are three homeless men in once-expensive suits belting, "I love life." Cue the dancing twins in silver bodysuits, wearing garbage pail lids for hats.
Cut to Dempsey's barbershop in the Mission, where black-and-white photos hang on the walls and dusty Playboy magazines rest on a table. Three barbers in matching jackets attend to a nattily dressed young man with the sharp, blue-eyed, flat-nosed features of a second-rate Irish pugilist -- someone who's learned what he's learned by walking into a few left hooks. Over an infectious groove the young man raps, "I put my pants on the same way as you, of course/ My pants are just more expensive than yours."
That's the scene of a video shoot for Jimmy Luxury -- real name James Kelleher, a 25-year-old transplant from Brockton, Mass., who spent his first four years in San Francisco getting fired from a string of bar-backing and floor-mopping jobs in Mission neighborhood watering holes. As in the opening shots of his first video for Sony Records, Jimmy's made a quick cut from rags to swing-aesthetic-steeped riches this year, when a demo CD that cost $50 to record became the subject of a bidding war between major labels Sony and Virgin.
With a song featured on the Go movie soundtrack (credited to Jimmy Luxury and the Tommy Rome Orchestra), and with a CD, A Night in the Arms of ... Jimmy Luxury, scheduled for July release, Jimmy finds himself in the rare position of having virtually everyone who ever kicked him off his or her couch showing up to try to mug in his videos.
The sudden change was a result of Jimmy meeting Tommy Rome -- real name James D'Angelo. (Regarding the moniker, Tommy says, "I was going to be Tommy Palermo, but I didn't want to go over people's heads. I'm Sicilian more than I'm Italian.") A producer and former member of Boston-based hip-hop band the Goats, Tommy discovered Jimmy pouring beers at his neighborhood haunt, the Shotwell 59, two years ago. He recognized in Jimmy -- who has always been more than willing to drop a freestyle -- a raw, original talent that warranted cultivation in the studio.
But despite his background in hip hop, Tommy's primary interest has long been in swing and pre-swing music. "Jimmy's always been a huge hip-hop fan," he says. "I've always been a big fan of Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra. I still listen to that stuff all the time, even the other stuff like Etta James, Billie Holiday, Dreary Blossom."
Dreary Blossom?
"She's on [the album]," explains Tommy. "Little white girl. They all had pipes back then. Really, we're not the biggest fans of swing, per se; we're both [more into] pre-swing and hip hop, so that's kind of where this album's at. It sort of combines to be swing-hop, I guess."
That vision came about by accident, according to Tommy. "I went to sample some other shit, and I threw in a Dean Martin CD by accident, and I was like, 'What the fuck is this?' " It was like dipping his chocolate into Dean Martin's peanut butter; he called Jimmy right away. "I put a drumbeat over it, and that night we decided to go out and do a photo session. So we did our first photo session before we did a song."
The photos from that night feature Jimmy and Tommy dressed to the nines and loitering outside the Hungry I in North Beach. "That's as close as we get to Las Vegas," says Tommy. "Not-so-bright lights, not-so-big city," Tommy laughs. "But Jimmy was always the smallest guy in the biggest high school."
The subsequent demo CD soon slipped into heavy rotation in a number of Mission neighborhood bar jukeboxes, as well as into the hands of record executives nationwide. The timing was impeccable: As evidenced by the choreographed swing dancers during last winter's Super Bowl halftime show, swing music's penetration to the farthest reaches of Middle America (where hip hop is already established) may now be called complete. Like the soaring stock market, the growth of swing music's popularity continues unabated even amid doubts as to its sustainability.
And ground zero in the swing revolution is, of course, San Francisco. "I think it's safe to say we probably wouldn't have done this album anywhere but San Francisco," says Tommy. "I think the swing scene here definitely encouraged us. Also, there's a strong hip-hop scene here." That an anti-swing backlash may follow doesn't concern him. "I thought long hair was played out, too, but look around," he says.
For his part, Jimmy refuses to make forecasts regarding swing's popularity, or, for that matter, to pay the swing scene much heed at all. "I don't pay attention to it," he says. "I've been into hip hop my whole life."
Musically, A Night in the Arms of ... doesn't play into the flavor-of-the-month concept. The samples on the album, despite most of them being over 40 years old, sound surprisingly fresh. Beneath and between the swing grooves, an outrageous array of layered scratches, found sounds, and hip hop and funk vocal samples interweave. The album does more to serve hip-hop heads a lesson about frontiersmanship than to offer suburbanites a comfortable entrance into the swing scene.
