Royal Crown Revue swings into Harrah's Tahoe

People have always had a difficult time describing Royal Crown Revue. Perhaps the best thing to call it is classic American music.

The seven band members pioneered the swing revival in the ’90s that helped open the door for such bands as Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Squirrel Nut Zippers and the Brian Setzer Orchestra. However, Royal Crown has its own sound, and borrows from many genres.

The band’s publicist requested that we not call it swing, because then that pigeonholes the band, he said. So how do we describe it?

“That’s going to be difficult,” said singer and bandleader Eddie Nichols. “We play some swing tunes, but our music’s mostly hybrid. But it will be a tough thing to change the public’s mind. We play roots American music. We play a mix of classic American styles. I always end up saying swing again. I know time wise we were there first with this revival.”

Nichols grew up in Manhattan as fan of a cappella “streetcorner harmony,” as well as the classic American crooners of the 1950s: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Bing Crosby.

“I bought a guitar and sat in a room for a year, practiced and came out and started a band,” he said. “It was stuff like Elvis, rockabilly and ’50s pop songs.”

Although Nichols became a fan of punk rock when it was born in the early 1980s, he didn’t play punk rock.

“I always compared it to a weird skiffle band,” he said. “We didn’t know. It was kind of like discovering American music because we didn’t know the music first. We were a bunch of punk rock kids. We were learning our instruments. Nobody taught us how to play 1-6-2-5, which is a common jazz chord progression. When we figured that out I’d write a song to it.”

Nichols’ band had two guitars and an upright bass. He knew something was missing. He likes to tell about the time Mark Mahoney, the club owner of a place called the Shamrock Social Club, gave him a phone call.

In a thick New York accent, Nichols imitated his friend: “Yo Eddie, I got this buddy, his son plays saxophone. Why don’t you get together with him?”

The sax player was Mando Doram, who has been with the band ever since.

Today’s lineup includes two more horn players, Jim Jedeikin on baritone and alto sax, and trumpeter Scott Steen. Mark Cally plays guitar, and Daniel Glass is on drums. The bass player usually is Dave Miller, but sometimes, as might be the case at Saturday’s show at Tahoe, longtime member Beikko Lepisto returns, Nichols said.

“The Tahoe show — I think we’re just going to have a good time,” Nichols said. “You’re going to hear some new stuff off our new CD, and, God willing, I’ll be in a great mood and will make people laugh and we’ll have fun.”

Because the Royal Crown Revue doesn’t fit inside typical musical categories, the band always has to work extra hard to win over the crowds. It’s height of popularity could have been in the mid-90s, when the Jim Carrey movie “The Mask” featured its song “Hey Pachuco!”

“Even after that film came out, when they booked us in nightclubs throughout the States, we were the band that plays that kind of music from ‘The Mask,’ ” Nichols said. “They still didn’t have a moniker for it.”

Even tougue-wagging Gene Simmons of Kiss has trouble identifying the sound of Royal Crown Revue, which appeared on three episodes of his television program “Family Jewels.”

“He wanted to do a Vegas-style act,” Nichols said. “God bless him, he knows a lot about music but he kind of got his genres a little mixed up. So he goes ‘I want to do this swing, big-band Sinatra kind of thing,’ but what we went up picking was these three ’50s rhythm-and-blues tunes. He was a gas to work with: super-funny, super-smart man. He fronted my band. I got to sing backups and play guitar which was fun for me.

“During rehearsal I started strumming the chords to ‘Dr. Love,’ and he started looking around and said ‘What is that?’ I said, ‘It’s one of your songs you wrote.’ ”

The Royal Crown Revue has more projects ahead. It will tour Europe this fall and is prepping for a variety show-style Christmas production, probably for 2009. Nichols and other band members also are writing for a possible Broadway show.