Swinging to a Different Drummer : It’s not just the clothes they wear. Or the big band music they dig. There will always be teens who follow the crowd. But it’s the spirit of doing their own thing that makes these Orange County cats cool.
Weird is relative.
Take opalescent purple eye shadow and Tammy Faye eyelashes.
In the mid-’80s, every “cool” girl at my high school glopped on the goo. I was strictly into black liquid eyeliner and bright red lips--the Audrey Hepburn look. The makeup matched my bouffant ‘do and the layers of starched petticoats that I wore under my full skirts. (The teacher in my Traffic and Safety driving class wasn’t real happy that the ensemble covered my feet and spilled over onto his side, making it nearly impossible for him to see the car’s pedals.)
In those days, only a handful of students at Fountain Valley High appeared in attire fit for the set of “West Side Story.” Two of them were my best friends.
We shunned the tattered, Gothic-inspired fashions and gender-bending looks along with the New Wave music it garnished. We were into roots rock and sharp dressing. So it’s understandable why grunge and all its flannel charm, or the phat style of hip-hop, doesn’t appeal to every teen today.
Take Fountain Valley senior Mark Vukadinovich.
He doesn’t own a pair of jeans. He’s strictly into slacks and has a great collection of vintage Hawaiian shirts. He slicks his ‘do a la Elvis--whose movies he loves because they’re so campy.
He prefers the big band music of Benny Goodman and Count Basie to the grunge rock of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder. A guitarist for the past six years, his idols aren’t Eddie Van Halen or Soundgarden’s Kim Thayill, but big band strummers Charlie Christian and Eddie Lang.
But the fact that Vukadinovich prefers cruising in his ’55 Hudson Rambler and playing the coffeehouse circuit in his swing band, Duke Diamond and the Gemtones, doesn’t exclude him from “cool one” status. (The nine-member band performs Saturday night at Our House Coffeehouse in Costa Mesa).
“I think a lot of people are afraid to be associated with anything their parents or grandparents are into,” says the 17-year-old. To learn more about the ‘40s, he quizzes his grandparents about the dance halls in Chicago they frequented when they were teens.
To experience these sounds live, he and his buddies have either had to cruise to nightclubs in Hollywood or sneak into shows that prohibit minors. The Orange International Street Fair and the now-defunct 8 1/2, an underage club in Fullerton, have offered some relief by booking local bands such as Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys and the Royal Crown Review.
He first started experimenting with vintage music two years ago with his previous band, Burning Lust, which cranked out psychobilly, an intensely raucous form of rockabilly, itself a form of early rock ‘n’ roll that borrows from country and hillbilly (think of “Blue Suede Shoes”). Burning Lust jammed until the end of last summer, when Vukadinovich’s band mates moved on to college. He then decided to toy with the big band sound.
“My mom doesn’t really care for swing,” he adds. “She’ll turn my music off and put on her Beatles records.”
The only one at his school who dresses like someone out of a black-and-white flick, Vukadinovich says that “every once in a while a football player or someone like that will be sarcastic about something I’m wearing, like ‘oh, nice tie.’ ”
That attitude only seems to encourage him.
“When you’re dressed up, you can totally tell they’re making fun of you,” says Vukadinovich’s band mate Stephen Derrick, a senior at Ocean View High. “I get a kick out of it. Like I’m supposed to get upset because some heavy metal guy is making fun of me.”
(For my girlfriends and me, our favorite response to close-minded statements by jocks was blowing a kiss in the air followed by a mocking apology that we didn’t resemble their goopy-eyed girlfriends.)
Derrick got into the hep cat sounds of the ‘40s and ‘50s in his freshman year when he first locked into jazz station KLON-FM (88.1).
“I then went through my dad’s records,” he said. During the mid-’60s when he was in high school, Derrick’s father played trumpet and was into big band--an extreme contrast to the long-haired scene his peers were into then.
Like father, like son.
*
This current fascination with gas-guzzling classic cars, tailored vintage fashions and jumpin’ tunes of the ‘40s and ‘50s re-emerged in the late ‘60s with the greasy teddy boys. It returned again in full form in the late ‘70s and boomed in the early ‘80s when yours truly delved into it. The latest incarnation counts die-hards from the past decade and the new blood of teens such as Derrick and his small network of friends at various high schools.
There’s only a couple of other guys at Ocean View who dig swing, and Derrick hangs out with them both. One is Michael Huff, 18, who plays trombone for the Gemtones. The senior decided to take up the horn when he recently tuned into jazz. He just rented the instrument and got a book. His knowledge of notes comes from five years of piano lessons.
He got into horns when his 15-year-old brother, Chris, picked up the trumpet a year ago. The brothers blow the brass side by side in the Gemtones and hit jazz shows together whenever they can.
“I want to expand the horn section even more,” says the older Huff. “ Someday I’d like to lead a real big band and have a full 11- to 12-piece horn section.”
Michael started dressing the part this year, first by chopping off his Beatlesque bob into a neat pomp. “To me it was a big deal,” he recalls. “It was a lot of hair I got rid of.”
Like other retro buffs, Huff and his friends raid local thrift stores for anything that appears pre-1960, in contrast to most high school students into alternative scenes who tend to don a second-hand melange of ‘60s and ‘70s duds.
Huff’s first vintage item was a pair of wing tips he got at Savers in Huntington Beach, considered a gem of a source among local hipsters. “There and my dad’s closet are my two good places for clothes,” he says.
He and the others say they like wearing vintage clothes, especially the suits, because when they do, they’re standing out and not conforming. “I’m doing what I want to do because that’s what I want to do and not because it’s what’s cool or popular at the time,” Huff says.
“Style is missing in clothing today,” Derrick adds. “Dressing back then meant looking sharp, sophisticated, looking good. Men looked cleaner, debonair. It’s not popular to do that now.”
Besides the handsome appeal of yesteryear, he also loves the way women wore their hair and makeup. “I don’t care for short skirts.”
*
That’s good news for Huntington Beach senior Daiquiri Scherer, 18--and bad news for her family. “My grandma wishes I’d wear mini skirts and that I’d stop wearing clunky shoes.”
Scherer plugged into the scene two years ago, when her interest in vintage vehicles grew. As a kid, she and her four older brothers would get money from their father if they could guess the make of an antique car. She came out on top last summer when she got dad’s 1941 Mercury. “My dad’s had it for 20 years, and it was already planned that I’d drive it. I ended up being the only one who liked old cars.”
Besides swing, she listens to rockabilly and golden oldies. But even though she loves movies and music from the ‘50s, she says: “The ‘40s era I find more appealing. The clothes and cars were classier.”
She loves vintage rayon dresses because “they flatter the body. I feel like a lady.” After Katharine Hepburn’s famous style, she also loves wearing men’s trousers. There are also gloves, hats and a pair of cat eye glasses in her wardrobe, although she doesn’t wear those items every day.
Like Vukadinovich at FVHS, Scherer was recently voted “most unique” for the yearbook. It’s a bittersweet title, considering some of the comments they’ve endured for the way they look. But it’s part of being different, they say.
Indeed, fans of Duke Diamond and the Gemtones, who attend many of the high schools in the area, are for the most part, the “weird” kids at school who prefer coffeehouses to Friday night parties where all the “popular” people go. Still, their audience likes the music but doesn’t care much about the clothes or the cars.
But that’s cool, because it’s a matter of being open to different scenes, Derrick says. “To me, anyway, it’s more about the spirit of the music than the fashion.”
Even louder than the music, it’s the spirit of doing their own thing that swings for these cats.