Official Press Bio, 1993

The music of the Cherry Poppin' Daddies is a union of the compositional elements and spirit of swing with a modern rock sensibility. From Cab Calloway to Dean Martin swing has always meant style, moral style, a way of dealing with the world that eschews the contrived cynicism of the "alternative" world and rock, at its best, has always meant energy, expression, intensity and naked truth. This strange coupling has made the Daddies one of the West Coast's most popular bands, regularly drawing sell-out crowds. Although the music always inspires runaway hip-swivelers to shake their groove things and pitch themselves head-long into the dark above the pulsing pit, the Daddies' songs are not vacuous ditties. Often they are explorations of some part of the world that's gone awry. Drunk Daddy is about child abuse, You Gotta Move is about violence, Flovilla Thatch Vs. the Virile Garbagemen about the insufficiency of traditional gender roles. When you have thrashed yourself into oblivion, there's something left to think about.

The musical scope of the band -- swing, rock, jump blues, country and funk -- has, over the years, attracted increasingly larger and more diverse crowds. Alternative Lad, punks, hippies, high school kids, metal-heads, jazz fans: their audience is as riotous and weirdly-spiced a crowd as could ever be hoped for.

The band, Dan Schmid on bass, Chris Azorr on keyboards, Jason Moss, guitar, and Brian West, drums, are all equally capable of navigating the demanding shifts and changes of style in a Daddies show. They are also all naturals to the stage. Like lead singer Steve Perry, they are bright, energetic, and physical enough to express the cartoon-like nature of rock and roll performance.

The most obvious part of the band, however, is the sharp and punchy horn section, comprising James Phillips on alto sax, Adrian Baxter on tenor sax, and Dana Heitman on trumpet. Whether stabbing and blasting into the air above the crowd or trailing delicate arabesques through the body of the song, the horns are always on display. And always popular.

Their full-length CD, Ferociously Stoned, has had favorable reviews in The Rocket, Alternative Press, The Oregonian and other magazines and newspapers and remained for over a year on The Rocket's Northwest Top Twenty list. They were the Portland Music Association's 1991 Crystal Award winners for Outstanding New Band. In February of 1994, the band was voted one of the three best bands in San Francisco by readers of the S.F. Bay Weekly. They have followed that up with strong performances at SXSW in Austin, Texas; Music West in Vancouver, B.C.; and SFO1 in San Francisco. The Daddies have been consistently recognized for their talent, scope, songwriting and powerful stage presence.

Their newest CD, Rapid City Muscle Car, is due out September 15th. In this recording, as in Fercociously Stoned, the Cherry Poppin' Daddies swing, and they swing without nostalgia. With each new song and each show they take the best of American Music forward. Don't hate them for being beautiful.

******************************************************************************************************************** Daddies.com 2000

Flag waving is dangerous. In the course of human history, it's always been a good way to get shot. For a band, it is a great way to get pigeonholed and marginalized.

Since their inception in 1989, the only flags The Cherry Poppin' Daddies have run up their pole besides the Jolly Roger, is their own collective freak flag. For twelve years frontman/songwiter Steve Perry has worked like a nihilistic pack mule creating songs that tell beautiful stories about the ugly and unfulfilled society we live in.

The band's 1991 debut album "Ferociously Stoned" is filled with stories of lust and wanting, sex, death, regret and redemption, a lexicon of the sad frail sock puppet theater that is mankind. The Daddies use of musical genres is equally wide ranging; punk rock, soul, funk, hot jazz, hardcore.

Throughout the band's subsequent releases, "Rapid City Muscle Car" (1993), "Kids On The Street" (1994) and the 1997 breakthrough album, "Zoot Suit Riot," has been nearly nonstop touring. Crossing the country three times in one year was not uncommon.

The band (Steve Perry, guitar, vocals, Dan Schmid, bass, Jason Moss, guitar, Tim Donahue, drums, Dana Heitman, trumpet, Sean Flannery, tenor saxophone, Ian Early, baritone and alto saxophones and Dustin Lanker, keyboards and piano).

******************************************************************************************************************** About the daddies as told by Steve Perry 2006

Well, we started in Nov 1988 with a benefit for the striking Nikolai door workers in Springfield, Oregon... We built a giant electrical motorized penis that shot salvos of dove liquid into the audience (still have it in our storage space)... Later we were into mad scientist rock, where we had ideas for crazy inventions which we combined with rock and roll - you know, "kids after the show go build your own shoe tree chariot, here are the blue prints!" Later still was the centurions of Rome stage show when I accidentally clocked a sax player in the head with a mike stand while battling with Caesar Augustus Bruno. Somewhere in there was the Still livin' with Mom tour when I did the miracle of the loaves and fishes dance in government cheese boots with sardines in my diaper and a toilet seat around my neck. Next we did the Escape from Flaccid Island tour and tried to get Mel Brooks to direct the video in which Dana drinks some lesbian Amazon cannibal tribes' jungle potion and grows 60 feet high and attempts to squash us all beneath a proudly erupting paper maché volcano. In the late 90's we 3 stooged our way into a double platinum record, then, in the afterglow, we took time to debauch ourselves to the four corners of our Rabelaisian imaginings. Now our flyin saucer seems headed for the sun again with our new ultra mega jam "Spin the Fuck Around"- the Hippies really get their stanky on to it, bisnatch. See you at the bank!

********************************************************************************************************************** Daddies.com 2006

Eugene, Oregon's Cherry Poppin' Daddies came together in the gray light of the pre-Grunge dawn, when America's rock underground was defined not by sloppy guitar groups but instead by phenoms like Fishbone, Faith No More, Bad Brains, the Meat Puppets, and early incarnations of the Chili Peppers and Metallica; bands that took musical tightness as a prerequisite and sought to bust creative boundaries by daring to traverse territory outside the individual members' stylistic comfort zones.

After introducing themselves with a 1989 4-song EP mixing funkadelica with big band charts (which won the approval of legendary jazz DJ Al "Jazzbo" Collins), the Daddies released a series of independently-produced records daring anything and everything an eight-piece with three horns and keys possibly could: swing (Drunk Daddy, Pink Elephant); metal (Midas in Reverse, Bobby Kennedy); funk (Dirty Mutha Fuzz, Equus); country/Americana (Silver-Tongued Devil, Luther Lane) and weird amalgams (Teenage Brainsurgeon, Hazel South Dakota). In 1997 the group compiled all its big band tunes onto a single disc called "Zoot Suit Riot: The Swingin' Hits of...", which inspired Universal subsidiary Mojo Records to load the boys into a tour bus traversing the country with comerades like Argentina's Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Ozomotli, and a host of punk bands on the 1998 Vans Warped Tour.

By the time the Daddies teamed with glam legend Tony Visconti (David Bowie, T. Rex) for a single called "Diamond Light Boogie", "Zoot Suit" had gone double platinum. Unfortunately, the neo-swing craze had also run its course, and the band's 2000 effort "Soul Caddy" found itself a stranger in a strange land of boy-band bland, monster-voice metal and a president who thinks jazz comes from Utah. After a brief hiatus from touring, the CPD's began performing anew in 2002. In recent months they have been writing new songs and re-dedicating themselves to what may be the weirdest career in show business.

c 1998-2006