Zoot Suit Riot (album)

By January 2000, Zoot Suit Riot had achieved double-platinum status of over two million copies sold in the United States, while also attaining gold record sales in Canada and New Zealand.

[5] At this time, largely following the success of the 1996 film Swingers, which prominently showcased the Los Angeles swing revival movement, public attention also started turning towards swing music, which had been slowly emerging within the west coast alternative underground pioneered by bands such as Royal Crown Revue and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

Singer-songwriter Steve Perry explained how the concept of a compilation came to be in an interview for The Daily of the University of Washington: We didn't want to be a "swing band".

The engineer instead told him it was a decent take and suggested keeping his comment in the final mix as an inside joke, to which Perry ultimately agreed ("Unbeknownst to us, it became a big hit record").

In its initial pressing, the album became an unexpectedly popular item, reportedly selling as many as 4,000 copies a week through both the band's tours and their Northwest distributors.

By October 1997, the rising mainstream popularity of swing music had resulted in consistently steady sales of Zoot Suit Riot, motivating Mojo to release the album's title track as a single and distribute it among modern rock radio stations.

[11] The Daddies, who were in preparation over recording a new studio album, ardently protested Mojo's decision under the belief that a swing song would never receive airplay on mainstream radio and the band would likely have to recoup the costs of its marketing.

[7][13] Nevertheless, Mojo persisted, and to the band's surprise, "Zoot Suit Riot" soon found regular rotation on both college radio and major stations such as Los Angeles' influential KROQ-FM.

[27] Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic, however, gave the album a rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars, noting that while the Daddies pulled off "reasonably infectious" tunes, the modernist lyrics had lent Zoot Suit Riot a "condescending Gen-X attitude, as well as a lack of understanding about what made swing fun", writing the album off as a "smirking hipster joke, only without any humor and very little music".

"[29] Perry's reflection on the album has been decidedly ambivalent, which he has described in interviews as being a "blessing as well as a curse", noting that while Zoot Suit Riot had exposed the Daddies' music to a wider audience and provided them with the financial stability to continue as a band, the success of the album continues to paint a one-dimensional image of the Daddies as an "orthodox swing band" over the prominently eclectic ska, punk and rock influences which largely feature in their music.

[30] In mid-2014, Perry revealed that he had re-obtained the rights to Zoot Suit Riot from Jive Records and planned to release a remixed version of the album.