Cherry Poppin' Daddies are back in season

The Cherry Poppin' Daddies have had a strange career. They've enjoyed controversy and endured success. The band's been -- in dizzyingly rapid succession -- an underground favorite, a rising star, a one-hit has-been.

Over the years, the Eugene band's story has featured many standard-issue music-biz perils-of-success plot points (issues with the "control freak" lead singer, lawsuits with record labels, media backlash). But then there are the weird little details unique to the Daddies.

For instance, singer/songwriter Steve Perry recalls a show the band once performed in a blimp hangar, following two other celebrities on the bill: Colin Powell and Dana Carvey. Then there was the band's song "Diamond Light Boogie," which Perry says Rush Limbaugh used on the air after taking a liking to the opening line: "Believe me when I tell you, I'm nostalgic for that good ol' atomic bomb." What the radio right-winger apparently failed to notice is that the rest of the lyric is a celebration of glam-rock cross-dressers.

But maybe what's most surprising about the Daddies at this point is that after all they've been through, they're back for more.

"We're coming to do it again," Perry says, talking over a barbecued chicken dinner at Doug Fir, before the band's Friday night show there. "We like each other, and we still want to play together, and the stars aligned." Though the band has performed sporadically in recent years, it's gearing up for more touring, and Perry hopes to have a new album completed by the end of the year.

After reaching the Top 40 with the song "Zoot Suit Riot" (1997) and selling 2 million copies of a compilation album by that name, the Daddies didn't just dry up and blow away, but they haven't been the same vibrant and regular presence they once were. Perry, stung by the harsh criticism that came along with fame, retreated for a while to the less judgmental world of science, earning his degree in molecular biology. Bassist Dan Schmid and keyboardist Dustin Lanker formed a pop-rock band called the Visible Men; Perry and guitarist Jason Moss split their time with a campy glam-punk act called White Hot Odyssey.

The degree to which the Daddies ceded their spot in the limelight might be indicated by Perry's story about creating a MySpace band page. By the time he got around to the task a few months ago, he says, online imposters had beaten him to the punch.

Slight, soft-spoken and thoughtful, the 42-year-old Perry jokes at the end of dinner about going to put on his "monkey suit." And he doesn't mean a tuxedo: He mimes strapping on a little hat at a cockeyed angle, and the intended circus organ-grinder image springs right to mind.

Onstage a bit later, in a glittering pink and black shirt, he's transformed into an almost comically bug-eyed ham, dancing, jumping, jiving and gesticulating through the mostly up-tempo set.

The club is packed, and though there are a few folks in fancy swing-era dresses or thin-brimmed hats and two-tone shoes, it's mostly just regular fans opting for jeans-casual comfort over the retro fashions that once dominated Daddies audiences.

Whether these are longtime fans or just folks who know them from the swing-revival associations of "Zoot Suit Riot" doesn't matter much. The band's eclectic, idiosyncratic approach isn't about to mollycoddle the genre fanatics.

Though the octet isn't quite as tight and dynamic yet as it was in its hard-touring heyday, it still shows impressive chops in a series of stylistic jump cuts: bright reggae/rock (the new song "Blood Orange Sun") Cab Calloway meets T. Rex (the magnificent "Diamond Light Boogie"), brisk swing ("Swingin' With Tiger Woods"), manic ska ("Sockable Face Club), and on through adrenalized fox trot, Beatlesque psychedelia, jump blues, punk rock.

By the time "Zoot Suit Riot" and "Dr. Bones" come up at the end of the set, the fans (having forgotten their late-'90s Lindy Hop lessons, apparently) are inventing hilarious new dances that look like jitterbuggers on pesticides.

Forget about that brief time in the Top 40 sun, and the 15-year history of the Daddies always has been like this. It's all a little strange. And plenty fun.

Marty Hughley: 503-221-8383; martyhughley@news.oregonian.com.