New
Morty Show on Its Way In the past few months, the New Morty Show has played to sold-out crowds at Bimbo's and have got
Las Vegas in a swivet, opening in the Empire Lounge at New York New York under a rotating, mirrored Big
Apple. The adult theme park would love to nail down the Mortys to a permanent contract. Okin and crew will
have nothing to do with that. Too restrictive. Besides, they're in the studio.
"We weren't even considering a label," says Morty. But Ralph Tashian of Riot Management saw the
band at the Fillmore Auditorium in October '96, and was, says Morty, "blown away. It was insane."
The record contract gives them a kind of permission to transcend their retro repertoire, one in which
the quirky verses and 4/4 rhythms of the '40s and '50s (particularly Louis Jourdan and the Timpani Five
and Louis Prima and Keely Smith) have been hallmarks of their work. "We really like the energy. Your
feet just start tappin'," Morty says. "If we're not having fun, what's the point?"
That's the thing about the Mortys. It's a very visual aggregation that puts out enough energy per
45-minute set to power up half the neon on the Vegas strip. The guitar player is a platinum blond and
pierced. The 'bone player (65-year-old Van Hughes, who has played with such greats as Duke Ellington)
looks like a riverboat gambler with his well-manicured mustache and crop of silver hair. Connie
Champagne, who has been seen in San Francisco in various incarnations (actress, punk diva, cabaret
singer, lounge act), is a fine contrast to the physical shenanigans of Vise Grip (aka Larry Castle), who
once owned a neighborhood hardware store and is now known to wipe his bald head, mid-set, with a
miniature squeegee.
Then there is Morty himself. With his hair poufed up into a five-inch pompadour, Okin was
probably born 50 years too late. Zoot suits suit him. As does a kind of Vegas mind-set. "Morty always
aspired to be a Vegas lounge act," says his friend and sometimes PR person, Tricia James. Morty
used to aspire. Now, his and the band's sights are a lot higher.
"We've recorded five songs already and I am just bowled over," says Champagne, who changed her
name legally from Kelly Gabriel several years ago. "It's getting trickier now," agrees Vise. "The
record company thinks we're off the wall. They call us the 'Swing B-52's.'"
Two years ago, when the band was a loosely organized conglomeration of several different bands,
including players from transsexual singer Veronika Klaus' band and St. Vitus Dance, they weren't very
good. Cute but no cigar. "We sucked," says Morty. "It was embarrassing. But we always thought we
would be a good live show."
With the addition 18 months ago of the energetic, gravel-voiced Vise pitted against the Kewpie-doll
cute of Champagne, the band suddenly jelled. But it was the Vegas gig for New York New York "that
really brought us together," says Vise Grip, 50.
The New Morty Show is definitely on its way. To one-nighters, Vegas stints, tours to back up album,
whatever it takes to become the hipster band for the millennium - sort of an atomic-powered Manhattan
Transfer with a twist.
"I'm the kind of person," says Champagne, "who knows what to expect out of the music business.
They don't call it a show art. It's show biz. Sure I'm tentative. But I try to stay focused
on the act and do my job well, write songs and sing them with Vise."
"I don't know how Morty had the insight, but he picked two characters to do his music and he
couldn't have done better," says Vise. "Connie and I are built for that material. She's the
singer. And I'm the acrobat."
And Morty Okin is smiling. Big time.
The San Francisco Examiner, 4/2/97
In the midst of San Francisco's swing band revolution sits a diminutive, 27-year-old Detroiter named
Neal Okin, aka Morty. The band he has gathered is a strange mixture of punk sensibilities, retro bop
and old-fashioned musicianship. And for their tenacity, originality and guts, "Morty" Okin and the New
Morty Show have been rewarded.
-Cynthia Robins
It's
Morty's World The New Morty Show, a jumping nine-piece combo that reprises '50s Las Vegas lounge styles, has become
the centerpiece of the hyperactive local swing set in the year or so the band has been in business.
At the group's regular performances at hot spots such as the Deluxe, Bimbo's, Cafe Du Nord or
Berkeley's Claremont Hotel, jitterbuggers in vintage clothes fill the dance floor while the young
band stomps through a songbook that wouldn't have been out of place 40 years ago at Wilbur Clark's
Desert Inn.
Oddly enough, the two lead vocalists got their musical feet wet in the San Francisco punk scene
in the early '80s - Grip, a hardware store owner moonlighting as lead vocalist of the punkers Hard
Attack, and Champagne, a suburban teen cruising into town to check the action at Broadway's Mabuhay
Gardens.
Onstage they make Okin, a classically trained trumpeter who cuts a somewhat comical figure at 5 foot
1 with a black pompadour and horn-rimmed glasses, the brunt of their jokes. Champagne, in her elegant
chanteuse mode, tosses off asides at the elfin Okin and at Grip, who does his Jimmy Druante-on-crack
thing and shoots more barbed one-liners at the beleaguered bandleader.
"I just put it together," Okin said, extracting a cigarette from a silver case and lighting it
with a Zippo. "Vise and Connie are such good front people, I don't know what the hell to do. I introduce
the band."
"It's Morty's World, and we all live in it," said Champagne, a veteran of the local cabaret circuit.
"This was Morty's dream. He put it together, came up with the charts. It's Morty's baby."
Okin is Detroit native whose father was a classical clarinetist who played in some big bands. Young
Okin concentrated on symphonic music until he hit college. He moved to San Francisco four years ago
with a band called the Psychedelic Lounge Cats and fell into the burgeoning swing scene, playing in the
horn section of St. Vitus Dance, one of the pioneering local jump-and-jive outfits, this one fronted
by Grip.
A year after Okin was dismissed from that band - "I was fired for not having an extension cord -
that's all I'll say about that" - he approached Grip, after St. Vitus itself broke up, about playing
Prima to Champagne's Smith in his new revue. Grip still occasionally appears with his own big
band, the Ambassadors of Swing, and Champagne keeps her hand in the alternative rock scene with her
group Ripple, but the pair most regularly work with the New Morty Show. They have also begun
contributing originals to the band's repertoire, such as Champagne's "Blue Martini."
Okin began to think about creating a Vegas-style show after running across an old album by bandleader
Ray Anthony. Champagne said she grew up on the music. Her grandmother once imitated Keely Smith in a
talent contest, and Champagne once met the deadpan grand dame of lounge singers.
The band's brassy, raucous sound has found favor not only with the youthful followers of fashion
who crowd the local swing shows, but with members of the rock community, including Kirk Hammett of
Metallica, who frequently attends gigs and hired the band in December to play his annual Christmas
party. Hammett even joined the band for a special swing version of the Metallica hit "Enter Sandman,"
cooked up especially for the occasion.
Although the music the New Morty Show plays isn't what is generally thought of as swing - the
domain of '40s big bands such as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey - the repertoire draws from
the postswing era styles of jump combos popular in the late '40s such as Prima's group, Louis Jordan
and other similar outfits that worked the middle ground between rhythm and blues and straightforward
pop in those pre-rock and roll years.
"People want to go out and hear good music," said Okin. "It's an elegance thing.
People are sick of grunge. You can go out and get an elegant evening with
great music. People are looking again for that kind of elegance."
The San Francisco Chronicle, 2/4/96
Although its performances revolve around the Louis Prima-Keely Smith impression fashioned by vocalists
Vise Grip and Connie Champagne, the hottest new swing band in town is actually named after its
diminutive leader and trumpet player, 25-year-old Morty Okin.
-Joel Selvin