Feature Article

Michael Andrew is an atavism. He is a throwback to an era when the scene was hot, the drinks were cool, and the people, even cooler. Doubt me? Well, just stop into The Coconut Club in Merv Griffin's Beverly Hilton any Saturday night between eight and eleven when Michael and his 10-piece band Swingerhead (now The Coconut Club Orchestra) are ruling the roost. Were it not for the absence of cigarette smoke, you'd swear you'd stepped right into a scene from a Ratpack movie replete with a Sinatra-like singer enticing the audience onto the dancefloor.

For Michael, entertaining an audience seems something he was destined to do ever since he was a take. "I just loved performing, but I didn't have any outlet. I grew up in the small town of Menomenee Falls, Wisconsin, where my father had a building company. My friends always wanted to do sports and normal kid stuff and I would always con them into being in shows that I'd write. My sister jokes that I would come upstairs when I was five or six years old and say, 'Okay, you have to buy your tickets from me.' and I'd put on a hat and be the ticket guy. Then I'd go downstairs and be the usher. Then I'd go backstage and be the announcer, then come out and do a one-man show."

Unlike some bands that cropped up during the recent swing resurgence, Swingerhead is much more accessible to the average Joe or Jane who hasn't spent 13 month in the studio perfecting swing steps. With a delightful repertoire that blurs the boundaries among swing, lounge, and Latin, Michael's tones go down as smoothly as a cold martini after a hard day's night. However, this stage master almost passed on the entertainment world. "When I went to college, I just assumed I'd go into business like my father. But I got invited to a theatre picnic in my sophomore year and met all these people who were like me. It was the first time in my life that people wanted to do the same things I wanted to do, so I started hanging out with them and eventually became a theatre major. I really didn't plan on being a singer and a bandleader. I loved this type of music, but I was a character actor. One thing I'd do was this Buddy Love-type lounge singer character, but it was more of an act than something I was taking seriously.

After college Michael developed a show for Carnival Cruise lines. "I'd play a nerd who ran around the ship wearing glasses with tape on them who had no idea he was a nerd. Them I'd go through this comedy routine with slapstick and the world's worst ventriloquist act and, finally, imitations. The first two were horrible, then I'd go into my Sinatra character and it would blow everybody away. It became Carnival's number one acts and they flew me all over."

Michael finally settled in Orlando performing gigs from playing Stan Laurel at Universal Studios Florida, to a steady singing assignment in Merv Griffin's Resort lounge. "There was no swing scene yet so it was a novelty act, but around 1993 an agent from the Rainbow Room in New York asked me to audition. He put me on for a ten-day trial and I was there for two years."

Michael eventually went back to Florida where he embarked upon another creative endeavor that combined his love of acting and singing. "A theatre director in Orlando wanted to do something with me. I told him my idea for an act called 'Mickey Swingerhead and the Earthgirls.' The story was that he comes to Earth from another time zone where swing is outlawed and he wants to get back to the '50s but he lands in the '90s. He challenged me to write it so I booked myself on a couple of world cruises and I took my laptop along and wrote the whole thing in India." The show got great reviews and Michael would love to mount a revival of it here on the west coast. "It was the biggest thrill of my life." He enthuses.

Once the swing scene finally exploded, Michael found himself very much in demand. In fact he's still migrating constantly between Florida and his regular Saturday gig in Los Angeles. However, that's only the tip of his creative iceberg. Recently he appeared in the upcoming MGM film Heartbreakerswith Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Gene Hackman, and Ray Liotta. "They watched a Sinatra-type singer with a band. When they were filming it, I was lip-synching to the tracks that I'd just produced a couple days before. All the extras came up to me during the breaks and said (sarcastically), 'Nice singing.' After a while I realized they didn't know it was my voice. At the end of the day they were doing close-ups and Maureen Crowe, the music supervisor, said, "Really sing full out because your Adam's apple has to move and look like you're really singing. So I did it and I noticed all the extras were looking at me differently. Later, they all came up to me and said with a different inflection, 'Nice singing."