Isaac Babcock
The Voice

Down a back alley around a corner of burnt red brick walls, a peppy staccato drumbeat creeps out into the atmosphere of a warm Friday night, pulling curious passers-by toward a dizzy underworld that perished nearly a century ago.

The gravity grows stronger as the music gets louder. About 9 p.m. a skinny kid in black wingtip shoes can't resist any longer. He checks his gold pocketwatch at the darkened doorway and steps into a room full of half-dressy misfits who wrap him up and spin him through the dancing days of prohibition's seedy past.

"Once you start doing this, it's hard to stop," said Tom Carroll, barely out of his teens and dressed in a striped polo, chinos and Chuck Taylors and standing at the door to another world. Outside it's just another hot night at the University of Central Florida. Inside, Swing Knights are partying like it's 1929.

Blasting out through MP3s and digital amplifiers, jazz-infused bongo beats and massive brass bands drunk on mint juleps and high on the rush of America's longest running underground soiree tear a musical swath through the night, luring eager revelers into dance-fueled delirium on a well-worn glossy floor.
This is swing dancing's golden era, stuck on repeat — and minus the gin.

If you haven't heard of America's first love affair with countercultural subversion, check Benny Goodman on Wikipedia. Booze got banned, but gangsters and music kept the party going. Peppy beats, tooting horns and thick strung upright bass set a young generation to a jitterbugging rhythm as America got a taste of a hedonistic good life before the Great Depression stole it all away.

Fast forward about 65 years and everything old is new again. Obscure bands such as The Cherry Poppin' Daddies, The Brian Setzer Orchestra and The Big Bad Voodoo Band leapt from the woodwork in the mid-1990's, hit the charts and fired up a swing dance resurrection, prying it from the shadows and into the limelight. Comatose for decades, swing suddenly hit the big time somewhere between Nirvana and the Spice Girls.

"It's always been there," longtime swinger Hurley Francois said. "But when the revival happened, it was like a catapult."

Swing suddenly found a new fan club, just as America's wallets swelled and the spirit of the 20s roared back to life. The fervor that drove the resurrection as far as the big screen in "Swingers" and hit dance clubs in every corner of America sizzled for half a decade. 

That's when Kim Ranachowski, a pretty twentysomething in short brown hair, tight blue T-shirt and bluer jeans, got started.

"I always wanted to do this," she said. "When I first went out there, I said 'I don't know how.' It didn't matter. That first night, I was hooked."

Ten years later, she still is, twirling across a dance floor as her feet skip twice to every twist of her hips moving in and out of a spot-lit circle on the floor. That kind of passion flits around the room with all the fire of a 300-beat-per-minute Lindy Hop.

The swing era is still alive in Orlando, and its heart beats inside the UCF Swing Knights. The growing club has taken an eccentric affinity for all the good things to come from the days when Al Capone ruled the speakeasies, and keeps the dance floor warm until the early morning.

Inside the walls of Education Complex room 174, austere white tile ceilings and mirrored walls house a backroom countercultural epicenter turned 80 years forward in time. The wood floor still lets chromed shoes jump and jive, and the music is as upbeat and infectious as it was days before Wall Street came crashing down.

Unlike most dance movements, swing found itself in two heydays that rose and fell with the American psyche. But the second time around, swing hit the scene with a new set of problems.

Something was missing from the swing revival of the modern ear, wrapped in irony and served with a dose of cold reality. The dance craze fueled by alcohol's shadowed prohibitionist past found its resurrection fueled by cleaner-living people. They kept the style and steps, but lost the sauce. The booze didn't flow on swing nights, the money didn't come, and dance club playlists slowly dumped the swing and filled back up on pop and hip-hop. With few clubs left to keep the movement on life support, swing all but hit the skids.

But there are a scant few places where that choked fire still smolders. Here on the Swing Knights' Wednesday and Friday night dances, where the lessons are free and open to anybody in the mood to try, you can still hop to your heart's content. And the best still do.

On that constantly vibrating floor, two pairs of bouncing feet wrapped in matching white sneakers bounce back and forth in perfect synchronous as "Sing Sing Sing" builds to a frenzy and threatens to envelop the room. Two dancers, each wearing the same loose camel khakis and white Ts, mirror each other in fast kicking double-time rhythm, readying for a frenzy to come.

Suddenly he's grasping her hands and flinging her airborne in an impromptu acrobatic ballet that sends her feet into orbit toward the ceiling. Time moves slowly for just a moment before she touches down. Back on planet Earth, she steps back in time like she'd never left the ground.

Suede wingtips of a few zoot-suited wallflowers tap out a beat 90 years old but still just as hip within this place. It's a time machine, cleverly hidden behind a gray steel door and rumbling with the subversive countercultural rhythm that first went worldwide when Josephine Baker started doing the Charleston on the silver screen.

The crowd may swell or wane on a weekly basis, but the regulars seemingly never slip off their dancing shoes.

Five years ago Francois, in his trademark newsboy cap, was spinning around on this same dance floor, shaking out a jittery, mesmerizing Charleston that would eventually win him a national title — and he won't tell you about that unless you ask. He's just here for the dancing, and for him that never stops. "He's here every week," Carroll said. "We've got a lot of regulars who never miss a dance."

And outside these walls, they're spreading the gospel of swing wherever somebody will listen and shake it.

These are kids who'll do anything to make it work. They'll set up a dance with a guest list of 10 and hopefully, often successfully, magnetize another 50 curious newbies to the floor. They'll race into a Top 40 club in downtown Orlando and start swinging to Hip Hop, dropping a "Lindy Bomb," turning any floor into their own personal ballroom with curiously familiar dance moves, and hoping the DJ catches on and spins what rare swing music he can find.

Funny thing: It's working. The misfit swing kids have successfully turned some of the downtown clubs into swing clubs, if only for a few moments until the big band music runs dry or the energy stalls. The confused bystanders who get curious enough often find themselves taking the ride back to UCF the next Friday night. And they're packing the dance hall.

"This is actually a slow night," Carroll said, looking over his shoulder and into a room of constantly moving bodies nearing 100 strong. A rival dance in Tampa stole away half the crowd for a special engagement. "On any other Friday night there might be 200 people in here."

But even if there were only 10, these swingers don't seem to care. As long as the music is playing, the dancing never dies.

"It becomes about love," Carroll said. "I'll be doing this for a lifetime."