Tom Maxwell still talks about the time he turned on MTV and saw Daisy Fuentes trying on swimsuits to his song, the Squirrel Nut Zippers' "Hell."

And yet he somehow still thinks that's weird.

What he's overlooking is the fact that a calypso about damnation could even make it onto MTV.

But in the '90s, anything still was possible — and the Zippers proved that by selling more than a million copies of "Hot," an album recorded in a week.

"I hardly remember 1997," Maxwell said this week from North Carolina.

Long after people stopped cramming into swing dancing lessons, Maxwell and his Zippers pal, Ken Mosher, have hit the road again.

The Maxwell/Mosher Band will play Oktoberfest in Veterans Park on Oct. 6.

Now just inside their 40s, Maxwell and Mosher look back on their days in the Zippers like two guys who never understood what the fuss was about.

One day they were traveling around the South, playing what sounded like Oingo Boingo in 1930s Harlem, and the next — well, let Maxwell tell it.

"We were hit by lightning," he said. "All of a sudden, you're on stage in Birmingham and it's 50,000 people."

The swing revival was on, and the Zippers went from coast to coast sparking zoot suit riots.

Never mind they didn't play swing.

But there they were on Dick Clark's "New Year's Rockin' Eve." And that was their music in a Super Bowl commercial for Intel.

"I remember seeing the Gap commercial and it's all these beautiful people wind-milling," Maxwell recalled. "They played this Louis Prima song that Setzer covered, and it said, 'Khakis swing.'

"I said, 'That's it. It's over.'"

The Zippers got in a platinum album and a gold follow-up — 1998's "Perennial Favorites" — before the fad tanked.

"At the end of the day, we were a one-hit wonder," Maxwell confessed.

But what a hit, and what a time to be making music that was so defiantly retro.

Maxwell and Mosher, both of whom left the band in 1999, have continued on that path, only as songwriters for movies and television.

They scored "My Mummy," a yet-to-be released film that was shot locally in 2004 by New Carlisle native and Coen brothers storyboard artist J. Todd Anderson.

"It's in people's DNA," Maxwell said of the music. "People might have seen Warner Bros. cartoons or 'Tom and Jerry' as kids. It's such American music. It's not black or white. It's not rich or poor. They don't think, 'This is old.' "

The only problem, as Maxwell sees it, is that, "America tends to be amnesic.

"You go to Copenhagen and they hate you because you're American," he said. "Then they're showing you all these Louis Armstrong records they bought."

In 2004, given the number of movies and TV shows that have licensed Zippers' songs, the duo got into the publishing game themselves.

But if you live in Turkey, you knew that.

"Our re-recorded version of 'Hell' was used for a Rinso commercial in Turkey," Maxwell bragged. "We recently got a copy of this absolutely hallucinogenic advertisement for Turkish laundry detergent."