A Stray Cat Struts Read online

  Brian Setzer is two years older than Lee and me. Now it means nothing, but when you’re fourteen and the other guy is sixteen, it’s a big deal. I always thought Brian was a cool guy. He was the first one I knew that had an earring and wore snakeskin boots. He had a Bowie record and could really play the guitar. He was well known in our school as the best guitar player but was also known for not sticking with anyone. He knew what he wanted and always had the dream to be a professional musician. Lee and I were in the same class and friends with Brian’s brother, who was an excellent drummer. We’ve all known each other since grade school. Brian and his brother had a band, and Lee and I had our band. We were the guys who were always looking for something musically different.

  This was 1979, and through the right research and quest for cool, we found rockabilly music and instantly fell in love with the sound and style. I started out finding out about rockabilly through some of the older English bands. The Beatles and Stones both covered classics by Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly. The Who had covered Eddie Cochran. A cousin of mine had a copy of Blind Faith, and I heard Buddy again on their version of “Well, All Right.” These types of records were easier to find than the originals. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t think these songs were just more album cuts by those huge bands. No one at FM rock stations pointed out that all the English groups had strong American roots and worshiped our original rock-and-roll stars. As much as we loved these 1970s rockers, they didn’t invent the blues. At a certain age, all musicians should want to get to the roots of the music they like. This was our time. WCBS 101.1 was the New York oldies station that played doo-wop and big hits from the 1950s, and I found myself tuning in a bit more. I was also listening to WRVR 105.5, a jazz station, and I’d try to see any of the original cats whenever they played at the Village Gate in the city or Sonny’s Place on Long Island. These guys were so good and their chops were so far beyond what I thought I could do that it helped me stay on the path, to look out for a type of sound and look that I could make my own. I’d also go into the city to see any type of new-wave band. There was virtually no place for anything like that on Long Island. Punk rock had kind of already come and gone. Even new-wave, skinny-tie, slightly left-field stuff was discouraged and ridiculed. Blondie, with one of my fave drummers, Clem Burke, had broken through, but the look had not. Elliot Easton from the Cars is a Massapequa native, had gone to our school, and moved to Boston after he graduated. He came to see us at Arthur’s Bar, and there was a little talk of him producing a demo. He’s still a good buddy and was another shred of proof that someone from our neighborhood could get out of town, make a record, and go on tour.

  The jukebox at Max’s Kansas City had some things I wasn’t aware of. It had the Ramones, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps “Be-Bop-a-Lula” and “Race with the Devil,” and Elvis Presley’s first few singles on Sun Records. I was ready to be exposed to this stuff. When I heard “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and saw some pictures of Elvis in his heyday as “the Hillbilly Cat,” the world stopped spinning for a split second, and I knew what to do.

  A couple of days later, I went to an alternative hair salon on St. Mark’s Place, cut off all my hair, and had it greased and sprayed into a pompadour style. The wisecracking, downtown hipster girl doing my hair told me, “It’s about time.” She was right. I walked across the street to Cheap Jacks and bought some baggy, pleated, gray sharkskin pants, pointy black shoes, and a black bowling shirt. I left the clothes I came in wearing on the floor of the changing room. I walked up to Penn Station, took the train home, and just turned back up at home and acted like nothing happened. There were, of course, the stares and disbelief from family and neighbors. Brian had adopted the rockabilly look a few months before and was playing by himself with a rhythm box in a few small bars. I started turning up, and we became a two-man gang.

  I encouraged Lee to get a double bass, and I started to experiment with different ways of setting up the drums. There were pictures of Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps where Dickie Harrell was standing up behind the drums. We thought this was supercool and unique. I took it one step further and moved the drums to the front of the stage and used only the basic pieces I needed to play rockabilly. Since then, I’ve seen pictures and heard about a few other people playing the drums standing up. At the time we formed the Cats, I didn’t know about of any of them besides Dickie Harrell. He would later tell that he only did it in photos. No one had ever moved the drums to the front of the stage and stood in a line with the rest of the band. I think I may have been the first guy to stand on top of them, too. We played a lot of gigs, and that gave me time to develop the stand-up style. We always encouraged each other to push it further and experiment with the showmanship onstage. Years later, in front of a bunch of name drummers, Tony Williams, maybe the best drummer ever, said that this change was my original contribution to the world of drums.

  We wanted to create a situation where we could play the music and look the part. We started to do a fun band called Brian and the Tomcats in a few bars in and around Massapequa. The established rock clubs on Long Island would not book us. It was too weird. It was still the 1970s on Long Island, and dinosaur rock and Southern-tinged, long-haired boogie was still the rage. We weren’t even punk rock. It was weirder even still. Three young kids with high hair and pink jackets, baggy pants, and two-tone shoes were not the norm. We learned and played Elvis, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Ricky Nelson, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins covers. Each of us was in our other “serious” band that we hoped to get record deals with. We got together to play rockabilly cover songs for fun on nights we weren’t rehearsing or playing with our other bands. The Cats had an instant chemistry, and it came across to the audience. The interaction onstage was good right away. There was an understanding of not getting in the way of the other guy. Everybody had the moves and knew when to pull them out. We really loved this music and felt comfortable with each other. We were still very young but had all had a good amount of experience doing gigs. We seemed to instinctively know how to pose for a photograph and really looked like we belonged together. Every great band has distinct personalities and slightly different looks but presents a united front to the outside world. Not every band translates into a bobblehead doll; I think the Cats always did. The three of us are certainly different people, and there have always been rubs, especially in later times, between the other two. Everyone has grown up a little, but each guy, me included, is basically the same person he was when we started this thing. It was a little fate and good luck that we had the pieces we needed right there in our school and that we met up under all the right circumstances. The history of rock and roll is full of these chance bits of kismet. I’m still grateful for the accident of where I grew up and who I grew up with. The luck of the draw was with us. Right away, there was a feeling that it would be us against the world. After a few months, the handwriting was on the wall. The Tomcats, our fun band, was the one everybody was coming to see, and we were packing out these little bars on Long Island in a scene we had created on our own. We started to do the Cats full-time.

  Since we were so young and made such a big impact on the rock-and-roll culture at the time, it’s impossible to step away from it. I never wanted to. I’m proudly the drummer from the Stray Cats and will happily have that as my epitaph. The others have tried to distance themselves more. After our initial success, I felt I didn’t have anything left to prove. The trick is to keep it going, which I know now is the hardest thing to do.

  Like Hyman Roth told Michael, “This is the business we’ve chosen.”

  2

  Escape from New York

  I had never been on an airplane before, but I wasn’t afraid. I was too excited to be afraid. We were getting out; we were going to London, the place where it all happened. We were never so sure of anything in our lives. I was nineteen. We’d sold our equipment except for the basic stuff that we’d need in London. We’d bought one-way plane tickets and had the tearful good-byes with
our families and small following of fans, none of whom wanted us to leave. One of the club owners said we were stabbing him in the back. We just wanted a shot. I’m not quite sure what we were expecting. We thought we knew everything; it turned out that we knew just enough to go all the way. We cut a striking figure boarding a plane with one-way tickets at JFK in 1980: three kids tooled up in rockabilly finery with a double bass in the seat next to us.

  Arriving at Heathrow before we knew the game turned out to be the first challenge. It came very close to being over before it even started. We all got in the same line for immigration. Fate intervened slightly, and Lee, carrying the bass, was told to go to a different line. Brian and I were called to the desk together. The woman didn’t like us right away. Luckily, dishonesty was the default defense mechanism. We told her we were on vacation; we weren’t in a band and had no intention of trying to play in England. The truth was that trying to get a gig and play there was the whole reason for coming. We couldn’t go back, so we pleaded and convinced her enough to where we were granted a thirty-day visa with a special notation in our passports that if we were found trying to work we would be deported with prejudice. Our first stamps were a special outlaw category, which fueled the whole us-against-them mind-set. We would cross paths with the same woman quite a few times over the next year while going back and forth to Europe. She always gave us a mean face and said she regretted ever letting us in the country. So we antagonized her any chance we got.

  We had an address. Someone who had come to a few gigs in New York told us if we were ever in London to look him up. This was all we had to go on; this was the whole plan. We somehow made it there. The subway and bus ride were unlike anything we’d ever seen. The address turned out to be a huge mansion in Kensington that had been taken over as a squat by punk rockers. The walls had been spray-painted and furniture taken out, probably stolen. Trash, bottles, and cans were strewn everywhere, and the floor and carpets were one big ashtray. The story was that it belonged to a drug kingpin who had been busted for smuggling and was in prison. After the shock and initial panic about what to do, we found some floor space, stashed the luggage and instruments in a closet that wasn’t being lived in, and set about the mission to become world-famous international rock stars. How to actually go about this was the part of the plan we hadn’t come up with yet. We were always supremely confident that if we ever got a chance, we could deliver. Where’s the gig? How do you get a gig?

  Back in New York, we had made our own scene. The established rock clubs wouldn’t hire us—American kids playing American rock and roll was too weird, too out there for New York in 1979. It was still very much all flares and long hair, Southern rock, and the American interpretation of the English interpretation of the original American blues. So we went around to neighborhood taverns—what we called old-man bars—that were usually owned and operated by the bartender. We would promise to bring the PA and to pack the place out—they’d keep the bar; we’d keep the door. We did this for over a year, four sets a night, five nights a week in a little circuit around the South Shore of Long Island: Tuesdays at Arrow’s in Bellmore; Wednesdays at the Fifth Amendment, a singles bar way out on the island; Thursdays at Arthur’s in Massapequa; Fridays and Saturday at TK’s Lounge in Amityville. We learned the craft at these gigs. We got dressed to the nines every night and played hard every set. We played a lot and loved every minute of it, discovering this great music as we went along. We had to do four sets a night, so we learned the greatest hits of Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson, Johnny Burnette, tracks from Elvis’s Sun Sessions, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and any song on any compilation we could find.

  We developed a good following, and it was genuinely different; no New York City hipsters, punk rockers, or even new wavers. Rockabillies had not been invented in the USA yet. Our gang consisted of just regular, slightly dirtbag Long Island types who loved us and came every night, rallying around the scene we had created. All we wanted to do was to play rockabilly music and be left alone. The term rockabilly had existed in the past in reference to the music but not as a lifestyle yet. The audience didn’t have a name for it. We loved dressing up and greasing our hair every day. We wound up being the local eccentrics who shocked everyone everywhere we went, and we embraced it. Every trip to 7-Eleven became a potential fight. There was no template for what we looked like. If we had been dressed like a classic rock 1970s front man with boas, sequined bell bottoms, and long hair or like a Southern rock hippie, it would’ve been all right; the Saturday Night Fever disco-boy look would have been pushing the envelope in our neighborhood but would’ve been accepted, but our look was totally foreign. They were all threatened by it, but our little following of people stuck with us. They liked following us around and protecting us. A few of them were pretty heavy kids into some shady stuff, a few carried guns, and they all carried drugs. They had discovered us and built their own schedules, love lives, and dealing around our shows.

  Brian had a tiny flat in a house on the canal near my parents’ place. I moved in with him. We played almost every night, slept until noon, had late breakfast at the luncheonette, went to thrift stores, listened to records, and were generally happy. We were making a living as musicians.

  There was still a certain restlessness and the deep knowledge that we had to get out. If we wanted to get this thing as big as we instinctively knew it should be, we had to travel. There was the once-a-month gig in the city with the hope of a journalist or record company big shot being in the club, but it wasn’t happening fast enough for us. A few of the English weekly rock papers had found their way to the USA, and we saw pictures of a music scene, punk rockers on the Kings Road, and concert reviews. We met a few English people in New York who knew about teddy boys and told us that Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran were household names in England. That was all we needed to hear. Within a couple of months, we sold whatever we had and bought one-way tickets for London. That was it; that was the whole plan—let’s go to London; it’s cool there.

  We found out a couple of places to go and hang out, trying to make the scene, meet anyone who could help find a gig. We heard about a gig in Camden, which was supposed to be a happening area, by a band called Cockney Rejects in a place called the Electric Ballroom. The whole thing sounded very appealing, so we got tooled up in drape coats, drainpipes, bootlace ties, creepers, and half a tin of Nu-Nile full regalia and hit the subway. The club was a classic old ballroom converted into a venue. The band was a loud, raucous thing, and the crowd was more interested in slam dancing than anything else. This was all new; we’d seen people be into gigs before, but not on this scale. In New York City, even the punk rock gigs were a bit more subdued and not as big as the thousand kids at this one. Standing at the bar, no one really took much notice of us. In an instant, it all turned bad. A full-scale riot spilled out from the main room into the bar: pint glasses flying, a rush of bodies swept us aside, punches and kicks rained all around. We found ourselves crouched behind the bar. I picked up a bottle to use as a weapon if anyone came behind the bar. It was mayhem. I looked up to see a German shepherd attack dog attached to a leash that was attached to a policewoman. She had a look of combined pity and annoyance. “You Teds had better get out of here,” she said. She didn’t have to say it twice. It wasn’t directed at us this time, but it was our first taste of a whole new, slightly violent world where people take the bands and the gigs and the fashion to a very serious level.

  We found ourselves walking down Camden High Street. We passed by a few skinheads spray-painting a bum in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Luckily, they didn’t see us. I didn’t understand the tribal aspect of musical tastes yet. I hadn’t met enough people who went all in with their style; I still thought it was anyone with a haircut against the squares. Even against this backdrop, the Cats were about to get a lot of attention.

  We quickly ran out of money. A couple of weeks, a few gigs, a few adventures, including a night or three sleeping in Hyde
Park on borrowed chaise longues, sharing bites out of a burger from Wimpy’s in Piccadilly Circus. A few nights of pure sleep on the floor was cheap at fifty pence a man for twenty-four hours in a XXX theater in Soho, and that was that. No one wanted to leave, to go home with our tails between our legs. It was getting grim, but we never lost the confidence that we were just one shot away.

  A few people at the squat were loosely connected with the music biz. Like most big cities, once you’re there for even a short while, with a little investigation, you realize that each particular scene is pretty small, and everybody knows everybody. Someone told us about a PR person he knew who represented some famous rock bands. I didn’t even know what a PR person was, and the idea of anyone actually knowing the Stones and the Who was beyond my conception. I got the address and one afternoon made my own way to Soho and rang the bell. The buzzer rang, and I went up the stairs. It looked like a little apartment. There was a very beautiful girl at a desk in the living room.

  “May I help you?” she asked in an accent. I had never met a girl who looked like that before, I had never been in any office before, I had never answered a girl with an accent before.

  “Who’s the boss?” I say in my right-off-the-boat Long Island accent.

  “He’s not here. What do you want?”

  This type of dialogue went back and forth for a while. She had probably met a hundred guys in bands who thought they were cool, yet I’m sure I had some snappy response. I really didn’t know what I was doing there or what I wanted; I really wanted someone to help me. Another woman came in. She was about four feet tall with bright red hair and had a French accent right out of a movie.