A Stray Cat Struts Read online

We had an amazing show and blew the roof off the place. It was the early stages of the brief time when rockabilly became a mainstream style. It would soon be possible to buy bowling shirts and creepers in your local shopping mall. The Stray Cats and all the hard work we put into it are responsible for that pop culture moment. This is our lasting contribution to rockabilly music and style.

  After the show, I introduced everyone to Britt. After a little reluctance and the suspicion that this was one more short-lived wacky thing from Slim Jim, everybody became friendly.

  I went back and stayed in LA after the tour. The others went back to New York. We were constantly on the road and making records for the next couple of years. We recorded the next album, Rant and Rave, at Maison Rouge Studios just off Fulham Road in London. I stayed at Britt’s house on Billing Street and walked to the studio every day. Brian and Britt became pretty close; I was happy about that. It was important to me that everyone got along. My connection and relationship with Britt was then and is now genuine, not a rock-and-roll stunt, and has stood the test of time. Even when we split up, there was no animosity and no ugly legal action.

  When there was a long enough break in everyone’s schedule, Britt and I got married in 1984, on my birthday, March 21. We set up a tent in the backyard at Stone Canyon and had a few dozen friends and family in attendance. Glenn Palmer made me a pink tie and tails. Judge Ronald M. George, the judge who had just finished the Hillside Strangler case in LA, performed the ceremony. He told me that I was about to get a longer sentence. Lee and Brian stood in as my best men, Lou was there, too, and Nicholai was my newest, closest little buddy, and he stood next to me. Britt’s daughter, Victoria Sellers, acted as her maid of honor. I had three small rock star wants: a vintage Corvette, a saltwater tropical fish tank, and a pool table. I had all three at that house, where we lived for four years. People came over on most weekends, and there were always willing pool players. Then we bought and moved into our own house at the top of Doheny Drive, moving in the fish tank, pool table, Corvette, and Pepe the Spanish dog, where we spent seven solid years together, living between London and LA, having adventures along the way.

  Every now and again, we’d have a spontaneous urge to just do something. A few times while living in London, we’d get into the 1965 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III, drive to Paris, and check into the same little hotel. Sometimes we’d go out and other times just buy easy food from a local market and eat in the hotel room. We’d go to a classic celeb-driven place like Régine one night and the next night go see a rock-and-roll show at a place like Bains Douche. We were welcome at both types of clubs. Sunday or Monday, we’d drive back to London and resume whatever was going on there.

  Britt is Swedish and maintained close ties to her roots. We’d fly to Sweden every Christmas and during the crawfish season in the summertime. We’d split the time between staying in town with one of Britt’s brothers and her classic Swedish seaside country house in Dalarö. A real quaint town about an hour outside the city, it’s like the Hamptons for Stockholm. The house had been in her family for a very long time. She rescued it and bought it in the 1970s. I was very friendly with Britt’s three brothers, and they still come to all the shows I do in Stockholm. I was especially close with her brothers Carl and Bengt and their wives and children. We would visit with and go to shows by any number of friends when they played Stockholm and we were in town. A good in-the-know rock-and-roll secret is to go see a big band in a place that is not London, LA, or New York. The bands have room on their guest lists and are not so stressed out. The artists are usually happy to see a friendly face in a smaller setting.

  We saw and hung out with the Boss at the Grand Hotel and at a few of his shows at the original Olympic Park on the Born in the USA tour. He liked the Stray Cats and had once gotten onstage at a club in Jersey and played the encore with us. Through good buddy Nils Lofgren, we’ve been to a lot of Springsteen shows. As part of those shows, Bruce would bring out a girl from the audience and act out a little sketch during the song. On one of the shows, the Boss brought Britt out as his foil on the number. She is a die-hard Springsteen fan, and it was a good moment for her. He really is the Boss and does a special one-of-a-kind show. I had a carte blanche on the Tunnel of Love tour and saw five shows at the Sports Arena in LA, bringing a different friend as my plus-one every night.

  One memorable show from the Born in the USA tour was at the LA Coliseum. Britt and I were in a VIP-type area in an early version of a skybox before the show. The elevator opened, and out walked Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson. He was in his full 1984 regalia, sequined military jacket and big mirrored shades. She was definitely a movie star and carried a big presence. Even a backstage room full of jaded Hollywood types stopped, quieted down, and checked it out.

  I’m a big fan of both of these true stars. I may be in a minority, but I believe MJ was innocent of the charges against him. He was an odd character, for sure, but a really talented guy—maybe the best ever—and it seemed to me that he was a genuinely gentle soul, incapable of hurting anyone.

  Michael Jackson surveyed the room and walked straight up to me and said in his gentle whisper, “I really like that song you guys do about the cat.”

  I was speechless. I think I softly croaked out a “Thanks, man.”

  They did a lap of the room, stopping to chat a little with a few people, and then left again. I don’t think they stayed and watched the show. That was a good one.

  Back in Stockholm, we saw everyone from Prince to Def Leppard play at the Globe, a fantastic venue in Stockholm that everybody likes playing at.

  In 1988, we welcomed a son, my best pal ever, TJ. Britt was forty-five years old when TJ was born. She already had two kids, and I will forever appreciate her giving me a son. We continued to travel to London and Sweden, putting TJ in a cardboard crib behind our seats on the plane. The trick was to get the last two seats in the upstairs premium economy section on the TWA flight. TJ has a very strong connection to Sweden; he speaks Swedish and stays in touch with some of the gang he met there. We lived a type of gypsy, hand-to-mouth, jet-set life in a normalish way. We didn’t let not being wealthy stop us. The trick of actually earning and saving two cents is one of the hardest ones in showbiz. Life of any sort is an expensive thing to keep going. There is little financial security in both the rock-and-roll and the acting professions. We lived well but were always hustling up and juggling money. To this day, we all continue to be very close.

  So in just a few short months, I had gone from two girls and one place to live, to no girls and no place to live, to one girl with two places to live.

  6

  Our Day: The U.S. Festival

  The week of the 1983 U.S. Festival was one of the best we ever had. The whole machine was firing on all cylinders; we were riding a successful record and a justified conquest of America. We had achieved a status that I couldn’t have even dreamed of when we were hustling up gigs and playing around the clubs on Long Island just a few years earlier. We had set out to make a living by playing rockabilly music; my biggest goal was to have an apartment somewhere and to wear blue suede shoes to work and not have a hassle. Now, the mannequins in the front window of Macy’s had pompadours and were wearing bowling shirts. This was real rock star stuff, and I loved it.

  The U.S. Festival was, at the time, the biggest rock show ever. It took place over the Memorial Day weekend in May 1983 at Glen Helen Regional Park near Devore, San Bernardino, California, in an open-field venue with the world’s biggest temporary stage. The event cost $12 million to put on and was organized and paid for by Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple and a major music fan. The U.S. Festival, pronounced like the pronoun, was meant to be a reaction to what Steve thought about the 1970s, which he felt was the “me” generation. He wanted the shows to be more community oriented. One of the ideas behind the festival was to combine rock music and technology on a grand scale. The whole weekend drew 670,000 people, and when we were onstage at sundown on Saturday, Ma
y 28, there were over 300,000 people watching the show. All of these fun facts are 100 percent known to be true; I looked it up on Wikipedia because I couldn’t remember any of the actual hard facts about that legendary gig. I do remember very clearly a lot of the other personal details and other behind-the-scenes stuff from the day that we were on, though.

  I’m pretty sure that we were starting or already on some type of tour, maybe the West Coast leg of one. I was living in Stone Canyon, and the other guys were staying at the Westwood Marquis on Westwood Boulevard, the west-side version of the Sunset Marquis where a lot of other bands stayed, too. A car picked me up, stopped at the hotel to meet the guys, and then headed to the airport. The next thing I knew, we were in a helicopter flying over LA. I know it’s been said before, but the first time you are in a helicopter, it really does remind you of a Vietnam-type scene out of Apocalypse Now. I thought about the ending scene of the Stones’ film Gimme Shelter. It was all a bit surreal. After what seemed like a long trip, where no one really spoke but exchanged those “can you believe we’re here?” looks, we were in a chopper over a giant throng of people that seemed to stretch for miles. There was a line of cars and traffic for as far as we could see. It was another one of those moments when I was too excited to be afraid.

  We touched down amid a cloud of dust and were taken to a nice makeshift backstage—functional but not luxurious. Britt and Nicholai had driven and somehow were already there. I think the current girlfriends of the other guys were there, too. We all were very friendly. Britt, Nicholai, and I all had matching white-and-black cowboy suits with smiley pockets and velvet belt loops made by Glenn Palmer. I completed the whole modern-meets-classic Grand Ole Opry outfit with sterling silver, engraved boot caps, collar points, and belt buckle with a white Kentucky colonel tie. It really was an amazing suit. I’ve always believed that going to work in an ensemble like that is at least half the fun.

  I walked around the backstage, talked to everybody, and stood at the side of the stage and watched a few of the other groups that were on before us. I was always the hangout guy in my band and really dug the camaraderie with other bands and being into the whole moment. I watched the Divinyls, which featured Chrissy Amphlett—friend and future wife of true pal Charley Drayton—on vocals and the excellent guitarist Mark McEntee. They had the big hit and great pop song “I Touch Myself.” Mark and his wife, fashionista suprema Melanie Greensmith, founder of Wheels and Dollbaby clothing line and shops, are still friends today, and I see them whenever I’m in Australia or they’re in LA.

  I also watched INXS. Michael Hutchence was my good friend. He was a real front man and had a great voice, too. He really was that lanky lead singer who would swan into a room, trip over a chair, and make it look cool. We had the falling-down part in common. One of their first USA tours was as the opening act of a Cats tour, and we became and stayed friendly. Our paths crossed again when Phantom, Rocker & Slick returned the favor and were the opening act on an INXS tour after they had really cracked America, including a two-night stand at the Hollywood Palladium that has played such a big role in my rock-and-roll storytelling. The usual hijinks occurred when a couple of true party guys got together. We had a few good times together when he lived in Paris and the Cats’ tour stopped there with a night off before the show. It was in the later part of the 1980s, and I hadn’t crashed out of partying yet.

  I had a Swedish relative, Blaise Ruetersward, whom I was very close with at that time. He was Britt’s brother’s wife’s brother. He was a big male model in Paris, and he shared a flat with a bunch of beautiful people, including a model girlfriend of Michael’s. Blaise is a fantastic guy who turned up and lived with us for almost a year at Doheny Drive while he was nursing a recent heartbreak delivered by an American model in San Diego. I helped him get over it by drinking a thousand bottles of Corona beer with him and letting him beat me a thousand games in a row at Ping-Pong in the summer of 1986. At last check, he was thriving as a fashion photographer in Paris.

  Anyhow, I seem to remember something in a nightclub where Michael stood up on and fell off a table in a crowded place without spilling one drop of his drink. The next night at the Cats’ gig, he turned up wearing his silk pajamas and bathrobe. We cemented a real bond a few years later in London. Michael had publicly started a tabloid-fueled affair complete with custody issues with Paula Yates, the estranged wife of Live Aid founder Bob Geldof. Bob and Paula’s kids went to the same prep school in Battersea that TJ went to from 1994 to 1998.

  I think Sir Bob is an awesome guy and really truly did something great and important for the human race under the banner of rock and roll. He’s a fellow Irishman, too. He came to see the Cats play, and I saw the Boomtown Rats on their first USA tour when we were still kids. He was part of the gang at Dingwalls in the early days of my fondest memories of London in the early 1980s. I wish we had been on that Live Aid show. It was through his example that I became involved with African famine and debt-relief charitable causes. I can’t say how much I respect the guy and what he’s done. I bumped into him in the Kings Road right after his first trip to Africa and intently listened to his description of the horror he’d seen. I had met Paula when she was a journalist for Record Mirror and also when the Cats appeared on The Tube, a pop TV program she cohosted with Jools Holland. I liked everybody.

  So it was a little uncomfortable when I would go to the school to pick up TJ and both Bob and Michael would turn up to pick up Bob’s kids. There was hostility and bad vibes between them, and although I wasn’t all that close, I happened to be there and to know and be friendly with both of them. A few times, I cooled Michael out and we walked around the school’s gravel driveway, away from the tabloid photographers who were camped out there. The drummer guy with a slight talent for trying to make everybody get along came into play again.

  In 1997, Michael was in LA making a solo record. I was already seven years sober by then. I went to visit him in the studio a couple of times; he was in pretty bad shape the last night I saw him. He did a few songs at the Viper Room. I heard about and was shocked by what happened to him just a couple of days later. The rest of the sad story is easy enough to look up.

  My girlfriend at that time was Claudia Cummings, a former Alabama beauty queen. She was gorgeous and talented, too. It was one of the few times when I’ve ever seen a girl and just walked straight up to her cold without introduction and told her I would like to get to know her better. The scene was the old Hollywood Athletic Club, and Claudia was the attractive spokesmodel assistant on a billiards-themed game show. She racked the balls and smiled at the camera. My old buddy Tom Salter was one of the owners of the club and had invited me over to watch the pilot and be a face in the crowd for the TV show. Claudia was also a background singer in Jimmy Buffett’s band, and I used to go to the shows. His crowd and band thought I was the punk rocker from Mars. The audience was the stoned, drunk, and higher-paid professional meathead types with their ties around their heads, giving each other frat boy high fives every two minutes. Meanwhile, I was sober, the squarest guy in the room who had a babysitter watching TJ back at the ranch on Doheny Drive. One night at a gig in Orange County, they all had to stop, stare, and comment about my quite ordinary blue suede shoes. Despite that, I have positive memories about that time.

  But back to 1983, when that day at the U.S. Festival belonged to the Stray Cats. Looking back on some press clippings and reviews of the show confirms this. Time magazine gave a favorable review to everyone and the gig as a whole and singled out the Cats’ performance as the day’s best. I dug the early sets and wasn’t as nervous as I would be now. I was caught up in the moment and had total confidence in our band. Everything clicked for us on that set. I think that we were always the best live band on any bill, but that day stands out because of the strength of the lineup. These were all world-class acts. If you look at the day’s bill now, with the Divinyls, INXS, the English Beat, Flock of Seagulls, Men at Work, and the Clash, it becomes clear, though we didn�
��t really know it at the time, that the Stray Cats were also representing the USA in our own backyard. We had already played a lot of big shows but were very confident that particular day, as we had a hit in the USA and were household names at the moment. The timing of the day worked in our favor, too. We strutted onstage, me carrying a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, to a thunderous applause from an estimated three hundred thousand people in the daylight. During the show, the sun went down and the huge lighting rig was turned on for the first time. Seeing the film now, I am struck by how cool our little setup was. We had this huge stage around us and had, by then, learned how to work it. The core of our setup, the tiny drum kit and two amps, looked very classy and retro-revolutionary in the days of big drum kits, keyboard rigs, and amplifier stacks. We didn’t have to waste time convincing this crowd. We had a double platinum album under our belts. I think we opened with “Rumble in Brighton” and did “Runaway Boys” in the set. The audience sang all the words on “Stray Cat Strut,” and the call and response on “Rock This Town” was the biggest noise from an audience I’ve ever experienced. The footage of the gig was recently on TV, and the Cats’ performance really holds up; the look and the music are timeless. As the show went on and it got dark outside, the show had highs and lows to coincide with the change of atmosphere. Especially when it is very hot and crowded, you cannot overwork the crowd too early, but you need to keep the intensity level up and keep them focused and interested during the whole show. I see a perfectly played and paced show from three guys all under twenty-five. After having not seen it in a long time, I was impressed with the onstage maturity and, as always, quality of the playing. This was a wild show that ended with me jumping off the bass drum as Lee held and pounded the double bass over his head and Brian threw his prized Gretsch in the air and caught it on the downbeat as I hit the last cymbal crash. All the while, we were under control. It was wild abandonment, but it wasn’t frantic. We knew where we were at all times and were very comfortable up there. We had done it—this was the peak of the mountain we had told everyone we were going to climb. We had brought rockabilly music and style all the way back and beyond anywhere it had been before.