![]() They were around for the first time.” His father, a construction worker, wasn’t musical but he did like Hank Williams his mother was an Elvis fan. “I got pictures of my dad with the big, baggy suit and the James Dean, and my mom with the big hoop skirt. True, his mother and father, now in their forties, had known the Fifties firsthand. Because whenever rock seems played out and ready for pasture, rockabilly is always there to remind a new generation of the music’s still-marvelous possibilities.īrian Setzer might be said to have taken up the torch from the Beatles. Clearwater Revival tended the flame in the Sixties such revivalists as Robert Gordon, the Cramps and England’s Matchbox appeared in the Seventies and as recently as 1980, the British art-rock group Queen scored a hit with a stripped-down rockabilly cop titled “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” Now, the jitterbug ethos is twitching again. But its legacy of power, pose and rock-cat style was never completely extinguished. Rockabilly was gone before it ever really had a chance to go anywhere. But by decade’s end, the music had virtually disappeared, withered by death and personal disasters and commercially minded career detours. It was then propagated by such fiery evangels as Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, the crippled Gene Vincent and the Burnette brothers, Johnny and Dorsey. It’s a brief enough tale: rockabilly was born in 1954, in the Sun Studios of Memphis, where Elvis Presley and guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black invented the rocking hillbilly blues. He’s certainly caught up on all the old news, though. ![]() “I missed all this the first time around,” he says with a sigh. Plopped on a sofa with a jug of Gatorade, a wall full of gold and silver Stray Cats records rising behind him, Setzer, with his piled-up pompadour, his gaudily tattooed arms, his Fifties memorabilia, seems the out-of-time incarnation of some dim, dead passion. Gene Vincent’s glory days were over by 1959, and Elvis Presley was still in the army. He is twenty-three, which is to say he was born in 1959 - the year Buddy Holly died, the year before Eddie Cochran released his last single, “Three Steps to Heaven,” and then cashed in his chips in a London taxi crackup. ![]() And Setzer is the least aged object in it. There are two tiny amps, assorted posters and souvenirs, stacks of Archie comics and Fifties hot-rod magazines. ![]() A Gibson banjo and a recently acquired Hawaiian slide guitar attest to his expanding musical interests. A small collection of vintage guitars - including the ancient hollow-body Gretsch that is his main stage instrument - stands along one wall. Upstairs, in the music room, are more treasures. Atop a modestly stocked cabinet of records - Vincent, Holly, Frankie Lymon - leans a lone photo of Setzer himself, yukking it up with Keith Richards. But Setzer has imposed his own style in no uncertain terms - here a pinball machine, there a gum-ball dispenser, everywhere rare, framed photographs of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent. The house is typical rent-a-pad: tan carpeting, burgundy drapes, undistinguished furniture. “You know: ‘What’re we gonna do about that guy?’ ” He laughs, but not meanly, at the thought of shaking up the straights. “I know they’re havin’ meetings,” Setzer says in his cheery New York honk, indicating the unseen neighbors. It is late afternoon in suburban Massapequa when Setzer stops the music, the silence that suddenly gathers over the trim lawns and neat, lookalike town houses nearby seems a mute reproach. As he ducks out of the gleaming black-and-yellow bomb, one notes the dancing letters on the back of his black leather jacket, which spell out REAL WILD CAT. Setzer is huddled in the back seat, fiddling with some minute decorative detail. Where the din grows loudest, there’s a driveway in it is parked a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air. Lacking Setzer’s exact address, one might as easily locate him by homing in on the ferocious backbeat booming out from his recently acquired town house. The town is about an hour’s drive east from Manhattan and down into the suburban clutter of Long Island’s South Shore. Brian Setzer, the Stray Cats’ singer and guitarist, has returned to his roots in Massapequa, New York.
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