Interview from : http://singermagazine.com
Rockabilly
Revial
By Greg Tutwilerr
Early in the ’80s, a band called the Stray Cats was tearing up the singles charts in the UK. The three-man band had revived a music genre’ that had all but settled into the cheap seats in the back of the has-been music closet.
This style, known as “rockabilly,” had sizzled up and down the AM dial in the ’50s giving birth to modern rock before succumbing to its own offspring like a rural highway in the shadow of a major interstate. All that changed, however, when guitarist-songwriter Brian Setzer and crew came to America with the single “Rock This Town.”
well, actually….
Setzer was not really a Brit. He was born in New York City in 1959. At eight, he began playing the euphonium, an experience that sparked dreams of one day leading a big band. As a teen, he’d hop the train into the city and hang around jazz clubs. One night, at a performance by the Mel Lewis Orchestra, Brian got the idea of leading his own band—but not as a sax, clarinet, or euphonium player, but as a guitarist.
Influenced by the late ’70s and early ’80s punk movement, and blues-rock groups such as Led Zeppelin, he set out to live his dream. In 1979, he formed the Tom Cats, a rockabilly cover band, with his brother Gary on the drums, and friend Bob Beecher on bass. Although it only lasted about a year, it was the spark he needed.
With school buddies Slim Jim Phantom (Jim McDonnell) and Leon Drucker, (better known as Lee Rocker), he formed the Stray Cats. Sensing that Europe might be a better initial audience, they headed for the UK. After a gig at the Venue in London, a backstage encounter with famed producer Dave Edmunds lead to a record deal with Arista. They recorded their first album in just five days in October 1980. Their first single, “Runaway Boys,” set the stage for their return to America and a string of hits including “Stray Cat Strut,” “Rumble in Brighton,” and “Rock This Town.”
With their bad-boy look and their simple, yet contagious music, the Stray Cats established themselves as one of the eighties’ most memorable groups and revived a style of music that had been out of the mainstream for twentyfive years.
Time passes….
Fast-forward another quarter century to a moment in Setzer’s living room, with Brian standing by his McIntosh stereo system complete with turntable (for playing vinyl records). “I was blasting some of my old Sun records when my son, with five of his buddies, came running into the room saying, ‘What kind of music is this? ‘This is great, what is it?’ I told them, ‘This is rockabilly music from the ’50s, and they said, ‘This is so cool! How come we don’t hear this anywhere?’ I told them that you’re just not going to hear this kind of music now. And that kind of inspired me to say, you know, I’m going to make a record that sounds just like this.” And that’s what the three-time Grammy winner set out to do.
Years after legends like Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley huddled in that little garage studio in Memphis (Sun Records), Setzer embarked on a mission to re-create, as close to the original sound as possible, more than twenty of his favorite rockabilly classics and underground hits from that era. He did it by renting old microphones, amps, guitars, and anything else that might have been used back then.
But the best part was perusing through all that music to find just the right songs for the record. “It was a blast,” Brian said. “I had a stack of vinyl and I got to use my turntable. I just cranked it up and played records all day. And when I heard songs that I liked, I just checked them off. I had original Sun 45s, I had reissues by the Bear Family, and I had CDs with different outtakes, I had a little bit of everything. It was my personal collection and that of friends who are record collectors. We had a lot of weird one-off kind of stuff like Peroxide Blonde; I had never heard of that before. You know, stuff that’s been really hidden down there in the vaults. In the end, I just picked the ones that I liked the best. I went through hundreds of songs. You could make whole records full of Carl Perkins alone, you know? Of course I picked some of the real well know songs like “Blue Suede Shoes,” I had to do that, but I also wanted to get deep into the catalog and pick some songs that I’m sure no one has heard.”
what you won’t do
Using authentic methods during the recording process ensured that Setzer would be able to capture much of that unique sound. And it’s evident in this new CD, Rockabilly Riot Vol. I: A Tribute To Sun Records, released this past July on Surf Dog Records. “The instrumentation in those days was always a four-piece band,” Brian told me, “not a three-piece like the Stray Cats (guitar, bass, and drums) or most rockabilly bands that you see. It was always an electric guitar, stand-up bass, which was all that they had. And they started slapping it, which really gave it that unique sound of the Sun sessions. And they had drums, and they always had either an acoustic guitar, or a piano backing up the track. I found that interesting because in the modern-day rockabilly, you never hear a piano or acoustic guitar. So it was key to adding that to the sound. Once I found the right players, who I basically already had, it was a matter of getting the sound right so that we could all play in the same room like they did in the ’50s. Today of course, everyone is in separate rooms, or not even there at the same time. But back then they did it all at one time. And it was about getting a balance of instrument volumes in the same room. So when I did this album, all of us were in the same room. And of course you capture that unique sound as well as the energy between the musicians. It really makes a difference.”
When they needed some echo in the production process Brian recalled, “I said, ‘We’re not going to use any digital reverb here now are we? Come on, we gotta carry this through.’ So there was this old water tank that had been used to water down horses during the Civil War. It’s been sitting there (behind the studio) for a hundred years or more. The tape-op said if it’s dry we could probably drop a microphone down in there and use that for the echo. So someone got brave enough to crawl down in that thing and hang a microphone in there,” he laughed, “and that became the echo.”
Brian also was careful not to get so wrapped up in the re-creation of the sound that it all ended up sounding the same. “We changed the microphone on the vocals, changed a couple guitars, all to keep the sound a little different on every song.”
Voices From The Past
Every song has its own history to it. Every musician has his or her own story to tell. “And when those guys came down there to the studio they each had little stories,” Brian said. “I remember saying it would be nice to have some background vocals, to make it sound even more like the original, and one of the guys in the studio offered to call up Ray Price from the Jordanairs. ‘What?’ So we called him up and he was right there ready to work with us. For crying out loud, he sang on the original “Hound Dog.” He came down and brought two of the other original guys. They came in and sang all the background vocals for us. That was really cool.”
“When I was looking through the songs originally, there were so many out takes, I had to get back to the first one. There are so many versions, and of course record collectors want each one, so I wanted to find the song that the artist wanted out there, not another version. There was a lot of work in that,” Brian said. One cut on the CD is really a lost gem. As Setzer was sifting through the Sun Record catalog he stumbled across a catchy tune called “Peroxide Blonde in a Bopped Up Model Ford,” by Jumpin’ Gene Simmons. The song however, due to a damaged master, faded in at the chorus, missing at least an additional verse of the song. With no luck turning up the complete song, Brian went looking for Simmons instead, and found him in Mississippi, near the Alabama line. Jumpin’ Gene tried to remember the lines to the song but “I couldn’t get back to that place I was when I was 18 years old,” he said. So he encouraged Brian to ink out his idea of the missing verses. When it was time to record the updated version Setzer invited Simmons in to sing the background vocals.
Sequel?
“I had so much fun doing this that I called it Part 1,” he said. “You know, I wanted to leave the door open, leave myself a loophole in case I wanted to do another one. There’s so much stuff out there that I could easily do another one. Rockabilly has a special chemistry about it. It’s got that receipt, you know, it was good, it was the roots of rock and roll. The lyrics and the music are just infectious. There’s just this spark. And the combination of the slap bass, the drums and that twangy guitar, it’s just right.”
Is the time right for another rockabilly revival? “That’s what I’m trying to do with this record, to give it a boost. The sound is huge in Germany right now, and out west here in the US. It’s not in any kind of commercial state and it’s not going to compete with mainstream pop. But there’s always an undercurrent of appreciation, kind of like the Blues. It’s kind of like the least known American music. Rockabilly seems to be like the unwelcome cousin to all the other American music genres. But it definitely has a following.” Rockabilly Riot Vol. I may be the boost it needs. Brian Setzer and his quartet plan to tour in support of the CD in the summer of 2006.