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Century-Fox has picked it up for Julia are golf, skiing and racketball.“Mr. T — the Bodyguard.”Stray Cats are stalking the 1950sFrom Page B14being from the U.S., because people saw us as the real thing. In the States, we couldn’t get anybody to come look at us. The record companies certainly wouldn’t come out to a Long Island corner bar to hear us. In England, the record companies saw us and started chasing us around.”The band’s first British album, “Stray Cats,” was produced by veteran rocker Dave Edmunds, who came to see the band and wound up offering them his services. “He told us that he wanted to produce us before somebody that didn’t know what they were doing did,” Setzer said. The band’s second album, “Gonna Ball,” was produced by the Cats themselves; the next Cats project will again find Edmunds at the helm.Right now, however, the Cats are still riding the crest of success with “Built for Speed,” their first U.S. release. A mix of songs from their first two British albums plus some new material, the record is No. 2 in the Top 10; a single from the album, “Rock This Town,” recently nosed its way into the Top 30.“We were surprised at the success of the album,” acknowledged Setzer, who writes most of the band’s songs, “becauseit didn’t get any airplay at all at first except on college radio stations and cable TV. Oh, yeah, it’s getting lots of airplay now, but for a long time, we got no help at all from the major stations. I’m glad that we’re making it, but I don’t feel like it was an overnight thing. We put a lot of work into it.”While Setzer, along with the rest of theStray Cats, played in pop bands during the 1970s, he maintains the three are no Johnnys-come-lately to roots rock and rockabilly.“This isn’t an image, it’s a way of life,” he said of the trio’s greased pompadours and their penchant for ’50s-style shirts, pleated pants, black leather jackets and copious tattoos (some look real, some don’t). “I’ve been greasing up since I was 15. I’ve always played rockabilly. I just played in a pop band to get me into the Manhattan clubs.“I’m a rocker, you know. I never liked long hair and beards; so I dressed the way I felt comfortable. In the beginning, people stared at me like I was from Mars, but I didn’t care. I was a loner. Where I grew up, on Long Island, there was nobody into rockabilly but me. The other kids in my neighborhood didn’t even know who Eddie Cochran was. I never couldunderstand it.”Setzer’s early musical influences consisted of approximately six record albums. His father, a construction worker, liked Hank Williams; his mother, a housewife, was an Elvis fan. “I listened to my father’s Hank Williams records and my mother’s Elvis records,” he said. “When I was a little kid, I wanted the first Beatles album, for some reason, and I had a Creedence Clearwater Revival record and one by a kind of doo-wop group, the Diamonds, that had a hit called ‘Little Darling.’“I was into being a guitar player first, rather than a singer. I saw the Beatles on TV and thought they all played guitars; so I wanted to play guitar, too. I tried to copy the Beatles’ Chuck Berry licks. You know, the Beatles covered Chuck Berry’s music and I covered their music.4 -yH#“Then, when I was about 14 or 15,1 saw that Eddie Cochran double album, the black and white one on the Legendary Master series. There was a picture of him on the front all decked out in a suit and a pompadour. I knew right away that was how I wanted to look. That was who I wanted to be. And his songs ... I mean, I could never identify with ’70s bands like Genesis and Yes.iversion of ‘Peter Pan’
Newspaper Details
Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph
Colorado Springs, Colorado, US
Sat, Dec 18, 1982
Page 37
Full Page
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USA 12 Mar 2019
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