A Conversation with Brian Setzer – HuffPost 8.11.14

Mike Ragogna: Brian, let’s talk about your new album, Rockabilly Riot! All Original. It’s all original material and you start it off with the adrenalized “Let’s Shake.” Rockabilly’s really all about the shake, isn’t it?

Brian Setzer: Yeah! [laughs] To me, it seems like nervous energy, you know? It was invented by guys who were just getting back after the war and they were experimenting. Guys from the country were mixing up that kind of music with the blues, there were jazz players who were experimenting with it, it was kind of a mish-mash. It seems like a big ball of energy to me, I guess that’s what’s always attracted me to it.

MR: I’ve been following your music for decades, and my feeling is you discovered that junction point where rockabilly meets swing and dirty boogie.

BS: I saw that it would work because it’s all based on the blues. The blues is the great granddaddy of all this music. That’s where it all comes from. So to me, it was like, “Why wouldn’t it work?” Country, swing, jazz, rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll, it all comes from the blues, so why wouldn’t it work? It wasn’t like I was trying to mix baroque music in there with it. All that music came from the blues. If you like these kinds of music, you take these little pieces that you like and you throw it in. It’s like making a bowl of chili or something, to me. It’s personal taste. Some guys like a little more jazz in their rockabilly, some guys like a little more rock ‘n’ roll. That’s the way you play it. But I always knew that would all work because it was based on the blues.

MR: To me, that’s “Americana.” What’s interesting is that we’ve defined “Americana” as this mid-tempo, kind of rocking, organic-ish, Byrds-influenced music, but it seems like the name “Americana” should’ve been applied to the blues, jazz, gospel, and, of course, rockabilly, that are truly “American” forms of music that sprang from history and culture.

BS: I get what you’re saying, the Americana label is almost folk music, isn’t it?

MR: Yeah, exactly.

BS: Yeah, I’m kind of an anomaly there, I never really fit into anybody’s box. I don’t know how I got those Grammys because I am certain there’s not a rockabilly category. They just kind of squeezed between the cracks somehow.

MR: Yeah, I think you’re right on with that. Okay, so for Rockabilly Riot! All Original, did you sit down and write these songs for the album or were these songs collecting?

BS: You know, I’m a songwriter. I sit down and I write songs. Then I decide what it’s going to be. “Is this going to be a big band record? Should I write some charts behind it? Is this going to be music for other people?” Once I wrote that first song, which was “Vinyl Records”–inspired by my daughter who collects vinyl records now–I was kind of off and running. You need that little spark. It starts a fire. Once a spark starts, you kind of get rolling. After I wrote “Vinyl Records,” I wrote a couple more and I said, “This is a rockabilly record.” Then what you want to do is not repeat too much. You don’t want twelve songs with the same beat in the same key. After you’ve written two or three that might be similar, you want to change gears a little bit. That’s kind of how I look at making a record.

MR: I love how you musically referenced Johnny Horton. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that done before the way you set it up.

BS: [hums cadence] Yeah, it’s got that Johnny Horton “Battle Of New Orleans” beat, which is really a military drumbeat.

MR: “The Girl With The Blues In Her Eyes” is another off the beaten path song, too. I guess that speaks to your earlier point of having variety on your record.

BS: You know, I came up with that just sitting down. I played a D major chord, which any beginning guitar player can play, but instead of going to A or G, I went to D minor and went, “Oh, that’s different, I’ve never really heard that.” Then I went to the G and the G minor. It sounded really different, but it was a little Beatle-sounding to me, so I thought, “I’ve got to make that fit into the ‘billy side a little more.” I added Paul Franklin on pedal steel and my friend Mike Himelstein wrote the lyrics. He didn’t have that in the title, “The Girl With The Blues In Her Eyes.” It was in the lyrics and I went, “Oh no, Mike, that’s the title. You have to rewrite these lyrics because that’s perfect. That’s the title of the songs.”

MR: Pretty original.

BS: Yeah, I thought that was really kind of different. When you get a spark flying like that, it just starts to roll.

MR: Speaking of rolling, “Nothing Is A Sure Thing” going into “What’s Her Name?” going into “Calamity Jane” practically comes off as a little storyline.

BS: I never thought of it that way! It’s really hard to sequence a record, you know? I guess you could look at it that way.

MR: To me, it was like love sets you up for a fall with “Nothing Is A Sure Thing,” then in “What’s Her Name?” you’re looking for her, and then “Calamity Jane” seems to be the end game.

BS: [laughs] In “What’s Her Name?” I was trying to talk about a guy who really loves a girl and he pretends he’s forgotten about her but he hasn’t. He’s going to go out looking for “What’s Her Name.” For “Calamity Jane,” I was thinking of an old western saloon, really, with that bluegrass call.

MR: The images push the envelope, but musically, it’s all very rockabilly.

BS: It’s all based on rockabilly. It jumps off in different directions, but it’s definitely a rockabilly record.

MR: Let’s talk about the players on Rockabilly Riot! All Original. You have Kevin McKendree, Mark Winchester, Noah Levy… Was this a dream rockabilly band for you?

BS: They’re the best guys I could think of. Mark retired, he became a carpenter to raise his daughters. More power to him, I don’t know many guys who could really do that. He came out of the woodwork again down in Nashville. As he says, “I’m tired of playing for the tip jar.” He’s back to playing, so I said, “Mark, you’re in.” Kevin I’ve used before, he’s a rockabilly piano player. That’s his favorite. Jerry Lee Lewis is his idol, but he could also be Oscar Peterson. Then as far as a drummer, I’ve got a local guy. I just love Noah’s feel. It’s kind of swampy, it’s not rock. It’s hard to find a rockabilly drummer. You don’t want a guy that can’t swing, he’s got to be able to swing. Noah’s got that swampy feel I like. My joke is I think the only way you could make a better rockabilly record is if you got Elvis to sing it, because I’m no Elvis. But I think I hold up my end on the guitar.

MR: You do, sir! Brian, to me, you are one of the best guitar players out there. It isn’t you’re your rockabilly either. Look at The Knife Feels Like Justice, which is one of my favorite albums ever.

BS: Oh wow.

MR: I feel that you could’ve gone any musical direction you wanted. But that’s not what you wanted. Brian, do you know what made you follow–actually, create–your particular mélange of rockabilly-plus?

BS: That’s a good question. You’re right, I could’ve grown really long hair and bought a Les Paul and a Marshall and made a lot of money. [laughs] Let’s face it, rockabilly is not on the tip of everyone’s tongue. I’ve got to say, I think it chose me. My first memory of hearing rockabilly records were the ones that my dad brought back from the army. He was drafted like most men of that era and stationed in Korea. His unit had a lot of guys from the south. He didn’t talk about it too much, but he said, “I was stationed with these guys from the south, they were playing this music here and I like it.” He had a Carl Perkins record, a Johnny Cash record and an Elvis record. I said, “Wow, this Carl Perkins guy, wow! Johnny Cash, I’ve never heard of him! Jerry Lee Lewis?” Then when The Beatles came out, I heard them cover the Carl Perkins songs. The Stones did a Chuck Berry song and I went, “Oh!” You don’t want to like the same music your dad likes when you’re a kid, right? But my dad would come in whistling the song and I’d say, “How do you know this song? This is The Beatles! This is The Rolling Stones!” and he’d say, “No, it’s Johnny Cash, it’s Carl Perkins. I don’t know who these English guys are but this is Johnny Cash.” I guess that’s the first experience I had wit hit, at a very young age.”

MR: And that molded you to need to do this.

BS: I just always loved that sound and the simplicity. It paralleled the energy of punk rock except the guys really knew how to play. It just spoke to me. It’s kind of like asking a guy why he likes redheads over brunettes. You really can’t give a solid answer.

MR: When you think about that era, rockabilly does seem to infer the roots of punk, right?

BS: It really does. It parallels it. I’m telling you, our first Stray Cats gig in England, you could draw a line done the middle of the club, punks were on one side and rockabillies were on the other side and they were nudging each other, really elbowing each other like a, “piss off” kind of thing. We had drawn an equal crowd of punks and rockabillies, I’ll tell you that.

MR: Did you share the same vision of music as Slim Jim Phantom and Lee Rocker? Did you all love a similar kind of music?

BS: Well, the guys loved the music, whether they had heard it or not. I could tell you when I was playing in the corner bar with my brother on the drums, Slim Jim would come in and lean on a post. This was 1978 or ’77 and I saw a guy with a pompadour and a cowboy shirt and a pair of jeans and boots. I was saying, “Who’s this guy?” People had long hair and earth shoes on and here comes in this cowboy-looking guy with a fifties haircut. He looked like he stepped off an episode of Gunsmoke. He was just standing there with his legs crossed. One night, my brother didn’t show up, but he goes, “I’ve got my drum set in the car.” He was just waiting, you know?

MR: In those Stray Cats videos, you took on that visual perfectly. I think it happened at a time when new wave was trying to decide what it was–Euro-romantic, punky-pop, etc. So your take on new wave was unique. Do you think that added to why people liked The Stray Cats?

BS: Well, the purists hated it because my hair was too long and I didn’t have my jeans cuffed the proper length. You have that with all sorts of music–blues purists refusing anything past 1946 and so on. A lot of people didn’t like it but I think the reason it resonated and it became a hit was because A, we added something new to it, we wrote rockabilly songs–a lot of the rockabilly style is just the one, four, five blues format. We actually wrote songs. We looked cool, we mixed some genres, we threw some punk in there, we had big, crazy pompadours with lots of grease in them. It resonated with the eighties world. They didn’t care that it came from the fifties originally, we had somehow re-energized it. And I can’t say enough about Dave Edmunds making it sound brand new. We weren’t trying to sound like a fifties record, which a lot of the bands were. They wanted to sound just like a fifties record, we didn’t want that. We wanted to sound brand new. Dave Edmunds really was a big part of that for us.

MR: Speaking of production, you reunited with Peter Collins for Rockabilly Riot: All Original. What was it like getting back together with him and making a totally different album with him?

BS: He’s so good. He’s the old school of producers that want you to record direct, not overdub, no three takes. You go in there as a band and make a record. That’s how we did dirty boogie. There’s no splicing guitar solos together. If you make a mistake but the song has that magic, that track has that mistake left on it. Plus he’s such a nice, easygoing guy. It’s really a pleasure. He basically came out of retirement to make the record, he doesn’t make records anymore, he did it just because he wanted to make a great rockabilly record with me.

MR: Nice. You’ve released so much vinyl, CDs and swag through Surfdog. You have quite the love affair with this label, huh.

BS: Well, it’s my manager’s label. I think we moved after Vavoom! when I was on Interscope and all that stuff mattered. I don’t know if it matters anymore. I don’t even know if people buy records…I’m so old school. But I recall asking if we could leave the label because we just couldn’t take the interference about wanting a “hit” record. I wouldn’t know what a “hit” record was if you hit me over the head with a hammer. I don’t know what that is, I just write songs. It became really tough to try and make a record because they had us redoing song after song, mixing it with different styles and things. I think eventually, we just said, “Would you just let us go and let us make our own records?” That’s when Dave Kaplan, who owns Surfdog came in. He just lets me make a record.

MR: I brought it up earlier, but what are your thoughts about The Knife Feels Like Justice these days? I believe it was a really great record that somehow just slipped under the radar.

BS: Man, I think there’s some really good stuff on there. I think I probably sounded too much like what was going on at the time. I moved too far away from rockabilly. I probably should’ve stayed a little closer, but you know, it almost hit. Do you remember AOR and CHR?

MR: Oh yeah.

BS: A lot of people won’t. Album-Oriented Radio and Contemporary Hit Radio. I think it was number one AOR and it came that close to jumping and the record company, EMI, just kind of jumped ship. They said, “Ah, we’ve done all we could.” Looking back on it, musically, I like a lot of it. Some of it I think is kind of overdone, with the big eighties drum sounds. But there’s still some good songs on that record.

MR: Yeah, that title track is great pop-rock, and it had “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams” and “Radiation Ranch”…

BS: Oh yeah, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is a good one, isn’t it? [hums]

MR: Ya! I have to ask you my traditional question. What advice do you have for new artists?

BS: You just have to do what you want to do or you won’t be happy, I don’t think. Things come and go so quick, you have to do what you want to do. That’s the first thing. At the risk of sounding like an old guy, it really helps when you bear down on your instrument and learn how to read some music. It just connects the dots for you. I know most people don’t read music, but if you have the patience to try and learn a little bit of reading, you can really connect a lot of the dots. I find that players come to me and ask, “How do you do that? How did you think of that?” I say, “Well, look at it this way. It’s because I learned how to read and write music that those thoughts come into my head.” I think that’s the best advice I could give, really.

MR: It’s unfortunate that nowadays, music education programs in schools have had their budgets slashed or the departments have been completely eliminated.

BS: I know, I know. I’m so lucky, I remember besides band class, we would have music class where they would roll in an old cart with an organ on it and we’d learn “The Erie Canal” song and old American songs I sing today that these little old ladies put their time into. It means so much. I’ll sing an old American folk song or something and my daughters will look at me and go, “What’s that?” I’ll think, “That’s right, you guys don’t have that.” It really is a shame that it’s gone.

MR: I had a similar experience with the little old lady. Or school’s music teacher humped portable organ to every class.

BS: Yeah, God bless those little old ladies, right? I’d say, “I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal, fifteen miles on the Erie Canal,” and my daughters will say, “That’s cool, what is that?” You don’t know “The Erie Canal” song? They don’t! How could they? You’re not going to hear that on Pandora.

MR: [laughs] Is your family going to continue the Setzer music tradition or do they have other goals?

BS: I think the buck stops with me. [laughs] I think I’m the anomaly. My elder daughter is going to college, she’ll be interested in photography and things. The little one is interested in cooking and nutrition. Not just cooking food, but what goes in it. She’s got that thing going. My son is doing his own thing and it’s not musical. I kind of feel like what I’d like to do is just touch someone and say, “Here’s everything I’ve learned,” but it’s not that easy. Probably what I’ll wind up doing is giving some lessons one day, I don’t know if it’ll be over the internet or teaching classes. People have asked me to teach what they call a master class where I go and show people things. That’s probably where I’m going to be headed one day. I wish I could just touch someone who likes my playing on the shoulder and say, “Here’s all I’ve got,” and boom, they’ve got it.

MR: Passing the torch.

BS: Yeah, it would be kind of nice to teach a little bit of it, because people ask me a lot. But I’m not quite ready for it.

MR: Brian, the problem is going to be that nobody is doing what you do, so it’s going to be hard to reach your level of heart-meets-feel-meets-proficiency.

BS: [laughs] Well, I can’t describe what I do, it’s just what comes out. There’ll be more great guitarists coming. There are plenty of great players around. I like to think I’ve got my own style and when people hear me or hear the radio, they say, “Oh, that’s Brian Setzer.” That was always the goal.

MR: Hey, the last time I saw you, you were singing the national anthem at a Yankees game. Are you signed up to do that again?

BS: Oh my God, you saw that?

MR: [laughs] I was the one yelling “Brian!” and you pointed towards me..or at least that’s how I delusionally remember it.

BS: Oh, my gosh, I do recall that! See, one summer, I just got it under my craw that I wanted to sing the national anthem. I think I did it at about five or six stadiums. It was a hoot. They always let me bring my guitar on and I’d do my doo-wop version of the national anthem. I think it was kind of a passing thing. If they asked me again locally, I suppose I could do it.

MR: Come on, it’s time already!

BS: No, it’s not time for that yet. [laughs] I still have a lot of rockin’ left, I’ve still got touring, but I think the next thing will be teaching. I think I’d rather watch the baseball game.

MR: Okay, ’til then, we’ll have to just imagine a rockabilly national anthem.

BS: You’ve got it, my man.

MR: I was just about to ask you what you’re doing in the future. You sort of just covered it, but what else do you want to get done?

BS: I won’t know until it hits me over the head. I can’t say, “Well, my next record is going to be a bossanova record. It has to hit me, so I don’t know. In my spare time, I just do really dumb guy things. I love my dogs–I guess that’s not dumb. I like to go to ball games. I’m trying to keep sort of fit. I’ve got my daughters who are college age. In my spare time, I’m not going to fashion model events or unique parties or anything like that. I’ve never liked any of that kind of stuff, so I just kind of do what everybody else does.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne