THROUGH IMAGERY STEEPED in fast cars, flashy guitars and flaming licks, since the earliest days of the Stray Cats and later with his namesake Orchestra, Brian Setzer has blazed a trail of his own creation. It took a certain level of fearlessness to play rockabilly in the early Eighties, let alone have worldwide success. And it took an even greater level of courage to pivot to swing and jive in the Nineties, when grunge and Britpop, propped up by MTV, reigned supreme.
“I don’t know if it was fearlessness — or just me being stubborn,” Setzer says. “I’m stubborn enough to refuse to follow along with whatever is going on at the time. I’ve always been someone who needs to follow his own trail. Trends be damned — I can’t follow them. I have to do what I want. Rockabilly was ignored before the Stray Cats started, so I feel proud to hold up that crown. We brought it back in a big way and did it the way we wanted. We didn’t just cover songs from the Fifties; we wrote our own songs and came up with riffs that wouldn’t have been thought of in the Fifties. That’s my badge right there; I wear it proudly.”
