Stray Cat Blues

I'm taking a momentary break from politics to write about popular music here.  This blog post is actually an expansion on comments I made about one of my recent Music Videos Of the Week.

I usually complain about how bad popular music was in the 1980s and how it's mostly been worse since then, but I should concede that there was some good music here and there in the '80s and there were occasional times where a promising musical trend would emerge.  But, because this was the 1980s, such a trend would fizzle out almost as soon as it got going.

One such trend was the rockabilly revival of the early part of the decade.  American rock and rollers emerging from the punk revolt rediscovered rockabilly, a form of music that had faded since the death of Eddie Cochran - one of the form's biggest stars - in a car crash in England in 1960.  The new rockabilly acts were fueled by a punk-style attitude and with the opportunity to bring a fresh approach to the music.  And no rockabilly-revival band was more visible in the trend than the Stray Cats.  

The Stray Cats - guitarist/vocalist Brian Setzer, bassist Leon Drucker, known as Lee Rocker, and drummer James McDonnell, known as Slim Jim Phantom - were a rockabilly trio from Long Island that started out playing clubs in the New York City area but had to move to Great Britain, where rockabilly never died out, to make it big.  They quickly developed a reputation there, attracting members of the Who and Led Zeppelin to their shows.  Rocker later told an interviewer when he knew they were making a name for themselves - when, after a gig, they were backstage and a stagehand came up to them and told the Cats that the Rolling Stones were there to meet them.

Pretty high praise, no?  The Rolling Stones, of course, had brought back the blues in the sixties, and here were the Stray Cats, three Americans in London, who had the potential to make rockabilly cool again.  They certainly looked the part, with their pompadours and their manner of dress.

The 1980s began with the unlikeliest of bands, Queen, paving the way for the Stray Cats to bring it all back home with their uncharacteristic number-one rockabilly hit "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" in America.  Whatever you think of Queen overall, that song demonstrated that the form could still find an audience in the country where it had originated a quarter century earlier - and Queen had made it sound fresh and contemporary as well. As a new act, the Stray Cats didn't so much leap into the American pop scene as they tiptoed in.  Their first American LP release, Built For Speed, was a hybrid of their first two LPs released in Britain.  Two singles from the American album were released - "Stray Cat Strut" and "Rock This Town" - and despite heavy airplay of the promotional videos for them on MTV, the records didn't get anywhere.  Until they did.

"Stray Cat Strut" was the group's signature song, containing obvious self-references and borrowing from the blues tradition of using animal and insect metaphors for sexual boasts.  (If you're thinking of Slim Harpo's "I'm a King Bee," you're on the right track.)  Although "Rock This Town" was the follow-up single, it hit the Billboard Top Ten first, while "Stray Cat Strut," which had been released as the trio's initial single in their homeland, had failed to get into the Billboard Hot 100 chart (peaking at number 109 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart in August 1982).  When "Rock This Town", made the Top Ten, the Stray Cats' record company decided to re-release "Stray Cat Strut" - this time with much more success. Debuting at number 43, it was the highest new entry on the Hot 100 chart dated December 25, 1982, eventually peaking at number 3 in March 1983.

Suddenly, the Stray Cats were superstars.  They were the toast of the pop charts and spurred a renewed interest in rockabilly, which Brian Setzer promoted in interviews with rock journalists with evangelical fervor.  "It's the most menacing music," he said of rockabilly.  "Heavy metal is kid's stuff compared to it."   In the absence of an eighties equivalent to the Beatles (talk about a contradiction in terms), the Stray Cats - whose name recalled the Rolling Stones' "Stray Cat Blues" - were seen by some as the Rolling Stones of the 1980s for bringing back rockabilly the way the Stones had brought back the blues.  

It was an illusion, of course.  While the Stones had in fact been part of a burgeoning British blues scene that included Alexis Korner, John Mayall, Manfred Mann, and the Yardbirds, complemented by white performers in America such as Paul Butterfield, Michael Bloomfield, Al Kooper and Stephen Stills, the Stray Cats were part of a rockabilly-revival movement in the States that never quite found its footing and never really involved a great deal of artists.  Robert Gordon was probably the best known rockabilly revivalist after the Cats. Also, too many rock critics were highly skeptical of the Stray Cats, finding more style than substance in their sound.  Mulu Halasa dismissed them as poseurs whose success was as attributable to the New Romantic craze in Britain - a quasi-musical craze that emphasized image more than music (think Duran Duran) - as it was to their rockabilly stylings, saying that their songs "could have been written in 1956 but, unfortunately for us, have been saved until now."  (And truth be told, Robert Gordon didn't get much support from the press either.  "Gordon would like to be a rockabilly revivalist," wrote Dave Marsh, "but since he understands none of the nuances of the genre, he is finally hopeless.")

As far as criticism of the Stray Cats was concerned, Halasa, Jimmy Guterman and others hit upon their Achilles heel - they brought nothing new to the sound of rockabilly and had little understanding of the Scotch-Irish rural Southern culture that produced it.  To be fair, the Stray Cats, as white ethnics from the urban Northeast, did bring a meatier sound to rockabilly and brought out more of its menace but were unable to go much farther beyond that.  They didn't do much to draw out anything contemporary from rockabilly the way that the British blues boom produced a fresh sound in the form of the Stones' or John Mayall's records.  In other words, they couldn't make a subgenre of rock and roll from 1956 sound new and fresh in 1983.

That year, the Stray Cats released Rant 'n' Rave With the Stray Cats, their third album and their first LP to appear in the U.S. exactly as it did in the U.K.  It was a flop.  And anyone who heard any of the three singles from it - especially the confused, sexist and messy "(She's) Sexy and 17," Rant 'n' Rave's only bona fide hit - could understand why.  The other two singles were  incredibly inane.  "I Won't Stand In Your Way" was a doo-wop ballad that reminded people why they didn't like doo-wop, and it inevitably featured none of Setzer's needling, edgy guitar style (one of the Cats' strengths).  But "Look At That Cadillac," a song celebrating GM's luxury brand, was even more egregiously dumb.  The Stray Cats' audience was primarily the Generation X kids in high school at the time, not their Silent Generation parents who listened to Elvis Presley in their teen years, and while a Cadillac - many of which Elvis himself gave away - may be been the car to want to have in the fifties, no one in 1983 would have called Cadillacs hip - especially when more luxury-car enthusiasts were looking more toward Mercedes-Benz and BMW. The Stray Cats sounded less interested in being culturally relevant in 1983 than they were interested in rolling back popular culture to 1956 just as the Reagan Administration was trying to turn back the clock to the 1950s on everything else.

So, in the end, the rockabilly revival craze was destined to be just that - a craze - and the Stray Cats, alone in profiting from that craze, seemed to disappear as quickly as they'd arrived.  They broke up in 1984, in fact, but they regrouped a couple of years later and have been intermittently active ever since, even as the world has passed not only rockabilly by but all rock.

The Stray Cats, in retrospect, made their mark on pop - you might even say they marked their territory - and, to be fair, Brian Setzer has made some strong music in his solo endeavors with and without his orchestra, but the Cats' lack of lasting impact shows that bringing back a dormant musical genre involves more than getting the sound right, and that no matter how good you are at replicating the music of the fifties, eventually you're going to have to make it relevant for your own time (as Queen did) or you'll become the musical equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg - true to the history but still inauthentic.

Not the cat's meow.