I'm not God's gift to rockabilly. There's great players out there, and some of them deserve a lot more than they've gotten.
I didn't realize how many true Rockabilly fans there were here in America.
I was raised on Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly and discovered the Stray Cats when I was 11 or 12 years old.
Elvis Presley's Sun stuff - there's an album out in England with just about all those sides on it - you know, the sound of that upright bass slapping away: that's what I like to listen to. That and Richard Pryor, that is.
God bless the boys from Memphis, blue suede shoes, and Elvis.
When I first wanted to play guitar it was because I had seen Brian Setzer. He's so good! I mean I was just blown away.
You had to pick something like Blue Suede Shoes because it's the flagship of the Sun label, but then I wanted to dig down and find something like Rakin' and Scrapin'.
I never thought I would be recording on any professional level, so to be doing a rockabilly, Motown, pop soundtrack in a L.A. studio was completely bizarre and amazing.
Everybody told me that if I insisted on doing rockabilly music, I'd never have a chance of selling any records. In fact, I lost count of how many people told me to ditch it all together, in favour, I guess, of sounding like everybody else.
That rockabilly sound wasn't as simple as I thought it was.
I called it Rockabilly 'cause I was rocking the strums, which you're not supposed to do.
If you went to school in Nashville, you were aware of all those '60s rockabilly people.
With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.
I like the Rockabilly look. My background is half Italian, half French. I wear cowboy boots and jeans.
I gleaned different style ideas over the years. In Southern California, there is a big rockabilly sub-culture. So when I would go to car shows, I would see women dressed like this. I had a teacher in high school that always had her Bette Paige bangs.
For every rockabilly festival staged here, there are 10 held overseas.
I basically sat down for a month, with all the Sun stuff I could find and just picked out my favorites. I didn't think that they were indicative of '54 to '57, although I tried to stay within that period.
To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.
You have to remember: I grew up in the 1950s, the era of cowboy movies and rock 'n' roll.
I didn't say I wasn't gonna do rockabilly. I just said I ain't gonna sing no song that ain't a country song. I won't be known as anything but a country singer.
I had a big time punk-rock phase and psychobilly phase. I used to go mad for the Guana Batz.
I fell in love with '50s hot-rod, pinup-girl culture.
I thought what I was good at doing was playing real simple guitar licks, since I'd cut my teeth on what Duane Eddy was doing; licks that were simple but had staying power.
