The Stray Cats were the Sha Na Na of the MTV era. A rockabilly nostalgia act, and like most nostalgia acts they offered up a tame version of the music produced by the folks they were paying tribute to—Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Wanda Jackson, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Burnette—and the list goes on. They carried the torch. But they forget to light the damn thing.
The Stray Cats hued to the original sound, but they were far too polite—the early rockabilly crowd was composed of berserkers, and the Stray Cats were more Apollonian than Dionysian. The early folks were out to burn the cornfield. The Stray Cats were out to pay their respects. They had sound and image down pat but they weren’t into arson.
They left that to rockabilly’s other modern day practitioners—bands like the Cramps, the Reverend Horton Heat, the Hillbilly Hellcats, Flat Duo Jets and Southern Culture on the Skids, to name just a few. Bands that injected their rockabilly with a healthy dose of run-amok dementia. Guitarist and vocalist Brian Setzer had the right haircut and he sure could play, and the same went for drummer Slim Jim Phantom and bassist Lee Rocker. But what I never heard from them was the barbaric yawp that made their models menaces to the social mores of their day. They weren’t dangerous—tribute bands never are.
I’m certainly not the first person to question the Stray Cats’ overly respectful and ultimately weak-kneed take on one of rock’s most primal genres. Rolling Stone’s David Fricke bandied about the word “spiritless,” while Robert Christgau went for the jugular, writing that Seltzer’s “mild vocals just ain’t rockabilly. You know how it is when white boys strive for authenticity—’57 V-8 my ass.” Later he would get even surlier, writing, “Brian Setzer is the snazziest guitarist to mine the style since James Burton. But he’s also a preening panderer, mythologizing his rockin’ ’50s with all the ignorant cynicism of a punk poser. He’s no singer, no actor, no master of persona. And if he can write songs he didn’t bother.” Ouch.