Brian Setzer

Verbatim discussion with an EMI Records security guard:

'Who are you here to see?'

v 'Brian Setzer. Call publicity.'

'Seltzer? Brian Seltzer, we got nobody working here by that name.'

Brian Setzer the slight blond guitarist, who, with the Stray Cats, made rockabilly a happening genre in the early part of this decade, is eventually located. In the publicity department. And, considering that the sales of Stray Cats albums probably paid salaries here for years, he finds the whole tale amusing. And all too typical of the music business.

'It's amazing. Everybody knows who I am. If I walk into a gas station the guy pumping gas knows my name,' he shakes his blond pompadour and laughs. 'But when I walk into EMI, they call me BrianSeltzer.

'Some of these people just don't care about the music.'

He is not just talking about the security guard. 'This is the worst business. It's horrible. It's such a burn-out kind of a thing. I'm not complaining,' he adds quickly. 'I mean I don't work as hard as my dad. I'm not setting stone 40 stories up in the air. That's really hard, physical work, but there's so much stupid stuff. Like, unless your record is going through the roof, you can't afford to go out and tour. But vyhen you just sit around for two years, and you can't play live, you just bounce off the wall. I was busy, but it wasn't the kind of busy that I wanted to be. It wasn't performing music. It wasn't working up a sweat and getting ridiculous. It was awful.'

Brian wasn't sitting around cooling his heels through any fault of his own. Following his well-accepted solo debut, 1986's The Knife Feels Like Justice, he was ready to do another. Had the songs written and everything.Even recorded 'em all. Bad move.

The record company interceded. Though in fairness, we must point out that it was not intentional. They went (temporarily) belly up. A lack of hit records will do that to you. For our purposes, that meant Brian (and all the work he'd done on Live Nude Guitars) was left in limbo, waiting for the tide to come. Or something.

'Actually, Live Nude Guitars was ready to go last year. But my record company sort of folded. There are six people left here,' he says, glancing around the echoing office building. 'When my record was ready, they weren't ready for me. So that delayed me six to eight months. It was like a nightmare. Because in my mind, the ideal way to make a record is in three weeks.'

Live Nude Guitars took a whole, lot longer than 21 days. It u was recorded with three producers (Larson Paine, Chris Thomas and Eurythmic Dave Stewart), and several of the songs were laid down months after the bulk were finished. a This can also be blamed on the businessmen.

'It was really frustrating, because when they came back, it I was all new people, and they wanted new stuff. Larson is a | producer in his own right,' Setzer recalls with a surprising I lack of bitterness. 'But he is more like my buddy. I felt I .1 didn't need to pay a producer $10,000 a track for the rock and roll tracks on the album. I figured I could just do it. But for the two songs that I felt I needed a hand with, I called up Chris Thomas. I love his guitar sounds on the Pretenders' records.'

A Mighty Sailin' Man

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Theoretically, after Thomas's work was done, so was the record. But then those dudes-in the suits interfered. Setzer found himself back in the studio—which he really didn't mind—recording three new songs to replace the ones the execs didn't like. One of those was Brian's favorite tune. The price you gotta pay.

''Some songs were great, but they just don't fit in. I had so many rockers that I needed something a little different, so I had to drop some because of that. I fought tooth and nail for a song called 'Cross In Love' and it didn't make it on the album. It ended up on the B-side of the first single. But it's one of my faves.'

There was a trade-off. Though 'Cross In Love' was delegated to B-side purgatory, Setzer did get the opportunity to work with Dave Stewart. In theory the pairing sounds like it was destined to be an OK Corral style showdown between Mr. Electronics and the snotty no-frills kid. In practice,'it worked surprisingly well.

'I guess it is kind of strange,w reflects Setzer. 'We hit it off as friends first. I don't even know how I met him—I think I took him to get a tattoo. Music was the last thing we talked about. Because we had nothing in common, we had everything in common. I really liked working with him. He's an eccentric genius. 'Rockability' is my favorite song. It's really super modern, year 2000 rockabilly. Road Warrior rockabilly. Since rockabilly is my favorite music in the world, I wanted to do something to make that sort of music modern. It's all machines, except for my guitar. I couldn't tell the difference. It was a real drummer programming the machines, and Dave programmed the slap bass.

''I did have to be talked into it,' he admits. ''But Dave convinced me to try. I'll be damned though, if after he did it, it didn't sound great. It sounded fantastic.

And while it seems far-fetched coming from a man whose idea of going high-tech a few years back was adding keyboards, he's right. It sounds good.

People change over the years. Most people, however, don't have reminders of the segments of their life etched into their bodies in permanent, lurid pictures. Brian, however, does. If he ever gave up music, he might be able to give The Illustrated Man a run for his money. Setzer claims the tattoos that crowd his upper body are not the products of drunken whims.

'They're all from different parts of my life,' he insists.

'Each one is significant.'

Most significant, perhaps, is the one at his right arm's center—a vivid rendition of .the Stray Cats logo. It must have served as a daily irritant in the days when he and past partners Slim Jim Phantom and Lee Rocker were not the best of friends. Or even speaking. Those days are behind them, though.

During EMI's hiatus last year the Stray Cats got together and recorded a reunion record, Rock Therapy. Though the record didn't outsell Bon Jovi, Setzer predicts the public hasn't heard the last of the Stray Cats.

''There will probably be another Stray Cats record,' he theorizes. T miss playing that stuff, with a real slap bass. We were the best in the world at it. But I really felt nat I had to do my solo records. I'd like to do both.

''You know,' he says with a grin, 'I think that I've really infiltrated the fabric of America. I've gone to country bars in the middle of Missouri where they only play things like Conway Twitty. Real country. And yet there will be four Stray Cats songs on the jukebox, and the band plays 'Rock This Town' on the pedal steel. Every week. U2 can't say they've done that. I think I've really gotten into America, and everybody knows who I am. If nothing else ever happens, I've done that.'

Of course, he has done more than that. And even before he made Rock Therapy he wasn't just sitting around watching his tattoos fade while EMI righted itself. In fact, about 90% of the people in his adopted Los Angeles home would have given their souls to spend their summer vacations the way Setzer did. Brian made his large screen debut as his hero, T rockabilly star Eddie Cochran in La Bamba, but Setzer has noo fiancee asked me to do it. I wasn't trying to imitate him, gauze-filtered close-ups.

''I can't say I really enjoyed acting. I don't want to be a drug dealer or a gangster on next season's Miami Vice. But this was special, I'm an Eddie Cochran fanatic—'Nervous Breakdown' is on the album. For me to play Eddie ... I don't think that there's anybody else who could do it. Eddie's fiance asked me to do it. I wasn't trying to imitate him, because I wouldn't know how. There's no film of him, so I have no idea of how he moved or anything. But there was one point when I was onstage doing 'Summertime Blues' when I looked into the wings. And there's Marshall Crenshaw who looked just like Buddy Holly, and Howard Huntsberry looking just like Jackie Wilson. It was like being in the Brooklyn Paramount in 1958. It was like I was there.'

In some ways, it would have been easier if he had. In 1958 rock and roll was not yet run by the businessmen. Records existed primarily as promotional tie-ins for road tours, not the other way around as it is now. At presstime, Setzer planned to do a short tour with George Throrogood. A headlining club set was still up in the air. But even if that happens, Brian isn't just going to sit around. He has a plan, a future: he'll just ernuiate everybody's favorite Skipper, Alan Hale.

''Remember Alan Hale's restaurant in Hollywood? The Lobster Barrel? He had no qualms about it, 'Hey, I'm the Skipper.' Well, I could do it, 'Hey, I'm the Stray Cats. All of 'em.' There's kind of this joke, that I should be a crab claw cracker in a restaurant, and when people order crab claws I'll go around yelling at them, telling them they aren't doing it right. That's what I want to retire and do. I'd be really cranky about it, and crack everybody's claws the right way. I want to be an old cranky sort of guy.'

Make that old, cranky and downright weird. No wonder he lives in Los Angeles. ®