FOREVER '50s

Rockabilly’s top cat talks about beating tinnitus, resurrecting Dick Dale, why you’ll never catch him with a Strat, and why rockers can’t play the ’billy.

- HENRY YATES

THE YEARS MIGHT roll by, but in Brian Setzer's world, it's always the '50s. There's his quiff, still upstanding at 62. There's his rack of Gretsch antiquities, gleaming like the hubcaps of the hot rods parked on his driveway. And there are his lyrics, exploring a hinterland of diners, drive-ins, jukeboxes and switchblades. The kingpin of modern rockabilly can even use the term cat, without irony, and pull it off.

But the image of an artist preserved in aspic doesn't quite fit. Because while the twang is still the thang on the Stray Cats frontman's latest solo album, Gotta Have the Rumble (Surfdog Records), Setzer's arrangements and voicings also give the 'billy a decisive nudge onward. “When I take a whole а different genre and put it into my rockabilly world, ” he tell GP, “that's what lights me up the most.”

What's the significance of that album title, Gotta Have the Rumble?

Of course it's a reference to my motorcycles, which give me my peace and quiet, believe it or not. That's my meditation - I just hop on and ride. But then it became about the tinnitus I had going on and the bigger amps I had to use. So I thought, Well, Gotta Have the Rumble — that refers to both things.

How bad was the tinnitus?