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 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.
I didn't realize how many true Rockabilly fans there were here in America.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
If you went to school in Nashville, you were aware of all those '60s rockabilly people.
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.
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 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.
You have to remember: I grew up in the 1950s, the era of cowboy movies and rock 'n' roll.
To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.
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.
