Lee Rocker - Racin' TheDevil

Mon 4th Sep, 2006 in Music Reviews

The resurgence of rockabilly in the ‘80s had a lot to do with one band: The Stray Cats. One of the key components of their sound was the happy slappin’, hard driving upright bass playing of one, Mr. Lee Rocker. Today, Lee is still on the highways and stages of bars and clubs and festivals around the world, making his donation to the world of rockin’ roots music. With the release of Racin’ The Devil this year, we are handed a nice slice of American roots music to blast out the windows as we cruise down the highway. Lee caught up with me from his home in California to talk about the road, the Cat’s and the heart and soul of his music and the world of music today.

Sounding laid back and happy on a late California summer day, Lee told me that his music is all about creativity and reality. “It is an accumulation of what I write and what my influences are. The one thing I never set out to do, even with the Stray Cats, and since then with my own records, is to present something that is like out of a museum. I don’t want the music to be dusted off and played like it was in   1956. I mean there are bands that do that, I personally think it is a silly thing to do. It has the threads that tie it back to where it came from like the upright bass and the twang on the guitar, but beyond that you can go anywhere with it”, said Lee.

Racin’ The Devil is definitely not anachronistic. Lee has compiled some of his best material here and these ain’t no re-treads. The performances by his band of compadres are fabulous and tight.  Lee is joined by Jimmy Sage on drums and Brophy Dale and Buzz Campbell on guitars.  “Jimmy and I have been playing together for about 10 years and Brophy has been with me for 8 or 9 years. The new guy is Buzz Campbell from San Diego. He had a band called Hot Rod Lincoln that I produced 10-15 years ago, and when it came time to add a new guitar player, I was real familiar with his playing. This is the best band I have had in god knows how long man, these guys are just on it man”, said Lee

With great up-tempo numbers like the instrumental ‘Swing This’ and the blistering ‘Rockin Harder’, you can hear the muscular and intuitive playing. But this is not simply a twang and bang session. Lee has written some bluesy, country styled songs such as ‘Lost On The Highway’, ‘The River Runs’ and a bit of a homage to living in  the U.S.A. with ’Texarkana to Panama City’. Some of the songs came from the road and some just came to him through the year. Lee said, “I spent about a year making the record. It was a kind of on and off process. I kept sort of coming back to it and it gave me some good perspective I think. I have done records where I have set aside 4-6 weeks to get it done. This one I kind of lingered and agonized over and I am glad I put that time in. Some ideas have been hanging around for years, and some songs sort of wrote themselves.”

Lee was influenced by many types of music growing up in the leafy ‘burbs of Long Island, just a half hour or so from New York City. The Beatles, Stones, Dylan and others were just a few of the artists that captured his attention. But there was something that sparked him and his mates Slim Jim Phantom and Brian Setzer when they were just kittens. “The music that really hit me, when I was about 13 or 14 years old, was when I discovered Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, the original rockers.This kind of changed everything for me. This music was not really known to the kids of my generation, it was like discovering some sort of secret music. Disco was all around and it was the enemy back then. There was nothing real going on. When I discovered rockabilly stuff, this was like 3 or 4 players with real instruments, and it was all about the playing and the attitude and the energy.”

From there Lee, Brian and Jim formed the Stray Cats and the rest is rock and roll history, as they say. With Dave Edmunds guiding them through their first studio foray and classics like ‘Stray Cat Strut’, ‘Rumble In Brighton’ and ‘Built For Speed’, their place in rockabilly was sealed. Lee even re-visits ‘Rock This Town’ on this new release. “I had no intention of doing ‘Rock This Town’, but I was playing with that riff and the drum beat and the feel on the bass and just having some fun and there was no song there, and then I started singing the chorus and I felt like we were onto something here.It’s a matter of doing something fresh and different”, Rocker said.

Since those days, Lee has put out some blues and rock tinged records, and kept slapping that upright bass with some of his idols. Not too long ago he was able to tour with Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley’s right hand man on those classic early rock records. Lee spoke, “We wound up doing about 40 shows across America. Scotty is one of my idols and I love his guitar playing. Getting to play with him was unreal. Those records were what got me into this music and getting to play with him was amazing. Scotty and Jimi Hendrix are probably the two most influential guitar players in the last 50 years in a way. The amount of other players that he has left an impact on is unbelievable.”

Lee has been on the road like crazy this year, having done over a hundred shows and is looking forward to a return to Australia. The band should be primed and ready to rock. Lee sounded particularly geared up about the brief tour here and rockabilly in general when he said, “On the road I see great things as far as rockabilly goes. I am seeing all sort of new faces out there. It is in the underground, but that is one of the things that is cool about it. There are a lot of bands out there playing and doing their own take on it. The whole thing with any kind of music is to put your own stamp on it and your own originality. It has to be real.”

Racin’ The Devil is out now on Alligator records and Lee brings his bass and the boys down to Australia for only a few performances at the Great Southern Blues and Rockabilly Festival in Narooma (29th of  September through the 1st of October) and one show down at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne. Don’t blink, you might miss him!