Brian Setzer Quotes

• "A lot of people put all that stuff on a pedestal, and they won't touch it. But I don't think that's the reason they did that. I think they played that stuff out of pure joy."
• "All the guys that I wanted to use lived in Nashville. I really wanted to use all the old gear with the tubes, microphones, old guitar and amplifiers. Even the bass had gut strings, and the drums had calfskin heads."
• "As a genre, rockabilly's post-Elvis profile has seldom been lower in the United States. Many labels that produced fresh bass-slappin' sides during the '90's are now out of business."
• "Bill Black only played on the A and the D strings. He never used the bottom E or the low G-always in the middle there."
• "Don't be afraid to take liberties with this music. Try and put some of yourself into it."
• "Elvis is not so difficult as Johnny Cash because his voice is so distinctive. If you try to copy Johnny Cash, it's just going to sound dumb."
• "For every rockabilly festival staged here, there are 10 held overseas."
• "George Harrison... I'll tell you, he was really a rockabilly Cat! I mean, he really was! He loved it. Carl Perkins, Eddie, Gene Vincent, that was the stuff he really liked. He was very dry, very British. It's such a shame he's gone."
• "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 can't tell you how many people have asked me to show them Stray Cat Strut and that little diminished run on the C. I guess my brain is wired backwards. I don't know what possessed me to do that, but I did."
• "I didn't know I was going to be part of the swing revival. I just wound up on that wave. It was something I've always wanted to try and all of a sudden these bands were popping up-Royal Crown Revue, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. I was lumped in with that."
• "I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through."
• "I mean, what 16-year-old is going to listen to Doc Watson?"
• "I put a metronome up to all the songs, and I tried to really keep it true to the original tempos."
• "I thought it would be cool to take flat-picking and put it in overdrive. I thought it would bend the ear."
• "I wanted to go back to Sun. Unfortunately, most of the gear is gone from Sun. The way I take it now, it's almost like a tourist destination. So, it would have been pretty difficult to have brought all the gear into Sun to make it like it was in the '50's."
• "I'm beginning to get the impression that I'll always be able to make a living! As a musician, you're always scampering... always hoping that you'll be able to keep working."
• "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've reached a point in my life where they just want me to write things I want to write, and they don't bother me!"
• "It is hard to play Blue Suede Shoes. I know everyone has heard it 10 million times, and that makes it even harder to play it, but there's a very laid back tempo on that. I was surprised at how slow it really was."
• "It's not about how loud you turn the amp up. That's not what makes it sound big. What makes it sound big is fooling around with different delays and reverb settings."
• "It's really funny, I think to myself... I've got my same guitar and amp, it's just a bigger room now! Some things don't change."
• "Mark Winchester has left the band. He's decided that he's tired of the road and just wants to concentrate on his career in Nashville. I don't blame him at all. He'll certainly be missed."
• "McCartney! Haven't met him and haven't played with him. I would LOVE to. He needs to make a kick-ass rockabilly record."
• "My D'Angelico is a jazz archtop guitar. That guitar was made for Glenn Miller's guitar player in 1939. It's a '39 D'Angelico New Yorker."
• "Normally, you go into the recording studio, make a record and then take it on the road and you think... wow... I could have done THIS to it, or something."
• "People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys."
• "Since the big band started I'm just always swamped with movies and things. It certainly pays the bills and it's very satisfying, because I get to write all these big charts and all this crazy music."
• "The biggest challenge for me was Get Rhythm. I don't know why."
• "The jazz chord substitutions in a country song... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of."
• "The new material is rockabilly... maybe a little darker side of rockabilly this time... some bluesy sounding stuff, almost pre-rockabilly."
• "The songwriting has never really stepped forward from the '50's."
• "They always want me for soundtracks and TV commercials. I just did something for Miller Beer. I'm really lucky."
• "They wanted me to ACT! I told them, no, no, no... I don't act!"
• "Those drum parts were so integral to that original rockabilly. People don't play that anymore. A lot of those original drum fills were kept."
• "To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box."
• "Veteran performers are dying off, and new acts simply aren't emerging on the national scene."
• "We had a little punk edge to us-we were full of piss and vinegar."
• "We weren't afraid to mix some crazy styles into the standard rockabilly look. We also took a lot of different musical influences that were part of that era."
• "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."
• "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'."
• "Young people do love this music. It's timeless. But, where are they going to hear it?"