Okay, okay, okay. So you've got a curl to your lip and a wiggle to your hip; so you've chucked the Les Paul and the Marshall stack and you're shopping around for Gretsches, Teles and pre-CBS Fender amps; you've traded in all your Deep Purple and Zep Lp's for half a dozen Sun re-issues and Creedence's Cosmo's Factory; and you've gooed up your long tresses with Dippity Doo and piled 'em up on top of your head into a gravity-defying pompadour. The symptoms are clear, dearie: you've got rockabilly fever, more than likely brought on by repeated contact with the contagious music of the Rockabilly Rebel, one Brian Setzer. Warning: there is no known cure, and the only relief comes with continued dosages of jumping jive.

Which is what Brian and the other Stray Cats have been offering on both sides of the Atlantic for over five years now. Already a number of their tunes have achieved classic status: "Stray Cat Strut," "Runaway Boys," "Sexy & 17." And with the recently announced breakup of the band, their relatively small but powerful musical output is certain to gain even broader recognition in retrospect, as more and more groups fuel the roots revival the Cats helped spark. What was the secret behind the Stray Cats' success with rockabilly, a style that half-a-dozen years ago seemed safely forgotten?

"I think it's just an art form that got lost," is how Setzer himself sees it. "It is a revival - I know the music was invented in the fifties - but jazz never really died, and nobody calls jazz thirties music, or calls Blues twenties music. I consider rockabilly an art form like them. And in a way it was too wild for the fifties. Face it: if you look at a Billboard Top Ten for 1956 there'd be people like Debbie Reynolds and Henry Mancini. There were a couple of exceptions, but rockabilly was really short-lived." While Setzer's own commitment to rockabilly is anything but short-lived, he also rejects the role of museum curator for a museum-piece style: "When the Stones did 'Little Red Rooster,' they had an edge it, they didn't do it just like Muddy Waters. We tried to do the same thing with rockabilly - put our own edge on it."

Brian Setzer has been wanting to put his own edge on music from an early age, thanks to the British Invasion of the 1960s. Asked what made him want to pick up the guitar, he responds without hesitation, "The Beatles. I didn't have much music in my family - except for my grandfather, who played banjo - but when the Beatles hit America I thought they all played guitar (pronounced GIT-tar), and I had to have that instrument." Once the six-year-old made up his mind, it took him about a year to actually get the instrument he wanted. I bugged my parents into getting me one when I was about seven - y'know, it was a pretty expensive thing for them - so they rented me one, this tremendous old jazz guitar. It looked really funny, 'cause I was always this small kid. Then when they saw I was serious, I talked them into getting me an Electric-a Harmony Rocket - and I started taking lessons."

Eight years of lessons, to be precise, starting with the Mel Bay series and teacher/saxophonist Henry Scurti, then jazz training with guitarist Ray Gogarty, who turned the fledgling guitarist on to Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Chuck Wayne and Joe Pass. "The other kids at school never heard of them," Setzer laughs. The training has stood him in good stead: listen, for instance, to the chord comping on "Stray Cat Strut" where he sketches a fluid, jazz-voiced line behind his vocal that makes the most of the space a three-piece band offers. Or listen to how he built "Look at That Cadillac" from a collection of swing-era riffs.

Not surprisingly, Setzer is adamant about the value of musical training. "A lot of people think it's cool not to know anything, but I think that's just sour grapes. I can tell you that it's important and useful. It helps you think."

By the time he was fourteen, the aspiring musician had already begun gigging around his Long Island home base. He recalls, "I just started off doing covers, gigs at Sweet Sixteen parties, playing tunes by the Allman Brothers, Creedence, Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan - which I still like. For a while I got into things like King Crimson, but now when I look back at it, I think that stuff is great technically but lacks soul. I just got tired of that pretentious, synthesized sound. What amazed me was how the bar bands on Long Island that had all those things - mellotrons, synthesizers, Hammond organs - how they paid for them. I guess their parents were from the other side of the tracks."

A loner by nature, Setzer was drawn increasingly into his own musical world. "One day,' he remembers, "I just kinda discovered that the Beatles didn't write 'Honey Don't' and the Stones didn't write 'Carol.' So I got into finding out who did. My dad knew 'cause he likes Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and country people like that. So I began buying reissues. And then when I heard 'Be-Bop-A-Lula' it just tugged my heart. I said to myself, Why doesn't anybody know about this, know what it is? Everybody did the blues: Johnny Winter, Led Zeppelin. The big thing in the Seventies was English blues. But when I stumbled across rockabilly I thought it was just as valid as the blues, and I thought, Why isn't someone doing it?"

Soon enough someone was. Everything about young Brian Setzer began to change. Thanks to a cover shot of Eddie Cochran on a reissue lp (the Legendary Masters series from United Artists) he began to grease and pompadour his hair, drape oversized shiny sports coats over his thin frame, sport blue suede shoes and the rest. Voila! the Rockabilly Rebel was born. "See, I was always a kind of weird kid," he explains. "So with the pompadour and the earring I got called every name in the book. But it fit in with the punk thing - I really liked early Pistols, early Clash, the Damned. So I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could punk up this rockabilly thing?" He had the chance to test his instincts: "I was playing with the Bloodless Pharaohs at places like Max's [Kansas City], and people would yawn through the set. Then I'd come out and do 'Be-Bob-A-Lula' for an encore and they'd go crazy. So I said Jeez, am I on to something?"

We all know the answer to that one now, but it took some time to work out exactly what he was on to then. "By the time I was eighteen," Setzer recalls, "the Pharaohs had kinda dwindled down, and I couldn't get gig gigs playing rockabilly stuff - for those you had to have the trucks and the Moogs and do covers. So eventually I landed a gig by luck. I wandered into this bar drunk and said to the owner, 'You hire me and I'll show you what rock and roll really is' - y'know, just being a jerk. But the guy liked me; he was taken aback by the way I looked and the fact that I seemed so crazy, but he hired me. So I had a guitar and a rhythm box, and I did all these covers of Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, couple of country songs, even Supremes stuff - a little bit of everything that I liked." It wasn't exactly the Ritz, though."

Setzer describes it succinctly: "It was an old-man corner bar. They'd say, 'Look at this kid with the black leather pants doing old Elvis songs.' Then when the kids started coming they'd get all grouchy. We'd set up - my brother was playing drums at that point, and we had a bass player - around the pool table." His rhythm section changed frequently until one night when two heavily greased rockabilly freaks walked in. One played bass, the other drums. Lee Rocker (ne Drucker) and Slim Jim Phantom (ne McDonnel) easily adopted rockabilly techniques, with Lee learning to slap his bass a la Bill Black and Slim Jim abandoning a standard kit for snare, bass drum and cymbal. It clicked, and the Tom cats were born.

The Tom Cats started to build a local following around Long Island, but they still felt stalled. England beckoned, Setzer claims, because he discovered the whole rockabilly scene there was still happening.

"I'd seen a cover of an NME and it had a rockabilly guy with a pompadour and a crazy head of hair. I said, 'Hey, that guy looks like me; somebody else knows that this type of music is.' I mean, now with Macy's selling bowling shirts it's obviously a big commercial thing, but then it was weird. And I had just met a Teddy Boy, which is an English version of an American fifties greaser. They keep the whole thing alive, rockabilly is what they live for. Well, he was a bartender here, but he told us [switches to a deep voice], 'You guys are the real thing - you're Americans. Well, okay, you're not from Memphis {laughs] but that's okay. They'd love you over there.' [Shakes his head] So we developed this grand plan to take England by storm, three eighteen-year-old kids - and we did."

We-e-ell, yeah, but the invasion took a while to establish a beachhead. The Cats - now Stray - began going literally door-to-door, from club to agent to record company, looking for a hearing. "We had no connections, nothing," Setzer explains. "We just went everywhere. One day we walked into a publicist's office - Jim found it - and met a girl named Claudine Martinet: She was really taken aback by the way Jim looked: the cowboy shirt, the pompadour, all that.

So Jim brought a tape, and she loved it. She played it around for people, and so somehow we landed this gig opening for a 25,OOO-piece funk band." He pauses. "It was quite a contrast, but we went over real big. Suddenly people were growing their hair or cutting it - depending on whether they were skinheads or punks that week; you know how trendy England is. But it was great for us; England really opened the door."

The next step: to open the door back to the good old US of A. England has often provided a nurturing haven for American musicians who couldn't get attention here - Jimi Hendrix and Chrissie Hynde are only two recent examples - but sooner or later the folks want to come home. Making it on your own turf carries a special satisfaction, after all; and the Cats wanted it. The first thing to do was to get a US record deal: remarkably enough, two hit lp's and several hit singles after their arrival in the UK, the Stray Cats had not been picked up by an American label. "It was the middle of the punk thing," Setzer says, "and everybody was anti-record company. So our manager at the time advised us not to sign. But by the time our second (UK) album rolled around, we still didn't have an American deal." With their manager on what Setzer sarcastically describes as an "extended vacation," the musicians themselves flew to LA and sat down to powwow with Capitol/EMI. They emerged with a contract and imminent US stardom.

Even though MTV helped break the band out of cult status, Setzer professes ambivalent feelings about the music-video concept. "All these video clubs get me down; sometimes it seems like there are no more live bands. See, I think MTV is going to mess things up as well as help them. It opened up a brand new audience - people in small towns in the middle of nowhere can see what's going on - but mainly you've got bands that make a video with a Linndrum, and they can't play."

That, at least is one criticism that could never be leveled at the Stray Cats. They're nothing if not performing vets, adept at pumping out arena-sized sounds from a stripped-down three-piece combo. "It's that slap bass," Setzer declares. "That adds a lot. Then when I slap a little repeat on my guitar, it's big. So if we added too much other stuff, other instruments, we'd get cluttered." Reproducing that big sound on disc is no simple task, but it falls to the trained hands and practiced ear of producer Dave Edmunds, himself no guitar slouch. "Nobody can make a standup bass and drums sound like Dave," Setzer raves, "He knows how to record that kind of rhythm section. He gets that standup bass to sound like a standup but somehow electric."

Setzer's own guitar work is easier to record, though he admits to using effects in the studio that he doesn't use live. He explains, "I like using effects in the studio where you don't really know you're using them, like if I use a repeat from the board. I mean, my guitar sound is compressed to all hell to get that really twangy-yet-clean sound. And now I'm beginning to dabble with other types of effects as well."

Live or in the studio, Setzer tries for a mixture of spontaneity and studied arranging in his music. "My solos are about half thought-out and half spontaneous," he claims. "'Rock This Town' I just did first take, boom. But for 'Stray Cat Strut' I worked out that run up on the diminished chord. It was a neat little trick the way I ran the pick over the strings." When he lets loose is when you can best hear the echoes of his musical studies: the solo in "Double Talkin' Baby," for instance, combines riffs and references from greats like Charlie Christian and Carl Perkins, Django and Scotty Moore. His unorthodox picking technique helps him improvise freely. "Cliff Gallup (Gene Vincent's guitarist) who was a big influence on me, used to do these fingerstyle guitar things that I learned. So I developed this technique of tucking the pick under my forefinger and picking with these three [thumb, middle and ring fingers} and then switching back to the pick when I wanted. It gives me a lot of versatility."

Versatility is one quality Setzer is striving to deve!op more. "I'm not going to be playing reggae tomorrow, but I'd like to do more modern things," he asserts. Part of this interest in new musical directions is the result of Setzer's assessment of the last Cats' lp. "Built for Speed" was great - it sold over 2 1/2 million copies - and we had already recorded "Rant n' Rave"; but it got old because it sat for a year before it got released. And, to be honest, it was a little too purist. We wanted to make the perfect rockabilly record, and it sounded too much like a museum piece. And lyrically too, like with 'Hot Rod Gang,' it's just behind the times because it sat on the shelf for so long. I like about half the album." He stops to consider. "To take people like Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran as an influence is great, but to try to play exactly like them and make your records sound exactly like them is wrong. I kinda did fall into that trap; I'm glad I've gotten out of it. After all, it's 1984."

And what is Brian Setzer up to in 1985 ? Looking for new musical styles to conquer and combine. "I've been listening to Joe Maphis and Doc Watson for flatpicking and Chet Atkins for fingerstyle things," he notes. "I've really been getting into blue- grass." No mere words: he's off to the music room, pulls out his banjo, and tears through the breakdown section of "Orange Blossom Special" for starters. He's also continuing to work on his lap and pedal steel playing.

But he's also determined not to be relegated to the nostalgia bin. "Lately I've been writing things that move away from rockabilly, that sound a bit more modern. It's still rock and roll, but I'm trying to write more songs. Like, 'Runaway Boys' is a song, but 'Rock This Town,' even though it's my favorite Stray Cat thing, is just a I-IV-V progression. Besides, playing pedal steel and banjo makes me think different now, too. I mean, I don't want to sing about bread lines in Central America but I guess I am growing up a little lyrically. I've got a song called 'Barbed Wire Fence' that's a punked-up bluegrass song about how people feel about the scary state of Soviet-American relations. I don't want to be silly about it, but I do want to move."

The desire to move musically has let Setzer to decide that "Barbed Wire Fence" and the songs like it that he's writing now will be the basis for his first solo lp. But what about the Stray Cats? "It's no reflection on Jim and Lee. They know I love playing live with the Stray Cats-it's one of my favorite things to do, besides working on motorcycles. It's just that I want to play with some different musicians and do some totally different things."

Recently Brian has begun to act on that desire. In November, at New Jersey's Capitol Theater, a number of guitar heroes took over the stage and strutted their stuff before an enthusiastic live audience and MTV's cameras, and the Rockabilly Rebel was among them. Backstage, he announced to anyone within earshot that "The Stray Cats are finished." As of deadline (late Dec. 1984) his musical future remained murky, though; his label, EMI-America, will say only that Brian still plans a solo lp, but adds that he has no studio time booked in the immediate future, so no record is likely for some time. Meanwhile, the man's not exactly sitting at home cooling his heels. His most recent musical foray came when he joined Robert Plant and keyboardist Paul Shaffer for the Honeydrippers' appearance on Saturday Night Live, where he uncorked a couple of patented Setzer solos.

The Stray Cats' demise, while regretable, was hardly a shock to anyone who'd talked to Setzer within the last several months. Even at the time of this interview, before he'd officially announced the band's breakup, his focus was clearly on the songs for his solo shot. "I've got one song that's like a Bob Seger song; I've got this punked-up blue grass song which is really wild; I've got a ballad; I've got one song that's sorta leaning toward Jason and the Scorchers-type stuff - I really like them; so I've got about five or six things that are totally different." In addition to guitar Setzer will be playing banjo and lap steel on the cuts.

To hold down the other chairs he'll be using a variety of musicians. "I'd like to use John McEwen from the Nitty Gritty Band on some banjo, and Mike Campbell from the Tom Petty group - he's a hell of a bluegrass picker, which you wouldn't know from Tom's stuff. But I'd also like to use a lot of young musicians without a name, because I find those people are the most eager, the most enthusiastic. I've got a great singer named Eddie von Bach who's like a white Little Richard. Bebe Buell, who's a great singer and a beautiful lady, has a country voice that'll knock you out - we sound really great together."

Setzer's current music tastes reflect his diversifying interests. "I admire Simple Minds, and I like the Alarm, though I think that lyrically they're a bit ahead of themselves-I'm not quite sure what they're rebelling against. I think Springsteen's new album is great. I like Tom Petty and Huey Lewis: he writes real good rock and roll songs without any pretensions, no preaching about how to solve the Salvadorean crisis. Rank and File and Lone Justice I quite like, and I think Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics is a great songwriter. Oh yeah, and one other thing, I want to put in a good word for heavy metal. I don't understand why Motorhead hasn't made it. They're the ultimate headbanging loud rock and roll band-you can't compare anyone to Motorhead."

What does he think about some of his fellow roots-revivalists? "The Blasters, when I first meet them, had bad mouthed me in an English paper, and I settled things out with them. I like them musically, but I don't think the guitar player's any good at all-I think he's quite useless. I really like Billy Zoom: I think he's got a lot to say, and he's a real good guitar player. I would like to say I like X-I think John Doe is a great a lyricist-but I cannot honestly sit down and listen to them and enjoy them, because musically I just don't hear enough going on to satisfy me. Marshall Crenshaw I like, but I don't think he's gotten the break he deserves."

Like most succesful artists, Brian Setzer created his break by creating something that wasn't there before he thought of it. Rockabilly revivalist sure, but he's ransacked a number of musical idioms, from swing to bop to new wave, and fused them into his own authentic sound. Whatever he does next, you can be sure it will be unique.