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 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.
Robert Plant is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, never mind rock star. He's so down to earth.
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.
For every rockabilly festival staged here, there are 10 held overseas.
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.
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.
To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.
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.
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.
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.
I put a metronome up to all the songs, and I tried to really keep it true to the original tempos.
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.
