>>PREVIEW
LEE ROCKER
Thursday, March 22
Broken City
If you didn’t know that Lee Rocker was the bassist for the Stray Cats, you would think he could be a rockabilly musician. Sure, he has the musical genes – his parents are both well-known classical performers. He was probably doomed to be a musician from the start, but just how does a somewhat privileged white kid from the Northern United States end up developing a love affair for a musical form that, at its core, reflected the life and concerns of disadvantaged rural black people?
His parents might have had something to do with it.
His folks introduced him to all types of roots music as well as rock and started him off playing the cello. Rocker thinks the answer is much simpler than that. For him, Americana and rockabilly, plainly and simply, is where his heart is. There are no geographic boundaries to music, in his view, and so it can be transplanted. Rockabilly, he suggests, is not a museum piece that people should pick up and dust off and say here it is.
"It’s a valid form like jazz or blues is and the trick really is to make it your own. What I try to do is to put my own stamp on it and use the vocabulary and use the history and do something new with it."
He certainly has done that. So much so that some people now consider him to be the elder statesman of rockabilly music. But what drew Rocker to rockabilly in the first place? It could have been the attitude embodied within the music that appealed to him or it could have been the energy. He argues that rockabilly, in its infancy, was the original punk music.
"It was definitely youth and energy and sweat and passion. The Stray Cats were not a punk band, but I think just some of that attitude and way of playing and aggressiveness always kind of shone through and set the Stray Cats apart from bands that played ’50s music." Or, he admits, it could have been girls that motivated him to pursue music.
Of course, that was a long time ago now, 30 years, more or less, and he was still in high school then and girls and cars are what rule that stage in nearly every boy’s life. Girls and cars aren’t so important now. Still, as Rocker says, "you write about what you know and what you do." That means that his last record, Racin’ the Devil, has more than a few songs on it about life on the road. It also means that his next album (he’s working on it now and hopes to have it finished by July) will likely be a little more political than his previous albums.
He hasn’t abandoned the traditions of rock ’n’ roll either. There will still be songs about girls, cars and booze. Rocker maintains his fondness for tongue-in-cheek lyrics and album titles. A few other things will also remain the same. He’s definitely not about to give up his love of organic rhythms and real instruments. It’s what defines him and, in his mind, defines the music he plays and which has fallen through the cracks of the mainstream recording world. It’s a good place to be. |
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