A Stray Cat Struts

by Slim Jim Phantom

  After this show, it was a perfect time for basking; it wasn’t the day for splitting right after the show. My band had just done what would be the show-stealing set; I had my glamorous wife by my side and half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s left. My best pal for the day was Eddie Van Halen, who was playing the next day and had come early to hang out and party at the festival. We nipped from my bottle and chased it with tall cans of eternally cosmopolitan Schlitz malt liquor. We’d hang out once in a while over the years to come. He’s one of the best musicians and coolest guys in the biz. We have always had a good connection. We took some classic backstage pictures together that appeared in a few magazines in the day and still pop up sometimes online. I look pretty tweaked; I guess I didn’t want to miss anything.

  The Clash was definitely one of the best bands around then. I had seen them play a number of times, including three nights in a row in 1981. They were doing a run at the grand old Lyceum Ballroom on the Strand, London, WC1. I turned up at the stage door and was welcomed by Big Ray, their security guard. I stood at the side of the stage, loved the gig, and went back the next night for three nights running. They always had a cool conceptual part to their shows. These featured a graffiti artist on a ladder, armed with cans of spray paint in crossed bandoliers and wearing a gas mask, who did a huge mural behind the band as they played. By the end of the show, there was a one-of-a-kind backdrop. I remember going into the dressing room right after the show and seeing Mick Jones sitting and eating his dinner off a plate on his lap while still all sweaty wearing his stage clothes. He was and is a supercool rock-and-roll guy whom I see when he comes to LA. I’ve rehearsed, played, and made a video at his studio / groovy hangout place in Acton, London, W2.

  Nicky “Topper” Headon was the drummer in the band at that time and was on their best records and gigs. He played a dozen classic drum licks on London Calling alone, and I’ve studied his playing. He was my genuine drummer buddy, and we hung out, talked about drums, and partied a bit. I was lucky in that I never got into the dark side of drugs like he and a couple of other buddies from that time did. We bought the same pink suits from Lloyd Johnson and wore them when he sat in with the Cats at their legendary 1980 New Year’s Eve show at the Venue, Victoria, London, SW1. I saw him a couple of years ago; he’s doing okay. I’m happy to have had some quality time with him.

  Joe Strummer was at a few of the early Cats shows and really helped the cause when he said some truly nice things about us in one of the big weekly rock papers. His word was respected, and it went a long way when he told the NME that we weren’t a hype. That was one of the worst things a band could be called at that time; it suggested a lack of substance. Our rapid rise and seemingly overnight success had caused a little jealousy, and the word hype was floated around in an attempt to hurt us. Joe batted that down in an interview. He didn’t have to do that, and I’ll always be grateful to him for it.

  The Cats had done our own run at the Lyceum at the end of the first English tour. We also filmed the video with Dave Edmunds for the song “The Race Is On,” recorded during the making of the first Cats record at Eden Studios, Chiswick, London, W4. We did it in one or two takes. This version of the George Jones classic was a top-forty hit in England and features a perfect rhythm track from the Cats and two of my favorite guitar solos, first one by Brian and then one from Dave.

  The Clash had some problems on the day of the U.S. Festival. Topper hadn’t been doing too well and didn’t make the trip with them. There was a replacement drummer, and he did the best he could. I think the guys were all fighting, and it famously was the last gig that Mick Jones ever played with his own band. After a set by Men at Work that was good but left the Cats’ set unchallenged, I was leaning on some road cases and noticed some kerfuffle behind the stage. The roadies from the Clash, having heard how much the band was being paid for the performance that day, were going on strike and refusing to move their equipment onto the stage and set it up. They were laying down their demands to the flabbergasted manager.

  That’s the dichotomy to punk rock band / road crew politics, the “we’re all in it together” versus “worker’s rights against the boss” argument. Certain punk rockers had preached about poverty, and when they found themselves successful with a little money, they were embarrassed and tried to hide it. That’s a very hard thing to pull off; it always shows through in some way. I never thought there was anything wrong with success. Unless you give it all away, there’s no way to hang on to the original ethic. I’ve never known anyone who really did it that way. The Clash road crew were that certain breed of professional English roadies in the 1980s who had nicknames and thought they were rock stars, too. From where I was standing, it looked like they were promised more money and started setting up the stage.

  Just when the manager thought he was safe, Joe came up to him with a new problem. As part of the technology theme behind this show, the organizer had arranged for a few minutes of the show to be simulcast to the USSR using some type of satellite technology. Through a Soviet/USA agreement, coupled with the wizardry of Apple, a certain weather or military satellite passed over the concert site and would be taken over for five minutes and used to beam the gig to the whole of Russia. The only catch to this experiment was that it had to happen at an exact time. Whoever happened to be onstage at the time of the satellite passing was the band that would be shown on Russian TV. That day, it happened to be Men at Work, and I suppose that the Russians who tuned in thought it was cool for five minutes to see any band from a big concert in the USA. I’m not sure if the Clash had been promised that slot and the timing of the show prevented it, but when Joe found out he wasn’t going to be on Russian TV, he went ballistic. I was still leaning on a few cases, taking nips from my bottle while keeping an eye and ear on what was going on. He was screaming at the manager to get the satellites back and wasn’t having it when he was told that to do that would be impossible. A few of the technical people from the festival were brought in to try to explain it. It wouldn’t have mattered who the band was; once that moment passed, that was that. I guess there must have been more stuff going on in their dressing room, because they looked a bit out of sync and distracted onstage that night.

  I, however, enjoyed the rest of the night. We all watched from the side of the stage and walked around the grounds a little. I drove home with Britt and Nicholai and stayed in my own bed. It was truly a special, magical twenty-four hours in my life and career.

  The next day was another day on the road for us. We had a couple of other big outdoor shows in California as the opening act for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. These were big shows too but not quite the magnitude of the U.S. Festival. We were taking a helicopter again; we were old pros at it by now. A car picked me up; we stopped at the hotel to pick up the others and went to the airport. I got out and went into the lobby. I saw Joe sitting there by himself among a bunch of luggage. He said that they hadn’t had so much fun the night before. I told him he should hang around for a few days and goof off in LA. I said we’d be back the next day and we could hang out. He told me that he had to get back to London “like my ass was on fire.” I asked him why, and he told me, “To vote.” There was a national election the next day in England, and he wanted to cast his vote against Thatcher. That cat really walked the walk on this one. He was flying all the way back to London from LA to cast a vote in an election that would result in a 99 percent victory for the bad guys, but he went anyway, to have his voice heard. That’s dedication.

  The next few days, I’m sure, were good times. The whole week of the U.S. Festival was good times. I do wish someone had offered me stock in Apple instead of the money we were paid, which I’ve definitely blown by now.

  7

  The Killer

  The first time I ever met the Killer was in Beverly Hills in 1983. The scene of the encounter was at the old Beverly Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard. I’d been to see him play before at the Palomino, another legendary venue that was an authentic juke joi
nt in North Hollywood on Lankershim Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. As the crow flies, it wasn’t that far from the Sunset Strip, but by that time, it was a different universe. Every country music artist from the 1960s through the 1980s played there. I saw many shows there featuring the original 1950s rockabilly stars, including Wanda Jackson, Carl Perkins, and bawdy rockabilly queen Janis Martin, who called me up onstage, where she was smoking a lipstick-stained, superlong cigarette and drinking a light beer, to announce me to the audience. By then, I was pretty much immune to any public embarrassment. I had already fallen off the drums and down enough staircases in nightclubs and had said enough stupid things in interviews to be thick skinned enough to take a little ribbing onstage from an old gal. In this instance, though, I did feel the back of my neck getting hot when she pulled a makeup pencil out of her handbag and wrote her hotel name and room number on a napkin. All of this was happening while I was standing on her stage with the band sitting behind me waiting to do the next number. I’ll bet I still have that napkin somewhere in a box in deep storage.

  “Drugstore Rock and Roll” was an early favorite record. We covered it back in the four-sets-a-night club gigs on Long Island, and we all thought Janis was smoking hot in the picture on the back of her album. The picture was from 1956, and she looked like Elly May Clampett. We didn’t have any girls who looked like that in our neighborhood.

  These musicians were all gracious and thankful, telling me personally that their careers had gotten a shot in the arm after the Stray Cats brought rockabilly music back onto the radio to new, younger fans and into the mainstream, where we always thought it belonged. A few of the more obscure artists hadn’t done gigs since the 1950s, so for them, the new interest in rockabilly was a real blessing.

  This was something that has always been very important to me and one of the things I’m most proud of being a member of the Cats. The fact that just by playing this music we were able to help these original artists that we loved and were influenced by is still a source of pride. I still get off on it. I still dig this music, those records and images, so much. The excitement I get from those original records and photos never fades away. I can still listen to a Sun Records compilation anytime, anywhere and get off on it. It will always improve my mood. I can look at the blurry photos on the album sleeve with these slicked-up hepcats in cowboy suits and the rocking songbird gals in 1950s gear and get the same rush I did when we first discovered this music and look.

  Rockabilly has that elusive musical secret: it swings … and it rocks. That sounds easy enough, but it is deceptively simple. The beat swings, but it also needs to be aggressive and at the same time danceable. It can’t be too fast, but it can’t drag. It’s gotta flat-out send you. The original cats—Elvis, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee, Little Richard—all loved hillbilly, bluegrass, jump blues, and rhythm and blues, and when mixed together in the musical pot, out came rockabilly. Sam Phillips, the owner/operator of Sun Studios in Memphis, was the mad genius chef for the whole movement. Elvis Presley captured his vision, put his own stamp on it, and changed the world.

  These people were mythical figures to me. The idea that I’ve met, worked with, and count as friends a few of these original band members is very much still with me. Being friends with Dickie “Be-Bop” Harrell, the drummer from the original Blue Caps, is to me like being friends with Paul Bunyan. This cat is a real American folk hero. He played drums and did the screams on “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” There would be no Beatles or Stones without that record—just ask them.

  Rockabilly should have an acoustic double bass, and in many ways, it’s the one defining thing about the music. The slapping style of the double bass—Carl Perkins called it the “doghouse bass”—creates a percussive sound in between the notes that fills in the gaps. When done right, the drummer and bass player can create a big sound for the soloist to play over. Rockabilly is traditionally guitar based, and you can’t be a great rockabilly band without a great guitar player. A certain twang is the desired sound, and the truly great ones expand on that.

  I firmly believe that Lee Rocker and I are the best rhythm section in the history of rockabilly. We didn’t get that way by accident; Lee and I spent a lot of our teenage years practicing with just the bass and drums. Being locked in with a bass player is the best feeling a drummer can ever achieve, and I’ve had many, many of those moments with Lee. Brian is surely the best guitar player anywhere, and together we invented our own style that combined these elements of rockabilly with the excitement of punk rock and the emotion of the blues. This music called to us. We were looking for a music that had all these things we liked and also had an image built in that we could add to and make our own. In rockabilly, we all found the outline for everything we wanted to do. It was a life-changing moment when I discovered I was hooked on this stuff.

  Sadly, the Palomino is gone today. The Beverly Theatre was a very cool original art deco theater that hosted vaudeville in the past before becoming a movie theater, and then it was a venue for small gigs and plays. Maybe it held 750 people. I remember seeing a quite a few shows there. It’s another example of one of those LA places that was once a grand landmark, but now it’s just not there anymore. Like many buildings in LA, if it had lasted until today, it would be vintage and antique. In 1984, it was just plain old. There is no rule saying you have to have rock-and-roll taste and vision to own property in a good part of any town. I’d like to save the whales, live local music, and the rockabilly architecture that is slowly fading in LA. I’ve done my part for two out of three, but it’s hard.

  I decided to go to the Jerry Lee Lewis show that night on my own. I saw in the newspaper that he was playing. I was just going to turn up, buy a ticket, sit in the audience, and watch the show. I didn’t know him or any of his band and management. I am now and have always been a huge fan. His early recordings on the Sun label hold up as some of the hardest-rocking stuff ever put down on tape. He was one of those early alchemists to come out of Memphis who were mixing up the flaming stew of rock and roll, blues, gospel, and country that had influenced me and every other rock and roller that I admired. He always kept the music rocking and on the verge of being out of control. All the way through the 1960s and 1970s, Jerry Lee continued making great records and doing high-energy live shows, where he was unpredictable onstage. He’s a true eccentric, and his personal life is the stuff of legend. He continued flying the rockabilly flag, especially in Europe, where he was hero to both the teddy boys and the rockers, causing riots at the gigs. The classic film footage of teddy boys smashing up a concert hall and throwing all the chairs onto a pile on the stage is from a gig in Germany. His 1960s records The Greatest Show on Earth 1 & 2, recorded at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany, are two of the hardest-rocking live records I’ve ever heard. Even when he moved to a more country flavor, I think he was just calling it country to get through to a different audience; it’s still really soulful and hard rocking.

  On the way to the show, I decided to ask bespoke rock-and-roll tailor and big Jerry Lee fan Glenn Palmer to join me. Glenn had seen Jerry Lee a dozen times in England, really dug it, was usually holding a little powder, and was good company. We bought two regular tickets at the box office and were in our seats talking before the show started in the mostly filled theater. A few fans said hello, but nothing crazy. I was in an aisle seat when a middle-aged guy wearing cowboy boots, a satin baseball jacket, and big belt buckle, complete with mullet and moustache that suggested he was a bit more country than rock, walked up, leaned over, and spoke to me quietly. He introduced himself as the Killer’s tour manager, told me that Jerry Lee wanted to meet me, and that he was there to escort me to the dressing room. Glenn and I looked at each other and shrugged. So I followed this guy to the front of the stage, up the stairs, behind the curtain, and to the dressing room. The Beverly was an old-time theater and had a hallway b
ackstage with numerous small dressing rooms. The tour manager pointed to one and told me to go on in. I knocked and waited for an answer. I didn’t get an answer, so I knocked again.

  “Come on in—it ain’t locked!” I heard the distinct sound of the Killer’s drawl.

  I opened the door into a very small typical dressing room with a dressing table against the wall and round lightbulbs around a mirror. The Killer sat in the one chair, and on his lap sat a very big, very young rockabilly girl dressed to the nines in a big skirt with petticoats, high heels, sporting a bleached-blond beehive hairdo, Marilyn Monroe makeup, the whole thing. Jerry Lee was puffing on a big Sherlock Holmes–looking meerschaum pipe and had his arm around the corn-fed, USDA-prime rockabilly girl. He was drinking something out of a red plastic cup. When I came in, he stood up to greet me and dumped her to the floor. I was still in shock from seeing her on his lap in the first place; now she was on the floor, looking very put out and unimpressed. Jerry Lee stepped over her and came toward me. I instinctively stepped back; the wall was right behind me, and I was a bit trapped.

  “Well, lookee here, boy. We got a gen-u-ine, rock-a-billy Stray Cat,” he said loudly in that unmistakable Jerry Lee voice.

  “Hi, Jerry Lee,” I answered, still trying to take it all in. I’d seen some rock-and-roll scenes before, but this one was just plain weird.

  “Call me Killer, boy,” he insisted, edging even closer. There was nowhere to go in the room; the palms of my hands were against the wall.

  “Mmm, I like your hair, boy,” he continued in a voice like a Southern sheriff right out of the movies, all while puffing on this crazy-looking pipe.