A long-maned Setzer wails onstage with
the Stray Cats at the Coogee Bay Hotel
in Sydney, Australia, in December 1990.
Photo by Denise OHara
Has that guitar been a longtime companion?
Yeah, I bought it a long time ago from a guy on Long Island when
I lived there, and incidentally it’s a really good one. Guitarists
tend to romanticize vintage instruments, but the old ones are really
so hit-and-miss. I rate them “Monday through Friday,” Monday
being the worst. With a Monday guitar, it’s like the guy working
at the factory started the week with a hangover and a fight with
his wife, which translated to a crummy instrument. With a Friday
guitar, the guy was in a great mood and was pumped up for the
weekend, so he makes a beautiful instrument. That ’59 is definitely
a Friday guitar—when it’s in perfect working order, it plays
and sounds incredible.
How would you compare your new guitars to their vintage
counterparts?
The new ones are ready to go right out of the box, but the old ones
take so much to play right. It’s not like you can just drop ten grand
on a ’50s guitar, plug in, and away you go. In order to make it playable,
you have to make it so unoriginal as to ruin the value of the
guitar—just as taking apart an old car and putting in a new engine
might improve the performance but makes it worth much less.
What sort of mods does it take to get an old guitar up to snuff
for you?
Take 1959 Gretsches: I’ve got them and I love them, but they tend
to be unplayable in original condition. First of all, you’ve got to
take the frets out, because they’re useless—they’re just these tiny
little tacks. The neck is usually just a mess and has to be planed
and straightened by a good luthier. Often, it has a reverse-bow so
bad it has to go in a steamer. The bridge is just no good and will
fall right off the guitar if you play too hard, so it’s best to pin in
a Gibson-style Tune-o-matic. The zero fret is also no good—it
doesn’t really improve the intonation like it’s supposed to—so
you’ve got to yank that out and fill up the empty slot. Honestly,
sometimes it just isn’t worth the aggravation—just pick up a new
guitar. It’s hard to exactly replicate something that’s five decades
old, but the new ones come pretty close—you can dial in a sound
that’s not very far from a vintage one.
To your ear, how do vintage and new guitars compare?
Man, the best ’59s have got a really warm crunch that’s great for
really straight rockabilly—probably because the wood has been
sitting around for so long. You plug those things in, and the
sound is just huge and woody. The new ones actually sound pretty
similar, but a little less magical, which is why the best old ones are
so expensive.
Setzer Goes Instru-MENTAL! is filled with impressive jazz blowing.
What is your background in that idiom?
Early on, I learned how to read and write music through a teacher
who taught me the rudiments. We went through all the Mel Bay
books, which I still think are great and would recommend to any
budding guitarist. And then the teacher basically said, “I can’t
teach you anymore.” So I had to get on two busses and walk a
mile carrying my Gibson ES-175 to the studio of a more advanced
guitar teacher, who taught me chords, scales, and theory, how to
play all kinds of inversions and extensions, and how to play over
chord changes. He showed me his conception of the guitar, which
was a fancy jazz sort of thing—something that has been part of my
playing ever since.
Which did you get into first, jazz or rockabilly?
I learned both styles around the same time. Things were much
different when I was coming up. You couldn’t just listen to any
style of music on the internet with the click of a button. You
had to make a bit of an effort to find and listen to music. In
New York, we had some of the best jazz players around, so I
was exposed to plenty of jazz. We didn’t have much in the way
of country and rockabilly players, but my dad came back from
Korea with records by musicians like Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee
Lewis—he got these from some of his army buddies who were
from the South—and I really got into the music and copped
some of the licks on the guitar. It all sounded good to me, and it
just seemed like a natural thing to mix everything up.