Ex-Stray Cat Tints His New Band Blue

Only three people born since “Blue Suede Shoes” hit the charts have managed to follow Elvis Presley and his ‘50s peers to stardom by playing rockabilly music.

Lee Rocker is one of them. He was still in his teens back in 1980, when he and his band mates in the Stray Cats--Brian Setzer and Slim Jim Phantom--began scoring hits with a musical style that had gone out of fashion before the Kennedy Administration began.

As he sits on a green couch in the music room of his hillside home, the trophies of Rocker’s rockabilly days are right over his shoulder--a row of framed gold records.

Resting on its side in a carpeted corner is the upright bass that Rocker, a small, trim man, literally rode to fame in flashy shows where he would climb aboard the sturdy instrument while slapping out beats to such signature Stray Cats songs as “Rock This Town” and “Stray Cat Strut.”

The Stray Cats have had two lives, and Rocker thinks that should be enough. There was the initial, hit-studded run from 1979-84, when they were early darlings of MTV, and a less-successful re-formation from 1988-92. Now Rocker, born Lee Drucker 33 years ago in Massapequa, N.Y., is trying to build a new musical life for himself with Lee Rocker’s Big Blue.

The band, which plays Friday at the Coach House, is a trio, like the Stray Cats, but it has a broader roots-music agenda that incorporates rockabilly only as an occasional flavor and places far more emphasis on the blues.

Rocker sings and plays his stand-up bass, joined by Long Beach guitarist Mike Eldred and Huntington Beach drummer Henree DeBaun, two strong but unheralded players who had kicked around the Southern California music scene before hooking up with Rocker two years ago.

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No longer a pompadoured ‘billy with dyed black hair, Rocker now wears a long, swept-back dark-blond mane that breaks in waves at the base of his neck. He strikes a dapper figure in a brown pin-stripe suit, white T-shirt, suspenders and two-tone wingtips, looking as if he’s ready to step out for a night at the Cotton Club rather than onto an idyllic front patio that commands a view of the Pacific.

Unlike Setzer and Phantom, who sport the tattooed, walking-mural look common to neo-rockabillys and the related punk-rock movement, Rocker’s arms and torso remain a blank slate.

“Lee won’t come in; he’s becoming a hippie,” jokes Jake Bricks, proprietor of a barbershop in Orange that is the tonsorial center for much of Orange County’s rockabilly and roots-punk subculture. Bricks says that he has passed word through Big Blue’s Eldred, who is a customer, that he’d like to get his scissors on Rocker. “Now it’s a little bit of a joke that he’s afraid I’ll scalp him.”

Rocker is a soft-spoken man with a friendly but reserved manner. During an interview, he drew hard on a succession of Marlboros and eventually reached for that ultimate musician’s security blanket, a guitar. Curled up on the couch, he picked out jazzy phrases here and there as he pondered questions and answers.

In Lee Rocker’s Big Blue, which recently released its debut album on the respected New Orleans blues and R & B label, Black Top, it’s clearly important to Rocker that he not be bound to a single musical style.

“I’ve always leaned toward blues,” he said. “In my mind there’s not that much that separates (blues from rockabilly). At this point I’m doing what I like and trying to not get pigeonholed.

“That’s a problem with rockabilly, and to an extent with blues as well,” he said. “You get put into this area where you’re supposed to stay and not move out of. I just want to do roots music. The idea is to experiment and twist it a little bit. The purists always get offended, but that’s fine.”

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Given his family background, it’s hardly a surprise that Rocker became a musician--although it is something of a surprise that he became the kind of musician he is.

His father, Stanley Drucker, has been principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic since 1948. He frequently performs as featured soloist and has twice been nominated for Grammy Awards for solo clarinet recordings. Rocker’s mother, Naomi, teaches the clarinet at Hofstra University and sometimes tours with the New York Philharmonic as a part-time recruit.

Young Lee got started on the cello at 6, but by his early teens he had caught the rock ‘n’ roll bug. His early garage bands played blues; then he discovered rockabilly along with Setzer and Phantom (born Jim McDonell), who lived in his neighborhood. Rocker says his parents didn’t object; an early incarnation of the Stray Cats, called the Tom Cats, played at parties thrown by his parents for their musician friends.

“Music for us is music,” said Naomi Drucker, who was in Laguna Beach with her husband recently for a visit with their son, his wife, Deborah, and their small children, Justin and Sadie.

“(Rock ‘n’ roll) was something that the kids were doing. We made our garage available (for Lee’s band rehearsals),” she said. “We were the only ones in the neighborhood who allowed the kids to do it. It was noisy, but it was fun.”

The Stray Cats played in the New York area for a while, then packed off to England in 1980. Rocker says they had been impressed at seeing a pompadoured head on the cover of a British music weekly; other than a vague inkling that things were better in England for ‘50s-influenced rockers, they had no firm expectations as they landed in London.

But by the end of 1980, the Stray Cats had a major-label deal with Arista and a single on the British charts. In 1982, they returned to the United States and hit No. 2 on the charts with their first domestic album, “Built for Speed.”

A second U.S. album went gold, but by 1984 the Stray Cats had split up. Setzer launched a solo career, and Rocker and Phantom teamed with guitarist Earl Slick in an unremarkable mainstream rock trio that released two albums.

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Rocker moved from New York to Los Angeles after the first Stray Cats breakup. Five years ago, as he and his wife were expecting their first child, they bought their home in Laguna Beach.

“It’s a real creative place,” Rocker says. “I grew up near the water in New York. I need to be near the water. I don’t have to go in it very often, but I need to see it.”

The Stray Cats re-formed in 1988 after Setzer’s solo career and Phantom, Rocker & Slick had fizzled. The band re-established itself as a popular touring attraction.

Then, in 1992, with the Stray Cats’ end again in sight, Rocker decided to start a blues-oriented band. Setzer put in a good word for Eldred, who led a local bar band called the Ace Tones. Rocker liked Eldred’s playing on an Ace Tones demo tape; the two subsequently jammed and hit it off. Eldred then suggested DeBaun, one of his old playing partners, to round out the lineup.

For Eldred, 34, Big Blue was his first chance to have his playing heard on a record. DeBaun, 46, who now goes by the stage name Henree Deluxe, had a low-profile but interesting performing career that began in 1969 when he was in the Navy, stationed at a base in Japan.

One of his comrades was killed on a combat flight over Vietnam; he left behind a drum set, and DeBaun taught himself to play on it, starting with “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

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In the early ‘80s, DeBaun, his wife, and their 8-year-old daughter, Venus, formed a New Wave family band called Unit III with Venus that landed tracks on two of the “Rodney on the Roq” compilations produced by KROQ’s new-music impresario, Rodney Bingenheimer. Unit III’s song, “Pajama Party,” remains part of the suite of intro music for Bingenheimer’s Sunday night show.

For Rocker, launching a band from the grass-roots up was a new experience; after scuffling briefly in England, the Stray Cats had enjoyed a royal road papered with plenty of cash.

But last fall, he found himself just another unsigned rocker, piled into a rented truck with his two band mates and a roadie. They plied the Southwest as opening act for British blues-rocker Paul Rodgers--a gig landed through business connections Rocker established in his Stray Cats days. On the local scene, Big Blue began by playing modest haunts such as the Blue Cafe in Long Beach and Linda’s Doll Hut in Anaheim.

“That was kind of a new experience,” Rocker said. “It was like starting over again, but in a good way. To experience that again, throwing your gear in a van and driving over and playing--I wouldn’t want to do it for too long, but it’s been nice to see it grow a little bit every month.”

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Big Blue’s initial Southwestern trip led to a contract with Black Top. The resulting album, recorded in Memphis, offers a good mix of styles and moods, from the romping, Fabulous Thunderbirds-style rock of “Darlin’ Darlene” to traditional slow blues, tense shuffles and R & B balladry.

The performances are sharp and spirited, highlighted by Eldred’s fluent and varied guitar playing and Rocker’s confident vocals, which can be convincingly urgent on the tougher numbers.

In something of a coup, Big Blue got Scotty Moore, fabled lead guitarist of Presley’s “Sun Sessions” band, to come out of semi-retirement to play on two tracks. Eldred had befriended Moore in an unlikely chain of events that began in 1991 when he tried to hunt down a mail-order album that featured Moore and Carl Perkins playing together.

Besides helping Big Blue get bigger, Eldred said his main musical mission is to get Moore inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame--unlikely under the current procedure, with its star-oriented balloting, but a certainty should the Hall ever establish a special wing for great supporting players.

In September and October, Big Blue went on its second tour (this time in a luxury touring bus), crisscrossing the country on a 15,000-mile trek. In Southern California, the band has begun to headline such bigger rooms as the Coach House and the Belly Up in Solana Beach.

Rocker says the Stray Cats’ legacy helped the band gather its initial audience, but, “it’s not a rockabilly or Stray Cats crowd any more; they’ve been outnumbered lately. People have really accepted what we’re doing with Big Blue. I don’t get Stray Cats songs yelled at me (as requests).”

The band does play “Beautiful Delilah” and “Drink That Bottle Down,” which Rocker used to sing with the Stray Cats, but they avoid the hits, all of which featured Setzer’s voice.

Big Blue also has been covering the “Sun Sessions” rockabilly nugget, “That’s All Right,” in honor of Scotty Moore. They plan to hit the road again next spring.

Rocker also has launched a side career as a record producer. In 1993 he oversaw sessions by a Spanish rock band, Los Rebeldez, which he says went platinum in Spain, and for a Japanese release by the promising roots-oriented Orange County rock band Mystery Train.

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Among Big Blue’s supporters are Rocker’s parents, who have seen several shows.

“They’re huge fans and the nicest people in the world,” said Eldred, a self-taught, instinctive player who confesses to being a bit nervous about having his playing evaluated by members of the New York Philharmonic.

“When a world-class clarinetist is watching, I get self-conscious. (Rocker’s) mom will say, ‘The pentatonic scale was great, and that triplet thing was beautiful.’ I have no idea.”

Rocker acknowledges that the Stray Cats, like any rock band that has had a run of hits and proven itself a good concert attraction, could serve as a bankable investment, one that the members might periodically want to tap with a run of reunion shows.

He says he remains friendly with Setzer, who has been touring and recording with a 17-piece big band, and Phantom, who is an active partner in a Hollywood nightspot, the Diamond Club. But he doesn’t think the Stray Cats will ever regroup.

“It would be easy money, but we don’t need to do it, and that would be the wrong reason to do it,” he said. “We’ve all come out of the Stray Cats in good shape, and that page is turned. I want to move on and not have this taken as a side project filling time until the next Stray Cats thing. Big Blue is a real serious thing for me. It’s something I want to do, and I want to do it long-term.”

* Lee Rocker’s Big Blue, Jive Kings and Hot Rod Lincoln play Friday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $10. (714) 496-8930.