When the Stray Cats Added a Fourth Cat: Exclusive Book Excerpt
Rockabilly revivalists the Stray Cats hit 1982 album Built for Speed featured two Top 10 hits: "Stray Cat Strut" and "Rock This Town". They followed it up with Rant n' Rave with the Stray Cats just over a year later. Despite yielding two Top 40 singles, "(She's) Sexy + 17" and "I Won't Stand in Your Way," as well as other songs that demonstrated that the band's range included styles outside classic rockabilly, the band was challenged by the typical difficulties faced by young rock and roll musicians trying to maintain their breakthrough success.
In Christopher McKittrick's book Howling to the Moonlight on a Hot Summer Night: The Tale of the Stray Cats , the author explores how a trio of throwback-loving musicians from the suburbs of Massapequa, Long Island—guitarist/singer Brian Setzer, drummer Slim Jim Phantom, and bassist Lee Rocker—returned rockabilly to the international pop charts as the Stray Cats. Over forty years and many classic studio and live albums later, the Stray Cats still epitomize the spirit of the founding fathers of rock and roll—a coolness that never goes out of style.
Howling to the Moonlight on a Hot Summer Night is now available via Backbeat Books. In the exclusive excerpt below, McKittrick recounts a little-known fact about the final weeks of the band's initial run—the addition of Tommy Byrnes, better known for his ongoing thirty-plus year run as a guitarist in fellow Long Islander Billy Joel's band, to the group. Byrnes remains the only "fourth Stray Cat" to perform alongside the otherwise unchanged Stray Cats lineup of Setzer, Phantom, and Rocker that has persisted throughout the band's various reunion albums and tours since their first breakup in 1984, including most recently the Stray Cats' 2024 summer tour. Though Byrnes' tenure in the band was brief, he would later work with Setzer on his first two solo albums (including 1986's The Knife Feels Like Justice) and has remained with Billy Joel's band throughout worldwide tours and the Piano Man's record-shattering Madison Square Garden residency.
Chapter 8: The Cats Go Astray
The substantially lower sales of Rant n' Rave with the Stray Cats compared to Built for Speed appeared to have shaken Setzer's confidence in the future of the group. Perhaps influenced by the musical support he had recently received on stage during shows on the last tour from Jeff "Skunk" Baxter and Mel Collins, when Stray Cats returned to the road for a July 4 warm-up performance at the Rio Theatre in Valley Stream, Long Island (an 1,800-seat movie theater located fifteen miles west of the band's native Massapequa that occasionally featured concerts) for the first of the final twenty shows of the group's original era, it appeared the members were already looking toward a potentially very different future. The most obvious change was the line-up—joining Stray Cats on stage for the entire performance was Tommy Byrnes as additional guitarist and backing vocalist.
Byrnes, who is best known today as a guitarist with Billy Joel's band since 1989, is a native of Lynbrook and Oceanside, New York, two South Shore Long Island towns located a few miles west of Massapequa. Since he was a teenager, Byrnes began playing the same Long Island club scene as Phantom, Rocker, and Setzer. In the early 1980s, Byrnes played in the BMT's, a local favorite band which at times included Freddy "Frogs" Toscano, a fixture on the Long Island scene for decades (in 1983 Setzer said in a profile in the Long Island music paper the Island Ear that Freddy Frogs & BMT's were his favorite group). The BMT's played a variety of music, including 1950s songs by Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Fats Domino, and frequently played Max's Kansas City on Sundays. The BMT's even played shows in Europe in the early 1980s after their single, "Crazy Little Mama" (a cover of the doo-wop song by El Dorados & Magnificents) reached the charts in the UK.
Byrnes first saw Stray Cats perform at one of their frequent Long Island gigs, TK's Place. "I was only 19 years old, and I remember watching them and I said, 'What the fuck is this?'" Byrnes recalls with a laugh. "They were all over the place. It was a three-ring circus, and they were animated as hell. They all had the best moves I'd ever seen on stage. I was an instant fan. In the back of my mind's eye, I see Brian with an orange zoot suit and a pink pompadour—which I'm not sure but was entirely possible—Jimmy standing on the bass drum while playing the snare and the cymbal, and Lee standing in the crook of the upright bass. It was like an acrobatics show. It was fun to watch and listen to, and Brian, Lee, and Jim brought a level of musicianship to rockabilly that had never been seen before." Byrnes subsequently met the band after the show, and shortly afterward Phantom, Rocker, and Setzer departed for London.
After hearing the first recordings by Stray Cats, Byrnes appreciated how well they were able to capture that sound and energy on record. "I always thought Bill Haley's records were the best-sounding records of that day, like 'Rock Around the Clock,' 'See You Later, Alligator,' or 'Flip, Flop, and Fly.' The way the stand-up bass and snare drums were recorded, it's unbelievable how great it sounds and how tight it is. And then I remember listening to the recording of 'Runaway Boys' for the first time and saying, 'That's it right there.' Dave Edmunds totally nailed it with these guys." Byrnes recalls that Stray Cats returned stateside after their initial success in London, perhaps in December 1980 when Setzer briefly returned to Massapequa for the holidays or around the time of their one-off performance at the Bond International Casino in New York in January 1981.
"They had a coming-home party for Brian—I don't think it was a party for the whole band—and we were the band [for the party]," he remembers. "He came in, saw that we were there, and somebody went home and got his guitar and amp and that was the first time we played together."
Even after becoming known for his work with Stray Cats, Setzer would occasionally join the BMT's on stage for their local performances while he still lived on Long Island. An October 1982 edition of the Hofstra Herald, the newspaper of local college Hofstra University, noted that Setzer had recently performed with the band at the Massapequa bar Heckle and Jeckles and both Setzer and Rocker performed with the group at the Bellmore bar Arrows. "Brian and I became fast friends, and he would come down and jam with us at Heckles because it was local for him," says Byrnes. "He would bring people down, like Dave Edmunds, and the two of them jammed at Heckles. I would just hang out with him and go up to his house and we'd play guitar."
Even though he and Setzer became friendly, Byrnes admits that the offer to join Stray Cats caught him completely unaware. Immediately before joining Stray Cats, Byrnes was playing with an upstate New York-based group named the Velcros that opened for Van Halen on their 1984 tour (the Velcros had previously opened for Stray Cats in 1982). At the time, Van Halen typically took unsigned bands with them on tour as their opening acts, and Byrnes later shared stories about being pelted with garbage by Van Halen fans to Eddie Van Halen when he met him backstage at the inaugural Farm Aid. "One day I went up to Brian's—he lived in Old Westbury at the time—and we went up to the music room, and he started playing a Stray Cats song," says Byrnes. "He said, 'What would you play if I was playing this?' So I started playing with him and we played different versions of the chords of 'Stray Cat Strut' and some other songs. And he said, 'Good, how'd you like to join the band?' I was like, 'What?' and he said, "You know, I've been doing this three-piece for so long and I'd really like to add another dimension to it.' I said, 'I would love to!' I was a huge fan, and Brian was like my first guitar hero that I ever actually met."
Byrnes began rehearsing with Setzer and remembers that he taught him a lot about some of the musicians who had inspired Stray Cats. "I knew Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, but I didn't know Cliff Gallup, who was Gene's guitar player, and I didn't know who Scotty Moore was, who was Elvis's guitar player," he recalls. "I knew who Jimi Hendrix was because I knew guitar players, but I didn't know the insides of what made those records so great."
Byrnes' role as the "fourth Stray Cat" brought a new dynamic to the group both visually and sonically, and his brief tenure of less than two dozen shows over a period of two months at the end of the band's initial lifespan has even come as a surprise to devoted Stray Cats fans when they learn about Byrnes's brief tenure in the band. He was never officially announced as a member of the group, though he did appear in a few posed photos with the other band members which may suggest he was destined for a permanent role in the group had the band not formally broken up at the end of 1984. After the Fourth of July performance on Long Island, the four-piece Stray Cats played two more U.S. shows—July 6 at Milwaukee's annual Summerfest music festival and July 8 at Trout Aire Amphitheatre in Minneapolis—before heading to Europe for three festival shows (two in France and one in Switzerland). At both U.S. shows the band opened for George Thorogood and the Destroyers, a fellow roots-rock devotee (though more inclined to Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker than rockabilly) who was also an EMI America artist at the time. One of the songs the four-piece Stray Cats performed at Festival D'Exilir in St. Pabu, France, "Rebels Rule," was broadcast on television. The clip remains the only known professionally filmed footage of Byrnes performing with the band.
Stray Cats returned to North America for their final shows of the tour with a performance at Kingswood Music Theatre in Toronto on July 29. "The first time I saw them was at Kingswood Music Theatre at Canada's Wonderland, just north of Toronto," recalls Lee McCormack, musician and host of the Tramps Like Us music podcast. "I was 10 years old and two years into my fandom by then. Super excited that my father took me, he was also a fan. The details are somewhat vague, but I do remember having the greatest time, hearing these songs performed live and seeing the fellas in person. I remember they came out in leather jackets, hair greased back and looking cool. I remember the stripped-down, bare stage. Quite a contrast to the bands of that early era with the big stage shows—I was into heavy metal and those live shows were all about big stages and walls of amps and pyro and lights and more is more. A small stand-up drum kit for Slim Jim and a couple of amps for Brian was all there was. I vividly remember a few trash cans on stage, complete with spray paint graffiti. I think they actually may have served as guitar stands—you could see the neck of a Gretsch guitar sticking out. I remember the crowd was full of rockabillies and punk rockers. I had found my people and my scene. That moment when the music becomes real and tangible. After listening to the records for the last two years, the music had come to life."
The group also radically reworked the setlist for the tour, best evidenced by a recording of the August 6, 1984, concert at the Park West in Chicago. While "Rumble in Brighton," "Runaway Boys," "Stray Cat Strut," "(She's Sexy) + 17," "Fishnet Stockings," "Something's Wrong With My Radio," and "Rock This Town" remained the standard originals in the setlist and "Double Talkin' Baby," "Somethin' Else," and "C'mon Everybody" were the obligatory doses of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran covers, the band skipped ahead a generation to include two covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival songs, "Hey Tonight" and "Lookin' Out My Back Door," plus an unexpected rendition of The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song, "Love Is All Around" (Stray Cats previously recorded and released "Lookin' Out My Back Door" as the B-side to the "Rebels Rule" single, though the sleeve misidentifies the song as "Lookin' Through My Back Door"). But perhaps most surprising were three as-yet-unreleased original songs, "Time Is on My Hands," "Barbwire Fence" and "Bobby's Back." The first song of the three, "Time Is on My Hands," is a slower blues jam and features an extended guitar solo by Byrnes. Rocker performed the lead vocals on the song and it later appeared on the first Phantom, Rocker, and Slick album (credited as a Phantom-Rocker composition), with the guitar lead reworked by Earl Slick.
The latter two songs eventually surfaced on Setzer's first solo album, The Knife Feels Like Justice (both credited to Setzer alone). "Barbwire Fence" as performed by Stray Cats is almost fully formed as the song that appears on Setzer's solo album. It deals with more serious material—the lyrics utilize the barbwire fence as a metaphor for what separates humanity from one another as we hurt the earth and our fellow man (Setzer later told Guitar World that he wrote "Barbwire Fence" about the Cold War). While Setzer would play banjo on the version for his solo album to highlight its country influence, the Stray Cats rendition is a full-on rock blast.
In contrast, "Bobby's Back" differs in parts from the version eventually released by Setzer. The soul-influenced song features slightly different lyrics than the finished version, including an incomplete chorus. The song is about the singer's acquaintance, Bobby, who just gets out of prison and discovers that much of the life he had known before going to jail has changed—his girlfriend has moved on and friends have settled down. The song ends by revealing that Bobby dies in a car accident several years later (speeding in Stray Cats version, high on drugs and alcohol in the later Setzer version) and the singer laments his fate. Like "Barbwire Fence," it was certainly heavier content than the typical Stray Cats song in which speeding in a car was typically highlighted as an enjoyable pastime. The song, buoyed by Byrnes' harmony vocals, hints at what a circa 1985 Stray Cats album may have sounded like since it seems entirely possible that all three of these songs were considered for inclusion on the next Stray Cats album because they were being debuted live. If Stray Cats recorded demo versions of these songs during the breaks in their tours in 1984, they have yet to surface.
The lyrics of the two future Setzer solo songs undeniably dealt with more mature themes than the lyrics of any of the songs on the band's previous three albums, something that Setzer had expressed earlier in the year to Trouser Press. "I know that with the next album we're gonna have to make a bit of a change," he explained about the band's then-hypothetical fourth album. "I can't be singing about hot rods and Harleys my whole life, and I won't want to. I'll want to change and write some different things." While Setzer did take that approach on his next album (his first solo album), the opposite actually happened in the long run—even forty years later, Setzer is still largely writing, recording, and performing music in the same thematic vein as the hits he became known for in the early 1980s.
And yet despite those signs pointing to the band's future a full four years after the band's lightning-bolt arrival on the London music scene, there was no denying that the group's popularity had substantially waned in the UK, where the group experienced a nearly two-year head start. Because of that, it was arguably logical to anticipate that the band's popularity would be similarly fleeting in North America over the coming months as well. "If one of your albums sells two million copies and the next one sells only 500,000—forget the fact that that's enough to make it gold, which is more than most records do—it's considered a failure," Rocker told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette two years later. "Your record company, your management, and everybody else who expected to make some cash from your success are bummed out. The most difficult thing to do in this business is maintain."
