A Stray Cat Struts Read Free Page B

onstage. Years later, in front of a bunch of name drummers, Tony Williams, maybe the best drummer ever, said that this change was my original contribution to the world of drums.
    We wanted to create a situation where we could play the music and look the part. We started to do a fun band called Brian and the Tomcats in a few bars in and around Massapequa. The established rock clubs on Long Island would not book us. It was too weird. It was still the 1970s on Long Island, and dinosaur rock and Southern-tinged, long-haired boogie was still the rage. We weren’t even punk rock. It was weirder even still. Three young kids with high hair and pink jackets, baggy pants, and two-tone shoes were not the norm. We learned and played Elvis, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Ricky Nelson, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins covers. Each of us was in our other “serious” band that we hoped to get record deals with. We got together to play rockabilly cover songs for fun on nights we weren’t rehearsing or playing with our other bands. The Cats had an instant chemistry, and it came across to the audience. The interaction onstage was good right away. There was an understanding of not getting in the way of the other guy. Everybody had the moves and knew when to pull them out. We really loved this music and felt comfortable with each other. We were still very young but had all had a good amount of experience doing gigs. We seemed to instinctively know how to pose for a photograph and really looked like we belonged together. Every great band has distinct personalities and slightly different looks but presents a united front to the outside world. Not every band translates into a bobblehead doll; I think the Cats always did. The three of us are certainly different people, and there have always been rubs, especially in later times, between the other two. Everyone has grown up a little, but each guy, me included, is basically the same person he was when we started this thing. It was a little fate and good luck that we had the pieces we needed right there in our school and that we met up under all the right circumstances. The history of rock and roll is full of these chance bits of kismet. I’m still grateful for the accident of where I grew up and who I grew up with. The luck of the draw was with us. Right away, there was a feeling that it would be us against the world. After a few months, the handwriting was on the wall. The Tomcats, our fun band, was the one everybody was coming to see, and we were packing out these little bars on Long Island in a scene we had created on our own. We started to do the Cats full-time.
    Since we were so young and made such a big impact on the rock-and-roll culture at the time, it’s impossible to step away from it. I never wanted to. I’m proudly the drummer from the Stray Cats and will happily have that as my epitaph. The others have tried to distance themselves more. After our initial success, I felt I didn’t have anything left to prove. The trick is to keep it going, which I know now is the hardest thing to do.
    Like Hyman Roth told Michael, “This is the business we’ve chosen.”

 
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    Escape from New York
    I had never been on an airplane before, but I wasn’t afraid. I was too excited to be afraid. We were getting out; we were going to London, the place where it all happened. We were never so sure of anything in our lives. I was nineteen. We’d sold our equipment except for the basic stuff that we’d need in London. We’d bought one-way plane tickets and had the tearful good-byes with our families and small following of fans, none of whom wanted us to leave. One of the club owners said we were stabbing him in the back. We just wanted a shot. I’m not quite sure what we were expecting. We thought we knew everything; it turned out that we knew just enough to go all the way. We cut a striking figure boarding a plane with one-way tickets at