Rock’n’Roll Heroes – Stray Cats’ Slim Jim Phantom

While the Stray Cats celebrated 45 years of red-hot rockin’ on tour in the US, Vintage Rock caught up with friend of the magazine, Slim Jim Phantom, to reflect on how New York’s Runaway Boys became rockabilly revolutionaries

The Stray Cats story is an inspirational tale of remarkable resilience and headstrong self-belief. Back when the 70s rolled into the 80s, this rockabilly trio of Brian Setzer, Lee Rocker and Slim Jim Phantom came bursting out of New York’s “old man corner bars” with a hot new (but oh so familiar) sound that garnered global acclaim and a die-hard fanbase.

Now, having just commemorated 45 years as a band with sold-out shows on some of the most prestigious stages the US has to offer, the band’s drummer Slim Jim Phantom took time out of his busy schedule to reflect and rejoice for three hours over a real-life rock’n’roll feline fairytale.

Feline Fairytale

“Everything has been really good so far,” opens the easy-going drummer from his San Francisco hotel room when Vintage Rock asks how things are in camp Stray Cat. “There was a really good vibe leading up to the tour. We’ve been changing the setlist up a little bit every night so far. If Brian feels a certain song at a certain time, he’ll call it on the fly. “Last night, he said, ‘Let’s play a song we haven’t played in 30 years’, and we just launched into Rockabilly Rules OK?. We hadn’t rehearsed or even talked about that one before, but it’s one of my favourite Stray Cats songs and we just pulled it out of nowhere.

“It’s good, because everyone’s in the moment and it keeps things interesting. Lee and Brian are so good, I’m just trying to stay steady and keep up. It’s a case of blink and it’s already changed three times with the Stray Cats. We do have a setlist and there are always certain songs that I look forward to playing. We’re doing a couple of newer ones that I’m really enjoying, but I still love Runaway Boys and we’ve been playing that one early on in the show. We’re hitting the audience over the head from the very start.

“That song was key for us and is the reason why we’re still able to play. It’s a song that really revolutionised the genre a little bit and I’m still very proud of that one. When we play Runaway Boys, we all look at each other for a second and, without speaking a word, say, ‘Can you believe we’re here and doing this?’

Rockabilly Rules

“All of us have tried not to use the analogy ‘it’s just like riding a bike’ to describe how it feels to be performing on stage together. We’re trying to think of something different to say, but that’s really what it is like. The word we do use is ‘brotherhood’ and it’s become something of a catchphrase between us.”

So, does that brotherhood also extend to audience members, too, wonders Vintage Rock?

“Absolutely,” enthuses Slim Jim. “The crowd have been there with us every single night. We’re in our sixties and we’ve been doing this for most of our whole adult life. We’re seeing a lot of younger fans in the crowd, but we’re of a certain age now where we’ve grown up and I think it’s the same for many in the audience, too. A lot of the people that I’m seeing have been there since the early days. They can trace their lives through our music: their graduation, wedding, kids’ first birthdays… We’re up on stage sharing stories about how we would cut school and smoke cigarettes behind the church when we were young, all that kind of stuff, and enjoy bantering with the audience. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Living The Dream

Born James McDonnell, into a close-knit Irish family in New York, a young Slim Jim would listen to his parents’ jazz records and had started playing drums by the age of 10. Taking lessons from Mousey Alexander, who had played with the ‘King of Swing’ Benny Goodman, he dedicated himself to the art.

“Mousey lived not too far from our neighbourhood,” recalls Jim. “I had a regular Slingerland four-piece drum kit and he had me playing sitting down like everybody else. Standing up came later. Learning to play jazz helped me with rockabilly because both styles of music swing.

“I always knew I wanted to do something with music. I knew that I wanted to do more than live where we lived, and I thought that the guy who worked in the drum shop at Manny’s in New York City was the coolest guy on the planet. I thought that it would’ve been a dream life if I could make a living in the city, wearing the clothes I wanted, while working at a drum shop. I could never have had imagined in a hundred years that I’d make a record, or travel, or anything like that.

Once The Spirit Grabs You

“I discovered rockabilly music around the same time as Lee and Brian. We all grew up in Massapequa and, at that time, you would hear a few of the big hits on the oldies station but, if you were of a certain age, you would discover Carl Perkins through The Beatles or Chuck Berry via The Rolling Stones. So that’s how I did it. I had some older cousins who I’d borrow records from. I’d practise playing the drums along to them and read the liner notes.

“I’d see names like E. Cochran, C. Perkins, C. Berry, B. Holly, then I would dig deeper. I researched it a little further and discovered Gene Vincent And The Blue Caps and I was like, ‘Whoa, holy mackerel, what is this?’ They were probably the biggest one for me because in some of the photographs, drummer Dickie Harrell was standing up and it really affected me.

“Buddy Holly And The Crickets was another big one, Eddie Cochran, of course, and Johnny Burnette And The Rock’n’Roll Trio. It goes without saying Elvis Presley and The Sun Sessions, too. When I was turned on to rockabilly, that was it, it was over… I moved into a tiny little flat and basically lived my life how I imagined Elvis lived in Memphis in the 50s.

Starting Out

“On this tour we’re actually performing a song, Miracle In Memphis, which is all about that time and I always get excited when we play it. Lee and I wrote that one for his solo record No Cats. He had called me up asking if I could come up with some words for a piece of music he had, so I thought about how we used to emulate a young Elvis 24/7 when we were teenagers.

“We would have been around 17 or 18 years old back then. Lee and I had been in many different bands around town before the Stray Cats. We started playing with Brian as a thing that we did on the weekends to make a little extra money. We all thought that rockabilly was the coolest thing and it was an outlet to get dressed up and play the music we loved.

“We lived for it. We were the three guys you couldn’t help but notice around town because we all dressed so differently to everybody else. Luckily, one of us played the drums, one played double bass, and one played guitar. It was kind of a no-brainer to just get together and take it to some of the watering holes.

Unwritten Manifesto

“Both the music and the look were as equally important to us. Early on we had an unwritten manifesto that you gotta look good and you gotta play good. All of a sudden, we had a hundred kids waiting to see us at this little local pub. We played every night for four hours and these kids just loved it. They started following us around wherever we gigged and would pack out all the old man corner bars in New York and Long Island.

“Every month we would leave open a slot to play a proper music venue in the city like CBGB or Max’s Kansas City, hoping that there would be a journalist or some record label person. We knew we were very good at what we were doing. We were making a good living and living a good life, but we knew that there was more to it than that, so that’s when we went to England.”

London Calling

“We really left a good thing behind,” continues Slim Jim. “We could probably still be playing at those bars and making a thousand bucks each week, but we wanted an adventure.

“I think that we knew that London was the place for us. We noticed that most of these Gene Vincent and Johnny Burnette records that we were getting had come from either France or England. We were walking around dressed like Teddy Boys in Long Island trying to not get killed and reading imported copies of the NME that were four months old. Everyone we read about in England seemed to be more open-minded. Bands knew who Eddie Cochran was and seemed more tuned in. I wasn’t getting that vibe from the big American hard rockers. We’d look at pictures of the King’s Road and everyone seemed to have more style.

“So, we just packed up and left New York. We had the guitar, the double bass, and two or three suitcases for our threads. We didn’t take out too much.

Do Or Die

“There were certain culture shocks when we first arrived, like being charged for ketchup at McDonald’s, low water pressure in showers, and the pubs closing at 11 o’clock. But the good really outweighed the bad. Yes, the pubs kicked everyone out at 11pm, but there was like eight different bands playing between 4pm and closing time.

“We had bought one-way plane tickets and were on an adventure. We had saved up a thousand bucks and that had gone in about three days, so we needed to get a few gigs. No one wanted to go back home, and we had no money to do it if we did. We were on a mission to succeed… Do or die!

“During that first summer, we knocked on the right number of doors, got to know the right people, and played a few gigs around the London circuit: the Golden Lion, the Greyhound, Dingwalls. We looked outrageous and we were from the US, so I guess we were kind of exotic. We had a lot of confidence in the band because we’d been doing it every night of the week in New York.

Big Buzz

“Word spread very fast about us because the UK had the music papers. When interviewed, Joe Strummer or Chrissie Hynde would talk about this band from New York they saw at the Greyhound, where a crazy guy stood up playing the drums, with a guy who looked like Eddie Cochran playing guitar, and a guy who spun this big double bass around. By the third or fourth gig there was already a big buzz surrounding us.

“We were living in squats and, because we looked intriguing, people would strike up conversations with us in the pub and offer to let us stay with them after we’d told them our story. One person was Ronnie Lane from The Faces, who let us live at his house for a week. Things like that just happened and it felt like we were in the right place at the right time. Somehow, we got to the point where there was a lot of record company interest in us. I think we met the first label in September and when we signed with Arista, they got us a flat to live in. I don’t know if things happen like that anymore, but the whole thing was like a storybook.”

Rockabilly 2000

Recorded at Eden Studios, Chiswick, the Stray Cats’ debut album was produced by the band with Dave Edmunds. Famed for scoring the UK Christmas No.1 in 1970 with a cover of I Hear You Knocking, Edmunds had produced Shakin’ Stevens And The Sunsets’ A Legend and was influential in the pub rock scene through his band Rockpile.

“Dave had come to see us play and was a fan,” recalls Slim Jim. “I think he first made himself known to us at The Venue, Victoria Station, and he kind of compared himself to Sam Phillips. He told us that he had a sound in his head but hadn’t found an outlet for it – he was basically looking for an Elvis Presley. We had that same vision in our own heads: a Gene Vincent for the end of the century, or Rockabilly 2000 as we nicknamed it at the time.”

With the backing of Arista and with Edmunds onboard to produce, the making of the Stray Cats album was a speedy process.

Ready To Go

“We had the songs ready to go,” explains Slim Jim. “We’d written Runaway Boys in London, but songs like Rock This Town, Stray Cat Strut and Rumble In Brighton had been around since New York.

“Rumble In Brighton came about after Brian and I read this tiny article in a broadsheet newspaper covering youth culture. It described the mods and rockers in Brighton, and we couldn’t believe that people would get all dressed up for any type of rumble. We had never been there, but we wrote the song about it.

“The label wanted the record by Christmas, so things moved very quickly. Suddenly, Runaway Boys was in the Top 10 at Christmas and then, when the album came out, we went outside London for the first time on a UK tour. It was quite amazing.”

Top Of The Pops

Vintage Rock is interested to know if the band wanted to avoid Brighton or were excited to pay the seaside city a visit.

“I think we played The Top Rank Suite in Brighton on that first tour,” reflects Slim Jim. “Our first impressions of the UK were probably like how you British guys think Memphis is going to be, you know, all Cadillacs and diners. Well, we had a similar romanticised view of England and soon discovered that things aren’t always how you imagined they’d be. But we loved it all.

“We had the added assistance of a hit record. When we went to Scotland, the Midlands or Wales, we were also in Melody Maker or on Top Of The Pops and our song was being played on the radio.

“I will never forget hearing Runaway Boys on the radio for the first time. We were driving in a Ford Anglia, and the three of us went crazy. It was a very special moment. But I look back now and think how it all was so incredible: we’d left New York, we’d been homeless and now we were on the radio and playing packed shows. And it was all so completely organic…

New York Savvy

“We had people waiting for us at every place we played. I remember Scotland being a bit gnarly. The doorman, an old-fashioned bouncer in a tuxedo, came into our dressing room with a milk crate full of switchblades, a comb that was sharpened into a blade, golf balls, brass knuckles, and he said, ‘This is what I just took off the audience, now have a great show lads.’”

Not ‘choose your weapons, boys,’ jokes Vintage Rock. “Haha, no,” laughs Slim Jim. “It might’ve been a bit rough, but we were from New York and a little bit savvy. We were like, ‘This is everything that we’ve been talking about since we started.’

“The audience loved you, but they hated you at the same time. All the kids at the front certainly loved us, but the grumpy older Teddy Boys at the back, drinking their pints didn’t. Well they had to say they didn’t like it to be cool, but I think a lot of them might have liked us deep down. We were Americans who were playing rockabilly in a very authentic manner. We always knew that we could break through with this music.”

So, the success the Stray Cats enjoyed so early on over here in the UK didn’t take the band by surprise, asks Vintage Rock.

“Well, I think we were just living in the moment.” concedes Slim Jim. “We didn’t have any time whatsoever to take it all in. When you’re young and achieve big success right away, there was a lot of pressure to keep it going constantly.”

We’ll Rock Till We Drop

Second album Gonna Ball swiftly followed Stray Cats in November 1981 and the combined sales of those first two LPs was enough to convince EMI America to compile a ‘best of’, titled Built For Speed, for release in their homeland in 1982.

“We were determined to make it in the States,” reveals Slim Jim. “When our record got a release there, we were treated very much like an English band. So, when we eventually went back home, we had to go prove ourselves all over again. There was a small buzz, but it couldn’t really spread like it had in England: there’s no NME and there’s no Radio One… but they did have MTV.

“When MTV started, they needed content. If you’re playing in Germany or France and Top Of The Pops wanted to air your latest song you can’t be in all these places at once, so they showed a video. That’s why a lot of the early MTV bands were British because they had the videos.”

Street Smart Strut

With Rock This Town and Stray Cat Strut enjoying regular rotation on MTV, the band secured Billboard Hot 100 placings at No.9 and No.3 respectively. Built For Speed peaked at No.2 on the album chart and the band reunited with Dave Edmunds in 1983 to record Rant N’ Rave With The Stray Cats.

However, with both the United States and Europe conquered, the trio surprisingly went their separate ways.

“We’d been living on top of each other for five years,” confides Slim Jim, “and I think it burned everybody out a little bit. We didn’t really have that much counsel back then and were kind of on our own. We just did whatever we were told: ‘Okay, another tour; okay, another radio show; okay, another album’, it seemed like there was no time for yourself to get away from the madness. I wanted to get a personal life at that point, which everybody was cool with.

“It takes a while to get a couple of solo records out of your system, which I think was important for everyone. I’m the drummer, I wanna be in the band forever, that’s just the drummer mentality. But if I was in the band the whole time, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do The Head Cat with Lemmy or Dead Men Walking with Glen Matlock, Billy Duffy, or Captain Sensible.”

Adventures Of Skinny Jim

Life Begins At 40

On 16 October 2018, the Stray Cats surprised us all when they announced they’d be reuniting to record a new LP with producer Peter Collins. Released the following May by Surfdog Records, 40 was their ninth studio album and first since 1993’s Original Cool.

“It was such a great experience,” remembers Slim Jim. “Things had changed, we used to start around 8pm or 10pm and work through the night until the sun came up. For 40 we went to Nashville, which is a central place for all of us. We’d start at noon, take a break, and then work through to about 6pm or 7pm. It was a nice, adultway to make an album.

“We have added Three Time’s A Charm from the record to our current set and I really look forward to playing that one. Brian had kinda written it for me as it’s got a Dickie Harrell vibe to it.”

Stuffed with hot rockers such as Cat Fight (Over A Dog Like Me), Cry Danger, Mean Pickin’ Mama and Devil Train, 40 was awarded full marks on its release by VR and we were keen to find out if it is possible that the Cats might make another record in the future?

“Oh, I would love to,” Slim responds, “I’m always up for it…”

Rock This Town?

“We’re like, ‘Okay, now you know the drill’,” reasons Slim Jim. “It always comes back to being in the band because it’s a special event. We all miss each other and the excitement of it, so that’s when we get back together. That’s when we’ll call Edmunds and make, what I think is one of our best records, Blast Off!. And it has happened a couple of times since…”

Prior to this US Summer Tour 2024, the Stray Cats reconvened in 2019 with a new album, 40, as well as a 40th anniversary tour. Taking in Birmingham, Manchester and two nights at London’s Eventim Apollo, the tour resulted in the Rock This Town – From L.A. To London live album.

However, that was the last time we saw Messrs Setzer, Rocker, and Phantom collectively play on British soil. Inevitably, Vintage Rock is keen to know if it’s likely that we’ll see the Stray Cats on this side of the pond anytime soon.

“I sure hope so,” Slim Jim answers honestly. “I mean that’s what usually happens. Everyone always talks about it, and I wouldn’t be surprised that we will have another talk. But it seems logical to me.

“Everyone’s in very good mental and physical shape and I’m definitely up for it. London is like our home turf. We experienced things over there that you could never recreate.”

Feline Good

“Right now, we’re living in the moment,” Slim Jim continues. “After a show everyone kinda settles down for a bit before we head off and do our own thing. My wife is on tour with us, playing with her band The Midnight Cowgirls, so I’ll catch up with her and I won’t see Brian or Lee until the next day. I think after a few of these shows, we’ll have a little bit of a party at the venue, but everyone just kinda makes their own way to the next show.”

As Slim Jim’s wife Jennie Vee returns with a coffee, it’s time for the drummer to get ready and head off for the lush Mountain Winery in Saratoga where the Stray Cats will most definitely rock the town inside out later that evening. But before bidding Vintage Rock a fond farewell, he adds: “When we were younger, we wanted everyone in the world to know about our heroes – Eddie Cochran, Johnny Burnette, Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent…

“I think we’ve definitely helped introduce rockabilly to another generation. I’m happy we managed to achieve that and it’s beautiful that we all still get to do this.”

For more on Slim Jim Phantom click here

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