Brian Setzer does not come off as your typical pop star. He’s not obsessed with inane posturing or with glamorizing his life; he just genuinely digs what he does. Then again, if the talented Setzer wanted to be a rock idol, he could have picked easier musical formats to market than big band and rockabilly. Indeed, it seems that, given his tastes, the animated guitarist and bandleader is a musician out-of-time. But he offers a good observation about this: “ I’d probably have a lot more competition if I lived back in the ’50s.”

The Long Island native and current Southern California resident may have retro tastes, but his fluid way of combining big band, rockabilly, blues and doo-wop is very modern. Just listen to the Brian Setzer Orchestra’s latest album, Vavoom! (Interscope), the follow-up to the 1998 Grammy-winning, double-Platinum The Dirty Boogie. “It’s all the blues to me,” observes Setzer. “I don’t understand why people don’t mix ’em up more often. That’s my stuff. Rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly, bebop, jazz, swing, country—it all comes from the blues.”

Over the course of 14 diverse cuts on Vavoom! (six covers and eight originals), the BSO ranges from rockabilly (“’49 Mercury Blues”) to jump blues (“Jukebox”) to a faithful rendition of the Bobby Darin (actually Brecht/Weill) standard “Mack the Knife.” Meanwhile, “Drive Like Lightning (Crash Like Thunder)” puts Setzer in James Dean mode with a gritty, surf guitar track. On the version of the ’50s-sounding “greaser” tune “Gloria,” Setzer has his sax players imitate a five-part doo-wop section, while on “That’s the Kind of Sugar Papa Likes,” he says his vocalists “sing the saxophone section, and the saxophones either doubled it, laid out or played a different part.” Then there’s the lead single, “Gettin’ in the Mood,” a reinvention of the Glenn Miller big band classic, featuring new lyrics, hip hop beats and even a rap during the break! In creating the new BSO album, the guitarist wanted to push the envelope and show even swing purists that their music could be vital today. All of the album’s tracks were initially produced by Peter Collins (Rush, Jewel, Indigo Girls) and engineered by John Holbrook (Natalie Merchant, Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks, and Setzer) at The Village Recorder in Los Angeles.

Setzer acknowledges that his taste in recording gear and methods runs to the retro over the modern. “Let’s put it this way, I live in a world of vacuum tubes, flashing red lights and tape,” he quips. “I’m not hip to new technology at all. As far as recording this band, it’s got to be all about the old Neumann and AKG tube mics. That’s just the best sound. I don’t care if you’re a techno group, a modern band—you use those old mics; there’s something to be said for those. I also use tape delay. My [guitar] amp is an old Fender, my guitar is an old ’59 Gretsch. I use an old chorus echo for that; it’s gotta be tape, slapback echo. John Holbrook has an old Echoplex, and after the band is recorded, we take the Echoplex and sometimes just slap it over the whole track.”

Minor tweaks aside, recording the music of BSO does not involve studio trickery—it’s flat-out organic. On his two most recent albums, which Holbrook has engineered, the core three-piece—Setzer, upright acoustic bass slapper Mark Winchester and drummer Bernie Dresel—first laid down the basic tracks. To avoid bleed-through, Winchester was placed in an isolation booth, which still allowed him eye contact with Setzer, who faced Dresel in the main room.

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Reprinted with permission from Magazine, December, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved