Jeff Spevak
Democrat and Chronicle

4/17/2003 -- At every show where there's an upright bass -- well, maybe not at the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra -- look for a couple of guys milling around with well-fed sideburns and hair that's built to carry a surfboard. The rockabilly fellows. The roots rockers. They're wearing bowling shirts, and maybe a couple of dozen tattoos on each arm. They talk the talk and walk the walk. Yeah, we got 'em in this town, all right.

Lee Rocker talks the talk and walks the walk, too.

''It is a lifestyle thing,'' says Rocker, calling from the office in his home in Southern California; the room is decorated, he says, with pin-up gal pals, Elvis pictures, a poster for the 1958 teen-rebel film Hot Rod Gang and what he calls ''a Dick Tracy chrome desk.''

''It's one of the few kinds of music that has the whole package about it. It is a music. It is a look: the hair, the clothes. You have a rockabilly scene in London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo and Columbus, Ohio.

''It's not the biggest thing in the world, but it's there. In one sense, it's the coolest thing in the world. In another sense, it's kept rockabilly in the underground.''

Rocker, who plays Wednesday at Montage Grille, is best known as the bassist for the Stray Cats, the slicked-up trio from Long Island. It dragged rockabilly out of the underground for a while in the '80s with the improbable help of MTV and its incessant broadcasting of hip videos for ''Rock this Town'' and ''Stray Cat Strut.''

Drummer Slim Jim Phantom is still out there, playing occasional gigs and running a nightclub that he owns in Southern California. Lead singer Brian Setzer is quite visible, having forayed into an attention-getting series of albums featuring a jazz big band backing his retro-electric guitar.

And Rocker? He's stayed the closest to his rockabilly roots. In fact his new album, Bulletproof, is as good as anything the Stray Cats ever put out.

Rocker, as it turns out, is an excellent singer, with the appropriate hillbilly hiccup. He writes clever songs that would have fit comfortably in the hands of the late Carl Perkins. Or Rocker's old band -- ''Blue Suede Nights'' sounds a lot like ''Stray Cat Strut.'' Rocker also picks excellent cover songs, in Perkins' ''One More Shot'' -- which opens with heavy echoes of ''Mystery Train'' -- and Johnny Cash's ''Johnny, Frankie's Man'' and the Beatles' ''I'll Cry Instead.''

''The Beatles, their early stuff was hugely rockabilly influenced. And really, for all of rock and roll, it definitely is the foundation,'' Rocker says. Although, ''I don't know about Metallica. Duran Duran might have skipped that chapter.

''I just love the music, and the influence kinda seeps through everything. And I've worked with a lot of the original guys, like Carl Perkins, who was a very dear friend, and Elvis' guitar player, Scotty Moore.

''But you have to put your own stamp on it. This is not a museum piece for me. (The song) 'Nothing Lasts Forever' would never have been played in the '50s. That would have been a slap across the face, those guitar tones, that distortion. There's a little more in-your-face, spaghetti-western vibe to it.''

Like many musicians who obsess on the roots of their work, Rocker hears rockabilly in everything. ''Willie Dixon was the premier upright blues bass player,'' he says, ''and he worked with Chuck Berry. I just found out, Jimi Hendrix was in Little Richard's band: That's where rock all comes from. You can figure where Jimi Hendrix might have gotten the inspiration for having an outrageous stage show. That's Little Richard, you know?''

Only one aspect of the rockabilly life seems to have escaped Rocker: No tattoos.
''Every time I went into the tattooist -- this is when we were living in London -- I was pretty loaded,'' he admits. ''The tattooist would say, 'Hey, come back tomorrow and we'll take care of this.' ''

Reputable tattooists don't like to illustrate drunks, who tend to wake up in the morning, groaning, ''What the hell was I thinking?''

''I would just never go back the next day,'' Rocker says. ''After a while, I would just say, 'What the hell, I might as well be the guy without the tattoos. I might as well be the rebel.''