My guess is that Lee Rocker's money years were with the Stray Cats, a trio he formed in Long Island with childhood buddies Brian Setzer and Slim Jim Phantom. The Cats were the first group to get a standup bass back on the radio in decades, therein pointing out the main flaw with rockabilly: it ain't commercial. Nonetheless, the Cats surprised an entire generation of kids who thought that Ozzy Osbourne invented rock and roll. Rockabilly fans live like a fetish cult, awash in a bright sea of tattoo ink, weighed down by their piercings and their day jobs. The last thing they want you to say is that rockabilly is old-fart music. But even in the '60s, rockabilly was a throwback to the '50s, when the Beatles were doing covers of Carl Perkins tunes like "Honey, Don't" and "Matchbox." Rockabilly was bastardized from country, R&B, hillbilly music, and more. It was the mother of all rock and roll, and Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Buddy Holly left their fingerprints all over it.

The lean, tense sound of the Stray Cats hit big with an audience long oversaturated by big-hair rock. Nineteen eighty-two was the year of the Cat -- formed in 1979, the trio first moved to London, cut a handful of tracks, then came back home to the U.S. megastars; their tour with the Stones couldn't have hurt. The Stray Cats were finished, however, by 1983; successive regroupings were failures, and finally, Lee Rocker got his own group.

Rocker has since cranked out a handful of solo albums. Unlike Mike Ness or Horton Heat, Rocker is a purist. He revived rockabilly, and he may be its last true champion. He's one of the best slap-bassists working, let alone living. "There's a rockabilly scene in pretty much every city in the world," he once said, "but you gotta know where to look." Ironically, Rocker says that it is the birthplace of rockabilly, the South, that wants nothing to do with it. "They're, like, 'Rockabilly?'" he says. "'What the hell is that?'"