The Stray Cats' Lee Rocker Pays Homage to His Influences on 'Dog House Shuffle': Premiere

Some of those players -- including Elvis Presley's Bill Black, Willie Dixon, Fred Maddox, the Tennessee Three's Marshall Grant, Carl Perkins' brother Clayton and Al Rex of Bill Haley & His Comets -- are featured in the "Dog House Shuffle" video, along with cartoon animations and studio footage of Rocker and his band recording the track. "Most of these guys were gone, sadly, by the time (the Stray Cats) got going," notes Rocker, who started playing upright bass as a teenager, after starting on cello and then moving to electric bass guitar. "I did see Willie Dixon play when I was a teenager, which was monumental to me. I had a wonderful friendship and working relationship with Carl Perkins, but his brother had died years earlier. I think they'd love this track, though. There is a small group of us, when you come down to it. It's not guitar world. It's upright bass, and we're a little band of renegades."

"Dog House Shuffle" comes on the heels of the Stray Cats' 40th anniversary reunion tour during the summer as well as 40, the rockabilly trio's first new studio album in 26 years. Rocker is planning to record more of his own material and tour with his band, but he predicts that he, Brian Setzer and Slim Jim Phantom aren't done rocking just yet.

"Everything this year was really awesome," Rocker reports. "The band sounded great, and it was a helluva lot of fun and we really enjoyed it and kept expanding it because of the good times the three of us were having. And it's pretty damn easy. So we're certainly looking at 2020, but we're just not settled on it yet. I am pretty confident you'll see more of us, though."