The Stray Cats' Lee Rocker gets all about the upright bass on "Dog House Shuffle," a one-off solo single whose video, premiering exclusively below, pays tribute to the instrument Rocker helped propel into the MTV lexicon during the early '80s.
"It's a tribute in a lot of ways," Rocker (nee Leon Drucker) tells Billboard. "It's a song I wrote over the last couple of months. I was thinking about my career with 40 years of Stray Cats and all of that and thinking about the upright bass, which is what started this thing. It takes me back to the opening line of the song -- which is "Took me 'round the world and I changed my name/found a little fortune, found a little fame/Doin' the dog house shuffle" -- which is right out of my story. Dog House is what they call the upright bass, so it's a tribute to the bass itself and a lot of the players that I came up listening to."