#slimjimphantom

The cover of the Stray Cats’ second album may have been shot at the Airline Diner on Astoria Boulevard in Queens, NY, but “Gonna Ball” was never released in the US! Here’s the Japanese and New Zealand pressings. 


#happybirthday to my pal @officialslimjimphantom yep #johnnyramone tribute with this fun bunch of pals oh yeah 😍 #Johnwaters the beautiful @tracilords and of course @jonesysjukebox #slimjimphantom #lindaramone @hwdforever #gabbagabbahey #straycats 📷 @photosmith_official 😍🎼🧚‍♀️💕🎂🍭 (at Hollywood Forever)

Managed to get into the Stray Cats’ homecoming club gig in Amityville, recorded for SiriusXM. They haven’t toured here the US for real in decades, so seeing them at all, much less from 15 feet away in a 300-capacity club instead of their usual 3,000-seat theaters, was a great big bucket list check off.


The Stray Cats released their first album in 26 years this weekend, and it took a while to find on vinyl. You’d think that given that they came from Long Island, that every record shop here would have it in stock, but no. it took six tries before I found a copy at Record Stop out in Patchogue.


The Stray Cats were from a town not far from where I live now, but they had to move to the UK to get discovered. This is one of their lesser UK singles, but the B-side is a very credible cover of “Looking Out My Backdoor” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

This record cracked me up! I picked up this U.K. 45 of Long Island’s finest, the Stray Cats, and it has a non-album B-Side called “Cross That Bridge,” about how Setzer’s headed to Manhattan-town and once he gets there, he ain’t never coming back. In the last stanza, he sings how he might take the Grand Central or the Southern State—and the song comes to a dead stand-still, just like the real Southern State. I just about died laughing.

I found this Stray Cats 45 and discovered on Discogs that it’s controversial among collectors. It appears to be an American release on Arista Records, but they were on Arista in the UK and overseas, and on Capitol/EMI-America in the US. So it is considered to be a Capitol release (a test press? No one really knows) despite the text on the label. I found my copy in an Arista sleeve, and there’s some faint handwriting in the corner that seems to say “Agency. Connie’s Place.” I believe the Cats toured the US before they got the US record deal (despite being a US band, they were first discovered and signed in the UK), so I wonder if this wasn’t a small custom promo pressing done for whoever booked their US tour, sent out to potential venues or to local radio stations in advance of a gig to drum up a crowd for their show. If they weren’t signed to Capitol in the US yet, that could be the case and might have been Arista US pressing the small run up as a courtesy for the band/UK arm of Arista. That’s my theory anyway.

Quasi-sorta-almost-probably a bootleg: The Stray Cats’ “The Toronto Strut,” a live double LP on wine-colored vinyl, recorded in 1983 as they were blasting off in North America. Just got it yesterday and it’s awesome.