It’s been a rough couple of years for Brian Setzer. But after canceling a Stray Cats tour last year due to medical reasons, he’s ready to rock the 18 towns the trio — including drummer Slim Jim Phantom and bassist Lee Rocker — will start playing at the end of July.
“I’m feeling really good, I have to tell ya,” Setzer tells Guitar Player from his home in Minnesota. “I wouldn’t book a tour if I couldn’t say I’m 100 percent. I would’ve taken more time if I had to.
“Honestly, the best thing for me now is just to hear that sound of that guitar and look over to see Slim Jim rockin’ on one side of me and look over and see Lee on the other side.
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“We’re the only ones that play this type of music, really, besides the local bands that play around,” he continues. “There’s a lot of them.
It’s frustrating when you sit down and your hands do nothing. You really can’t take it for granted. Playing guitar is certainly on top, but so is holding a toothbrush, y’know?”
— Brian Setzer
”But when I hear that Gretsch guitar through that Fender Custom amp — that sound! And when I feel the vibration of the Gretsch, it’s the best feeling in the world. I need to feel that every night. When I don’t get that, I’m chasing it with other things.”
The electric guitar maestro did, in fact, get hit with a health double-whammy last year.
During early 2025, he revealed that he was battling a debilitating autoimmune disease that led to intensive treatments at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
“The best way I can describe it is, your nerves are like wires, and wires have sheathing on them,” Setzer explains. “Well, that’s coating has kind of eroded, so the wires malfunction. Basically, they lock up my hands and feet. I can’t move them. I can’t button my pants, let alone play guitar.
“It’s frustrating when you sit down and your hands do nothing. You really can’t take it for granted. Playing guitar is certainly on top, but so is holding a toothbrush, y’know?”
Being at Mayo did give Setzer some perspective. “I’m lying in there and some guy next to me has got cancer,” he notes. After about a year of treatment, his acumen began to return.
“I was able to hold a guitar pick. That came first,” he recalls. “It was, ‘All right, I’m more than halfway there.’ And then when I was able to fingerpick, when my fingers came back, then I had the whole package.”
But Setzer’s return was further delayed by an unintended dependence on Kratom, an over-the-counter herbal wellness tonic that’s been deemed “unsafe and ineffective” by Mayo, and a controlled substance in several states and the District of Columbia.
“It started innocently enough,” says Setzer, who went to the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation clinic, also in Minnesota, for recovery. “They advertise it as a safe tonic to give you energy, and it’s not. So that just aggravated the whole thing. I just stopped everything and went away and cleaned out and came back fresh and clean.
I had to go get everything out of my system, really. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. If anyone has a problem you go and they take care of you.”
— Brian Setzer
“I had to go get everything out of my system, really. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about; if anyone has a problem you go and they take care of you. And thank God you can come back.”
While there’s no guarantee the autoimmune issue won’t return, Setzer is confident that he and the band are in full-speed-ahead mode right now and predicting additional tours in the future. He’s locked and loaded with his three main axes — two Gretsch G3500s flame-maple models and a G3600, all late ’50s or early ’60s.
“All three are number ones,” he says. “I’ll probably just rotate them.”
He also still uses the early ’60s Fender Bassman amp with original Oxford speakers that he put in to replace the reissue series speakers.
“The only difference now is I turn the cabinet around, because the amp is too damn loud,” says Setzer, who along with his fellow Stray Cats uses in-ear monitors, primarily to hear his vocals. “I want the band to be all the same volume. I don’t want to blast away a standup bass, which is inherently an acoustic instrument. Turning it around does the trick.”
I said to myself, ‘This is a great one. If I could turn this into a song, it would be really fun with the Stray Cats.’”
— Brian Setzer
The Stray Cats are also coming back with two new recordings from last fall — a rendition of “Stampede,” a circa 1959 surf instrumental by the Scarlets, for which Setzer wrote lyrics and a fuller arrangement, and a cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Teenage Heaven.”
“‘Stampede’ had a great guitar riff — that’s the trick, is finding an original guitar riff,” Setzer explains. “I said to myself, ‘This is a great one. If I could turn this into a song, it would be really fun with the Stray Cats.’”
Setzer, who recorded his parts at Terrarium studio in Minneapolis, adds that “When I record songs like that, I always want to make sure I can play them. I don’t layer on a bunch of guitars and put things on that wouldn’t let me replicate that live.”
As for more new material — Stray Cats or his own — Setzer says, “I don’t have anything else written at the moment. But when it does happen it’s really nice; I can just run down the block here [to Terrarium] with my buddy Jason [Orris] and knock ’em out. It’s really fun making records that way.
“What’s in the pipeline for me now is to play, that’s all. I’m just glad I can play and so many places are waiting for us and people want to see us — which I don’t take for granted.”
The Stray Cats’ upcoming tour itinerary includes:
Friday, July 24, Las Vegas, NV, The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan
Saturday, July 25, Phoenix, AZ, Celebrity Theatre
Sunday, July 26, Del Mar, CA, The Sound
Tuesday and Wednesday, July 28–29, Highland, CA, Yaamava’ Theater
Friday, July 31, Santa Rosa, CA, Luther Burbank Center for the Arts
Saturday, August 1, Saratoga, CA, The Mountain Winery
Sunday, August 2, Wheatland, CA, Hard Rock Live
Tuesday, August 4, Sandy, UT, Sandy Amphitheater
Wednesday, August 5, Colorado Springs, CO, Pikes Peak Center
Friday, August 7, Tulsa, OK, River Spirit Casino Resort
Saturday, August 8, Kansas City, MO, Uptown Theater
Monday, August 10, Huber Heights, OH, Rose Music Center at The Heights
Tuesday, August 11, Interlochen, MI, Interlochen Center for the Arts
Wednesday, August 12, Northfield, OH, MGM Northfield Park
Friday, August 14, Westbury, NY, Flagstar at Westbury Music Fair
Saturday, August 15, Atlantic City, NJ, Ocean Casino Resort
Sunday, August 16, Morristown, NJ, Mayo Performing Arts Center
