Brian Setzer says that he feels “98 per cent” and is playing as good as he ever has after recovering from an autoimmune condition that left him unable to play the guitar.
Speaking to Guitar World, the Stray Cats frontman admitted that his career was hanging in the balance, after losing the use of his hands in late 2024.
““It was the strangest thing…before you knew it I was having trouble holding a toothbrush, a fork. I couldn’t button my pants,” he said. “There was no pain, but my hands just wouldn’t work. Of course, there was no way I could play the guitar, which was pretty scary.”
Worst still. There was no off-the-shelf cure, no magic pill to make him better. What worked was his doctor’s “Plan A”.
“When my doctor diagnosed my condition, he told me there was no real cure, so it wasn’t a slam-dunk that I would see results,” he said. “But his plan A was to get me playing again.”
Setzer announced he had the condition in February 2025, and first noticed it during the Stray Cats’ tour, when his hand would be cramping up. “It feels like I’m wearing a pair of gloves when I try to play,” he wrote on Instagram. He was in the early stages of his treatment but had recuperated to the point of being able to tie his shoelaces and hold a pen.
Setzer received treatment for almost a year, undertaking a programme of infusions at Mayo Clinic until he regained the ability to hold a Gretsch guitar in his hand and fret some notes – and regain it he did.
The Stray Cats have returned with their first new material in six years, with two singles, Stampede and Teenage Heaven – and Setzer is on blistering form. The latter is an old Eddie Cochran tune, and the former has an interesting back story. It’s technically a cover, too – though a reimagining/rewrite might be a better descriptor. It was originally a super-short, sub-two-minute surf-rock instrumental by the Scarlets, which was put out on 7” by Prince Records in 1959. There was not much there but it planted the seed in Setzer’s mind.
“I heard the song and thought the guitarist was so good,” he tells Guitar World. “I said, ‘I want to play that!’ There wasn’t enough of a song there, but I loved the riff, so I basically wrote a song around it.”
That Scarlets riff is a doozie. Setzer gives it a different treatment, a little rawer and more overdriven and throaty than the splish-splash spring reverb soaked original. But it’s a strange riff, with a little something about it that reminds us of something – one YouTube commentator said Master Of Puppets.
And it is an important riff. Pete Antonio and John Sanzone laid this down in 1959. Could they credibly claim to be the first surf-rock band, beating Dick Dale to the punch? Dale did not release Let’s Go Trippin’ until 1961.
Besides his peerless rockabilly playing, this is another of Setzer’s gifts – he unearth’s classics from rock ’n’ roll history that are ripe for rediscovery.
