In February of 2025, Brian Setzer told people what had been happening to his hands.
“Like I am wearing a pair of gloves when I try to play.”
For most of us that’s an inconvenience. For a man who has made his entire living off a hollow-body Gretsch, off the specific accuracy of a right hand that has to hit a string in exactly the right place at exactly the right instant, it’s the end of the job. An autoimmune disease had gone after the one thing he could not work around.
He cancelled the tour. Two words in his statement did all the work.
“I’m gutted.”
The band from Massapequa
The Stray Cats came out of Long Island around 1980, three kids from Massapequa playing rockabilly at a moment when nobody was playing rockabilly. Setzer on guitar, Lee Rocker on upright bass, Slim Jim Phantom standing up at a drum kit with almost nothing in it.
They couldn’t get arrested in America, so they went to England, and England lost its mind for them. “Rock This Town” and “Stray Cat Strut” landed in 1981. By 1983 they had “(She’s) Sexy + 17,” and the pompadours and the rolled cuffs and the standing bass had gone from a niche revival to something your cousin was attempting in a garage.
Setzer’s guitar playing was the thing underneath it all. It wasn’t nostalgia. He had chops that would have made him a jazz player in another life, and he was pointing them at a style everyone had written off as a museum piece.
Later he built a swing orchestra around himself, a full big band, and had a hit with “Jump, Jive an’ Wail” that won him a Grammy and put a horn section on MTV in the late nineties, which nobody saw coming.
The year in between
An autoimmune disease is not a broken finger. There’s no cast, no six-week timeline, no doctor telling you the date you’ll be fine. You do the treatment and you wait, and every day you pick up the instrument to check, and for a long stretch the answer is the same.
Setzer is 67. He was born in April of 1959, which means he has been playing that guitar for well over fifty years and has almost certainly not gone a week without it since he was a teenager. Now imagine picking it up daily and getting nothing back. Not pain, exactly. Numbness. The hand doing an impression of a hand.
He didn’t do the thing that would have been easy, which is to keep quiet and quietly stop. He said what it was and he said what it cost him and then he went away and worked on it.
March
On the ninth of March, 2026, the announcement came.
“It’s good to be healthy and strong again.”
That’s the whole quote. Eight words, from a guy who a year earlier said he was gutted. No press conference about the journey, no documentary crew, no long post about resilience. Healthy and strong again, tour dates below.
The Stray Cats go back out on Friday the twenty-fourth of July, starting in Las Vegas. Fifteen confirmed shows, running through the sixteenth of August, and the last one is in Morristown, New Jersey, which puts the final night back in the New York metro area the three of them came out of. Whether anybody planned that or the routing just did it, it’s a good way to finish.
What actually happened here
There’s a certain kind of comeback story that isn’t really a comeback story, where somebody vanishes for personal reasons and comes back and everyone agrees not to look too closely.
This one is clean. A man got sick. The illness took the exact thing he needed. He named it in public, cancelled the work rather than half-doing it, went and got treated, and when it turned around he said so in eight plain words and put fifteen dates on sale.
At 67, after a year of picking up a guitar and getting nothing, he has to walk out on a Las Vegas stage in front of people who bought tickets specifically to hear the thing his hands could not do last summer.
There’s a version of that first downbeat that’s terrifying and a version that’s the best feeling available to a human being, and they are probably the same version.
Friday night, Las Vegas. The orange Gretsch, the upright bass, the standing drummer.
Rock this town.
