Everything old

"I'm stuck in the 1950s," she says, smiling. "In the '50s, especially the mid- to late '50s, there was a sense of hope in America. I mean, it's like, there was all that rocket-age stuff. People thought we were gonna be living on the moon in 20 years, ya know? Myself and a lot of people, we think romantically about that time period, because the time period we live in now doesn't have a lot of hope, and everybody is so jaded and Grinchy. Nobody cares about their surroundings. Nobody cares about how they look. I mean, I do have a microwave and a brand-new TV, and I wear modern underwear. I don't like the vintage underwear thing. That goes a little too far for me."

Lenz grew up in San Diego, the daughter of a rodeo queen who grew up on an Oregon ranch and a Kansas boy who was a 1950s greaser whose radio was always tuned to Wolfman Jack broadcasts--Lord, how does that sound for a storybook beginning? She only recently began remembering that rockabilly and old country were very much the music of her past, and the very sound she rebelled against during her teenage years. Indeed, in the 1980s, she fashioned herself something of a Mod, listening to the Jam and the English Beat as she and her pals rode their Vespa scooters around San Diego, looking to pick fights with the very rockers she'd come to adore only a few years later. Her life was Quadrophenia bathed in Southern California sunlight. Twelve years ago, her idea of rockabilly was the Stray Cats, and she absolutely hated it.

When she was 20, she moved to Los Angeles and got a job in the music business, working for a management firm. She didn't even consider getting on a stage herself, but she was drawn to the big-band sound she heard played every afternoon on a local public radio station; soon enough, she was enamored of the Gershwins and Cole Porter and Frank Loesser and the other Tin Pan Alley greats who created American pop music.

"I listened to that music every day for six years, and I think that reawakened my love for traditional American music," she says. "I know every word to every standard ever written. I love the old style of songwriting where songs really had feeling."

And it was in Los Angeles that Lenz discovered her love for swing music, not just rockabilly but the music of Louis Jordan and Nat Cole. If swing is a trend now, in L.A. back then it was an underground movement, played in dark clubs after hours. Lenz began hooking up with musicians, trekking to places such as the King King or the Palomino to see the Paladins, Royal Crown Revue, Dave & Deke Combo, or Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys, all of whom were just beginning to play around L.A. at the beginning of the decade. For them, retro wasn't a fad; it was a lifestyle, and Lenz embraced it to the point where she wanted to participate in the scene, not simply observe it.

"I used to listen to all kinds of music when I was growing up, but I never thought of myself as a creative person," she says. "I had a guitar, and I'd strum a few chords on it, and I played piano, but I don't think I was encouraged by my family. It seems like the people I hung around with as a teenager and the people I dated and ended up living and being involved with were artistic or musical, so I always felt kind of insecure. I never felt like I could explore it, because they were all so much better than me."

Meeting and marrying a mathematician (four years now) with a like-minded love for rockabilly helped her get over her fear of trying; she no longer had to compete with someone else's abilities. So when Lenz and her husband, Charlie, moved to Dallas in 1994, she ended up at the University of North Texas and discovered she was probably the only person in Denton who didn't have a band. "So we had a house, and I just figured, well, I'll start a band," she says, recalling the Andy Hardy beginnings of her first group, Rocket Rocket, which featured members of the Grown-Ups, Slobberbone, and Wayward Girl.

The band performed no more than five shows around Denton, and it was indeed one of those kinds of bands that happens only in Denton: Everybody sang, they played at the Karma Cafe, and the repertoire consisted of vintage 1950s and '60s tunes. Lenz, of course, sang Wanda Jackson songs.

"The first time I got up on stage, I got hooked on it, like heroin," she says. "I didn't know. It was like the first time you have sex. You don't know how great it's going to be, and then when it's over with, you're like, Let's do this again tomorrow night! I think for the first time in my life I discovered what my passion was." But Rocket Rocket would disband in short order, and Lenz moved back to Dallas, where she decided she didn't want to share the microphone with anyone else.