Here’s what was s’posed to happen: It was New Year’s Eve in Denver in the year 2000, and since Y2K was a bummer fake-out, we had one more chance to get really sent when the real millennium smashed midnight. So like good little gorehounds (and nuthin’ but) we showed up at the Cramps concert at the Ogden expecting bikini girls with machine guns, teenage werewolves flashing braces on their fangs, and creatures from the black leather lagoon.
But here’s what really happened: The Cramps staged a spectacle far wilder than we’d ever imagined. The actual set list has been lost to time, but I recall maybe a little “Human Fly,” maybe some “TV Set,” maybe “The Mad Daddy.” Poison Ivy Rorshach shimmied in a fishnet bodysuit, swinging her guitar to the band’s big beats from Badsville, while frontman Lux Interior ate his microphone, humped the floor, and then came again (pun intended) as Elvis Fucking Christ.
My most vivid memory is of Lux stacking the stage monitors into a tower as the clock’s minute arm swirled toward oblivion during the band’s unhinged rendition of their first single, a cover of the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird.” He scaled at least four of them to the top, whipped out a knife, and violently denuded himself — all the while hollering, Hollering, HOLLERING papa-oo-mow-mow papaoomowmow until he exhausted himself and released us into 2001. It was a perfect kiss-off to the last hundred years. But by that point, the Cramps had been bidding adieu to the 20th century for decades, remaking and rearranging trash culture in their own image like groovy Dr. Frankensteins.
Experiencing the Cramps live was like stepping into a twilight zone where everything in rock & roll was more. The Cramps’ music was a proprietary cocktail of Sun-baked rockabilly, surf rock, early R&B, and punk attitude, boiled in a cauldron of kitsch until it had doubled in size. But in 1990, when MTV asked Lux and Ivy about their inspirations, Lux didn’t so much as flinch when he replied, “sex and horror” — two catalysts that brought teenagers to drive-ins in the Fifties (and ever since) and it’s that B-movie aesthetic that set the Cramps apart from their forebears and gorebears.
“This is rock & roll the way it never really was on the radio, but the way you always dreamed it could be — drooling horrorama lyrics, great cheeseoid guitar riffs, postlobotomy drum bashing and a singer for whom inhibition is the dirtiest ten-letter word of all,” Kurt Loder wrote in his 1984 Rolling Stone review of the group’s Bad Music for Bad People comp.
The Cramps were campy, demented, sexy, and inspiring. Artists from the White Stripes to White Zombie have cited the (often literally) stripped-down arrangements and the fact that Poison Ivy was a rare female band member in the Seventies and Eighties as blazing trails for them. “I always liked the Cramps a lot, and seeing Ivy made me think, ‘I can do that,’” White Zombie’s Sean Yseult told Rolling Stone in ’93. Similarly, Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland recalled thinking, “When I saw the Cramps, I thought, ‘Easy guitar, I could do that.’” Others in the Cramps fan club include My Bloody Valentine, Faith No More, the Black Keys, and Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye, who supervised a newly released Cramps archival compilation, Gravest Gravy.
The acts the Cramps influenced are so diverse mostly because the Cramps never fit in anywhere, so everybody could find something unique in them. They desecrated all the same New York stages as the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Blondie during the real year punk broke, but critics never counted them in the scene. And when the Stray Cats and the Blasters brought their rockabilly revivals to the mainstream in the Eighties, the Cramps were just too weird and nasty for primetime. After all, this was the group that played a free show at a mental institution in 1978, the band whose frontman would wear kinky boots on Late Night With Conan O’Brien.
That’s because Lux Interior, born Erick Purkhiser in 1946, was a self-aware misfit. He grew up with the remnants of the first wave of rock & roll culture — old enough to revere Elvis as the King but also young enough to appreciate him as a joke. “I’ve learned all I know/By the age of nine,” he sang on “New Kind of Kick,” and he meant it.
Lux’s soulmate, Poison Ivy, a.k.a. Kristy Wallace born in ’53, joined him in totally rejecting the British Invasion. They met when Ivy was hitchhiking in Sacramento in the early Seventies and bonded over Lux’s insane record collection. They relocated to Lux’s native Akron, Ohio, before moving to New York, where the Cramps formed in summer of ’76 with guitarist Bryan Gregory. Gregory’s sister, Pam “Balam,” joined on drums, and they had no bassist. They cut their fangs on Sam Phillips and bubblegum covers. They almost called themselves the Bop Crazy Babies, Ivy once said, but opted for the Cramps since it sounded like a gang’s moniker. Their first business card said they offered “music for every occasion.”
Lux was older than rock traditionalists Steven Tyler, Robert Plant, and Bruce Springsteen but instead of treating the genre like serious art, the Cramps augmented everything about rock & roll’s first wave (when it still seemed dangerous and a threat to teens) into a Roger Corman teensploitation flick: more wolf whistles, more double entendres, more blood on the pavement, more garbage. They were cut from the same swath as the Misfits and the B-52’s, fellow enthusiasts of Fifties kitsch, but they lacked the menace of the former and the artistic ambition of the latter. They just wanted to party like it’s 1959.
GODLIS*
Gravest Gravy collects recordings from the same 1977 session with producer Alex Chilton and drummer Nick Knox that yielded their first singles (“Surfin’ Bird,” “Human Fly”), and on Gravest Gravy you can hear how they drafted their whole blueprint in their first year. There’s the Lux-Ivy original “TV Set,” which is a Ventures-like beach rocker about beheading somebody (or some body), there’s Lux heehawing his vocals on “I Can’t Hardly Stand It,” and there’s “Weekend on Mars” with its inspiriting “Let’s go, go, go” chorus.
Then there are the covers. Their take on the Blond Bomber’s “Rockin’ Bones” is the best of the bunch, like a spooky call-and-response campfire singalong that’s far creepier than the version they recorded on Psychedelic Jungle in 1981. “Rock on (rock on, rock on)/Roll on (roll on, roll on),” they sing at a medium lope. “I still got all the rhythm in these rockin’ bones.” The session’s hiccuping version of Roy Orbison’s “Domino” and an off-the-hinges rendition of Sam Phillips’ “Problem Child” also capture the Cramps then — and who they’d be until Lux’s 2009 death ended the band.
The compilation is a great celebration of true originals who had a unique vision for their music, and it’s a good excuse to revisit the rest of the Cramps’ catalogue. The first two albums, Songs the Lord Taught Us (1980) and Psychedelic Jungle (’81), as well as the singles comp … Off The Bone (’83), contain most of the Cramps’ legend. Lux spent the rest of his life trying to top the lyrics, “I’m a human fly, and I don’t know why/I got 96 tears and 96 eyes,” and he came close time and again.
Critics wrote off the Cramps’ middle years, alleging Lux wrote sexist lyrics (e.g., A Date With Elvis’ “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?” and Stay Sick!’s “All Women Are Bad”), though Ivy always levied the sexism tag right back at critics for failing to notice she produced their recordings, occasionally recorded bass, and co-wrote the originals. (Anyone who questions the sexual dynamic in the band could be referred to the 1990 Much Music interview where Ivy, once a dominatrix, pointed out that Lux was wearing “training heels.”) Stay Sick! also housed “God Damn Rock & Roll,” a hilarious parody of “Old Time Rock & Roll” a song by another artist Lux was older than about a subject Lux likely knew better. “I dig that goddamn rock n roll,” he sang. “That kinda stuff that don’t save souls.” The album also contains a better “Shortnin’ Bread” than Brian Wilson could ever muster.
And then there are the later triumphs like Flamejob’s “Let’s Get Fucked Up” (a staple of my high school mixtapes) and Big Beat From Badsville’s “Sheena’s in a Goth Gang,” which is funnier and maybe funner than the Ramones’ prequel if you’re in the right mood. “She looks so macabre with her cobweb stare … Sheena’s in a goth gang now.”
But where goth was a fad, rock & roll was just rock & roll to the Cramps. Lux said his hero was Ricky Nelson, and while it’s easy to point to the obvious big names who influenced the Cramps — Elvis, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Little Richard, Carl Perkins — there are likely thousands of others Lux and Ivy treasured more whose names never appeared in Rolling Stone. (And here’s an acknowledgement that Rolling Stone never did a proper Cramps profile, though they did wind up on the cover once thanks to Lorde.)
“I think the main thing is that no one has a goddamn clue what rock & roll is in this day and age, period,” Lux Interior said, in 1988. “What the Cramps are is a rock & roll band. We listen to a lot of old rock & roll. We like it. But we live in this day and age, we like all the things in this day and age, but we try to be a pure rock & roll band.”
The lucky few who got to see the Cramps live know that the Cramps’ pure rock & roll was like nothing that came before or since. To quote an old poster for the band, “The men don’t know but the little ghouls understand.”
