This post on The Cramps is actually something I have had in my draft folder for months and was just waiting to upload some music to go along with it. Lux Interior, the progenitor of “psychobilly” rock-n-roll just died at the age of 60 (some sites say 62) and I figured I would finally get this post up as a tribute to this outrageous but creative rocker.

There is not a lot of reliable information on the net about punk-rockabilly band The Cramps really that can paint an accurate picture of their history. Some fan sites dismiss the possibility of providing a believable bio at all. What comes across ultimately is that they are as wild as their songs and have lived an on the edge life that qualifies them as the real deal and not just a theatrical stage show that leaves their antics at the dressing room door.

The Cramps founders and only permanent members singer Lux Interior (Erick Purkhiser) and guitarist Poison Ivy (Kristy Wallace) met in Sacramento Ca about 1972 and migrated east to Akron Ohio and then wound up in New City in the mid seventies when the NY punk scene was gearing up and getting ready to explode. They began performing along side seminal punkers like The Ramones, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Television and the rest at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. The line up is a constant flux of colorful looking rhythm guitar players and drummers and bass players. The back up players come and go and return again like pole cats to a hen house and the current line up, as of this writing, seems to be Lux and Ivy and Sean Yseult (formally of White Zombie) on bass and the return one of the band’s more popular drummers Harry Drumdini.

The music is go-daddy wild and their stage shows are just sort of freaky and subversive in the old school Alice Cooper horror rock show style. They are not like Alice Cooper in music style at all really but their shows have that sense of theatrics Cooper had. While alot of the punk scene seemed to do simplified improvisations on standard rock morsels of the late 60′s and early 70′s The Cramps musical roots are more grounded in the sounds of The Ventures and Eddie Cochrane, Carl Perkins and Elvis than anything else in rock-n-roll. It has a swampy, twangy, 60′s fuzz tone sound that reminds you of road side revivals, red light hotels, straight bourbon shots with poppers and road house switchbade rumbles. Classic bombshell Ivy appears on stage in leopard skin tight pants and chewing gum snarl while manic Lux usually wears high heels and seems to need mega doses of lithium.

With song titles like Drug Train, Swing the Big Eyed Rabbit, Can Your Pussy Do the Dog and Like a Bad Girl Should how can you go wrong? Poison Ivy is on the mark with her high octane V-8, reverb driven guitar work and I will have to say that Lux Interior is genuinely one of a kind doing his schizoid Elvis from B-Movie land on amphetamines frontman gig. He is a theatrical showman from an insane asylum and yet it never seems out of place. They are unabashed about their drug use and sexual fetishism and their socially reprehensible activities become the core material for their songs and shows. They have been around a long time and are still going. I tend to like their later recordings, from Date with Elvis on, as the sound quality of the recordings on their own Vengeance Records label sound better, but the early songs are really meaty and raw, especially on tunes like Garbageman and Human Fly.

These are all powerful rock songs. Not everyone’s cup of tea or shot of heroin and you would have to like raw NY punk in some form or another to appreciate it all, but you would have to like Link Wrey and surf guitar as well. They have a mythic element to them that few bands have and can maintain for three years much less three decades. Lux may be a little too much for the average born again Christian  (or  Bertrand Russell reading agnostic even) to handle while former NYC dominatrix Poison Ivy is always really smoking in looks as well as twelve bar blues.

One fan site worth a look is posted below.

http://www.carrollsweb.com/rockndog/cramps.htm

MP3 SELECTIONS FROM FLAMEJOB

AND THE BIG BEAT FROM BADSVILLE

MEAN MACHINE

SWING THE BIG EYED RABBIT

LIKE A BAD GIRL SHOULD

MONKEY WITH YOUR TAIL

AUDIO FILES MAY BE NOT WORK FOR A WHILE. I AM RESOLVING THE ISSUE. PLEASE HANG LOOSE WHILE ALL FILES ARE MOVED TO MY HOSTING ACCOUNT AND THEN MOVED BACK TO INDIVIDUAL POSTS. IT WILL TAKE SOME TIME BUT IT WILL GET DONE EVENTUALLY. SORRY.

URANIUM WILLY 4 FEB 10

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Movie Makers, Actors, Artists, Musicians and Personas, Music-MP3s . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.