The Greatest Band of All Time

I've gone on at length in other posts about how cool is is to know now that I lived, as a child, oblivious to what would one day be, a very short distance from the future Lux Interior, in those dimly-remembered days when neither of us had drawn much attention to himself one way or the other. Here is the testimony of another buckeye who feels that same mystical, geographic kinship...
--Chuck


Guest Writer: Rebecca Carlisle-Healy
God Damn Rock and Roll: The Cramps
From: August 10, 2005
http://www.urbanhonking.com/greatestband/archives/2005/08/the_cramps.html

For me, The Cramps start in Ohio. I don't know if history supports me on this, because creation stories are alluringly murky at this point, but it my belief that The Cramps formed in 1972 in Akron, Ohio. This is plausible, as Lux Interior nee Erick Purkhiser grew up in Akron, but legends conflict enough to indulge theory. Was it Akron or Sacramento? Was it hitchhiking or art class? Although true evidence suggests that Poison Ivy Rorshach and Lux Interior physically met in California, in my heart I know that their spirits' union---the holiest of all unholy unions--occurred in Ohio, the land of my own maternal home.

There's something about Ohio that brews some of my favorite creation. It's an often overlooked state, but it has quietly bred some of the greatest popular figures in our time-off the top of my head-Devo, Dean Martin, Gloria Steinem. Yeah, so that's a mixed bag, it does demonstrate a certain fecundity. But it's like magic happens when you mix low brow, Midwestern, and working-class with indian and the underground railroad. If you are born weird in Ohio, you have to forge your own way to what seems cool to you with scraps and cut-up bits, whatever happened to filter through the trees and burial mound hills. For Erick Purkhiser, this was Ghoulardi, a local late-night horror host, comic books, and rock and roll music.

It is this stuff that The Cramps are made of. Culling all that is trashy, demented, and rejected, Ivy and Lux formed an aesthetic of dime store junk and the cheapest of thrills. Their true genius is not in their originality, but in the rough aping of the lost culture of pulp camp and trash. They are librarians of Americana's dregs. TV horror emcees, mid-century poster princesses, crudely drawn comic zombies--whatever bore a B was thrown into the wash unsorted, and what came out of the dryer smelled like cigarettes and was made of spandex. Ivy wears it in promotional photographs and album covers, a cheetah-woman in fishnets and patent stilettos. When Lux wears it, it looks like leather pants and scratches on his chest.

But for all the posturing and the sex, The Cramps aren't even that cool, at least in the traditional sense. They're too clever to be cool. As much as Lux looks like Iggy Pop's evil twin when he's cut and bloody on stage, he lacks the dreamy vacancy that makes a dumb ruffian beautiful. The Cramps are self-caricatures, smart alecks, wiseacres. You can put sunglasses on that and it's hot, and it's simpering, but it's also just dorky. Their predilection towards corny jokes and kitsch makes it hard to know where to put them in punk history, even though their 70's New York arty punk resume would seem to put them at the top of everyone's must-have list. An example: in some of my research, I came across a "psychobilly" website whose Cramps write-up attempted to justify its inclusion on the site in such a way that made it obvious that the site's author did not realize that The Cramps themselves had coined the term. It seems like the band missed this fame and cruised straight into infamy. It's as if they didn't know that the party was over, and the now-sober revelers are looking upon their seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time antics with embarrassment.

So, the music. The band's 4-piece lineup shifts with the tides, and only Ivy and Lux have remained constant. Their sound varies with the change, but it's typically a stripped-down drummer, Lux on vocals, and a second guitarist to drone, buzz, and feed back Ivy's plucky, more sauntering licks. Drummer-beast and second guitar-beast have too many aliases to list, but they seem to effectively understand the party for the time being. And let not your notice slip that Ivy is not relegated to the bass, that eye candy's trifle, but a capable musician in the heavily manned world of rockabilly-garage-punk, making her 1-note call as lead. And she's eye candy, Poison Ivy, plain and slim beneath kohl and leotard. She stoically two-steps in her role as the ultimate bad girl vixen, somewhere between a smirk and a sneer.

Lux is more plainly obscene in his role as the sinistral. He plays a mascara-smeared wino with his pants around his ankles, prancing and writhing and he cusses and spits out lyrics so stupid they're brilliant. An Elvis croon gets lost in an animal's guttural slobbing and extended sexual hyperventilations. A microphone is blowjobbed, and a stage floor is thoroughly humped. But beneath it all, you are aware that all of this is parody, a front for the kind of witty theatrics that far pre-date rock 'n' roll. "Can Your Pussy Do the Dog" is about fucking, right? No. Oh, no. It's the courtesan's dry humor in another era when men wore high heels. It's like if Momus fell in love with Ricky Nelson instead of Japan.

I'm really not ready to provide you with an album-by-album chronology, or to highlight the finer points of their low-light career. I appreciate The Cramps as a broad, sopping mess of decade's worth of material, all of it throbbing snarky on basically the same note--funny, weird, and beautiful. But even that, though true, might be too much to say, because in the end, they are just a simple rock 'n' roll band; and maybe The Cramps are just Lux and Ivy's elaborate homage to the greatest bands of all time. But either way, I am glad they are from Ohio.

Lux Approaches

Until quite recently, I knew very little about the personal lives of Lux, Ivy, and various other Cramps. After Lux died, bits of intriguing information started coming to my attention. I had always known that Erick Purkhiser was born in Akron, Ohio, as was I. Earlier this year I found out that his family lived in Stowe, Ohio, which was right next to my hometown of Cuyahoga Falls. Over the weekend, courtesy of a controversial ebay auction, I learned that Lux and his family actually lived in Cuyahoga Falls at the same time I did, just a little over a mile from my house. Also, he had a son, and it is almost certain that the boy attended the same elementary school I did (since they lived even closer to it) at the same time I did. He's a few years younger than I am, so it would only have been for a year or two, and we'd have been at opposite ends of the building. But it got me thinking. If Lux-- or Erick-- ever attended any of our school plays or pageants, then HE would have seen ME on stage decades before I would see him. Interesting thought, that.

If this keeps up, I'll eventually find out he lived in my basement at some point.

--Chuck

(Above) Lux Interior's performance art tribute to Chuck Berry's Number One hit song from 1972.

Remembering the Cramps' Lux Interior: Matchmaker, Symbol, Expert Driver
By Camille Dodero
Friday, Feb. 6 2009
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2009/02/remembering_the_1.php

I met one of my best friends seeing the Cramps live. This is probably one of the highest compliments you can pay a musician of any age, genre, or scale, aside from having actually conceived a child to a band's record--and frankly that involves premeditation, and if doesn't, it likely involves misjudgment or Massive Attack, and in any case, if you're making babies to the Cramps, you are a couple of sick fucks. But meeting a best friend at a band's show and ending the night with a rare understanding between complete strangers--We Need to Be Friends Immediately--seems to reflect on the performer, in retrospect, because it involves serendipity and miracles, artists as sublime conduits and unsuspecting heroes. In this instance, the spindly, psycho-sexy, leather-pants-wearing Lux Interior as Wesley Autry. Without Lux on October 16, 2004, I wouldn't know K, or eventually met J and S, or ended up here, and I most certainly would've gotten run over by that train.

Actually, that night in Boston, the Cramps played the old classic "Drug Train," a two-minute-plus "Johnny B. Goode"-styled hootenanny in which Lux plays conductor, woo-woos like a steam trumpet, and tries to wrangle innocent bystanders on board by bragging about the VIP section: "I've seen Elvis with your Mother/On the drug train." This is exactly what I came to love about the Cramps: ludicrous, debased, Presley-obsessed, and totally inappropriate. Right now, the track "Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?" is the most popular Cramps ringtone on iTunes. And their other song titles also shriek volumes: "Eyeball in My Martini," "Don't Eat Stuff Off the Sidewalk," and "Dr. Fucker M.D. (Musical Deviant)." So brilliant, so stupid. And let us consider "Bend Over, I'll Drive" from 1991's Look Mom, No Head, in which our hero Lux repeatedly demands his beloved lean over so he can take the controls. It's very romantic, especially since Lux's pillow talk stinks of necro fetishism: "Bend over, I'll drive/Is this the way Grace Kelly died?" This is wax-museum foreplay, werewolf flirtation, the sound of filthy hitchhiker seduction.

According to Cramps lore, picking up a hitchhiker is exactly how Lux Interior met his spikey-heeled sidekick, wife, and guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach. She also supposedly funded the Cramps' first record with money she'd made as a dominatrix. But far-and-away the greatest footnote in the Cramps legend is their 1978 live show at the Napa State Mental Hospital. Before Pitchfork TV, and Girl Talk on a rollercoaster with a camera, and all those supposedly innovative scripted scenes of bands playing rooftops, lofts, and dog parks (guilty), the Cramps booked a show in a California asylum. Someone there from a punk collective Target Video had a camera, and the grainy black-and-white footage is unbelievable. Lux is open-shirted and electric, the room is a mixture of patients and covert fans. It's tough to discern who's who, mostly because there is no fourth wall: audience members wander the stage listlessly, hug-assault Lux, grab him for mid-song solo dances. "We drove 300 miles to play for you people," Lux tells them. The immediate response, "FUCKKKK YOOO!" He continues, "Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I'm not sure about that. You seem to be alright with me." Inmates running the asylum, as it goes, I once watched this entire performance on a date.

The date, the best friend, the asylum video--all this means is that I liked the Cramps more than I ever probably would have, left to my own devices. I'm fully aware, they more or less wrote the same three songs over and over and over. And that, with all that thonged-out lady ass and horrorcore iconography, they really should have been metal. And that some of their schtick was just plain gross. But Lux Interior sang about being a teenage fly, drank beer out of a sneaker, performed in his skivvies, and enticed his wife by telling her to bend over so he could drive. Genius. Especially since it was the way Lux Interior died.