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| The literal beating heart of the band. |
The Very Basics
The Cramps started when Erick Lee Purkhiser (aka, Lux Interior) met Kristy Marlana Wallace (aka, Poison Ivy Rorschach) at Sacramento University in a class called Art and Shamanism. They bonded over collecting in general, records in particular. They started a pilgrimage east from there, stopping first in Akron, Ohio (1973), then New York City (1975), where they became a staple of the scene around CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City; after they played their first show, Lux Interior offered this bon mot: “Gee, we could do this again.” When they nailed down an original line-up, it featured Bryan Gregory on guitar and Pam Balam on drums, but twisted knot at the heart of the Cramps would forever and always be Lux Interior on vocals/front-man presence and Poison Ivy commanding lead guitar. Nick Knox (drums) deserves honorable mention as the longest-serving member of the band, lasting from 1977 to 1991. After several years in New York, the band returned to the West Coast and based themselves in Los Angeles.
Their debut EP, Gravest Hits (1979) buzzed big enough that Big Star’s Alex Chilton produced their debut album, 1980s, Songs the Lord Taught Us. The then-fledgling I.R.S. Records released it, but the Cramps chafed at the lack of creative control from the off and the relationship quickly soured. After 1981’s Psychedelic Jungle dropped, I.R.S. blocked them from releasing any new material until 1983’s live album Smell of Female. There's no real telling how much that hurt the band in the States , but they always did better in the UK, where they had their first hit singles - e.g., “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog” and, their one and only UK Top 40 single, “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns” – and where Stay Sick! (1990) charted at No. 62; meanwhile, back in the States, they couldn’t even find distribution for 1986’s A Date with Elvis until 1990. The rest of their discography, includes studio albums Look Mom No Head! (1991), Flamejob (1994), Big Beat from Badsville (1997) and Fiends of Dope Island (2003), plus the compilations Off the Bone (1983, released illegally, apparently) and, most famously (or this was the first one I heard), Bad Music for Bad People.
While critics have classified under a grab-bag of genres (e.g., psychobilly, gothabilly, garage punk, rockabilly, garage rock, horror punk, neo-rockabilly, punk rock and surf), the Cramps dubbed it “rockabilly voodoo” on their early promotional flyers. They claimed various influences, everything from early rockabilly (e.g., Jerry Lott, aka, The Phantom), “rhythm and blues, and rock and roll like Link Wray (both big fans) and Hasil Adkins,” 60s surf acts, 60s garage like The Standells, the Trashmen, the Green Fuz and the Sonics, The Ramones on the punk side, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and, believe it or not, Ricky Nelson. A quote from Wikipedia about A Date with Elvis speaks to their aesthetic arc:
“The album featured what was to become a predominating theme of their work from here on: a move away from the B-movie horror focus to an increased emphasis on sexual double entendre.”
Calling them a working/touring band sums it up nicely. Members came and went and always with creative names – e.g., Candy del Mar and Slim Chance (both bass players) – but Lux Interior and Poison Ivy had one of the rare partnerships/common-law marriages in music that carried on to the end. In a nod to their success in Europe (even early, e.g., 6 nights at Hammersmith Palais, then three at the Odeon, then three more at Hammersmith in 1984), they played a farewell European tour in the summer of 2006 followed by a final show at the Marquee Theater in Tempe, AZ on November 4, 2006. The band officially folded in 2009 when Lux Interior died unexpectedly of an aortic dissection.
Some Telling Quotes
“The failure of outsiders to acknowledge the influence of blues and R&B on The Cramps is an omission bordering on racism. Rockabilly is rooted in the blues and we consider ourselves a blues band.”
- Poison Ivy Rorschach
“I’m the Queen of Rock n’ Roll and for this to not to be recognized is pure sexism.”
- Poison Ivy Rorschach
“I think one of the things that makes rock ‘n’ roll such a great thing is a separates the squares from the cool people.”
- Lux Interior
“She was the queen, the high priestess, rock ‘n’ roll incarnate, a consummate symbol of dangerous music in her garter belts and vinyl mules, her hennaed curls crowned with a prom-queen tiara (‘No queen of rock n’ roll should be caught dead without a crown,’) jerking the fretboard of her massive Gretsch toward the audience like the barrel of a gun.”
- Please Kill Me, 2020 interview
A Half Dozen Points of Interest
1) Live at the Napa State Mental Hospital
In the summer of 1978, the Cramps played a live show at the California State Mental Hospital. A San Francisco-based collective called Target Video filmed the event....and, of course, it made it to Youtube. Lux Interior shared some (wonderful) memories that you can’t get on the videos:
“People were coming up to us and talking as we were performing. People were standing there yelling in our ears. I remember this one woman screaming at us, 'I HAVE AN UNCLE WHO’S IN THE BUSINESS. HE CAN GET YOU SOME GIGS. ‘CAUSE I THINK YOU’RE REALLY GOODI' — while we were doing a song. I remember this great big tall black guy who weighed about 300 pounds and he had a cowboy hat and a Sex Pistols t-shirt. He looked like a football player or something and he said, 'This is so great. I never thought punk rock would come to me.'”
2) Twin-Axe Attack Without a Net
No Cramps album featured bass guitar until A Date with Elvis – i.e., when Candy del Mar stepped in. They did, however, use on the song “The Surfin’ Dead,” which they performed on the soundtrack for Return of the Living Dead – and Poison Ivy played that as well. Speaking of...
The Cramps started when Erick Lee Purkhiser (aka, Lux Interior) met Kristy Marlana Wallace (aka, Poison Ivy Rorschach) at Sacramento University in a class called Art and Shamanism. They bonded over collecting in general, records in particular. They started a pilgrimage east from there, stopping first in Akron, Ohio (1973), then New York City (1975), where they became a staple of the scene around CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City; after they played their first show, Lux Interior offered this bon mot: “Gee, we could do this again.” When they nailed down an original line-up, it featured Bryan Gregory on guitar and Pam Balam on drums, but twisted knot at the heart of the Cramps would forever and always be Lux Interior on vocals/front-man presence and Poison Ivy commanding lead guitar. Nick Knox (drums) deserves honorable mention as the longest-serving member of the band, lasting from 1977 to 1991. After several years in New York, the band returned to the West Coast and based themselves in Los Angeles.
Their debut EP, Gravest Hits (1979) buzzed big enough that Big Star’s Alex Chilton produced their debut album, 1980s, Songs the Lord Taught Us. The then-fledgling I.R.S. Records released it, but the Cramps chafed at the lack of creative control from the off and the relationship quickly soured. After 1981’s Psychedelic Jungle dropped, I.R.S. blocked them from releasing any new material until 1983’s live album Smell of Female. There's no real telling how much that hurt the band in the States , but they always did better in the UK, where they had their first hit singles - e.g., “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog” and, their one and only UK Top 40 single, “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns” – and where Stay Sick! (1990) charted at No. 62; meanwhile, back in the States, they couldn’t even find distribution for 1986’s A Date with Elvis until 1990. The rest of their discography, includes studio albums Look Mom No Head! (1991), Flamejob (1994), Big Beat from Badsville (1997) and Fiends of Dope Island (2003), plus the compilations Off the Bone (1983, released illegally, apparently) and, most famously (or this was the first one I heard), Bad Music for Bad People.
While critics have classified under a grab-bag of genres (e.g., psychobilly, gothabilly, garage punk, rockabilly, garage rock, horror punk, neo-rockabilly, punk rock and surf), the Cramps dubbed it “rockabilly voodoo” on their early promotional flyers. They claimed various influences, everything from early rockabilly (e.g., Jerry Lott, aka, The Phantom), “rhythm and blues, and rock and roll like Link Wray (both big fans) and Hasil Adkins,” 60s surf acts, 60s garage like The Standells, the Trashmen, the Green Fuz and the Sonics, The Ramones on the punk side, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and, believe it or not, Ricky Nelson. A quote from Wikipedia about A Date with Elvis speaks to their aesthetic arc:
“The album featured what was to become a predominating theme of their work from here on: a move away from the B-movie horror focus to an increased emphasis on sexual double entendre.”
Calling them a working/touring band sums it up nicely. Members came and went and always with creative names – e.g., Candy del Mar and Slim Chance (both bass players) – but Lux Interior and Poison Ivy had one of the rare partnerships/common-law marriages in music that carried on to the end. In a nod to their success in Europe (even early, e.g., 6 nights at Hammersmith Palais, then three at the Odeon, then three more at Hammersmith in 1984), they played a farewell European tour in the summer of 2006 followed by a final show at the Marquee Theater in Tempe, AZ on November 4, 2006. The band officially folded in 2009 when Lux Interior died unexpectedly of an aortic dissection.
Some Telling Quotes
“The failure of outsiders to acknowledge the influence of blues and R&B on The Cramps is an omission bordering on racism. Rockabilly is rooted in the blues and we consider ourselves a blues band.”
- Poison Ivy Rorschach
“I’m the Queen of Rock n’ Roll and for this to not to be recognized is pure sexism.”
- Poison Ivy Rorschach
“I think one of the things that makes rock ‘n’ roll such a great thing is a separates the squares from the cool people.”
- Lux Interior
“She was the queen, the high priestess, rock ‘n’ roll incarnate, a consummate symbol of dangerous music in her garter belts and vinyl mules, her hennaed curls crowned with a prom-queen tiara (‘No queen of rock n’ roll should be caught dead without a crown,’) jerking the fretboard of her massive Gretsch toward the audience like the barrel of a gun.”
- Please Kill Me, 2020 interview
A Half Dozen Points of Interest
1) Live at the Napa State Mental Hospital
In the summer of 1978, the Cramps played a live show at the California State Mental Hospital. A San Francisco-based collective called Target Video filmed the event....and, of course, it made it to Youtube. Lux Interior shared some (wonderful) memories that you can’t get on the videos:
“People were coming up to us and talking as we were performing. People were standing there yelling in our ears. I remember this one woman screaming at us, 'I HAVE AN UNCLE WHO’S IN THE BUSINESS. HE CAN GET YOU SOME GIGS. ‘CAUSE I THINK YOU’RE REALLY GOODI' — while we were doing a song. I remember this great big tall black guy who weighed about 300 pounds and he had a cowboy hat and a Sex Pistols t-shirt. He looked like a football player or something and he said, 'This is so great. I never thought punk rock would come to me.'”
2) Twin-Axe Attack Without a Net
No Cramps album featured bass guitar until A Date with Elvis – i.e., when Candy del Mar stepped in. They did, however, use on the song “The Surfin’ Dead,” which they performed on the soundtrack for Return of the Living Dead – and Poison Ivy played that as well. Speaking of...
3) Giving a Queen Her Due
Poison Ivy taught herself guitar and she – along with many others – believed she never got her due as a guitarist. She started on “a solid body guitar, a rare Canadian model called a Lewis, that she sound on 48th Street in 1976”, but passed onto a 1958 Gibson 6120 hollow-body before graduating to “her famous hollow-body Gretsch.” Worse:
“Most interviewers spoke directly to her civil partner, Cramps front man Lux Interior, and largely ignored Poison Ivy, whose guitar work on her famous hollow-body Gretsch was the backbone of the Cramps sound. Not only was she the lead guitarist and occasional bassist, she also produced the majority of the band’s thirteen studio albums and co-wrote all of the band’s original songs.”
4) The Beating Heart of the Band
Despite all that, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy very much saw the band as common property – and from the beginning. As he recalled in a 1998 interview with Lo-Fi: Easy Living for Cool Moderns (reproduced on Greasy Kid Stuff Magazine):
"It’s great that Ivy and I are together; it makes things easier to stick to what we believe. Like somebody could say something to us that's totally stupid and I can look at Ivy and say ‘Uhh...is that totally stupid?’ And she'll go, ‘Yeah, that’s totally stupid.’ And we know.”
And this is even sweeter from Poison Ivy:
“I think we kind of brought each other up, we’ve been together so long. We’re both romantic people, which helps. Getting together made us think of things to do, being partners in crime. Whereas alone we might have just been nameless drifters. God, I do love a happy ending.”
5) Avid Collectors
“I’ve got like 80 3-D cameras. I’ve got a 3-D camera that’s 100 years old that I still take pictures with. We’ve got about 3 or 4,000 movies on video tape. We have a million 45’s — mainly rockabilly and rock ‘n roll instrumental 45’s. These are things that we cherish. We have almost all of the Sun 45’s —- like 200 Sun 45’s & 78’s. We found most of our stuff in junk stores for a nickel. Back when no one was collecting this stuff it was real easy to find.”
- Poison Ivy
6) On the TV
The Cramps didn’t get a ton of shots on TV, but fans from the industry gave them exposure where they could – e.g., a 1994 appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien (where they played "The Ultra Twist"). My personal favorites: an appearance on the 1995 Halloween Episode of Beverly Hills 90210, where they played “Mean Machine” and “Strange Love,” and even got a clever shout-out in the episode title (“Gypsies, Cramps and Thieves”); the second was voice-work on Spongebob Squarepants when Lux Interior did the voice-over as lead singer for the band The Bird Brains and sang a song titled, “Underwater Sun.”
Sources
Wikipedia – The Cramps
Please Kill Me interview (w. Poison Ivy, 2020)
Greasy Kid Stuff Magazine
MTV Europe/UK Interview 1990 (in which they get grilled about “All Women Are Bad”)
Notes on the Sampler
As much as I love the Cramps and appreciate Poison Ivy’s guitar work, they didn’t lay down the most intricate or varied sound. They make up for that in raw power and floor-pounding grooves. I have my favorite albums (A Date with Elvis and Flamejob), but tried to spread it around for the sampler. In order, by album:
Songs the Lord Taught Us: “Rock on the Moon,” “Tear It Up,” and (a song I love) “Strychnine”
Psychedelic Jungle: “Goo Goo Muck” (the first song by them I heard, fwiw; think it leads Bad Music for Bad People?), and a pair of slyer, slower numbers in “Primitive” and “Voodoo Idol”
A Date with Elvis: “How Far Can Too Far Go?,” “Aloha from Hell,” “Hot Pearl Snatch,” “People Ain’t No Good,” and a pitch-perfect ode to camp, “Get Off the Road”
Stay Sick: “God Damn Rock ‘n’ Roll,” “All Women Are Bad,” and their most famous, “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns”
Flamejob: “Nest of the Cuckoo Bird,” “How Come You Do Me?,” “Sado County Auto Show,” and “Let’s Get Fucked Up”
Big Beat from Badsville: “Cramp Stomp” and “It Thing Hard-On”
I must be a bad person, because I love this stuff. Till the next one...trying to make this feature more regular, for what it’s worth.
Poison Ivy taught herself guitar and she – along with many others – believed she never got her due as a guitarist. She started on “a solid body guitar, a rare Canadian model called a Lewis, that she sound on 48th Street in 1976”, but passed onto a 1958 Gibson 6120 hollow-body before graduating to “her famous hollow-body Gretsch.” Worse:
“Most interviewers spoke directly to her civil partner, Cramps front man Lux Interior, and largely ignored Poison Ivy, whose guitar work on her famous hollow-body Gretsch was the backbone of the Cramps sound. Not only was she the lead guitarist and occasional bassist, she also produced the majority of the band’s thirteen studio albums and co-wrote all of the band’s original songs.”
4) The Beating Heart of the Band
Despite all that, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy very much saw the band as common property – and from the beginning. As he recalled in a 1998 interview with Lo-Fi: Easy Living for Cool Moderns (reproduced on Greasy Kid Stuff Magazine):
"It’s great that Ivy and I are together; it makes things easier to stick to what we believe. Like somebody could say something to us that's totally stupid and I can look at Ivy and say ‘Uhh...is that totally stupid?’ And she'll go, ‘Yeah, that’s totally stupid.’ And we know.”
And this is even sweeter from Poison Ivy:
“I think we kind of brought each other up, we’ve been together so long. We’re both romantic people, which helps. Getting together made us think of things to do, being partners in crime. Whereas alone we might have just been nameless drifters. God, I do love a happy ending.”
5) Avid Collectors
“I’ve got like 80 3-D cameras. I’ve got a 3-D camera that’s 100 years old that I still take pictures with. We’ve got about 3 or 4,000 movies on video tape. We have a million 45’s — mainly rockabilly and rock ‘n roll instrumental 45’s. These are things that we cherish. We have almost all of the Sun 45’s —- like 200 Sun 45’s & 78’s. We found most of our stuff in junk stores for a nickel. Back when no one was collecting this stuff it was real easy to find.”
- Poison Ivy
6) On the TV
The Cramps didn’t get a ton of shots on TV, but fans from the industry gave them exposure where they could – e.g., a 1994 appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien (where they played "The Ultra Twist"). My personal favorites: an appearance on the 1995 Halloween Episode of Beverly Hills 90210, where they played “Mean Machine” and “Strange Love,” and even got a clever shout-out in the episode title (“Gypsies, Cramps and Thieves”); the second was voice-work on Spongebob Squarepants when Lux Interior did the voice-over as lead singer for the band The Bird Brains and sang a song titled, “Underwater Sun.”
Sources
Wikipedia – The Cramps
Please Kill Me interview (w. Poison Ivy, 2020)
Greasy Kid Stuff Magazine
MTV Europe/UK Interview 1990 (in which they get grilled about “All Women Are Bad”)
Notes on the Sampler
As much as I love the Cramps and appreciate Poison Ivy’s guitar work, they didn’t lay down the most intricate or varied sound. They make up for that in raw power and floor-pounding grooves. I have my favorite albums (A Date with Elvis and Flamejob), but tried to spread it around for the sampler. In order, by album:
Songs the Lord Taught Us: “Rock on the Moon,” “Tear It Up,” and (a song I love) “Strychnine”
Psychedelic Jungle: “Goo Goo Muck” (the first song by them I heard, fwiw; think it leads Bad Music for Bad People?), and a pair of slyer, slower numbers in “Primitive” and “Voodoo Idol”
A Date with Elvis: “How Far Can Too Far Go?,” “Aloha from Hell,” “Hot Pearl Snatch,” “People Ain’t No Good,” and a pitch-perfect ode to camp, “Get Off the Road”
Stay Sick: “God Damn Rock ‘n’ Roll,” “All Women Are Bad,” and their most famous, “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns”
Flamejob: “Nest of the Cuckoo Bird,” “How Come You Do Me?,” “Sado County Auto Show,” and “Let’s Get Fucked Up”
Big Beat from Badsville: “Cramp Stomp” and “It Thing Hard-On”
I must be a bad person, because I love this stuff. Till the next one...trying to make this feature more regular, for what it’s worth.
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