Crash Course No. 40: Feeling the Cramps

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.”

One Hit No More, No. 116: Marshall Crenshaw, The Motor City Mellow Dude

This one felt most right...

To think it all started with Beatlemania...which left the artist feeling conflicted...

The Hit
Marshall Crenshaw wrote “Someday, Someway” in only 30 minutes and it only strayed into “hit” territory (it topped out at No. 36), but it’s still a cool little tune by a largely forgotten singer/songwriter. He built it around Gene Vincent’s “Lotta Lovin’” (loosely), but made it his own:

“Crenshaw wanted to use the beat to create a hypnotic effect and wrote a new melody around it. The lyrics were described by Crenshaw as simple, but with a hidden depth; he later claimed that the lyrics had been influenced by the beginnings of his marriage.”

You’ll hear that slightly-fuzzed, reverb style guitar all over Crenshaw’s considerable catalog, but there’s definitely a better version of the single knocking around – e.g., The 9 Volt Years collection version. The studio version from his debut album is still a fine song...but, Lord, the crunch on that guitar on that 9 Volt version. Simple isn’t always better, but it sure as hell can be.

I remember seeing Crenshaw’s video on early MTV growing up, but only appreciate now just how far it went over my head. It’s a love song about the rarest subject of the form: the actual work of a relationship, as opposed to the fun shit of infatuation.

The Rest of the Story
“Although he was seen as a latter-day Buddy Holly at the outset, he soon proved too talented and original to be anyone but himself.”
- Trouser Press (quoted in Wikipedia)

Crenshaw was born in the Detroit, Michigan suburb of Berkley in 1953. There isn’t much about his childhood on the web, but he did mention how every high school seemed to have five or six bands. He formed his first band at age 15 – and it may or may not have been named “Astigfa” – an acronym for “A splendid time is guaranteed for all” borrowed from The Beatles’ “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” but the records show he played in that one. In any case, they played yard parties around the area before they could play the bars, and they played the bars after that. That carried Crenshaw to his early 20s, when he decided he wanted more.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 53: Hank "Herky" "Skeets" Williams, Country's OG Rock Star

I like this one. Captures the fuss.

“Hank Williams’s legend now overshadows the rather frail and painfully introverted man who spawned it. Born Hiram Williams, the ‘Hillbilly Shakespeare’ came from a rural background.”
- Country Music Hall of Fame Bio

The Basics
The Country Music’s Hall of Fame doesn’t have much to back up that framing, but Hank Williams did squeeze a lot of hits and a lot of trouble into a short life. He was born Hiram Williams in 1923 in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, called Mount Olive. He was also born with spina bifida occulta, a cosmic accident that shaped his life from cradle to grave, but had more consequences on the back end.

His father, Elonzo Huble “Lon” Williams, supported the family with work on lumber company railways, but he disappeared from Hank’s life at a young age. Lon Williams fell off a truck while serving in World War I and those injuries lingered until 1930, when he started developing facial paralysis brought on by an aneurysm. He spent more than eight years in the hospital – the balance of Hank’s childhood – which left his mother, Jessie Lillybelle “Lillie” Williams to raise the family. She proved more than up for the task, working multiple jobs (during the Depression to boot) and ran a succession of boarding houses - even after the first one burned down.

Lillie also encouraged Williams’ love of music. The story of how he got hold of his first guitar varies – one version has him selling peanuts to buy it, another has people from all over whichever town he lived in at the time (they moved around a bit) claiming they bought it for him – but the man who taught him to play it was a busker named Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne. Lillie paid Payne when she could for Hank's music lessons and fed him when she couldn’t, but he taught Williams the basics and on a blues-based foundation. Later, Williams would call Payne “my only real teacher.”

Circumstances – in this case a fight with a phys. ed. teacher – planted the family in Montgomery, Alabama, which is where his musical career starts. In 1937, Williams entered and won a talent contest at the Empire Theater playing a song of his own composition, “WPA Blues.” That earned him $15, but also an angle to sell himself to the local radio station, WFSA, when they saw him busking in front of their building on weekends and after school. The station’s producers handed him the equivalent of a part-time job ($15/week), but it started him on his way.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 52: Ernest Tubb, Country Music's Mid-Century Saint

Handsome fella...

Think of him as the bridge between the original generation and the modern one...

Ernest Dale Tubb was born in 1914 in the area around Crisp, Texas (southeast of Dallas, fwiw) to sharecropper middle management (his father oversaw a 300-acre cotton farm). He fell in love with and learned music on his own, mostly by listening to the Jimmie Rodgers records he pinched his dimes to buy (I covered Rodgers in an earlier chapter). By his late teens, Tubb had nailed down Rodgers style enough to get a sliver of time and too little money for performing on San Antonio’s KONO radio station, but he still needed day jobs (e.g., digging ditches for the Works Program Administration) to stay whole. Things could have carried on like that till Tubb met his maker, but two events changed his life.

First, he cold-called Rodgers’ widow, Carrie Rodgers, in 1936 (three years after his passing) to ask for an autographed photo of his idol when he found her name in a local phone book. Touched by his sincerity, she invited him over. A friendship developed and, "impressed by his friendly personality and heartfelt singing,” Carrie Rodgers became his mentor and champion, listening to his radio broadcasts to give him pointers and making introductions to connections at record labels. She got him signed with RCA, but they did little to promote him – a defensible choice given first singles like “The Passing of Jimmie Rodgers” and “Jimmie Rodgers’ Last Thoughts.”

Tubb’s second life-changing moment came when some undiscussed health issue led to a tonsillectomy in 1939. The procedure lowered his voice, putting both yodeling, higher pitches and a career as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator out of reach. After some time to heal, write some songs and rework his vocals, he approached Decca Records – again, with Carrie Rodgers making introductions. The label picked him up and sent him to Houston to record some new sides – “Blue Eyed Elaine” and “I’ll Get Along Somehow” – giving Tubb his first taste of success. Carrie Rodgers pulled some more strings and helped him to his first full-time gig as a musician: the “Gold Chain Troubadour,” named after Gold Chain Flour, a product put out by the sponsor of Fort Worth’s KGKO, Universal Mills. All that made him big enough to join package tours with other up-and-comers in mid-century country like Bob Wills and Roy Acuff, but his world changed in 1941 when Tubb wrote and released, “Walking the Floor Over You.”

The single sold 400,000 copies right away (though it wouldn’t go gold until 1965) and, in just two years time, scored Tubb an invite to play the Grand Ole Opry. Whether his name proceeded him or his just killed it that night, that debut performance received three standing ovations. From there, the rest is country music history.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 51: Gene Autry, "King of the Cowboys"

The scourge of outlaws across the West...

With this chapter, we enter the world of the Singing Cowboys...

The Basics
Orvon Grover “Gene” Autry was born 1907 and raised on a ranch in North Texas near a town called Tioga; for whatever reason, every source I read mentioned he was the grandson of a Methodist preacher, but only one (Alan Cackett) explained that’s where he learned music (on a mail-order guitar with his mom) and singing (in his grandfather’s choir). Autry started with a day job – as a “relief telegrapher” for the St. Louis & Frisco Railroad – but he kept himself going through the night shift by singing and playing. After a nudge from the famous comedian, Will Rogers, who’d heard him sing, he went to New York City to try to land a spot, but got an encouraging rejection instead – i.e., they told him to come back after a couple years on radio.

Autry started in the Tulsa market and got big enough on KVOO (he was "Oklahoma's Yodeling Cowboy") to due some recording (“My Dreaming of You” and “My Alabama Home,” both with a former co-worker, Jimmie Long) and pad his resume for a return to New York. He arrived just before the 1929 Stock Market Crash and a profound depression in the recording industry, but he made up for that by recording for any label that would have him, at times “cutting masters for five different companies, each of which issued his sides on multiple labels for chain-store distribution.” Because he started in the business before country fully separated from the blues, some of his early tunes (see, “Do Right Daddy Blues”) carried the influence, but he mostly sounded like Jimmie Rodgers (profiled here). Both his sound and image cleaned up over the years, starting in 1933 when he started to play up his cowboy persona (which he’d earned; he did work on a ranch), but he refined it further still over about 20 years first in radio, then the movies, and finally on TV.

The work ethic he brought to his earliest recording work never left him. Over a career that dipped into the early 1950s, Autry made 640 recordings, wrote or co-wrote 300 songs, and he scored more than a dozen gold and platinum records (something I read said he was the first to receive a gold record, but I’ve read that at least three times now). On the back of country hits that include his signature single, “Back in the Saddle Again” (a guy named Ray Whitney wrote that one), “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way),” not to mention just about every mid-century country standard you can name, plus, some of the most famous Christmas songs ever written/recorded – e.g., “Rudolph the Red- Nosed Reindeer,” “Up on the House Top,” and, his own composition, “Here Comes Santa Claus” – Autry’s recordings sold over 100 million copies.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 50: Hank Penny, the Itinerant Understudy of 1940s Western Swing

Handsome devil...

I needed a palette cleanser after that last one. To start by setting the scene...

“While he never achieved the kind of success enjoyed by fellow bandleaders like Bob Wills or Spade Cooley, during the late '40s and early '50s Hank Penny ranked as one of the foremost practitioners of the Western swing sound.”

Herbert Clayton Penny was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the autumn of 1918. His father, a disabled coalminer who moonlighted in a few creative arts (e.g., he played guitar, did magic and wrote poetry), inspired young Herbert to follow in his footsteps – and he didn’t wait long. He found paying work on local radio by his mid-teens and spent most of the rest of his life bouncing around for work in entertainment.

New Orleans was his first destination. Penny arrived in 1936, just in time to hear the first stirring of the Western swing sound, then put out by Bob Wills (profiled here) and his one-time bandleader/one-time collaborator, Milton Brown. He met one of his own steady future musical companions, the “steel virtuoso” Noel Boggs, but Penny did more radio work as a solo performer at New Orleans’ WWL. That period didn’t last long, though; he was back in Birmingham by 1938.

Once back home, Penny formed the first of many bands of his career. He called them the Radio Cowboys and handled banjo playing duties; the rest of the line-up included Julian Akins (guitar), Sammy Forsmark (steel guitar), Louis Dumont (tenor banjo), Carl Stewart (bass), and a guitarists/fiddler named Sheldon Bennett led on vocals...and I will only mention one more of Hank Penny’s band’s lineups because there are a lot of them (and, for the curious, allmusic.com is the best source). The Radio Cowboys got big enough locally to record a couple sides, their first being “When I Take My Sugar to Tea” and one of Penny’s own compositions, “Flamin’ Mamie.”

Penny spent the next several years bouncing between cities and bands, some of them major destinations in country music history – e.g., Nashville and Chicago (home to National Barn Dance) – and he was personally fairly in demand, turning down offers to lead established radio acts like the Light Crust Doughboys (where Wills started). After reuniting with Boggs in Atlanta (on another radio show), Penny moved on to Cincinnati’s WLW radio station where he formed his next band, The Plantation Boys, which, apart from Carl Stewart, had a completely different line-up (and Stewart switched to fiddle). Before long, though, he felt the pull of the unlikely city that had become the Western swing mecca of the United States, Los Angeles, California.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 49: An Absolute Bastard Named Spade Cooley

Prick!

This one’s messy. It also features a horrific murder, something I don’t come across much in researching musicians, but it’s the wobble between the online sources that complicates the tale of Spade Cooley. There is no question as to the brutality of the murder, and Cooley’s plain guilt in it. To start at the beginning...

The man who became Spade Cooley was born in Grand, Oklahoma in 1910, but with the name Donnell Clyde Cooley. He grew up poor and his family moved West, but sources don’t agree on where or when. Because Wikipedia’s timeline makes no damn sense, and because the dates in Wide Open Country's bio don’t track, I’m going with the basic chronology/destination in musicianguide.com’s bio: Cooley moved with his family to Oregon in 1914, when he was four, and that’s where he grew up and, quite possibly, attended Chemawa (or Chimewa) School, one of the notorious boarding schools for Native Americans. But, again, that doesn’t really track.

He developed a curiosity about music and started on stringed instruments in his childhood years. Regardless of whether Cooley started learning from a friend of his dad’s, he played in school orchestras through his childhood, first on cello, later on violin; he also picked up fiddling by working barn dances for money. No doubt more consequentially, Cooley married a girl named Ann when he was 17 (and she was [?]; also, no last name), and moved to California. Or, as musicianguide.com puts it (which gets at why I’m wary of the source), “In 1931 the Cooley family moved to a farm in Modesto, California.” (Which Cooley family?) Somewhere during this time, he picked up his nickname from a poker game where he won three times in a row on spade flushes.

Determined the escape a life in farm-work that drew both him and the entire “Okie/Dust Bowl” diaspora, Cooley started to poke around Hollywood with an eye to a career in entertainment. After a couple trips, he landed work steady enough move his family down to Tinseltown. He found his first stable work in the movies, working as a stand-in for Roy Rogers, “with whom he had more than a passing resemblance.” He also built a name on the burgeoning swing-club circuit as a fiddler, and even toured with Rogers’ touring band, Foy Willing's Riders of the Purple Sage. Between that work and an assist from his manager, Bobbi Bennett, Cooley landed a job with Jimmy Wakely, the bandleader for Gene Autry’s radio show, Melody Ranch. Wakely also headlined at the Venice Pier Ballroom. And there go the 1930s...