When I heard the news on February 4, 2009, that Lux Interior had passed away due to a heart-related ailment, I thought of Poison Ivy, the other half of the life, love, and creative partnership that conjured the Cramps. It’s been 37 years since the pair met in Sacramento, California’s land-locked capital, a place that could not possibly contain or support the duo’s singular brand of hyper-rock expression. But it was there where their fates were written as curious music lovers, record collectors, and ultimately as musicians—vocations that would endure for the remainder of Lux’s life.

“Everything great from any era has been repressed,” Ivy once told Re/Search Publications. And so it was the Cramps who set about bringing to light those things that had been left in darkness. Taking their cues from underground forms of music and culture, they specialized in resuscitating cast-offs, shooting them up with rockabilly and surf rock, and bringing them back to life. Exhuming the bones of so-called trash culture and rearranging them to fit the punk times, the Cramps explicitly brought life to the late ’50s and ’60s era of exploitation, from B-horror to grindhouse sleaze, and set it to a rock ‘n’ roll beat with just drums and guitars.

“I think rockabilly was a quantum leap in culture,” said Ivy in the same Re/Search interview (published in Incredibly Strange Music, 1993). “Something happened in the evolution of people’s minds… maybe it was the atom bomb: ‘Let’s do it now because we might get blown up!’ In the ’50s, everybody was bigger than life about everything.” In back-to-basics punk and new wave times, the Cramps were the band with a sound, an image, and reputation bigger than life. Their stage persona also intermingled with their personal life; you might see Lux and Ivy at the record swap… they really did specifically choose to live near one of the world’s most famous cemeteries.

read more