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.

Their existence also defined a new genre of punky hillbilly goth, though it was by accident that the Cramps named their music “psychobilly.” They borrowed the word from “One Piece at a Time”, Johnny Cash’s slightly psycho song about working on an auto assembly line, and used it on a poster advertising one of their early gigs (the band would come to regret, deny, and despise the label). And yet, in one word, “psychobilly” describes the twang they twisted to the point of psychosis, as well as their suitably demented stage presentation.

Born with the names Eric Purkhiser and Kristy Wallace, Lux and Ivy got acquainted in art class in 1974; both shared an interest in glam rock and in discovering unusual music. They eventually found out that some of the weirdest sides were the old R&B, surf, and rockabilly singles, and they set about collecting them. Following a record-buying trip to Memphis and a layover in Ohio, they landed in New York City, where, in 1976, they birthed the Cramps. Returning to Memphis in ’77 with producer Alex Chilton for the recording of their debut EP, Gravest Hits, they followed with a debut album, Songs the Lord Taught Us. All but one (”Human Fly”) of the five songs from Gravest Hits were covers of old songs, presumably inspired by records in what was now a growing collection. Their grinding version of “The Way I Walk” by Jack Scott remains one of their finest recorded moments.

Scott was a semi-obscure Canadian-American rockabilly singer who originally wrote and recorded the song, turning it into a Top 40 hit in 1959. Despite his way Northern roots (he originally came from Windsor, Ontario), Scott was a hillbilly music lover, which may have partly contributed to Lux and Ivy’s fix on him. According to his own website biography, he had 19 singles in 41 months (including “Goodbye Baby”), which was more than anyone at the time except for the Beatles. He also claims to be the first white rock guy (and indeed he was before Del Shannon and Mitch Ryder) to have a hit out of Detroit, known ’til that point for its blues and R&B sides. Scott was having his moment as part of the great mid-’70s rockabilly revival, when at the same time the Cramps released their “The Way I Walk”, the song was also being performed by Robert Gordon, a straight-up rockabillyist. Gordon had left the NYC band Tuff Darts to collaborate with guitarist Link Wray (of “Rumble” fame and a superhero to Lux and Ivy). Gordon and Wray’s faithful version of “The Way I Walk” (with the Jordanaires on back up vocals) appears on the album Fresh Fish Special.

As if there were a finite number of songs in the world, the downtown New York punk crowd seemed to share the same sensibilities in oldies, if not the same record collection. How else can one explain not only the Ramones but the Cramps cutting “Surfin’ Bird”, a Top 10 hit for the Trashmen in 1964? The Minneapolis garage band combined two songs, the doo-wop send-up “Papa Oom Mow Mow” and the nonsensical “The Bird’s the Word”, which had both been hits for the Rivingtons, a West Coast R&B vocal group. “Surfin’ Bird”, with its frenzied delivery (complete with sound effects), was quick to join the repertoire of teen garage bands everywhere, including Michigan’s Iguanas whose drummer was the soon-to-be christened Iggy Pop (yet another Detroit rock guy, and one with whom Lux shared a move or two). The Ramones released their version of “Surfin’ Bird” in 1977, while the Cramps’ surfaced in 1979: Well-known for their reclusion, maybe Lux and Ivy didn’t know they’d been beaten to the punch. Or, maybe in the grand tradition of versions, the song was so good it deserved to be recorded again and again. Or maybe, more likely, they just didn’t care.

Iconoclastic yet simultaneously reverent, if the Cramps had one particular specialty, it was primitivism. They once reportedly declared a desire to never develop or advance and the song “Primitive”, from their third release, Psychedelic Jungle, ties up the primitive aesthetic in a song: “What I respect you just can’t see / What you expect, I’ll never be / That’s how I live / Primitive.” The Groupies, a garage band from New York’s Lower East Side, originally released “Primitive” in 1966. According to his liner notes in the Nuggets box set, Mike Stax of Ugly Things magazine writes, “… the Groupies claimed their music was a totally new style, ‘abstract rock.’” Quite a claim given that the song’s central riff was lifted straight from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning.” The Cramps played that one true to form themselves, and yet what “Primitive” lacks in original melody it retains in the philosophy to remain raw, instinctual, and untainted. In 30 years of making music, the Cramps remained committed to their directive to stay pure; if anything, in performance they got closer to the bone. By the time they released the seriously raunchy Fiends of Dope Island in 2003, I had a hard time parsing the fictional parts from the documentary. However, there was never a question that the Cramps took seriously their mission to pass down the songs that had been delivered to them. “What’s for me ain’t for you,” Lux sang in “Taboo.”

The Cramps’ act was not lost on Americana minimalists like the Flat Duo Jets, English drug enthusiasts the Spacemen 3, and especially the Gun Club, whose Jeffrey Lee Pierce did to the blues what Lux and Ivy had done to rockabilly. Pierce may’ve also been the one to coin the phrase “like an Elvis from hell,” words that would become frequently used to describe Lux. And in the whole North/South rock ‘n’ roll divide coming full circle, Detroit guitar and drum act the White Stripes, featuring the flamboyant frontman and his silent-type partner, were the latest model of hillbilly goth to underscore rock’s Southern connection.

“O
ne half hillbilly and one half punk / Big long legs and one big mouth / The hottest thing from the North to come out of the South / Do you understand?” sang Lux in “Garbage Man.” After all the covers have been collected, my favorite Cramps song is an original that appeared on Songs the Lord Taught Us. “Garbage Man” is based on an idea borrowed from bluesology: Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and bluesmen across time sang of situations in which their baby made love to or, worse yet, ran off with the garbage man. In the Cramps’ story, Lux declares himself the ultimate trashman, while dropping references to “Louie, Louie” and “The Bird’s the Word.” “Garbage Man” comes from the Cramps’ earliest era, when the band was still fairly tame, perhaps even innocent. But after 30 years of rockin’ and reelin’, the Mad Daddy has finished his route: “You’ve got to live until you’re dead / You’ve got to rock ’til you see red / Do you understand?” Yep, I think we do.

Watch: “Garbage Man” [at youtube.com]

Tags: Lux Interior, The Cramps, Jack Scott, The Trashmen

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