Punk Cramps: In love with the picture on the TV

Nerds and savages are two rather opposite character patterns in rock culture. The nerd, especially if he is a record collector of rare moments of human effort or borderline experience, i.e. if he cultivates collecting areas such as early rock 'n' roll, garage psychedelia or things that came from southern swamps, he wants to contain the wildness that he himself lacks.

Wants to have the wildness documented and thus conquered by recording studios, to control it and only show it as a well-sorted collection when called on by other nerds. Armed with white gloves.

The wild singer, on the other hand, wants to show something completely different. And even though Lux Interior (1946–2009), extremely wild, often gloved stage center of the Cramps, always insisted, unlike Iggy Pop and Jim Morrison, that he had only ever almost exposed himself, he was still wilder than these and all their punk epigones put together. I know, I watched him.

The Cramps: “Gravest Gravy” (Vengeance Records/HHV)

But he was also exactly the recording and knowledge-collecting, dedicated philologist of various ultra-vital trash directions of vintage US pop and rock music. The voluble representative of the good old theory that the kind of enthusiasm that makes it worth hoarding vinyl only thrives below the regular budgets of the culture industry: despite all the little kits with their blunt and drastic label aesthetics.

Whether these were small for reasons of provinciality, eccentricity, avant-garde spirit or entrepreneurial inability plays a secondary role. Lux Interior felt just as committed to the historical results of these romantic or (in my opinion) rightly romanticized working conditions as to a brutally entertaining stage show.

But these rockabilly and hillbilly, blues and rock 'n' roll gems, hard to find in the 1970s, a time of prog and especially AOR hegemony, were also revelations of transformative truths for him. He didn't have an authentic approach, but rather a glam and drag-oriented approach to rock 'n' roll, psychedelia, country and rockabilly, along with the associated clothes, make-up and exaggerated habitus.

Lux Interior was alone until he picked up a hitchhiker in Sacramento who prayed to the same gods. She would later call herself Poison Ivy or Ivy Rorschach (*1953) and it was only his death in 2009 that the two would separate.

Together they built up their record collection, which a man who met them in 1977 said was already the largest trash, psycho and rockabilly archive there was in the world. With this collection behind them and the pair's dazzling appearance, they become local stars who are often invited backstage and decide to be a band themselves.

From now on, Poison Ivy will define the strands with a strict but enthusiastic rhythm guitar, over which Lux could then beat. It was like reverse Ike & Tina Turner. She holds the store together musically while he attracts attention from the front. The crooked thing about this picture: there is no known marital violence among the Rorschach Interiors; they were a symbiotic couple in every respect.

And: Ivy has always been an eye-catcher. She was often the model for the album covers and illustrated titles such as “A Date with Elvis”, “What’s Inside a Girl?” and “Journey to the Center of a Girl.”

Unnerved by California's mellowness, the couple moved to Lux's hometown of Akron, Ohio, in 1975. There and in the surrounding area, US music is currently being completely transformed: Rocket from the Tombs, Pere Ubu, Peter Laughner, Dead Boys, Adele Bertei, Devo, Bizarros - everyone who will storm New York or LA in the next few years with future underground music comes from these industrial cities in decline.

That's why the Cramps, despite all their 50's enthusiasm, never sound retro: the synthesis of rusty metalwork and obdurate to humorous backwoods results in a double outsiderness for which the punk mindset is not enough. Almost exactly 50 years ago (11/1/1976) the Cramps played live as a quartet for the first time in New York, where they moved at the end of '75, at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. Six months later, the recordings that we are talking about here were made in mythical Memphis: the lost debut album "Gravest Gravy".

The Cramps were always a women's band: they were set in motion by two drummers, whose second, Miriam Linna, went on to have her own career as a musician (The A-Bones, among others) and label maker (Norton Records), for her part reconciling fan philology with childlike enthusiasm.

However, both had already been replaced by Nick Knox when the recordings took place in Memphis. Later, it was Candy Del Mar who relieved Poison Ivy as lead bassist. But for Memphis 1977 there is another very important male band member to be introduced.

In the summer of 1982, I was staying in a hotel of dubious reputation in Manhattan. My hallway neighbor was rarely seen. When I came home late at night, he would sneak down the corridor, wearing a hooded robe like the reaper himself. His hair, which only hung asymmetrically on one of the scarred sides of his face with an extreme side parting, had already turned natural gray at the age of 30 - at least that's how it was supposed to look.

He actually played one of the countless zombies in George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The night porter warned me about him, although the hooded man greeted me regularly with delicate grunts. That was Bryan Gregory, who was no longer with the Cramps at the time. In 1980, after the release of the first official album, he left the band overnight. He died in 2001, probably as a result of AIDS.

On the record in question, however, it is unmistakable. In the first song, the Cramps signature piece “TV Set”, you can clearly hear him filling up the breaks with sharp, sharp noise broadsides. But only in the designated places.

The Cramps uphold the traditions they believe in, most of which date back to the 1950s. At the same time, they are an unrestrained 1980s noise troupe, whose classification requires the stupid word postpunk to go a few laps around the block. The noise ricochet of Gregory's guitar compares well with the recording the band made of the same piece - the lyrical I'm in love, but only with the image on the television screen and the same person's voice on the radio - three years later with the same producer for their regular album, Songs the Lord Taught Us.

They are more disciplined, in the same places and they are tuned to chords, whereas on the '77 recording they actually sound like a disturbed television. The nihilistic musique concrète of the media environment of the mid-seventies.

They made these recordings with Alex Chilton (1950–2010) as producer, another figure of the century of the brilliantly incomplete and tragically underpaid, about whom one could write a few hundred newspaper pages. Of these now released sessions, which were made at the Ardent Studio in Memphis in 1977, only five songs that were not re-released here ended up on the first EP (“Gravest Hits”), four songs later re-recorded with Kid Congo Powers on the second album “Psychedelic Jungle” and one, namely “TV Set”, which was newly recorded but with the same line-up, on the first album “Songs the Lord Taught Us”, which Chilton also produced.

But now they were a different band, strongly influenced by the success of their stage provocations, faster, more professional and more jittery. On “Gravest Gravy”, an album title that was developed together with Lux, they are stylistically more open.

Chilton is also a musical influence here, bringing his quirky beat/pop fantasies to the very nice “Hungry,” a cover version of 60’s teen band Paul Revere and the Raiders, on which he also plays organ. If you read elsewhere that Lux Interior once raved about how brilliantly Marc Bolan managed to incorporate harsh rockabilly and rock 'n' roll quotes and lines into T. Rex without breaking the teen paradigm, then you can imagine what was intended here.

Great gray eminences of the 80s hardcore underground have come together to finally release this album that the Cramps themselves have always wanted to release. Henry Rollins supervised and wrote liner notes, and his life partner, Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, among others, took part. The activation of the Ardent sound, which gave us so many great Alex Chilton, Big Star, James Luther Dickinson and Tav Falco works, was ensured by various sonophile specialists who were recruited for the project.

If you listen to this today, you can feel a feeling of departure that is bigger and more far-reaching than you would have thought based on its long-term effects. The rich and dense subculture around psychobilly and the bats of zombie rock 'n' roll, which Lux Interior proudly claimed a decade later as an answer to the Cramps, only lasted for a while. What remains of all this today are, above all, the Cramps themselves and their 20 years of work with 20 musicians involved on twelve albums.