Lux Interior: 10/21/46--2/04/09

The news that Cramps frontman Lux Interior is dead at the age of 60 (or 62—reports vary) of a pre-existing heart condition, is a serious blow to anyone who has followed the band from its inception in 1976 through recent incarnations. The Cramps were a throwback to the grindhouse days, when the lurid and suggestive were more than enough to entice and hypnotize an audience.
The first time I saw the Cramps was 1979, at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom. They were first on a triple bill, followed by a power pop new wave band called The A’s and finally headliners Talking Heads, touring behind their Fear of Music album. My friends and I drove into the city for the show, all expectant of an excellent show by David Byrne and company, having eagerly devoured the Brian Eno-produced album that featured the ‘hit’ single ‘War During Lifetime.’ Nothing, but nothing could have prepared us for the arrival onstage of the Cramps. They were far away in the cavernous space of the Aragon, but there was no mistaking the primitive rockabilly crack of Nick Knox’s drums, the oozing primordial garage riffs of guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach, the screeching feedback of Brian Gregory’s other guitar as something strange and wonderful. But it was all nothing compared to the manic energy of the group’s frontman, one Lux Interior. This crazed vision in tight black pants and a t-shirt leaped and capered around the cage, hiccupping and heavy breathing into the microphone, taunting the audience and the band, clawing at the stage curtains, which he managed to climb to a level several feet off the ground. The audience, including my friends, were completely taken aback, and, to a large extent, completely alienated. Some rolls of toilet paper actually bounced off the stage curtain and around the stage. Needless to say, the Talking Heads audience was, for the most part, not the Cramps audience. The Heads were great that night, but really it barely registered. I was completely smitten by the Cramps, and I would never be the same.
I haunted the local record stores until I turned up a copy of the group’s first recording, an EP entitled Gravest Hits. Consisting of a mere five tracks, it emphasized the group’s rockabilly roots. The leadoff song, “Human Fly” also gave an indication of the late night sci-fi B-movie influence that would be in stronger evidence on the group’s subsequent recordings. “I got 96 tears in 96 eyes” Lux intoned, and those who ‘got it’ thanked God that the Cramps, the band we had always imagined in our wildest trash rock fantasies, actually existed. The classic “The Way I Walk” and the Sam Phillips-penned “Domino” rounded out side one. Side two consisted of the Trashmen classic “Surfin’ Bird” in which Ivy and Brian Gregory whipped up an adrenal frenzy of guitar noise while Lux made every sound, human and not so human, that he could with his mouth, his vocal cords, and the microphone. Lux recognized that as the vocalist, the microphone was truly his instrument, and the way that he wielded it was evidence of his virtuosity. At times he would practically inhale it, while at others he would thrust it down his pants. The side, and the EP, concluded with a haunting rendition of the Thomas Baker-Knight ballad “Lonely Town,” originally recorded by Ricky Nelson. It is perhaps the closest thing to a ‘serious’ Cramps performance you’ll ever hear. “Going down to lonesome town” sobs Lux, “where the broken hearts stay…” Its’s a uniquely desperate and desolate moment in the group’s recorded history.
Gravest Hits was followed, quickly, by the band’s debut album, Songs the Lord Taught Us. Now the full glory of the Cramps’ many influences came much more sharply into focus. The opening song”TV Set” is a rant about cutting off someone’s head and putting in the TV set, or the Frigidaire. “Garbageman” infused the group’s rockabilly leaning s with a more hard edged punk sound,as did “what’s behind the Mask”, “Sunglasses after Dark,” and “Strychnine.” There was the surf rock of Dick Dale and the Ventures, the garage rock of the Standells and the Trashmen, and the emerging punk of the Ramones, the Damned, and the horrorshow rock of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The list of groups that would not exist without Lux and the Cramps is too long to contemplate, but certainly would include The Birthday Party, the Gun Club, Spacemen 3, and The White Stripes.
With the next album, Psychedelic Jungle, the band replaced freaked out guitarist Brian Gregory with Kid Congo Powers, formerly of the Gun Club, and moved out to L.A. The new album replaced the claustrophobic Alex Chilton production of the EP and first album with a warmer, yet looser, sound that ultimately seemed to define the sound the group had been looking for. Powers took Gregory’s wall of noise approach and executed it with more precision, resulting in an increased lexicon of guitar sound. From here the group moved on to series of albums—Stay Sick, Flame Job, A Date With Elvis—that increasingly emphasized trashy Americana and sexual fetishism, and Lux increasingly (always, really) wore patent leather jumpsuits and high heeled pumps onstage, scaling the amplifier stacks and tottering around to the seeming consternation of Ivy. 
The last time I saw the band was in July of 1996, when they played at Metro to celebrate the third anniversary of the fetish boutique House of Whacks, and they naturally emphasized the fetishitic parts of their catalog and Lux and Ivy both put on quite a show. In the words of ‘J. H. Sasfy, Professor of Rockology’ in the liner notes to Gravest Hits:
“ The CRAMPS dove into the deepest recesses of the rock’n’roll psyche for the most primal of all rhythmic impulses — rockabilly — the sound of southern culture falling apart in a blaze of shudders and hiccups. As late night sci-fi reruns colored the room, The CRAMPS also picked and chose amongst the psychotic debris of previous rock eras - instrumental rock, surf, psychedelia, and sixties punk. And then they added the junkiest element of all — themselves… The Cramps don't pummel and you won't pogo. They ooze, you'll throb."
We’re still throbbing.
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