Cramps - The Zombie Dance

Yet another magnificent Californian con artfully sprouted amid the Midwest's wasteland before taking the tangent to the Cbgb's of New York lore.
The prehistory of rock resurrected in the guise of four human wrecks raised on bread and Billy Lee Riley. The privileged gateway to a "fourth dimension" where Duane Eddy's twang tones merge with the aesthetics of Edward D. Wood Jr. and the austere philosophy of DIY.
The soundtrack to a snuff movie you'll die laughing at.
Rockabilly put through the meat grinder.
The endless replay of the same three chords buried under tons of white trash.
Garage that suddenly discovers it's psychobilly (or voodoobilly, for what it's worth).
The new wave that regresses into an inviting garbage dump of the '50s and '60s impossible to steer clear of.
Zero intellectualism (although...), zero pretensions.
Pure, (un)healthy fun.

I – File Under "Sacred Music"

One of rock's most excessive and cartoonish metamorphoses, psychobilly is also the clever ploy through which vocalist Lux Interior (aka Erick Purkhiser) and guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach (born Kristy Wallace) perpetuated the life cycle of a language whose funeral gets held every time the decade changes, yet which punctually keeps reappearing before us in different guises.
Like punk, of which it's merely a rather peculiar manifestation, the style coined by the two outcasts incorporates more or less everything the "progressive" intelligentsia has always regarded with disgust: the immediacy of the message, the poverty of means (and technique), the lo-fi sound, physicality exhibited as a primordial legacy and, above all else, the much-feared rediscovery of rock'n'roll as an inexhaustible goldmine to be plundered wholesale.
"We want American kids to start dancing again," Interior declared in one of their first interviews, as if carefully reasserting the playful nature of their repertoire and, at the same time, mending the rift that had opened up between the dance-happy generation of the '50s and the mutant art-rock of the early '70s; this too went against the grain of much of punk, often a vehicle for "lofty" messages, steeped in social propaganda and never short of ambition.
Second guitarist Bryan Gregory even went so far as to commit the "sacrilege" (for the rock audience of the time, that is) of sparing a word of praise for disco precisely as "consumer music," perceived at a gut level as the epitome of disengagement, of the ephemeral. "Of course, I'd rather people danced to rock'n'roll," Gregory clarified after the damage was done, but that's not really the point. The point, if anything, is that in the Cramps' absolutist conception, rock is identified in toto with dancing as a code of togetherness that transcends the individual and veers toward the (de)mystification of an entire system.

In every feverish throb of Ivy's six-string – yes, the devil is female – what's compressed isn't just the semantics of the twelve-bar blues, but also, and above all, the dictates of that junk culture whose precepts urge a fascination with squalor, with refuse, with cast-off matter that feeds, like Romero's zombies, on the fetishes (sex first and foremost) embodying consumer society. Far from running out of steam as a mere pose, this trash impulse spills over into the glorification (and simultaneous mockery) of one of the most authentic American cultures: the "low" and vulgar culture of B-movies, of pulp literature immortalized on Ace Books releases, of sex-starved adolescence, of the electric riffs of "Rock Around The Clock" wafting out of jukeboxes, of fast food, of the reckless enthusiasm (and therefore authentically "alive" enthusiasm) for the forbidden.

In their own way, their music could be called "sacred" (as a hilarious note printed on the back cover of Songs The Lord Taught Us suggests), since the stylistic and iconographic imagery the band draws on evokes a sort of old testament of rock'n'roll in which the gurus Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Link Wray have fun turning water into wine or blood into tomato sauce. The Cramps themselves act as keepers of a "lost" tradition (as if guarding some kind of Holy Grail) to be revived through transfiguration, priests of a ritual long since fallen out of use, to be handed down in all its corrupted authenticity.

On the other hand, if we're going to talk about sacredness, then it's an exquisitely and paradoxically profane sacredness, emblematic of that coarse, foul-mouthed cult of female breasts and buttocks that harks back to porn magazines or, further up the evolutionary line, to the ancient and far more "concrete" Roman bacchanalia. It's no coincidence that the erotomaniac symbolism of Date With Elvis worms its way into the gradual process of the "liberalization of porn aesthetics" (N. Barile) that ran through the entire decade of the '80s: an air of wickedness some have linked to the most extreme manifestations of the New York underground, like Richard Kern, who turned himself into a conduit – aided by his suspicious dealings with Lydia Lunch, Sonic Youth and Henry Rollins, all prominent names who lent their faces and bodies to his short films – between experimental cinema and rock avant-garde.
Not without foundation, this interpretation nonetheless seems a bit of a stretch, since the conceptual violence inherent in Kern's work (the idea of sex as an open field for channeling social critique and the pure pleasure of horror) is a far cry from the altogether lighthearted tone of their songs, steeped instead in the self-irony that would come to define the "multi-sector" fetish so well absorbed by the audience of the following decade.

Ceremony-masters of the inane, miraculously plucked out of the flow of history, the Cramps are a neuralgic short-circuit that never stops dazzling precisely because it seems indifferent to the (illusory) concept of progress. It's the past resurfacing in different guises; a burden of memory from which it's futile to detach ourselves, since it's an "inner scar" we're destined to live with, like it or not. After all, what is Lux Interior if not yet another incarnation of that codified style whose emotional baggage keeps getting passed down — the same style that, before him, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop had already elevated into the very paradigm of rock'n'roll?

We're dealing, in short, with the eternal return of the "almost identical," the triumph of infinitesimal variations, a semi-deliberate postmodernism (ugh) understood above all as an attraction to dead, decayed forms — the emblem of a necrophiliac craving that vampirizes disposable genres and picks apart their most hidden Freudian crevices. Rorschach herself underlined the sweeping scope of the band's project: "You can't separate music from other forms of culture; what we do isn't just music. Everything I've seen on TV, everything I've eaten, everything I've heard on the radio is an influence. We're celebrating pop culture."

II – Forever "B"

I love low-budget movies, they're more in touch with reality
Lux Interior

As the saying goes: nature makes them, then pairs them up. In 1972, twenty-six-year-old Erick Purkhiser (originally from Ohio but transplanted to Sacramento, California) was a budding young singer still looking for his path. Floored by a performance by Marc Bolan and his legendary T. Rex (anyone mention glam?), and obsessed with the grand guignol of Alice Cooper, Purkhiser had served time in an amateur outfit founded by his younger brother, the Aristocrats, without getting anywhere. In truth, his real obsession was film: science fiction, horror and B-to-Z-grade crime pictures were the genres he plundered most. His was an unconditional love for the most instinctive, clownish side of the human imagination — certainly not for Cinema with a capital "C" as practiced by the likes of Lang and Hitchcock, or part of the American avant-garde of the '60s (Stan Brakhage chief among them), who had elevated it to a forma mentis to be explored with critical awareness and sharp intellectual rigor. At most, you might spot faint affinities with the work of Kenneth Anger, particularly "Scorpio Rising," which nihilistically celebrates the '50s biker generation, juxtaposing images of violence with the rock'n'roll and doo-wop hits that were in vogue at the time.
In any case, it was in '72 that the unsatisfied Purkhiser, roaming the streets of Sacramento on his motorcycle, first met his future other half — and lifelong musical partner.

Ever since her teenage years, Kristy Wallace (born 1953) had cultivated a highly peculiar taste for fashion, film, rock'n'roll, and above all sex. "Maybe Jimi Hendrix did influence me, actually… on the level of sexual energy," she confessed in recent years. "Back then I was always stoned out of my mind, too wrecked to be influenced by anyone on any level other than the sexual one. You can't separate horror and sex — they're both part of rock'n'roll's imagery. That's what I want: to turn people on."
Raised in a family steeped in a deep love of music (her father was a violinist, her mother a pianist), Wallace developed, from a very tender age, an almost religious devotion to the electric riffs of spry old codger Chuck Berry and his fellow retirement-home residents; at the same time, she began flaunting her rebellious streak, and under the motto "Superwomen! Belted, buckled and booted!" dreamed up a look inspired by the heroines immortalized by Russ Meyer in his early pulp (master)pieces. By the time she was just nineteen, the girl already had a couple of soft-core film appearances under her belt and was living dangerously on the edge, amid drugs of every kind and sex galore.

Fate decreed that, through a string of circumstances that "fortuitous" barely begins to describe, on that momentous day in '72 the blonde panther Wallace happened to be hitchhiking at the exact moment Purkhiser rode by on his motorcycle. "She was wearing a pair of two-tone pants, with each leg a different color," the future Lux Interior explained. "How could I not stop and give her a ride?" It could almost pass for the plot of one of the cheap flicks he was so fond of: ladies and gentlemen, presenting "The Hitchhiker Killer," a homicidal maniac who vents his depravity on defenseless young girls with their thumbs out, then, gripped by post-coital delirium, mutilates their bruised corpses, perhaps throwing in a bit of gratuitous cannibalism for good measure. Thankfully, none of that happened. The two, in fact, hit it off immediately and discovered deep affinities: both devoted to cheap movies as well as avid consumers of raw rock'n'roll and narcotics, Purkhiser and Wallace parted ways certain they'd meet again, sooner or later.

Sooner rather than later. Just a week later, the lovebirds found themselves classmates in a (wonderfully oddball) course called "Art and Shamanism" at Sacramento City College. From that latest coincidence began a partnership in pure "Bonnie & Clyde on amphetamines" style that, even today, after thirty years of sonic and otherwise mayhem, still finds them inseparable partners in crime (and happily married, too).
More than a love nest, their ramshackle apartment in Sacramento could, depending on how you looked at it, evoke either a batcave avant la lettre or a junkyard: macabre objects in abundance, garbage, piles of vinyl scattered haphazardly across the floor and every other available surface — flat or otherwise. You could picture it, with a bit of imagination, as an equivalent of the London squat occupied in the late '70s by Scritti Politti (whose photo graces the back of their first EP), only with fewer books, more trash, and above all more records: Sun, Coral, Groove Records were the labels that reigned imperiously over those obscure 45 rpm relics. "They're nervous records, absolutely full of energy," Interior recalled years later. "There's real tension behind this idea of a guitar backbeat and a singer who sounds like he's on the verge of a breakdown. It's an infectious sound that completely grabbed us."

Even before they had a band, though, Purkhiser and Wallace already had an aesthetic. Rechristened Poison Ivy Rorschach and Lux Interior (ridiculous pseudonyms tying into both Bowie's pseudo-erudite shapeshifting and the Beefheartian practice of musicians hiding behind alter-egos of dubious taste), they began dressing in slavishly kitsch fashion, concocting something halfway between Elvis's pomaded quiffs and the dark-tinged glamour of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."
It didn't take long — helped along by their drug habits and the not entirely legal ways they scraped together a living — for these two otherwise ordinary-looking kids to become favorite targets of the local police patrols: one night, playing cops and robbers, they very nearly ended up behind bars for a good long while. Realizing that staying in Sacramento had become untenable, Interior and Rorschach said goodbye to California and headed for Akron, Ohio. It was the winter of 1973.

III – The Akron-New York Axis

Believe it or not (and you should), the "devolved" and weathered state of Ohio briefly held — roughly from '76 to '79 — the distinction of being one of the three or four most talked-about areas in all of American rock. The cities of Cleveland and Akron, the respective world capitals of steel and rubber, were the main poles of attraction, thanks to the bubbling, creative post-punk of Pere Ubu and Devo, the first true bards of post-industrial alienation. Even before them, though, the fearsome Electric Eels and Rocket From The Tombs had drawn an ideal dividing line between the proto-punk charges of the Stooges and a new ideal of sonic (de)construction veering toward a sharp-edged, fauve modernism. The imperative soon became hybridizing rock's vocabulary with the gurgling mutations of synths, exploiting avant-garde scaffolding without sacrificing punk's physical impact. A revolution, no less — and an all-Ohio one at that. After all, with its "Eraserhead"-like landscapes and the round-the-clock metallic clang of its steel mills, a place like that could only produce a pack of degraded sonic terrorists, certainly not a new generation of dolled-up flower children.

At this point the obvious question arises: what on earth do Electric Eels and Pere Ubu have to do with the Cramps? Well, a bit, actually. While it's beyond doubt that the background of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy (the "Rorschach" had already been dropped from her stage name) looked much further back in time, and recoiled from both electronic contamination and the intellectual pretensions overflowing from the scene's most prominent figures, it's still possible to trace, in some of the early Cramps songs, a very subtle "Ohio" influence that's often gone unnoticed, almost buried beneath the more obvious sneers of their retro creed. So it should come as no surprise to learn that, during the eighteen months of forced isolation spent in Akron (when the scene was still in its infancy), the couple had no real trouble getting close to the sounds of the bands jostling over the city's handful of venues. (Which makes sense, given the shared ground: glam-rock on one side, garage on the other.)

It was then that the desire to start a band — one that could channel all the ideas and impulses stockpiled somewhat haphazardly during those apprenticeship years — became impossible to resist. As usual, coming up with the band's name preceded the actual recruitment of musicians by nearly a year: "The Cramps," the admirably effective brand chosen by Ivy, was immediately enshrined as the bogeyman of an irreverent yet playful sensibility, built around the evocation — and simultaneous deflowering — of all those '50s and early-'60s artists whose screeching rockabilly spasms had paved the yellow brick road leading to garage-rock and, by a winding path, to the punk era.

Frustrated by their inability to rope other musicians into this oddball project, the two grasped a simple truth: stuck in the mud of Akron, they'd get nowhere fast. New York was the obvious destination, the wonderland every aspiring musician dreamed of, eager to dive into the raging pandemonium of the "new waves." "New York it is, then!" the lovers cried in unison, after stumbling on a photograph, published in the music magazine Rock Scene, depicting the colorful human fauna hanging around Cbgb's.

Having shaken off the grayness of the Midwest and embraced the toxic air of the Big Apple (autumn '75), our heroes were in for a rude awakening: the crowd at Cbgb's turned out to be far more ordinary than the heavily made-up weirdos immortalized in that fateful photo. "We went to New York thinking, because of that one picture, that everyone walked around dressed like clones of the New York Dolls," Interior recalled. "Of course, nobody did... It was all jeans and deadly boredom." Despite the disappointment, the two managed to make progress on the lineup front, recruiting the ghoulish Bryan Gregory (aka Greg Beckerleg), who had moved from Detroit to pursue his ambitions as a graphic artist and had somehow ended up working as a clerk in a Manhattan record store.

A Mephistophelian figure with near-limitless stage presence, Gregory happily agreed to join an as-yet hypothetical rock band: legend has it that the very next day after being asked, he showed up already looking the part (well, sort of…) and ready to go, clutching a third-hand guitar with the band's name scrawled on it. Almost touched by such enthusiasm, neither Ivy nor Interior had the heart to tell him that what they actually needed was a bassist. As the saying goes, they made a virtue of necessity. "Brian wanted to play guitar, so we both played guitar," Ivy explained. "We were clear that we didn't want more than four people in the band. Besides, the kind of music we make is so rhythmic that we couldn't really see why a bass was essential."

To complete the line-up, Gregory sent for his sister Pam, calling her in from Detroit — the first of many (too many) session players who would station themselves in the band for a split second before bailing out with equal speed. The newcomer, rechristened Pam Balam, was put behind the drums by the other three, and rehearsals kicked off in the basement of the shop.
The repertoire consisted mainly of covers (Red Crayola's "Hurricane Fighter Plane" was a regular fixture), plus a handful of originals that were slowly taking shape, like "Sunglasses After Dark" (a reworking of the Dwight Pullen song of the same name), "Don't Eat Stuff Off The Sidewalk" and the clattering "TV Set". Sadly, that line-up lasted only a couple of months, until Balam skipped rehearsals and hightailed it back to Detroit. In her place they recruited Canadian Miriam Linna, who, true to perfect punk-rock form, had never played a drum kit in her life.

There's no getting around it: the striking number of women in the band — anything but common for a rock band of the era — is impossible to miss. It wasn't entirely unprecedented, of course: there was already pioneer Maureen Tucker pounding the skins in the Velvet Underground, and that very same year, 1976, Tina Weymouth was starting to slap out her frothy bass lines for Talking Heads, not to mention China Burg and Nancy Arien, already enlisted in the fledgling Mars, the most deranged no-wave nightmare in living memory.
In none of those cases, however, had there been such a complete reversal of gender roles between the "frontman" and the "mastermind" of a pop collective. As Greg Kot noted in the Chicago Tribune, "the yin-yang relationship struck up between Interior and Ivy is far from traditional: with the male reduced to a sex object and the female cast as lead guitarist, it overturns decades of typically rock stereotypes."

That, at any rate, was the Cramps who made their debut on November 1, 1976 at CBGB's, opening for Suicide. Musically speaking, the performance left something to be desired ("Just before we went on stage, we put new strings on the guitars because we were afraid the old ones might break. After doing that, we couldn't get them to stay in tune," Interior explained), but the energy unleashed onstage was such that the crowd called the quartet back for a full four encores.

Despite the skepticism of the late club owner Hilly Kristal (who saw them more as a parody — and, in the end, he had a point), the Cramps became one of the regular names on the venue's packed bill. While the Dead Boys were all the rage and the music press scrambled to land interviews with the Boyfriends and the Fleshtones, the four Halloween masks were slowly carving out a place for themselves — elbows out — as one of the most abrasive and shameless outfits in the New York underground.

IV – "I wanna be a producer!"

The story of every great pop act is marked by an encounter with a mentor, a guru who senses the potential in their proteges, indulges them, and works to bring out their talent. Whether it's patrons able to offer protection and visibility (enter Andy Warhol), or bona fide musicians like John Cale, Tom Verlaine and Brian Eno, capable of giving their charges a distinctive sound and, at times, using them as a vehicle to carry on their own sonic experiments, the contribution such figures have made to the world of music is incalculable.
For the Cramps, meeting Alex Chilton was, of course, a blessing, a godsend: the troubled man behind the Box Tops, who in that dizzying autumn of 1977 was haunting New York's underground scene while still nursing the wounds of Big Star's glorious collapse, immediately spotted the glint of genius in the eyes of those four reprobates.
It was at Max's Kansas City that Chilton first stumbled upon the Cramps' music. The band, which had by then replaced the departed Linna with Nick Knox of the defunct Electric Eels (Ohio rearing its head once again…), was already well seasoned: a live machine oiled to perfection and ready for the big leap. The meeting with Chilton, arranged by mutual friends, was a success: filthy and depraved just the way he liked it, the four of them won him over instantly; it was a short step from there to deciding to head to Memphis to cut some material.
To be fair, that October session at Ardent Studios wasn't actually their first time in a recording studio. Back in June, before Knox joined, the band had already recorded a few tracks under the supervision of Richard Robinson (who'd previously manned the desk for the Flamin' Groovies), but they were less than satisfied with the results; with Chilton, by contrast, the understanding was instant and, above all, fruitful.
Eight songs were recorded in all: "Domino", "The Way I Walk", "Surfin' Bird", "Lonesome Town" and "Rockin' Bones", plus the three originals "Human Fly", "Twist And Shout" (shaped out of Bill Allen & The Backbeats' "Please Give Me Something") and the irresistible boogie of "The Mad Daddy", Interior's affectionate tribute to DJ Pete Myers. Already taking shape on the horizon was that razor-thin line between original songs and dredged-up relics of the past, proof that the notion of "imitation" (borrowed from hard-rock practice and glam's conceptual outlook) was already a cornerstone for the band.
Also released as singles on Vengeance Records (the label they founded themselves), the two quintessentially "Crampsian" prototypes "Surfin' Bird" (The Trashmen, April 1978) and "Human Fly" (November 1978) immediately caused a stir on the underground circuit and got a healthy dose of airplay on college radio stations.

If we want to deflate the all-too-common belief that the Cramps operated in some sealed chamber, immune to outside influence, the structure of "Human Fly" betrays traces indirectly linked to the free glam-punk of the Electric Eels and — astonishingly — even to the earliest stirrings of Pere Ubu, back when they were still babes in arms. You only need to look past Poison Ivy's descending scale, dripping with "oldies" echoes and set up to raise the curtain on their mad theatre of horrors, to find an implacable, driving two-beat rhythm, over which a fuzz tone sprawls with pachyderm grace — yes, a hideous exaggeration of Detroit garage, but one that, at the same time, turns out not to be so far removed from the sonic abominations cooked up in Cleveland.
It's strange to think that two Pere Ubu singles, "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" (released in September '75, while Rorschach and Interior were still living in Akron) and "Final Solution" (March 1976), never even registered with the band: the gusts of nuclear wind conjured up by Allen Ravestine spill out quite literally from the hellish chaos into which Gregory, like a "robotic" Ron Asheton, hurls his chords, torching any chance of redemption before it even arises. It's a sound built to spread in waves, compressed to an almost unbearable degree (the sulfurous guitars of "Final Solution" aren't far off), with Interior's onomatopoeic "bzz bzz" framed by Chilton like radioactive static scratching across the sonic spectrum.

The explosive charge of this and other tracks was captured for posterity in the now-legendary performance of June 13, 1978 at Napa State Hospital (released on DVD only in 2004, after long circulating as a bootleg): a thrilling display of perfect — and unsettling — mimicry between band and audience, something we'll come back to later. The rest of the West Coast mini-tour was just as ferocious and earned them a well-deserved record deal with Miles Copeland's I.R.S. From there it was all downhill (in the good sense): first a run of shows opening for the Police, then the release of the EP Gravest Hits (I.R.S., 1979), containing five of the eight tracks recorded with Chilton, and finally a new UK tour — this time as headliners — to gauge the already considerable interest building among British audiences.
By the start of summer 1979, the time was ripe to get to work on their first full-length record.

V – Zombies, werewolves and sunglasses after dark

Recorded at the legendary Phillips Recording Studios in Memphis and released on April 1, 1980, Songs The Lord Taught Us strengthens ties with tradition while standing squarely outside it. The choice of studio, for one, was no accident: the "sacred" rooms of Sun Records were the ideal setting to capture the "faux-vintage" essence of the sound the band had in mind. It may seem obvious to point out, but the journey into the quartet's music really does run through the peculiar acoustics of those cramped walls, where sound gets lost, dissolving into electrostatic particles, pure discharges of tension.
Chilton was, naturally, a master at handling a live sound dripping with sweat and auditory secretions, though during the album's gestation he didn't hold back on his own brand of eccentricity. "We had the record ready exactly in the form you'd hear it now if you went and bought it in a shop," Ivy confided to John Mendelssohn of Creem in August 1980. "We were all really happy with it. But Alex is never satisfied with anything, so the night before it was due to be mastered he called us up and said: 'Look, instead of paying me the rest of my fee, let's use it to re-record the whole thing from scratch. We'll get Nick and Bryan down here tonight and mix it while we record.'" Luckily, no one took the madness seriously, but that anecdote alone should give you an idea of just what state the brilliant Tennessee loose cannon was in.

Musically speaking, on Songs The Lord Taught Us the parallels with punk and new wave boil down to a rediscovery of the sheer impact of primordial garage rock, without overlooking the booming tribalism of Velvet Underground-era "White Light/White Heat". The rest is pure (?) Cramps sound, an amalgam of Southern rockabilly and white rock'n'roll, steeped in literary and cinematic references that veer into outright plagiarism of EC Comics and bargain-bin horror movies. The "Pink Flamingos" of punk-rock, if one ever existed.
"TV Set", a primitive ritual for creatures enslaved to the cathode-ray tube, stands as one of the most putrid — and therefore astonishing — examples of this song-form, driven by Knox's "Tucker-esque" percussion (often reduced to toms, bass drum and snare), scorched by old-school riffs and skewered by Gregory's wall of noise (pay attention to his anti-solo on "Garbageman", gloriously degenerate like early Lou Reed). Much of the music's appeal lies precisely in the dialectical clash between the two guitarists and their utterly distinct styles: on one side, Ivy's abrasive yet glittering sound, tremolo bar cranked all the way, her riffs etched with android precision; on the other, Gregory's demonic amplification, all low frequencies and blankets of feedback, which he hurls at our eardrums with murderous intent. Their bare-bones interplay, often built on spare rhythmic inlays, is the (rotten) pulp of this forbidden fruit, the load-bearing structure on which werewolf Lux Interior can sow terror, mimicking the sly vocal affectations of the "King of Rock".
"TV Set", as noted, opens the record in the best possible way: from there it's like boarding a runaway train, as one after another come the limping "What's Behind The Mask", the irresistible boogie of "Mad Daddy", the Stooges-esque "no fun" of "Mistery Plane" and the flash-paper primitivism of "Zombie Dance".
In some cases they even come close to absolute perfection, and when that happens (the voodoo ritual of the definitive "I Was A Teenage Werewolf", the gargantuan "Garbageman", the famished progressions of "Sunglasses After Dark") the sparks fly for the ages.
These are "post-modern dances" whose reference points are blurred both by the revisionist approach to the material and by small but ingenious touches to the sound (the reverberating percussion, the cavern of echo swallowing the voice, the sandpapered tremolo of the guitars, the perceptual void left by the absence of bass), designed to evoke — and distort — the shape of surf music, multiplying a hundredfold the angles from which to investigate it. It is, in any case, a caricature, a grotesque deformation that nonetheless remains faithful to its masters, standing at the opposite pole from the cubist deconstruction that Suicide (themselves no strangers to flirting with rockabilly) applied to the remnants of American musical tradition.
The four covers on offer (through and through Cramps songs, just as the original Cramps songs are, in turn, covers of something else) round out the circle of tutelary names, but while the paroxysm of "Rock On The Moon" (Jimmy Stewart), the bruised pallor of "Strychnine" (Sonics) and the volcanic hiccup of "Tear It Up" (Billy Brunette) are all, in the end, true-to-form numbers, the real surprise comes from their take on Little Willie John's "Fever", here reduced to a perverse sigh, a dark game of tension and release handled by the band with real finesse. Far removed both from the earthy sensuality its author gave it and from the formal rigor instilled by femme fatale Peggy Lee, this "Cramps fever" reveals a band sharpening the claws of its horror-movie charm, navigating a fabric riddled with orgasmic silences and putrid Hammond flourishes, even managing to cleverly dodge the revivalist traps so easy to fall into when tackling a repertoire already plundered by illustrious names.
And it's precisely that most "plundered" and traditionalist strain of horror that is celebrated in Interior's lyrics and stage antics: that stockpile of overused yet instantly recognizable idioms, those deep-rooted "negative" archetypes that tip over into an intimately mocking perspective, a world away from the morbidness of gothic and the like. That's not to say there isn't a whiff of something foul, some "emotional" knot left simmering beneath the surface: after all, isn't the protagonist of "I Was A Teenage Werewolf" not unlike the countless troubled teenagers scattered across flat, forgotten small-town America? Who could deny that in that scream of "Somebody stop this pain!" there's a trace of real anguish, of despair deliberately disguised as entertainment ("Let me entertain you with my pain," Kat Bjelland of Babes In Toyland would later whisper) that goes beyond pure exhibitionism? The Cramps' sleight of hand also lies, crucially, in blurring the line between joke and drama (with a clear tilt toward the former, that much is obvious), letting the tragic evaporate into the comic and vice versa. Exactly how chefs Ivy and Interior manage to pull off and make artistically palatable such a paradox without collapsing into mere pantomime remains their own private trick — don't try to steal an ingredient from the recipe, or you might end up like the mouse in a den of cats.

VI – Welcome to the Jungle

Just when everything seemed to be going smoothly (a new coast-to-coast tour, the single "Garbageman" in heavy rotation, the fan club "The Legion Of The Cramped" founded in '81 by Lindsay Hutton and an unassuming young man who, a few years later, we'd come to know simply as Morrissey), Lady Luck decided to play dirty again: after a show in Berkeley, Gregory made off with the band's van — gear and all — and vanished without a trace. The record label would later spread rumors that he'd joined some satanic cult, when in fact the guitarist "just went to L.A. to deal drugs," as Interior bitterly clarified years later. News of him afterward would be scarce and contradictory: he's known to have formed a short-lived band called Beast, worked as a tattoo artist, and eventually as a clerk at a sex-shop chain. A reckless terrorist of the six-string and a junkie beyond all human imagining, Gregory died in 2001 of a heart attack, reportedly at the age of 46.

Having settled in Los Angeles and replaced their thieving guitarist with the excellent Kid Congo Powers of their new "neighbors" the Gun Club, the Cramps made another quick trip to London before heading back into the studio (this time A&M's La Brea Avenue facility) to work on their second album.
On Psychedelic Jungle (April 1981) the band is joined in the production chair by Nigel Reeve, though it's Ivy who does most of the heavy lifting at the mixing desk; the decision to part ways with Chilton, however, proves a double-edged sword: it lets the tapes show off a cleaner, more polished sound — helped along by the studio's slicker surroundings — but it drains the material of dynamics and strips away much of its more virulent shading.
The grooves feel catatonic, as if warped through a corrosive acid lens (listen to "Can't Find My Mind" or the swampy "Caveman"), which justifies the nod to psychedelia in the title. It's no coincidence that in several spots it sounds like the 13th Floor Elevators cut with a heavy dose of John Lee Hooker ("Under The Wires").
But it's the covers that fill out half the tracklist, and as ever the reinterpretations are compelling: "Primitive" (Groupies) gives off a bluesier, more pungent aroma than usual, "Green Fuzz" brings a melodic gust that for a moment strays from the usual rockabilly turnarounds, while the singles "The Crusher" and "Goo Goo Muck" (originally by The Nova's and Ronnie Cook & The Gaylads, respectively) rank among the tastiest fruits of this sweaty coupling of twangy straightforwardness and punk theatrics.
The real highlight, though, is "Don't Eat Stuff Off The Sidewalk", a live staple for years but never officially recorded until now. And what on earth were they waiting for? Ivy's circular chord progressions are blades that stab with style, Powers' piercing shrieks recall Cale's mournful viola on "Heroin", Knox pounds the toms with the fury of a comatose zombie, and a gaunter, slicker-than-ever Interior licks your face with his forked tongue, clinging to the skin like molten honey. Could you really ask any more of these four reprobates? No — so hush, and enjoy.
In a curious transitional phase between the campy horror of the recent past and the dirty jokes of the imminent future, the band even tries its hand at comic miniatures (the cartoon sketch "Jungle Hop", the bouncy twelve-bar diagram "The Natives Are Restless"), though "Beautiful Gardens" is as tough and brazen as ever, with the singer aping Johnny Lydon's paranoid drawl over a derailing finale, garnished with the "subtlety" of backwards-running tape (confirming once again the most obvious debt owed to Sixties psychedelia). The murderous lullaby "Green Door" (Jim Lowe) closes the curtain on an album that, all things considered, works well, even if it's a notch below its celebrated predecessor.

Right after the recording sessions, a third European tour set off, bringing the Cramps back the warmth of their audience and the admiration of several of their small-screen idols (at the Halloween show, the ghoulish Vampira, host of 1950s horror shows on ABC-TV, even made a cameo appearance). In truth, though, the situation was anything but idyllic: during the sessions for Psychedelic Jungle, the already strained relationship between the band and the gruff Copeland had deteriorated further, with the band accusing him of pocketing outrageous sums (all royalties rightfully owed to them, according to Interior), of failing to provide adequate support on tour, and of meddling heavily in the choice of artwork. The lawsuit that followed dragged on for two full years, during which the musicians were barred from recording new material (after all, they were still under contract with the "enemy's" record label).

Paying dearly for their incurable stubbornness, the Cramps were forced to fall back on live shows as their sole means of support, making do by endlessly recycling their accumulated repertoire and stretching their already substantial stock of covers even further. A couple of shows held at the Peppermint Lounge in New York were carefully recorded with an eye toward a live album (released in November 1983 under the Big Beat imprint for the UK market and Enigma for the American one) titled Smell Of Female (as if to say: for two years we haven't caught a whiff of a studio, but we still haven't given our nostrils a rest!).
Meanwhile I.R.S. marked the "divorce" with the brief but worthwhile compilation Bad Music For Bad People (I.R.S., 1984), packed with rarities and B-sides, among them "A New Kind Of Kick," which wreaks havoc left and right with its primal beat, the almost "cybernetic" chatter of the guitars and Interior's devastating screams. Unquestionably another one of their masterpieces.

Finding the right record label proved an all-too-exhausting undertaking, during which the band had to weather a carousel of comings and goings (Powers was the first to amicably bow out and head back to the Gun Club), one almost impossible to reconstruct chronologically without sending the already weary reader into the soft arms of Morpheus. Suffice it to say that, in the lineup heard on their fourth studio album, released in February '86 in Europe and a full four years later in the States (!), the Cramps had been whittled down to a trio: just Knox, Ivy and Interior, united once again against the world.

VII – “You look just like an Elvis from hell…”

In his review of Date With Elvis (Big Beat, 1986) for Melody Maker, the ever-punctual Simon Reynolds (who nonetheless seems to suffer from an age-old obsession with "sexual correctness") noted that the songs offered "an inexorably crude and threadbare way of looking at sex." This remark joined accusations leveled from several quarters charging the band with sexism and, worse, bad faith in perpetuating outdated social and sexual stereotypes. In response, Ivy, asserting her central role within the band, declared: "I think it's a joke to hear people call us sexist... I write this music and co-write the lyrics, so how can I be sexist? Paying attention to a girl isn't sexist at all, it's simply part of animal nature." Her spicy post-feminism starts, in fact, from the image of the pin-up/dominatrix who subjugates whichever male happens to be on hand in a morbid S&M ritual, or, far less grandly, that of the girl whom (Neanderthal) men mock with their buddies down at the bar, but who rules the roost between the sheets – and, more broadly, within the relationship. This is the body here made an object of aesthetic worship, whose plunging poses, thighs wrapped in soft sheer stockings, and scarlet mouth – which, depending on her mood, can either kiss or castrate – Interior explores.

What's sympathetic to the risqué framework the band has chosen, then, is not the denigration of women but rather their elevation as an active subject (Ivy) who operates within the "system" and subverts, from behind the scenes, the rules governing the unfolding of sexual dynamics. And if we bear in mind that "porn, like science fiction, replaces existing realities with wild alternative universes" (Laura Kipnis, "The Utopian Fantasy Of Deep Throat"), then it becomes easy to understand how this surrender to the "collective fantasy" of pornographic language testifies not so much to a hidden aspiration toward social realism as to an almost unbearable desire for escape.
In the Cramps' art, the "alternative universes" mentioned above are achieved in a rather simplistic way, namely by unrealistically overplaying the "allure of the cliché." Fittingly enough, it is precisely in this refusal to reason about superstructures, and in reducing reality to its most linear and clear-cut elements (not necessarily the truest ones), that their much-vaunted "B-movie" status – that is, their belonging to a precise commercial (sub)genre – manifests itself most accurately.
The band itself feeds on stereotypes that aren't contested but rather put on display as visual and auditory relics still capable of exerting a pull on our unconscious; from this point of view, A Date With Elvis stands as the most successful archaeological recovery of that "American Graffiti"-style sensibility the band may have aspired to since its very beginnings.
Very polished on the surface, the record nonetheless sounds strangely "normal": not exactly a stellar quality for a band that has made excess its creed. Bass appears for the first time, and as a consequence much of the sonic radicalism goes out the window, replaced by the craft of musicians increasingly absorbed in reflecting on themselves as "classics." Even Interior seems to have shed the werewolf's guise for the more ordinary one of the eternally horny satyr, drooling lasciviously over the crumpled pages of an old issue of "Hustler." To continue the parallel with John Waters, the tone now seems closer to the good-natured, mannered one of "Hairspray" and especially the musical "Cry Baby" (which the band came close to contributing to the soundtrack of), rather than the iconoclastic one of "Pink Flamingos." Which isn't necessarily a flaw.

Though less incisive overall, the showstoppers are still there. "What's Inside A Girl" hypnotizes as usual, with its red-hot guitar figures and the unstoppable pounding of the drums. "Cornfed Dreams" agonizes over programmatic stop-and-go moves, while Ivy's scratchy riffs spill out in every direction, eventually turning into pure percussive delirium that would make even the wildest Gregory turn pale. "(Hot Pool Of) Womanneed" chugs along at a brisk, train-like pace, while the famous "Hot Pearl Snatch" and "Can Your Pussy Do The Dog?", decked out with a truckload of obvious double entendres, grab attention with some of their most successful riffs.
Elsewhere the band plays the card of stylistic cross-pollination, as in the succulent parody of Californian flower power "Kizmiaz" (another clumsy pun), complete with Hawaiian "alohas" from a Poison Ivy stationed in front of the microphone for the first time. Even more explicit in its farcical intent is "Chicken," with the onomatopoeic clucking of the guitar and the cock-a-doodle-doos of old rooster Interior, whose stage antics have by now been reduced to two or three overused tricks – the hiccuping vocals, the panting breaths, the hysterical vibrato(r) – and, what's more, increasingly less appealing ones.

Be that as it may, it's from this record (which peaked at number 34 on the UK chart) that the Cramps essentially become Poison Ivy's creature: producer, guitarist, bassist and occasional singer (not to mention cover vamp for albums and singles), the Interior household's jack-of-all-trades eclipses the band's male counterparts in a duel to the death that, on the following EP Get Off The Road (Big Beat, 1986), turns into a celebration of the "lethal" femininity that had always lurked latent in her Varna-style image (the heroine of the cult film "Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!").
On the title track, the lustful guitarist indeed steals the show from her husband, painting a picture of a chorus of man-eating girls on motorcycles proudly claiming dominion over the streets (perhaps another double entendre?) despite the dismissive comments from Knox and Interior: "Hey, who by hell do they think they are?", "Ah, they're just a bunch of girrrls…". Almost parodying the puerile battle of the sexes that John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John elevated to a (sub)cultural icon of a bygone era in "Grease," Poison Ivy's thousand little voices make "Get Off The Road" one of the most delightful moments in their entire output. An output that, to avoid any misunderstanding, continues to hinge on the attraction/repulsion duality toward the concept of seriality, sexual commodification and, ultimately, pop culture itself, elevated into a stern bulwark of that "American way of life" within which, like it or not, one remains imprisoned. The object of desire is thus mocked, at times violently roughed up, but ultimately adored, because in the Cramps' worldview an alternative to it is simply unthinkable.

VIII – He who stops… is saved!

The recruitment of the cheeky Candy Del Mar on bass (apparently after a furious row with Ivy over a parking spot!) allowed the Cramps to embark on a new string of shows in Australia and New Zealand (documented on the live album Rockin 'n Reelin In Auckland New Zealand from September 1987), as well as to reappear as a quartet on the studio album Stay Sick! (Capitol/Enigma, 1990), a less brilliant rehash of the porno-cabaret hinted at by its predecessor. Look Mom No Head! (Restless/Enigma, November 1991) fares a bit better, featuring yet another reshuffled lineup: with the roguish Jim Sclavunos (a résumé well worth respecting: Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Sonic Youth and Bad Seeds, among many others) replacing mainstay Knox, and bassist Slim Chance of the Mad Daddys, the band persists with its clichés, but does so with a certain style (just listen to the joyous "Alligator Stomp" or the hilarious "Bend Over, I'll Drive") and with a rediscovered horror-goofball streak that's a nostalgic delight ("Eyeball In My Martini").

In truth, the two albums form an almost inseparable pair in reaffirming the more traditional course inaugurated by A Date With Elvis: there's the chopped-up blues of "Miniskirt Blues" and "Hardworkin' Man" (the latter courtesy of "Captain Beefheart"), but there's also no shortage of an ode to bad girls in "Bikini Girls With Machine Guns" (Quentin Tarantino will no doubt love it), which oozes trash from every available orifice. In short: zero surprises, plenty of dead weight, few thrills.

Quite simply, the Cramps of the '90s had come to a standstill. Not that they'd ever moved all that much, it must be said, but now their music identifies unmistakably with the ideal of drowsiness celebrated in that zombie dance where "nobody moves" and everything stays locked inside vacant stares and cold limbs. Where once the living dead had been a figurative device, it now becomes the very label under which to file the sonic graveyard emanating from the grooves; on the other hand, Ivy and Interior now seem interested only in collecting records, fleeting cameo appearances on TV series (not least one on "Beverly Hills 90210") and endless tours (in '91 came their first concert in Japan). But that's fine, what more could one ask? Our "heroes" had (almost) always been musically conservative, their gaze fixed firmly within the boundaries they themselves had staked out with bloodied markers. They never sold out, and that alone is a tremendous credit to them (then again, who could they ever have sold out to?), but over the years they had undoubtedly lost some of their shine and charisma.

All these considerations aside, it remains reassuring to hold in your hands an LP like Flamejob (Medicine Label/Warner Bros., 1994), their first and only release for a major label, skillfully put together both in its cover art (the most Poison-Ivy-meets-Catwoman image you could imagine) and in its raunchy, true-to-form songs: all symptoms of continuity – here synonymous with predictability – in their musical approach and of their skill in managing their own underground myth. From the opening of "Mean Machine" onward, it's one already-seen gesture and over-familiar riff after another, a "dazed psychobilly-singing routine" we're all tired of, yet one that, deep down, we'd rather never ended (a bit like Woody Allen's filmography). And come on, let's give credit where credit's due: this time Interior really goes all out to liven up the stage like in the old days (he deserves a handshake just for his demonic bellow on the title track, enough to make Foetus jealous), and several songs hit the mark: "Ultra Twist" (built on the "Mission Impossible" theme), the delightful skit "Naked Girl Falling Down The Stairs" and, last but not least, a "Sado County Auto Show" that wipes out much of the gothabilly scene with a snap of the fingers.

What Flamejob promises, Big Beat From Badsville (Epitaph, 1997) fails to deliver. The lineup is the same as on the previous album – the now tight-knit Rorschach-Interior-Chance triangle, plus one Harry Drumdini (go figure…) on drums – but this time no song is particularly memorable, aside from "Sheena's In A Goth Gang" and "Monkey With Your Tail," which bring back the wacky atmospheres of Psychedelic Jungle. Worth noting, however, is the changing of the guard in the spotlight between the band's two leading ladies: while Interior settles back into the role of an honest journeyman, Ivy's guitar roars as never before, at times indulging in furious tours de force (the maelstrom of "God Monster" stands for them all) that make the listen slightly less tedious than it has any right to be.

Proving that their impatience with record-label management remained a constant feature of their character, the partnership with Epitaph also comes to an end shortly thereafter, leaving the Cramps all alone to vent their baser instincts on stages across Europe, the United States and South America. Meanwhile, compilations start piling up around them: Bmg is first to try its hand with a mediocre Greatest Hits (1998) drawing material from A Date With Elvis, Smell Of Female and Stay Sick!, then Emi rolls up its sleeves and in 2000 bundles together Songs The Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle and Off The Bone (an old compilation released by Illegal in 1983 containing ten tracks from Bad Music For Bad People plus seven others between covers and live versions) into a single box set.
In 2001 the Interior couple also decide to take stock, reissuing their entire post-I.R.S. catalogue (except Flamejob) on their revived Vengeance label in remastered editions with lavish packaging and a handful of unreleased tracks thrown in; which, on closer inspection, is merely the prelude to a return to the scene after a full six years away from the studio and a strong urge to rediscover their bite on record as well.

And the Cramps (new addition: bassist Scott "Chopper" Franklin) are back, my friends, nastier than ever this time. As raucous as in their youth, and perhaps even filthier, one might think. Though by now everyone has figured out they're not being serious; or maybe everyone figured that out from the very start, who knows…
The fact remains that Fiends Of Dope Island (Vengeance, 2003) is their best work since the days of A Date With Elvis. Having restored their old fascination with the macabre and the blasphemous (a title like "Elvis Fucking Christ!" leaves little – or perhaps too much – to the imagination), Interior and Ivy dust off their "worst" outfits (that is, the ones they save only for special occasions) and toy with their own status symbol so shamelessly and cruelly as to leave you stunned. They may be anachronistic as much as you like, but they still know how to entertain (and at over fifty years old, that's no small feat).
The evidence is there for all to see (hear): whether it's small revivalist exercises (the fiery chili of "Wrong Way Ticket," a possessed, manic dance the likes of which they hadn't managed in years), curious stylistic patchworks (the exotica standard "Taboo," the crackling, "punked-up" country-blues shot through with flashes of theremin "Dr. Fucker Md") or psychobilly merry-go-rounds driven by a wobbly, dangerously fuzzed-out bass ("Dopefiend Boogie," "Mojo Man From Mars"), the songs ooze a gargantuan sense of intoxication, one hardly to be found in their output of the previous decade.

Not content with these two hefty blows, the gang lands a third strike on our wallets with the instruction manual How To Make A Monster (Vengeance, 2004), containing a wealth of unreleased material (the earliest demos date back to '76) and the complete reissue of two performances at Max's Kansas City and CBGB's – the latter truly spectacular – dated 1977 and 1978 respectively.
Like two old folks rocking in their chairs by the fireside (but with a knife hidden in the girdle), Ivy and Interior tell their grandkids tales of wartime, of when they were forced to eat off the sidewalk alongside the late Uncle Fester (Bryan Gregory, that is) and played for two dollars a night, yet could still writhe about on stage without a care in the world, free of arthritis troubles and – more importantly – back when the seasons still knew how to change properly.
The recording quality, as you might already have guessed, isn't exactly hi-fi, but the sheer exuberance on display is off the charts and more than compensates for the somewhat flawed sound.

In 2006, thirty years after their formation, the Cramps appear aged but still alive and kicking among us, indifferent to anyone turning up their nose and ready to set off on yet another world tour. Plenty of water has certainly passed under the bridge since that distant 1972, when Rorschach's lively eyes first met Interior's more inebriated ones in a mocking "look of love", yet their performance carries on relentlessly, even preserving intact old and (un)healthy habits such as the constant lineup reshuffles. On that note, bass duties are now handled by the curly-haired Sean Yseult (already a co-founder of White Zombie and Rock City Morgue), since, as Interior explained, "Franklin finally found the money to go to Bangkok and have a sex-change operation". (Cue the canned laughter: 3, 2, 1, now!).

IX – A brief digression: the "File Under Sacred Music" experiment

You can skip this little paragraph: it doesn't concern the Cramps as a band and isn't essential to reconstructing their career. And yet, it's in undertakings like this one that we can trace a fragment of that complex, multifaceted "idea" underlying their modus operandi.
"File Under Sacred Music" is in fact the trick that video artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard devised, using as their fetish object none other than the notorious "Live At Napa State Hospital", here elevated to an eternal simulacrum of visceral energy and "rock'n'roll attitude" for future generations.
The idea is as simple as it is intriguing: faithfully replicate the historic concert in every respect, enlisting professional musicians to play the band and real patients from mental health institutions to watch the chaos unfold. A replica achieved also through hands-on tampering with tapes and VHS copies, manually "damaged" to reproduce the grainy, extremely low-fidelity surfaces of the original footage (the concert had in fact been filmed in black and white by a veeery amateur camera).

Staged at London's ICA on March 3, 2003, the performance is used as a pretext for recreating a physical space in which to re-enact (or relive) the event and interrogate its nature, breaking free from the notion of mere staging and reinterpreting the "here and now" as a category reproducible ad libitum.
The sharp split between the "lived experience" and its representation (how can one forget the infamous "mass supermarket" staged by U2, that "PopMart Tour" which, deep down, remains one of the most deviously conceptual events ever attempted in pop music?) is examined both in its most immediate aspects, namely the irruption of chance and variability into the direct relationships between participants (for instance, in the way the musicians interact with the audience), and in its indirect ones, established between the work's audience (us, the spectators), the work itself, and the omnipresent ghost of the original artifact.

What matters most here is to note how "the art of imitation" the Cramps themselves championed was, in the end, turned back against their own sacred aura. Citation artists par excellence, the Cramps have themselves become objects of citation, now an integral part of that same "trash heap" of icons they spent years rummaging through in search of the most appetizing scraps.
The metamorphosis can now be said to be complete: that feeling of self-satisfaction and gratification felt when confronted with an accomplished fake and grasping its underlying references (a feeling some listeners of the era must have felt venturing into the first Cramps songs) turns into the anxiety of having to deal with an artifice of an artifice, an alternative testament to reality that future generations will perceive (hopefully only at first) as self-sufficient, perhaps unaware that it is itself shaped by the memory of a memory. Come to think of it, a good old "what goes around comes around" fits the bill perfectly.

X – What a lovely way to burn…

Now you’ve listened to my story/ and here’s the point that I have made
The Cramps are born to give you fever/ be it Fahrenheit or centigrade…

A journalist once noted that, upon encountering Ivy and Interior's lifestyle, the real surprise "is realizing just how normal it is". In a way, he had a point: beyond the perverted image and the oddly "matriarchal" conception underpinning the saga, the couple remains a rare example of a happy marriage, as well as a perfect union of purpose and devotion to the original word of rock. Deep in their hearts wrapped in barbed wire, the two are still the same obsessive collectors who, thirty years ago, picked through Sacramento's flea markets, got thrilled at the sight of a rare Sun single, and studied every riff down to the last detail.
In '96 Ivy herself, photographed amid the ocean of vinyl that engulfs their Hollywood home, compiled a list for Guitar magazine of obscure blues and rockabilly tracks containing her favorite guitar parts, once again displaying a truly staggering expertise. Together with her husband, she could write volumes on rock'n'roll if she only wanted to ("and if only she knew how to write", the spiteful would say), but I don't think she cares all that much: she prefers to (re)live that ancient ritual and the unwieldy army of pin-up idols that comes with it by playing it out onstage, tirelessly celebrating its malevolent/redemptive power.

The art of the Cramps, in the end, is the quintessence of fetishism: a "good" fetishism, if you'll allow the term, and above all a two-way one, since it doesn't just bubble up from the broth of primordial urges that soaks Date With Elvis from head to toe, but is even more fundamentally expressed in the veneration of an idea of music to surrender to blindly and ultimately become a willing servant of. A music turned mistress in her "shiny leather boots", a demanding mistress who spares no whippings on the already battered backs of a pack of Severins indulging beyond all imagination. In the act, however, the pack feels the constraint on its own movements and the full weight of the value system it chooses to embrace: a stronghold that over the years has become a comfortable gilded cage from which Rorschach and Interior, aspiring to that evergreen status they've always seen as the ultimate goal of their artistic path, have not the slightest desire to escape.

The intimacy of the listening experience is anything but a secondary aspect, and it goes hand in hand with the collective dimension of Cramps ritual and philosophy. What does the psychobilly subgenre represent, after all, if not a universe reserved for the chosen few (devoted fans, grave-robbers of 45s with heavy makeup and dressed in latex), apparently closed in on itself and almost disconnected from the rest of rock's developments over the last three decades? As Dave Marsh astutely noted in "Rolling Stone", the Cramps became spokespeople for "a culture that developed rock'n'roll along parallel musical lines but divergent social ones", settling, that is, into an underground limbo where individualistic drives toward a never-satisfied transgressive/hedonistic ideal coexist with an innate sense of community — a microcosm, quite distinct from the "surface", to belong to and find shelter in. Even untangling the web of references and mental associations that follow feeds the sense of being part of an elite, a group sharing values and aesthetic experiences.

With due caution, it seems to me that this sectarianism doesn't diverge all that dramatically from the principles established at the dawn of house music: the concept of a "brotherhood", of a higher order to relate to while still firmly holding onto the principle of the individual's free self-determination, of "anything goes", of the pursuit of pleasure (which, in the Cramps' case, becomes above all the pleasure of allusive recognition, of contemplating a suitably mythologized past) as an inescapable imperative. Of course, in their case the matter takes on much blurrier contours, and above all there's no precise gathering place to cement social bonds ("the church for the people who have been excluded from grace", as Frankie Knuckles called the Warehouse, and which perhaps only CBGB's and other "not for tourists" New York haunts could represent), but that's because "modern" rock lost its "communal" nature long ago, built instead on premises too often at odds with those of dance music. On the other hand, the Cramps "want" to turn rock back into dance music, so it all adds up.

As unconscious legacies, those songs and that equally powerful image have become the flesh and blood of a conscious refusal to adapt to their own habitat and, ultimately, to the passage of time. Once again, the creation of a parallel world is the chosen trick; moving from that world to an indirect critique of certain social models of our everyday life — the frustrated garbage man (of all things!), the troubled teenager, the zombie-like clerks shuffling around the records office — is a side effect that doesn't crack the fragile but intact "fun" equilibrium of their music.
The Cramps don't celebrate death, but life, even if they often do so in a paradoxical way. "Life is beautiful and beautiful things can still happen", Interior once stated, almost forgetting the filthy villain role he himself created and that, let's admit it, suits him to a tee. Sure, life is beautiful, but only — I'd add — if you live it by your own rules and in line with your own inclinations: exactly what he and his little wife did throughout an entire career lived on the margins, utterly indifferent to the charts (aside from a few placings in the indie top 50 and the occasional visit to the lower rungs of the mainstream ones — who's ever seen those, anyway?) and to the musical trends that, especially in the '90s, were pushing in an entirely different direction.

"You could be in a band or in a padded cell: the only thing that matters is not getting caught", explains the ever-authoritative Poison Ivy Rorschach, sealing with a few words their now thirty-year-long artistic and ideological journey. "We have a song called 'Wig Hat' that contains a line from an old blues song. It goes: 'My mama had twin boys, and on a summer day, she hit one on the head. I'm the one that got away.' Well, we're the ones that got away".

Gravest Gravy (2026) is the first posthumous collection, not counting the various live releases, and arrives after the band's breakup caused by the death of Lux Interior; it gathers a series of recordings left unused for the debut EP "Gravest Hits". Production duties aren't entrusted to just anyone: at the helm is Alex Chilton, who brought the band, then based in New York, to Ardent Studios in Memphis. Once there, he created an overexcited, feral atmosphere to push the Cramps, and especially Lux Interior, into unleashing all their primal fury.

Long live the outcasts. Long live the Cramps!