THE FEVER EXTINGUISHED Lux Interior
Feb 06, 2009
"It's not music. It's misdirected noise": When the Cramps frontman died on Feb. 4, we felt a disturbance in the Force.
BY TIM STEGALL
"Who are The Cramps? They are the most beautiful - yes, beautiful - group I have ever seen, and the fact that they exist is enough." - a pre-fame Morrissey, 1979
The band walks on, looking like 1950s juvenile delinquents straight out of American International Pictures' central casting office attempting a glam rock version of The Addams Family. The gangling, basketball-player-tall front man, resplendent in Herman Munster makeup, black fright wig hair, black PVC head-to-toe, and black patent leather stilettos, surveys the audience with demented glee. To one side, a porcelain china doll exuding stock-still ice maiden sex, straps on a big hollow-body Gretsch guitar a la Eddie Cochran. A pompadoured drummer in head-to-toe black and vintage Ray Bans, settles behind the minimal kit, looking like the corpse of Roy Orbison.
Mr. Dementoid Singer leers at the gathered masses, then grabs the mic and announces, "On this solemn occasion, I have one word to set the proper tone." He then leered a beat longer, and stuck the mic in his mouth and HOOOOWWWWWLLLLLLLED!!!!!
By the end of the set, The Cramps would reconstruct the entire history of rock 'n' roll in their image, and Lux Interior - said dementoid - would wind up stripped to a black pair of silk panties, writhing on the stage howling further, covered in red wine and smeared makeup. It's what happens when you spend the preceding minutes acting as a shaman in the service of demon rock 'n' roll.
"Rock 'n' roll is so great that everyone in the world should think it's the greatest thing that's happening. If they don't, they're turds." - Lux Interior
Once you saw The Cramps live, you were marked for life. Such was the passion and commitment and intensity of their mission to strip rock back to something primal and ferocious. And much of the impact of the band had to do with the vision and personality of Lux Interior. (And "vision" might be more apt a term than any of us realize: The man was once quoted as saying, "I lived on mescaline for a long time.") When Lux left this sphere Feb. 4th, 2009, battling an existing heart condition in Glendale Memorial Hospital in Glendale, California at 4:30 AM PST, this sphere lost an awful lot. But Lux surely died knowing he and The Cramps changed the world in ways it likely does not realize.
The Cramps - who for all intents and purposes, were the core of husband Lux Interior and wife Poison Ivy Rorschach, through innumerable lineup changes - believed in rock 'n' roll. It was a fundamentalist religion to them, of snake handling, speaking-in-tongues intensity, and had nothing to do with whatever you saw on MTV or read in Rolling Stone. In The Cramps couple's universe, '56 Elvis met '72 Iggy headlong at 150 mph, illuminated by the sickly blue cathode ray light of 1000 low-budget horror and exploitation films, soundtracked by scratchy no-hit '60s garage rock and beyond-obscure '50s rockabilly 45s. It was a universe given context and life within the energy of the early Manhattan punk scene, although they didn't sound like any other punk band alive. But loads of bands ended up trying to sound like them, and loads of fans were introduced to a culture, lifestyle, and aesthetic much richer than whatever was offered by whatever was the modern pop culture at any given point across their 30-years-plus existence. Including whatever the punk or indie scenes had to offer.
Lux was born Erick Lee Purkhiser ten days before Halloween of 1946, in Stow, Ohio. He grew up during the rock 'n' roll '50s in the thrall of local disc jockey Pete "The Mad Daddy" Myers and late night horror movie host Ghoulardi. Come the early '70s, "feeling quite psychedelic" as he put it, he allegedly picked up young hitch-hiker Kristy Wallace and began a lifelong romance that would color every aspect of their new lives together. By the time they'd relocated to Cleveland, they'd already begun a lifestyle where they'd be existing on lunch meat in order to afford collecting scratchy 45s, books, movies, etc., etc. - the talismans of their aesthetic.
And then: "After we saw the New York Dolls, I was sure that was what we should do," as Lux would put it. "I didn't know how to play an instrument, but neither did they." By the time the pair had migrated to mid-'70s punk rock NYC with brother and sister Brian and Pam "Balaam" Gregory on guitar and drums, respectively, Purkhiser was Lux Interior, Wallace was Poison Ivy Rorschach, he was singing and writhing and she was strumming. And nothing would be the same.
It's hard to calculate the immensity and scope of The Cramps' impact. It surely exceeded their record sales: According to Reuters, the band's best-selling release (1984 greatest hits package Bad Music For Bad People) only moved 95,000 copies. But The Cramps likely did more to propagate the vogue for '60s garage sounds than Lenny Kaye's seminal Nuggets collection and introduced more punk rockers to rockabilly than anyone this side of The Clash. The thing was, The Cramps were not a nostalgia outfit. These strains were influences. There was no attempt in channeling the Sun Records' spirit as, say, the Stray Cats tried to look and be Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. In tapping into garage-psych, they never did as The Chesterfield Kings and grow Brian Jones pageboy haircuts and wear Beatle boots and corduroy and play through crappy Vox amps with buzzes. Even playing CBGBs and Max's, they were a sore thumb that impacted all around 'em: Opening several show for The Ramones, the headliners took note of how the voodoo exorcism had transformed The Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird" and would work up their own typically stripped-down arrangement for 1977's Rocket To Russia LP.
But... where do you think Jack and Meg White figured out they did not need a bass guitar? That The Gun Club figured out they could make punk rock out of the bones of rock 'n' roll and blues past? (To the point of the band paying explicit tribute in the song "For The Love Of Ivy," and losing guitarist Kid Congo Powers for a time to The Cramps.) Where Australia's The Scientists, once tired of channeling the Dolls and Flamin' Groovies, learned to get swampy and primal? The Jesus and Mary Chain learned to reduce, reduce, reduce, and get noisy? It is literally possible to cite thousands of cases for The Cramps' impact on all most of us hold dear. But room does not permit.
Instead, you should weep. The Cramps taught by live, throbbing example what Lux Interior stated to a pair of interviewers years ago: "It's not music. It's misdirected noise!"
"To us," Lux summarized, "rock 'n' roll is a blues-based folk music, not a record company product." More musicians could stand to have that attitude nowadays. We will never again see Lux climbing atop enormous PA stacks, stripped to the waist, his leather pants riding dangerously low, finding lighting gels and stuffing them in his mouth and spitting them out in the audience, mindlessly chanting a one-word mantra over his band's frenzied deconstruction of "Surfin' Bird":
"MOW! MOW! MOW! AAAAAAOOOOOOOUUUUUUAAAAAGGHHHHHH!!!!!"
Rock 'n' roll as cathartic ritual.
As the man himself ad-libbed on The Cramps' rendition of Little Willie John's "Fever": "Well, now you've listened to my story/Here's the point that I have made/The Cramps are born to give you fever/Be it Fahrenheit or centigrade - WE GIVE YA FEE-VAAHHH!" I always took that to be The Cramps' version of KISS' "You drive us wild/We'll drive you crazy." Except The Cramps meant it, and meant something beyond selling lunch boxes and action figures.
And with Lux Interior's exit, so exit The Cramps. What a pitiful world we now live in.
TIM "NAPALM" STEGALL, an Austin-based punk rock musician and writer, has fond memories of interviewing Lux and Ivy twice. "Lovely people," he says of them.
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