Monocled Alchemist

Article published in NME, 29th March, 1980

The Cramps | Invasion Of The Cramp Monsters | The new terror menace to the world’s teenage minds returns to plague our worried land. Communing with the rockabilly zombies: Max Bell

THE NORMALLY mild-mannered offstage figure of Lux Interior twists and writhes his face in a rare show of angry emotion . . . If looks could kill. Lux looks like he could spit a bucket of blood.

All him and Poison Ivy Rorschach did was to walk into the buffet bar on York Station and within seconds the entire room is staring at them. Lux is wearing his habitual black, undertakers coat, plastic trousers and a shiny top hat. Ivy trails him lovingly in gold lame pants and a pair of severe diamante spectacles.

For some reason the combination has tickled the imagination of all the other occupants of the buffet. They gawp over cheese rolls, their mouths a perfect question mark. Some people titter and nudge. Some people are outraged and point accusingly, openly offended at Lux’s appearance.

Given the opportunity, they would like to exercise some physical violence on his large and harmless exterior. It’s exactly the same on a train heading for Edinburgh where The Cramps are to play for many of their most fevered and committed fans.

Laughter

Lux looms down the corridor in crepuscular silence, oblivious to the horror on the faces of all the mothers who hide their children from this nasty man.

Eventually some oafs start to laugh out loud, seemingly unaware of their own intense anonymity. Lux echoes their laughter back at them and the situation is suddenly ugly until Ivy hurries him towards the relative safety of a dining compartment.

After 15 years of being jeered at, Mr Interior is getting immune to the insults.

“It isn’t an act we suddenly thought of, to look like this. I’ve always been a freak. The first gig we ever played at CBGB’s we were completely out of tune for 45 minutes and the club owner Hilly Kristal told us we sounded like a total joke.”

The Cramps | Invasion Of The Cramp Monsters

Five years later a lot of people would probably endorse Kristal’s opinion in spades. By much common consent The Cramps are inept musicians, actors, dumb Yanks.

Another favourite line of reasoning goes like this: they’re so bad they’re good; they’re the best worst band in the world, an amusing cult artefact that crawled out of a mausoleum one day, like extras from The Tomb Of Ligeia.

It’s true that they don’t like being in the sun too much (although they have to keep warm) but Ivy comes from Sacramento, California and not Providence, Rhode Island.

QUITE WHY they inspire this strange mixture of open hatred and patronising possessiveness is baffling to The Cramps. Although they admit that their appearance encourages a certain degree of suspended disbelief, they are very serious indeed about their ultimate ambitions.

Lux picks through a dead chicken and addresses the table.

“When A&M in America sent out their guideline to the record stores they described us as a cult new wave band who’d just recorded an album in Nashville. That really insulted us.

Apart from the fact that we made the record in Memphis, to be labelled as a cult group is so horrible, it implies an elitism that we don’t want. I think The Cramps are a very commercial band. Once our biggest ambition was just to get on a stage, but now it’s to aim for some kind of world domination.”

The Police tour of ’79

Ivy qualifies the statement with shy assurance, calling forth the double rock ‘n’ roll spectres of blind faith and raw power. These two commodities were straining to breaking point long before The Cramps first came to England as a support band on the Police tour of ’79.

Night after night they fought long and hard against antipathy and collective blandness, and they didn’t stand a chance. This time The Cramps are headlining a more sensible tour of small halls, colleges and clubs in an effort to convince Great Britain of their undoubted magnificence.

The Cramps | Invasion Of The Cramp Monsters

So let’s state once and for all before we step into fiction that this group are not a contrived garage band with a penchant for Charles Adams and The Munsters.

On a good night The Cramps make time stand still; they are utterly convincing proof of the scrambled mechanisms that constitute classic rock ‘n’ roll.

They live out Lux Interior’s assertion that any great simple rock ‘n’ roll music mixes with any other —and anyone who can’t appreciate The Cramps’ vitality and surrender to the rhythm is missing the whole point that has fuelled the genre since Jerry Lee Lewis destroyed his first 88 and Little Richard dipped into his first make-up bag.

In New York The Cramps are not very popular with the cliques of art-conscious new music frauds. The American press would rather they disappeared for good.

The nucleus of the group converged on New York City in late 1975. Lux and Ivy already had a blueprint based around an obsessive love affair with vintage rockabilly that stemmed from prolonged exposure to Cleveland’s premier radio stations and the genius of Alan Freed’s ‘Moondog’.

LSD and plastic

The pair spent years scouring through the bins of every record store from Akron to Tallahassie assimilating a collection of oddities that would fashion their addiction for gone vinyl.

“When I met Ivy in California I was a psychedelic guru. I was tripping out. LSD and plastic were my biggest influences, more so than music. I’d always liked these weird records with strange-sounding names and after I started to listen to rockabilly I couldn’t listen to anything else.

Joe Sasfy (an eminent rockologist) said that it demands the most inexplicable leap of faith in any musical phenomenon. It’s such a wild, emotional sound; it demands that you question your own life.”

Lux looks down at his hand, a mangled confusion of purple bruises and open-sore cuts, the result of his nightly confrontation with this nation’s club ceilings.

The Cramps | Invasion Of The Cramp Monsters

Apparently his lifestyle is not only a question, it’s an answer.

“If people say I look silly, well I don’t feel it. When I’m trying to get gone I don’t think of anything else except getting out of my mind. It’s self-hypnosis, a different level of consciousness. I don’t feel the pain until afterwards but when I smash my hand through a ceiling there’s nothing, it’s a trance.”

Ivy whispers her consent. “An abstraction, a state of nothingness.”

Lux IS disappointed when he can’t reach that edge, even though it means he pays all his wages out in repairs to angry club owners. When the band played in Edinburgh he clambered to the top of a precarious amplifier stack and hurled himself head first into the crowd.

Voodoo

This time the manager of the hall, The Astoria, joined him on the boards and attempted to pull the power but somehow Lux fended him off to the delight of all those of us straining against a thin line of disgruntled bouncers.

Even so, Lux feels that recent events have stifled The Cramps’ natural spontaneity.

“When me and Ivy managed the band we were a lot crazier. Sometimes I feel just like this week’s rock band. I want the audience to be surprised and shocked.”

Interior likens their music to the equation between voodoo, religion and catatonic music which inspired the afterbirth of ’50s rock ‘n’ roll in the American South.

“We’ve gone out of our way to deny any involvement in black magic, but we rely on voodoo in the same way that Sam the Sham and Creedence did. That’s the real thing too. We don’t meet in Haiti and hold mass rituals, but we believe in certain powers.

The Cramps | Invasion Of The Cramp Monsters

We have candles on stage for atmosphere not effect and we use Schwabs Jinx-Removing sprays and John the Conqueror floorwax and — what’s that perfume called, Ivy?”

“Uh . . . Atom Bomb? No, Tigress. It all works. You don’t need to know anything about the occult to become powerful; you can feel it alone in a room.”

Lux and Ivy are pretty kooky, but they’re not deadpan stupid. The much-laboured and ultimately derogatory definition of their music as only a part of the trash aesthetic misses the point.

For some of the current tour The Cramps have gone out with The Fall, labelmates on Miles Copeland’s IRS/Faulty Products shebang. Due to a misunderstanding over double-headline status the initial dates are beset with bad feeling and tantrums.

After the Edinburgh night The Fall’s lead singer condescends to offer Lux the advice that “you shouldn’t bother with all that Kiss theatrical shit. You don’t need it”, and the Fall’s manager insists on taking Lux in front of a mirror in order to show him how “ridiculous I look, to humiliate me”.

Obviously these slights are not just insulting and hurtful.

Songs The Lord Taught Us

“How can anyone tell me it’s theatrical? I’m sorry that we used the stage. That’s what a stage is for. I admit we’re still in love with a nonsense life, that we’re remnants from a time when we took acid and never came down, but I hate making sense all the time. I’ve had a million looks and a million names.

In Sacramento I was Vip Vop, after the Isleys’ song. It’s on my driver’s license.”

We talk about The Cramps overdue debut album, ‘Songs The Lord Taught Us‘, produced in Memphis, Tennessee by Alex Chilton. I wondered how they felt making a spiritual journey to the shrine of the musical form they have turned into a contemporary sound.

“It had to be an inspiration for us. In the South rockabilly has overtones of fire and brimstone. It’s a fusion of country, R&B and Holy Roller fundamentalism, the same way it was for Elvis. Those people drink strychnine and handle snakes and they also play Stratocasters; those are their rites. We’re coming from another territory, that’s all.

“But it isn’t a joke and the album title wasn’t a joke. Whichever Lord you believe in, we believe the Lord taught us those songs.”

Are you religious in any more orthodox way?

“Well, I don’t want to go to heaven if there’s no hell. I see lots of both and I want to live them both. We don’t exclude anything, we believe in it all.”

The Cramps | Invasion Of The Cramp Monsters

THIS ACCEPTANCE of diversity can be traced and enjoyed throughout a range of material that belies their detractors. Cramps noise is an embodiment of force fields like Chuck Pullens, Link Wray, Dick Dale, The Ventures, Surfaris, Rivingtons and The Kingsmen.

The first song they ever un-learnt was ‘Quick Joey Small’ and amongst the outakes on ‘Songs The Lord Taught Us’ were an obscene version of ‘Louie Louie’ and a cover of Tommy James’ ‘Hanky Panky’.

“The covers have to be songs that we could have written. ‘Rockin’ Bones’ is one we could have written and so is ‘Goo Goo Muck’. I think the only people who can judge it have to be living a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, be sexual beings.

With rock ‘n’ roll the search is over, it’s the end of a landscape. You can’t look at it like great art, it isn’t a painting or a sculpture, it’s outlaw music and it’s hard to do it right. It has vaseline in it and naturally it offends.”

Ivy Rorschach dreamed the name Cramps one night as she lay in a semi-comatose stupor peering over an old Kinks album. “I wanted a name that implied a gang, something warped, a problem . . .”

Sexual denial

Lux interrupts. “At the time in America there were no good band names anymore. It was all Lightning Spot or Aerofeather, things that meant nothing. Everyone was into this sexual denial, hippy sensibility. We were called a glitter band . . .”

He cackles immodestly. “The best thing about our audiences is that they’re a mixture of the terminally unhip and the terminally hip. So you’ll get a guy in a suit and tie standing next to someone with a nail through his head.” (Which one’s ‘hip’? — Ed)

To this end The Cramps like their shows to be events and not just interludes in a social calendar. They’ve played to larger crowds but their forte is a club, at least somewhere where they can be seen and heard.

“We don’t want to be huge in a Madison Square Garden sense but huge value-wise. We want to become unforgettable. Gene Vincent was never huge but in many ways he’s the biggest. Actually Ricky Nelson was my first idol, Elvis was too strange . . .”

Ivy gazes at Lux with sultry admiration. “You looked like Ricky Nelson back then.”

Electric Ballroom

HALFWAY through writing this thing I decided it needed a definite burst of adrenalin. There’s only one way to appreciate The Cramps — on a stage — and a week after my notes had been pulled into some kind of shape I was suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

The band’s important London date in the Electric Ballroom turned out to be a minor let down, predictably enough. They suffered from the most baffling sound problems and an audience who are still not ready to deliver themselves from all evil.

Because of this incoherence it was only really possible to enjoy The Cramps as spectacle and from that perspective it’s obvious that even on a bad night they are the perfect rock’n’roll band with images as attractively ugly as all the great performers.

Lux Interior is a naturally brilliant white singer straight out of the Presley mould with a line in lunacy that elevates him to the pantheon of the true eccentrics. Like Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, Lux is a potent, underrated vocalist and he’s here now.

Rockin’ in the graveyard

Some people will insist that the thing is dead, sunk in a sea of safeness, but pessimism from a position of isolation and inverted idealism can’t explain the appeal of an animal as untamed as The Cramp monsters.

Besides which, those reports have been greatly exaggerated — rockin’ in the graveyard is highly recommended. One reason why the Cramps are as funny as they are serious is the fact that all of them are fans with fantasies fresh from over-exposure to the pleasures of the flesh and the 45.

By way of an interlude here are some of their favourite records.

Top 10s

Lux’s Top Ten 1) ‘It’s A Gas’ — Alfred E. Neumann 2) Mama Oow Mow Mow’ — The Rivingtons 3) ‘Ballad Of Thunder Road’ — Robert Mitchum 4) ‘The First Singles From Outer Space’ (N.A.S.A. and the Sputniks) 5) ‘Paralysed’ — Legendary Stardust Cowboy 6) ‘Yum Yum Yamaha’ — Carol Conners 7) ‘What Is A Fisteris?’ —The Joker (aka Mad Daddy) 8) ‘Girl On Death Row’ — Duane Eddy/Lee Hazlewood 9) ‘Surfari’ —Ward Darby and the Raves 10) ‘Red Hot Mama’ — Wayne Williams & the Sure Shots.

Ivy’s Top Ten 1) ‘Funnel Of Love’ — Wanda Jackson 2) ‘Golden Boy’ — Tommy Jim Beam & the 4/5ths 3) ‘Flamingo’ — The Charades 4) ‘Harlem Nocturne’—The Viscounts 5) ‘Whistle Bait’ — Collins Kids 6) ‘She Set Me Free’ — Charlie Feathers 7) ‘Muleskinner Blues’ — Dolly Parton 8) Want Some Of That’ — Kai Ray 9) ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ — 13th Elevators 10) ‘Barracuda’ — Standells

“THERE AREN’T too many Brian Epsteins or Malcolm McLarenss around in the States.” Bryan Gregory, one half of The Cramps’ guitar front, sits in his room bemoaning the lateness of his group’s discovery and the reactionary nature of Americans in general.

“There are so many dull people, you can see that everywhere, it’s so apparent. Even down to the fact that Americans have no creative shoes like they do here, where shoes have style, they’re sleek and sexy.

In America they’re all — “Bryan searches for the appropriate insult — “hippies”, he spits, “it’s so boring.”

Bryan Gregory and drummer Nick Knox, the other occupant of the room, are unknown factors in Cramps terms. Lux is the Garbageman, the wordman, the focal point and mouthpiece; Ivy is musical director, partime manager, full time skipper of an impossible team.

Brutal upbringing

Bryan and Nick have a reputation for being psychotic and they probably are. An impromptu talk held in Bryan’s room does nothing to dispel the notion that these two honchos are quite happy to keep a distance from any aspect of normality, that they are synched into the communal doctrine of image and madness which oft befalls the hapless victims of brutal upbringing.

When Knox was a child his father Iarruped him into order and didn’t care about the weals. Under their Cleveland home Pa indulged his love for ultimate deterrents in the form of a large and totally illegal arsenal, including a selection of police and sub-machine guns.

Nick’s first drum was a military model with a crank to keep the beat. Knox is a terse, witty character with a nonchalant stare halfway between amused and bored. He keeps a tight rein on words.

When Miles Copeland asked him why he spoke so little Knox told him he had water on the brain which froze in cold weather. Knox guffaws loudly and then starts to nod off.

Popular in NYC

I ask Bryan why it took so long for The Cramps to get signed in New York City. ‘Songs The Lord Taught Us’ could and should have been made three years ago and even now the American release is weeks behind ours made us struggle harder which could be a good thing . . . but after a time you wonder if maybe they don’t understand.

“We’re popular in New York but you wouldn’t know it. I got real angry when bands were getting signed after three months and we’d been around for ages. That was so unfair, they got the rewards immediately.”

THE REASONS for this snubbing are obvious though. Even by New York standards, The Cramps are peculiar and to a record company their music is impenetrable. They are revivalist in a sense, but there’s nowhere for a dull A&R man to plug in his new wave marketing index.

They don’t even have a goddamn bass player! It’ll never catch on. Gregory has plans. He wants to direct a black horror film a to Roger Corman.

We’re just the same as cavemen

“Lux is going to produce the next album but I’m more interested in films incorporating some aspect of the band. I’ve got phenomenal ideas but no bucks. I see that in the future . . .”

Bryan drifts into conjecture. Has he ever acted?

“No, but I’m sure I could.”

Knox: “I have.”

Gregory: “But nothing major, no plays or anything?”

Knox: “I nearly got arrested once for being drunk and disorderly in a restaurant while I was acting. I was amusing my small circle of friends.”

Nick trails off into an involved story about falling off chairs.

“The police in Cleveland don’t bother with me. I look like a law-abiding citizen.”

The last impressions I had about The Cramps before I stumbled off into the night are all totally unrelated. One was Lux Interior’s overview of modern urban living.

“I’ve always thought of the city not as a centre of civilisation but as a jungle and all the people who think they’re so sophisticated are kidding themselves. The buildings don’t make any difference; we’re just the same as cavemen.”

The other was the cautionary tale of ageing rockabilly original Tex Rubinowitz who The Cramps played with in Memphis. Rubinowitz is a perfect example of that correlation between religion, narcosis and the muse.

Every night when he’s touring Tex gets completely pickled, toped, blotto, picks up any women who will and smashes anything that looks like it needs dismantling.

After that he goes home to his Baptist mother and indulges a gargantuan guilt complex. That kind of style money can never buy. The Cramps know all about style instinctively. How could they be bettered? For what you are about to receive may the Lord make you truly gone. Amen.