THE LORD GIVETH WHILE THE CRAMPS TAKETH AWAY

THE LORD GIVETH WHILE THE CRAMPS TAKETH AWAY

FEATURES

Strychnine Zombies Leave The Swamp

by John Mendelssohn

Just up from the shore of every port city in the English-speaking world, there is a movie house that shows horror films around the clock. Drunken sailors on their last few hours of shore leave stagger into it, over the supine, often unconscious forms of local derelicts, winos and general reprobates, in hopes of being frightened back into something resembling sobriety before they return to their ships. But the movie house rarely gives them their 99 cents’ worth, for its repertoire is invariably cretinous and incompetent to the point of being a great deal less terrifying than gUffawable.

\ If this movie house were a rock ’n’ roll group, it would call itself the Cramps.'

There is another way that this may be put. In the very late 1950’s, long before American youth got heavily into barbituating themselves into catatonia, getting one another pregnant at 12, and smoking animal tranquilizers, the PTA of the land nevertheless found much to decry. There were lurid monster magazines and comics, rife with gore and mayhem. There were lurid monster and sci-fi movies, even rifer with all manner of implicit perversity^ And in spite of Dick Clark and the heinous FrankieBobbies of South Philadelphia and Elvis’s being a model GI a trillion miles away in Germany, there was still rock ’n’ roll, the music of lustful delinquents.

All that the parents and teachers of the very late 1950’s dreaded most, the Cramps are, and in spades. Ghoulish and mindless as they are, they’ve become fave raves of so many American youngsters that America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine felt compelled to dispatch someone to investigate what makes them tick, if not so sick. For this mission, the magazine selects that old fellow who introduced David Bowie to the music of Iggy Pop in San Jose many, many years before.

I’m interested In real magic, like rock Wroth*, —Lux Interior

The old fellow accepts the assignment with some trepidation. He has interrogated Ian Anderson, a smug asshole, while the Jethro Tull star was in a foul, foul mood. He has tried to induce the masterminds of such major international corporations as Foreigner to admit to being shrewd and calculating sods while inscrutable Oriental waiters who may well have been coldblooded assassins in disguise lurked in the background. He has shared a Coke and a smile with Black Oak Arkansas, among other flesh-eating Southern guitar armies of the night.

But he has never questioned someqne whose cheeks appear to have been the site of the last several Annual Maggots’ Picnics, like the Cramps’ quintessential^ creepy Bryan Gregory, nor anyqne who seems to have been snatched from the very crypt only moments ago, as the Cramps lead singer, Lux Interior, does.

. The old fellow’s fears turn out to be unwarranted, though, for on the afternoon that he confronts the Cramps in the Hollywood offices of their record company, Gregory is nowhere in sight, and Lux and Poison Ivy Rohrshach—who is not only the Cramps’ lead guitarist,but also lucky Lux’s very, very close friend—are both affable and a little reticent. Lux does not slaver even once, as he does indefatigably on stage, and reeks not of formaldehyde, but of the Mexican beer he’s been consuming in voluminous quantities through the afternoon. Ivy conceals her pulchritude behind a pair of glittery butterfly spectacles of the sort that particularly silly .women went for in a big way in the very late 1950’s, and nasalizes her vowels more charmingly that anyone with whom the old fellow who’s come to grill her has conversed since Susie (Mrs. Greg) Shaw.

Implored to saunter down their own personal memory lanes, to recall the earliest days of the Cramps, Lux sips his beer and reveals that he and Ivy met years and years (eight, don’t you know) ago in Sacramento, California, to which he’d come to be “a psychedelic guru.” He accents the second syllable of “guru,” precisely as Marc Bolan did in T. Rex’s great hit “Metal Guru,” and explains, “How I got to be a psychedelic guru was I just appointed myself one. Basically, all you have to do to become one was take enough drugs.” He and Ivy met when he picked her up hitch-hiking. She denies having found the psychedelic guru’s great wisdom ah irresistable aphrodisiac. “I,” she giggles, “was wiser than him.” Lux frowns lovingly and explains why he eventually came to apostasize acid-gobbling. “The same people who’d been telling everybody to forget everything their parents had ever taught them turned into something like parents themselves.

“ ‘Oh,’ they’d say, ‘are you still eating... meat?’ Instead of parental pressure, there was hippie^ pressure, which was just as oppressive. When that happened, we looked to rock ’n’ roll, but there was nothing there—things had gotten duller and duller as rock had gotten progressively more progressive. Then things started to get better. I remember going to see 71 Rex in Cleveland: Marc Bolan weighed 300 pounds, and came out in this batwing costume, and beat his guitar with a whip. ‘Holy Shitl’ I thought, ‘This guy is my idolf On the drive home I was singing better than he had on stage, and trying to form a group began to seem like such a natural thing.

“After we saw the New York Dolls, I was sure that that’s what we should do. I didn’t know how to play an instrument, but neither did they! So we moved to New York, thinking that all the kids there looked like the Dolls, that there was this heavy Dolls sort of subculture there. Of course, when we got there we discovered that the Dolls were just weirdos, just'like Elvis had been in the South. Instead of the heavy rock ’n’ roll subculture we expected, all we found was garbage all over the streets and people who’d,mqved there to become -dancers or actors. It hardly seemed like a great breeding ground for rock ’n’ roll.”

The young couple persisted nonetheless in dreaming of having their own .group. About six months after their arrival in The City in the fall of ’75, Lux discovered that a fellow salesperson irv the record shop in which he’d gotten a job nurtured the identical ambition. Thus did Gregory, formerly an assembly-line laborer in his native Detroit and a sleeper-in-phonebooths in Manhattan, come to join the fold, and with infectious enthusiasm. “A couple of days later, he came to work with t this guitar he’d bought for $85, with the name of the group stenciled on it. I took one look at it,” Lux recounts, “and said, ‘Let’s do it!’ The three of us made a pact thatUf we didn’t make it, we’d join hands and jump off the Empire State Building.”

By the day after the Bicentennial Halloween, they were ready to audition to perform at the birthplace of New York new wave, CBGB. By the following summer— by which juncture they’d finally found a permanent drummer in Nick Knox, a refugee from Cleveland who fully three years later would continue to play as though he’d never held drumsticks before 3:30 yesterday afternoon—they were headlining. Their infamy was such by February, 1978, that CBS News used their likeness to print advertisements for their Raunch And Roll television special.

I don't want to do anything but be a singer in a rock `n'roll band.

A year later they met Miles Copeland, manager of the Police and soon to become the first major low-budget record mogul of the 80’s, who persuaded them to allow him to re-release the two singles they’d recorded and pressed by themselves on an Illegal Records EP. The last spring of the 70’s found them scurrying to and fro across England to such enthusiastic receptions that both Melody Maker and NME depicted them on their covers.

By the summer of ’79, it became clear that no mere EP could continue to satisfy the swelling legions of their fans for long, and they motored down to Memphis, to the studio in which Sam Phillips had recorded the primal Elvis hits that altered the course of popular music in our time. There, with Alex Chilton—once of the Box Tops, later of Big Star—calling the shots, they recorded an entire album of the brutish and macabre rockabilly that is their stock in trade.

By the day before Mother’s Day, 1980, their renown was such that they were able to attract a sizeable delegation of young people in regulation punk disarray even to an unadvertised autograph-signing session in a record shop in the San Fernando Valley, where nipple-length shag haircuts and platform shoes remain all the rage, and any kid who’s content to hear “Stairway To Heaven” fewer than eight times daily is shunned by his peers for being totally... gnarly.

In view of the fact that the two biggest things they’ve got going for themselves—v gall and a sense of humor—traditionally have been worth about as much in the, uh, rock marketplace as a warped Sgt. Pepper’s...soundtrack album, it’s suspected that they’ve invoked no little Aleicester Crowley-derived voodoo to attain the pinnable of stardom from which they now survey the competition. When confronted with this ugly allegation, though, they snap fast refutations, and then change the subject. “Crowley’s a jerk,” Lux snarls, momentarily ceasing to spill beer down his maw. “I’m not interested in that crap. I’m interested in real magic, like rock ’n’ roll, like things that happen sometimes at our shows that no one know are going to happen— things that are totally unexpected.

“I really like the unexpected to happen, and at the moment it isn’t happening.” It is for this reason, presumably, that he’s been known, say, to hurl himself off a 14-foothigh stage into the midst of a mob of murderously drunken young Glasgow thugs, and later to shower them with the contents of garbage bags. “The one thing I don’t dislike about being as successful as we __ are now is that you begin to feel that you’re ¶|| in a slot. Somebody lines up 30 dates arid you go play them. Yours is the next group at.. .Wally’s Fish Bar, the one after 999 and before XTC. I liked being able to do things like play at mental institutions, but now we’re working with people who just know how to set up normal things.”

One gathers that working with Alex Chilton must have been Lux’s kind of change of pace. “Regardless of what you may have heard about him,” Lux affirms with a happy smirk, “he really is completely totally out of his mind.”

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“We had the album done,” Ivy chimes in, very softly, “in exactly the form you hear it in now if you go buy a copy at a record shop, and we were all going, ‘Oh yeah, great1.’ But Alex is never happy with anything, so the night before it was going to be mastered, he was calling us up and saying, ‘Look, instead of paying me the rest of my advance, let’s use it to re-record everything. We’ll fly Nick and Bryan down here tonight, and I’ll mix it at the same time we’re recording it.”

The old fellow who’s come to interrogate the class couple gingerly speculates that they might be very near an age at which they might begin to find it a little.. .unseemly to continue to act like lunatics for the delight and astonishment of mostly-teenaged fans, and wonders if they’ve considered alternate lines of work. “I don’t want to do anything but be a singer in a rock ’n’ roll band,” Lux asserts in no uncertain tone. “All I did before this group was collect records and listen to records and make tapes of records to play in my car. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do anything else. At one time I did paintings. I won’t say I was an artist because I hate the word, but I painted and stuff, and a lot of people thought I was real good. But one day 10 years ago I just stopped doing it.

“I’ve always had the feeling that I could do whatever I wanted to do. It’s just that I never wanted to do anything like I want to do this.” ,

“Actual age,” Ivy muses, “doesn’t really mean anything—it’s just a matter of willpower to change the atoms in your body around.”

“That’s right!” Lux agrees, causing yet another dozen fluid ounces to disappear down his gullet. “I feel like a vampire in a way because I know that I’ve looked a lot older before than I do now. A lot of groups start out as adolescents and then later start thinking that rock ’n’ roll is dogshit, and then feel like they ought to get into something ‘worthwhile.’ Well, I’ve always despised people who used rock ’n’ roll as a steppingStone to something else, like David Bowie. I feel like I’ve grown up, and then gone backwards.” ,

He opens another beer and muses, albeit not meiancholily, “Maybe it’s a good thing that what we’re doing doesn’t have that much to do with looking real great and young.1”

He thinks of something that cheers him, and a faint smile reappears on his extraordinarily pallid mug. “There’s always ✓ so much turmoil going on around our band. If the other two were here, we could be breaking chairs o/er each other’s heads for you right now.” Once more Ivy chimes in. “It seems like we can’t get anybody to work with us who doesn’t want to put the guitars through an octave-splitter so it’ll sound like we have a bass or to take music lessons so that we’ll play better or something. It’s hard for us to think of ourselves as sojne bizarre revolutionary1 band, but I guess we are because we just go through people like watei; 'trying to find somebody who understands uS.i”

Lux has run out of beer, and appears eager to run out of the room, so the old fellow who’s come to interrogate them realizes that he must now pop the question he’s most keenly looked forward to ask the Cramps, or forever hold his peace. “Why,” he asks the co-leaders of the most conspicuously bassless band in all of modern rockabilly, “don’t you ask Jack Bruce if he wants to join your group?”

“Yeah!” Lux crows beerily while the apple of his eye beams by his side. “I think a harmonica player would be great for our band!” ’ ■ Ip