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Posted by
Trixie Malicious February 11, 2009 -
741 views
"The Cramps' Lux Interior was a twisted Elvis from Hell:
It's hard to think of Lux Interior as dead, despite what reports say. Then again, it was always hard to think of him as alive
Some 30 years ago, with the King still warm in his casket, Lux rose like a zombie from the primordial swamp as a twisted, grotesquely libidinous, werewolf Elvis from Hell, and the mask – if it was a mask – never came off. The Cramps went one step further than punk rock: they didn't merely go back to basics, they stripped rock'n'roll naked and flaunted it in its lethal distilled form: as a relentless sex beast, a psychotic release, a nihilist post-apocalyptic celebration, the ultimate in trash culture.
I was a teenage psychobilly fan with a blue flat-top, armed with Songs the Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle and Off the Bone, and the green-skinned Lux Interior on my Drug Train poster was like a super anti-hero, a deviant who would happily give a fuck in public. His wife, guitarist Poison Ivy, a bad-girl in full, burlesque glory on the Smell of Female cover, was his perfect lusty counterpart. It was her dominatrix work that funded the Cramps' early releases.
The last Cramps gig review I read described Lux masturbating on stage and climaxing on the mike to Love Me as the set concluded. A typical show (Boston, 1986) found him clad in leopard-skin briefs drinking wine from an audience member's shoe and French-kissing a random person in the crowd for a full 10 minutes with the microphone in their mouths.
Lux actually wore his interior on the outside, it seemed – any skeletons that might have lurked in his closet were paraded on stage. But the most legendary Cramps performance was captured on a handheld camcorder, their 1978 gig in a California state mental hospital – bringing psychobilly salvation to the beleaguered, and the starting point for Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's recent ICA film, File Under Sacred Music.
No one managed to equal the Cramps stylistically, they were in a different league to the laughably macho Meteors and most of the British psychobilly scene, though Billy Childish's Thee Headcoats and Nick Cave's Birthday Party echoed their gothic-psychedelic edge.
In his sleeve notes to the rarities compilation How to Make a Monster, Lux complained about those who regarded the Cramps a joke. Lux and the Cramps were serious about rockabilly, horror, foot fetishes, sci-fi B-movies and 50s kitsch. They were all about keeping it pure, raw and minimal, but could never be described as revivalists.
They deconstructed rockabilly gems such as Surfin' Bird, Jailhouse Rock, The Way I Walk and Love Me, and made them throb with playful menace. They came from a similar place to the Gun Club, whose declared mission was to "destroy rockabilly", but the Cramps (for whom the Gun Club's For the Love of Ivy was written) didn't crash and burn or go through reinventions. Rather like the Ramones, who came from the same CBGBs scene in New York, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy clung to their buzzsaw sound and never diluted it.
Like the sexploitation, hammer horror and B-movie imagery they maintained to the last, the Cramps' treasure chest is almost bottomless – from Tear It Up to Ugh! A Music War to the ridiculously camp surreality of Naked Girl Falling Down the Stairs. So has Lux Interior joined the ranks of the living (or surfin') dead? Next full moon (on Monday), you might just hear him howl."
_The Guardian Newspaper, Owen Allan
