Lux Reading

Available for free this week on Rock's Back Pages three cool interviews with Lux Interior by Paul Rambali (1978), Cynthia Rose (1983), and Susan Compo (1995).

One quote from Rambali's piece really jumped out at me:

For us, we've loved rock'n'roll all our lives, and this band is the end of it. We're not using the band to get into galleries or become mime dancers or anything. We want to be a rock'n'roll band, and I'll do it till past when I'm dead.

Made back in 1978, it's a promise Lux more than kept. Rock on Garbageman.

Songs The Cramps Taught Us: Green Fuz

The Cramps second album, the great Psychedelic Jungle, contained a remarkable seven covers. This was "remarkable" in the sense that it's an extraordinarily large amount of covers, and in the sense that the songs themselves were, well, remarkable. Everyone of the songs they covered was incredibly obscure at the time the album was released in 1981, so much so that only the most dedicated record hounds and devotes of musical esoterica would have recognized all of them as covers. Additionally, each of the songs seemed so much of a piece with The Cramps' musical vision, that it was hard to imagine they could have emanated from anywhere other than Lux Interior's twisted imagination.

So this week, in honor of the late Lux Interior, I will present the original versions of each of the seven covers presented on Psychedelic Jungle, alongside The Cramps' cover versions for your listening pleasure. My friends Guy and Peter have also promised to do "Songs The Cramps Taught Us" posts in Lux's honor.

"Green Fuz" (or "Greenfuz") was originally recorded by garage rockers Randy Alvey & the Green Fuz from Bridgeport Texas at a deserted roadside cafe in 1969. "Green Fuz" had already appeared on the second Pebbles compilation by the time it appeared on The Cramps' second album, but no doubt the way a lot of people first heard it (present company included) was as the classic lead off track to Psychedelic Jungle.

Lux Left Instructions

I wanna leave a happy memory when I go,
I wanna leave something to let the whole world know,
That the rock 'n' roll daddy has a done passed on,
But my bones will keep a rockin' long after I've gone...
Rock on...

Lux Interior left instructions as to what should happen in the event of his demise. We're supposed to rock on, which is exactly what I intend to do. But not before paying proper respect.

It's impossible to calculate the effect The Cramps' music has had on me personally. It was largely through The Cramps that I learned to appreciate the pleasures of junk culture--the stuff I had always been taught to look down on. More than any punk band, The Cramps taught me that rock'n'roll music is at its most powerful when it is at its simplest. More than any other band (with the possible exception of The Ramones) The Cramps taught me that rock'n'roll music should be fun. More than any other band The Cramps taught me not to eat stuff off the sidewalk (no matter how good it looks). I literally do not know what would have become of me without The Cramps.

I can't think of a better description of The Cramps' music than that provided on the back of their first EP, Gravest Hits, by Dr. J.H. Satisfy, Professor of Rockology, American Rock'n'Roll Institute, Washington D.C. U.S.A.:

In the Spring of 1976, The Cramps began to fester in a NYC apartment. Without fresh air or natural light, the group developed its uniquely mutant strain of rock'n'roll aided only by the sickly, blue rays of late night TV.

While the jackhammer rhythms of punk were proliferating in NYC, The Cramps dove into the deepest recesses of of the rock'n'roll psyche for the most primal of all rhythmic impulses - Rockabilly - the sound of Southern culture falling apart in a blaze of shudders and hiccups.

As late night Sci-Fi reruns coloured the room, The Cramps also picked and chose amongst the psychotic debris of previous rock eras - instrumental rock, surf, psychadelia, and sixties punk.

And then they added the junkiest element of all - Themselves.

Nick Knox, stoic drummer with the history of the big beat written in his left hand. Ivy Rorschach, Voodoo guitarist with the rhythm method down as pat as her blonde beauty. Bryan Gregory, flipping cigs and fractured guitar runs at the incredulous mob. And Lux Interior, the band's frontal lobe, wherein Elvis gets crossed with Vincent Price and decent folks ask, "What hath God wrought?"

The Cramps don't pummel and you won't pogo. They ooze, you'll throb.

The rock 'n' roll daddy has done passed on, but his bones will keep a rockin' long after he's gone.

I'm breaking my usual rule about not posting music that is commercially available because "Rockin' Bones" is available on the Psychedelic Jungle/Gravest Hits CD two-fer. And if you don't own--at the very least--The Cramps IRS records, go out and buy them right now, then work your way through the rest of their catalog. But this version is kind of special because it was transcribed directly from a vinyl copy of Psychedelic Jungle purchased by a genuine mutant teenager.

Next week: "Songs The Cramps Taught Us."