THE CRAMPS

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 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 colored the room, The CRAMPS also picked and chose amongst the psychotic debris of previous rock eras - instrumental rock, surf, psychedelia, and sixties punk. And then they added the junkiest element of all — themselves.
— J. H. Sasfy, Professor of Rockology
from the liner notes of The Cramps 1979 release Gravest Hits

It would be almost impossible to have never heard of The CRAMPS. Their career has been the stuff of legend.  Dangerously bizarre but most of all cool, The CRAMPS represent everything that is truly reprehensible about rock’n’roll.  Founding members Lux Interior (the psycho-sexual Elvis/Werewolf hybrid from hell) and guitar-slinging soul-mate Poison Ivy (the ultimate bad girl vixen) are the architects of a wicked sound that distills a cross of swamp water, moonshine and nitro down to a dangerous and unstable musical substance. Their cultural impact has spawned a legion of devil cults and dance-floor catfights, and created in its wake a cavalcade of cave-stomping imitators. As punk rock pioneers in the late seventies, they cut their teeth on the stages of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City and recorded their first record at Sam Phillips legendary Sun Studios, funded mainly by Ivy’s income as a dominatrix in NYC. They coined the now popular term “psychobilly” on their 1976 gig posters. Their hair-raising live performances are still a total, no-holds-barred rock’n’roll assault. After a quarter century of mayhem, they’re too far gone to even consider any other course. (from the Cramps website)

Cemeteries, rock `n` roll, old mansions, horror movies, a splash of surrealism-add atmospheric clothing (preferably black) and some tongue-in-cheek humor, and the list does a pretty fair job of delineating the wacko-Gothic world of the Cramps.

This is the band, after all, that signed its current contract with Enigma Records at Bela Lugosi`s gravesite in Los Angeles. The band that foreshadowed today`s concerns about nutrition and diet with a 1981 song that cautioned listeners not to eat stuff off the sidewalk, no matter how good it looks. The band that once played a free concert for patients at a California mental hospital after being told by someone: ``You guys ought to play at a nut house. That`s where you belong.``

Formed some 13 years ago after Lux and Ivy migrated from California to New York-and added drummer Nick Knox and second guitarist Bryan Gregory (later replaced by Kid Congo Powers)-the Cramps forged their sound in the Big Apple`s punk/New Wave scene of the late `70s.

But while their early efforts displayed a good deal of punk`s urgency, their primary stylistic stomping ground became an alternate-universe version of rockabilly known as psychobilly-a crazed, take-it-to-the-max form where standard rockabilly vocal hiccups became desperate gulps and gasps, and rockabilly`s sprightly rhythms became stark, dark exercises in the weird and the warped. (Tom Popson - Chicago Tribune)

Conjuring a fiendish witches' brew of primal rockabilly, grease-stained '60s garage rock, vintage monster movies, perverse and glistening sex, and the detritus and effluvia of 50 years of American pop culture, the Cramps are a truly American creation much in the manner of the Cadillac, the White Castle hamburger, the Fender Stratocaster, and Jayne Mansfield. Often imitated, but never with the same psychic resonance as the original, the Cramps celebrate all that is dirty and gaudy with a perverse joy that draws in listeners with its fleshy decadence, not unlike an enchanted gingerbread house on the Las Vegas strip. The entire psychobilly scene would be unthinkable without them, and their prescient celebration of the echoey menace of first-generation rock & roll had a primal (if little acknowledged) influence on the rockabilly revival and the later roots rock movement. (Allmusic)

The Cramps Official Site
The Cramps Wiki
The Cramps Allmusic
Crypt of The Cramps
Mike's Cramps Webpage

Essential Listening


Songs the Lord Taught Us
Gravest Hits
A Date With Elvis
Stay Sick!

Essential Reading


The Wild World of The Cramps

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