The story of The Loafin' Hyenas first club gig at Raji's in Hollywood when Lux Interior & Rob Ritter showed up

 This photo that came up in yesterday’s Memories is from when the Hollywood, California band that I was in, The Loafin' Hyenas, played our first club gig at Raji’s, the epicenter of Hollywood underground bands at the time. I think this was 1988. At that point the band consisted of myself on vocals, former Cramps guitarist Click Mort, a wild cajun gal from Beaumont named Dionne Sparks (now Neva Trejo) on fiddle, & the former rhythm section from the band Blood on the Saddle, Ron Botelho on bass & Hermann Senac on drums. This is the lineup that recorded our first single “Scatter” (about Elvis’ chimpanzee) b/w “Move It!” (a reworking of one of my earlier songs from Tex & the Saddletramps days) that was one of the early releases from Long Gone John’s Sympathy For The Record Industry label (SFTRI 008). Hear the song "Scatter" here: https://at.tumblr.com/t-tex-edwards/t-tex-edwards-ch-dld-bft-brit-omm-audio/riw8sqxa1sfx

And what a night it was. I don’t remember much from our performance, but I do remember who was there in the audience that night. In the photo below just to the left of the speaker cabinet (& darkly in the first photo), you can see original Gun Club bassist Rob "Graves" Ritter in sunglasses (yes, after dark AND indoors) sitting on the floor with his friend Tim Farris from the band Celebrity Skin. Rob was our favorite & the first bass player Click & I recruited for The Loafin' Hyenas & he jammed with us once when we were in the early stages of writing songs & putting the band together. But Rob was too busy at the time playing reunion gigs with 45 Grave & soon joining the band Thelonious Monster, to have enough time to devote to our project. He did return toward the end of The Loafin' Hyenas & contributed some beautiful bass lines to our only album, THE LOAFIN’ HYENAS on Patrick Mathè’s New Rose label out of France.

Also that night Click had invited his old bosses from The Cramps, Lux Interior & Poison Ivy Rorschach, who surprisingly showed up & crowded into the stuffy basement room at Raji’s where the bands played. I remember Lux pointing out in conversation afterwards in his humorous goofy manner, “Hey, we’re both lead singers with three letter names that end in ‘x’ Lux & Tex!”. I had invited Chip Kinman from Rank and File, a band that I admired & had opened shows for a couple of times back in Dallas at The Hot Klub, who also showed up.

The next photo is still-my-sweetie Karen Kritter & I, in one of Raji’s booths.

Then this last image is a flyer made by Click Mort. I don't remember if this was the same night as the one that I'm describing in this post. But it would make sense since Lux produced the first Mad Daddy's LP...

The Cramps Guide to Teenage Monster Movies

"God Monster" by Slim Gil: slimgil54@yahoo.fr

The Cramps Guide to Teenage Monster Movies

Paul Rambali, NME, 25 July 1981

"Movies nowadays are all high technology and no brains, no imagination. What do you call it when you do something real good and you didn't expect it? No spontaneity... Not enough instinct. All those movies all look the same. There's no more fuzzy things!" – Lux Interior

THE CRAMPS HAVE a song called 'I Was A Teenage WereWolf'. Back in the days when teenagers and werewolves were more or less synonymous terrors that caused palpable tremors in the minds of God-fearing citizens, somebody had the bright idea of combining the two in a film called I Was A Teenage WereWolf. Mixing liberal sympathies with outright shock, it urged that one unhappy juvenile's delinquency was simply the result of an incipient case of Homo Lupus. The film is a piece of sentimental fiction but the Cramps song is autobiographical fact. Lux Interior was a teenage pariah. And his teeth were soo loooong...But they told him it was 'growing pains'. And then there was a film called The Fly, about a scientist who inadvertently transmutates into a human fly. It caused quite a scare in 1958. That was long before The Cramps wrote a song called 'Human Fly', which is about being a human fly, who cries 96 tears with his 96 eyes. 

"Some Guy had just climbed the World Trade Tower and the headline in The Post that day was: HUMAN FLY CLIMBS TOWER. I was out walking along the street at about six in the morning. It felt like Night Of The Living Dead the way all of the people were wandering around. Somebody had jumped off the roof of the building next to ours and they were scrapping him off the sidewalk. All of that made me go home and write the song..."

"People sometimes say our songs are about horror movies but none of them is. 'I Was A Teenage WereWolf' has nothing to do with the film of the same name. That song is absolutely true. I wrote a song called 'Man With The X-Ray Eyes' once after seeing Man With The X-ray Eyes on mushrooms, but we never did it." – Lux Interior*

ONE OF THE things I like about The Cramps is the imagery on which they feed. A midnight snack in the twilight zone of American culture. The Cramps pick their way through the discarded junk of another generation – the garage records and the B movies – like savages scavenging in old ruins where the gold has all been looted and all that's left are the totems. I asked the members of the Cramps to choose some of their favourite films. Most of these, it turns out, are horror films. Some are lurid teenage exposes. None of them is famous, though some are infamous. All of them are raw, heedless attempts to rattle an audience somehow. It may seem like a morbid selection, but the Cramps aren't morbid people. No more so than the millions of people who regularly go to see - and are amused as much as shocked by such films as Friday The 13th. Oddly enough, you need a sense of humour to really enjoy horror films. Or at any rate a sense of the absurd. I like to think that one day The Cramps will connect with all those millions of people. Their music isn't just the soundtrack to a horror movie. It is a horror movie. A horror movie without a budget, which is often the best kind.

IVY RORSCHACH: I like Peter Lorre, especially in M, but my favourite is Barbara Steele, because she doesn't have to do anything. She just stares. She's got a great aura, so breathtaking. She's made tons of horror films, although I think Black Sunday was the best. She's just incredible because she looks like a vampire anyway. She's got theses really weird teeth, and she always plays that kind of role. I'll watch the whole of The Pit And The Pendulum just to see her for five minutes. And it's just the way she looks, it's not make-up or anything...

KID CONGO: I like James Dean, an obvious choice. I like Vincent Price...Let's see...I like all those cheesy blondes like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Mamie Van Doren I like a lot!

NICK KNOX: I like those blonde actresses too. And I like Clint Eastwood because he's so cool. The way he handles a gun: "I got five bullets in this…Do you feel lucky?". The way he kills all the bad and the ugly. That's what I want to do, kill all the bad and the ugly.

LUX INTERIOR: I always have an impossible time picking a favourite because I don't like actors or actresses too much. I like things that get completed without any stars or things like that...

Films

Note: Dates and production details have been given where possible, but some of these films were doomed to obscurity. The only remaining copies are probably rotting away in the store rooms of Southern drive-ins where they once got a week-long feature run before making way for a Budd Boetticher western or a re-run of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers.

Mother's Day (1980)

Directed by Charles Kaufman

Starring Nancy Hendrickson and Deborah Luce

KID: It's one of the new wave of cheap horror films that are making the rounds in America. It's sort of like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but more up-to-date. It's about this mother and her two sons, Ike and Adlai. There's these three college buddy girls who go on a fraternity hike. They're heading off into the mountains and all the townspeople are saying: "oh... You don't wanna go up there. It's not safe!" and so on, and of course they ignore them, as stupid college girls would do, and of course Ike and Adlai get hold of them and terrorise them. Ike and Adlai have the best house in the world. I would die to live in this house. It's completely covered in graffiti, inside and out. Great words like 'Bread' and 'Milk'... all this really good stuff on the walls. They eat their food out of garbage pails – dog food and rice crispies and stuff. It's too cheap for anybody to put their name to it, but I think it was made in New Jersey. Anyway, I haven't got to the good part yet. One of the girls gets killed, and then the other girls get their own back. They get Ike and put Draino down his throat and then smash his head through the TV set, and then Adlai gets an axe in the crotch. It all looks like a home movie, and the dialogue is great, so funny.

IVY: It's called Mother's Day because the two guys are both murderous assholes but they're absolutely terrified of their mother. All through the film the mother is saying: "Don't go out in the woods, boys, because Queenie's out there! "Queenie's supposed to be some sort of bogeywoman, but the two guys think there's no such things as a bogeywoman. Then after the girls have killed the family and you think it's all over, this thing called Queenie arrives, and that's the end of the film. There was a real epidemic of these horror movies just made by amateurs. None of them ever gets a feature run. They get shown in bills of three movies and it only costs two dollars to get in. A lot of them are just miserable but that was a good one.

Ship of Zombies (1972)

LUX: That's a really great one, though it would probably be pretty hard to see. It just consists of these people that are shipwrecked out in this boat for some reason; they're in this boat and they come across a mist-shrouded ship, so they get on board. Most of them go below deck and then one by one the girls come on deck in bikinis and these Zombies come out of the hold and chase them. They chase the first one for almost 15 minutes, and the whole time she's screaming at the top of her lungs and cutting herself as she runs into things. By the time they finally catch up with her she's covered in blood from head to toe from continually running into things. The Zombies are real wild too. And it’s all human being noises backwards! And one after another they get killed off. Nothing else happens. It goes on for an hour and a half. I think it was made in the early '70s. In LA they show a lot of these Mexican and Philipino movies of which maybe only ten prints were ever made. These sick LA TV stations buy them and show them. LA is much better than New York was for horror movies. New York has this standard thing of showing only the kitsch favourites. LA gets the real raw junk!

Death Race 2000 (1975)

Directed by Paul Bartel

Starring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone

NICK: It's a sports movie. The Death Race is the national sport of America in 1999. It's a race from New York to the West Coast and you score points by running people over. It's a real neat movie because they race around in these souped-up cars and some of them have guns that come out and some of them have daggers and there's a cowboy who's got these two big long-horns on the bonnet that he stabs his points with. When they stab somebody or run someone over the blood is so crimson red, and it just gushes out of the wounds. If you like colour you'll like this. Stallone plays a driver called Machine Gun Joe Kelly. He should have got an Academy Award. At the start of the race he pulls up to the line and there are all these people in the stands with big white F's on their sweatshirts because Frankenstein is the top driver. Stallone pulls out a machine gun and starts shooting into the audience. That's my favourite movie. That's why I like to drive so much...

The Cool And The Crazy (1958)

Directed by William Witney

Starring Scott Marlowe, Gigi Perreau and Dick Bakalyan.

"A few weeks ago a Brooklyn school principal committed suicide because he could not suppress the rape and hoodlumism in his institution. The Cool And The Crazy is a badly written, sloppily edited, poorly directed, low-budget film that may well inspire more such tragedies." - The Hollywood Reporter.

Filmed on location in Kansas city, where Dick Bakalyan and another actor were arrested for their delinquent appearance. Bakalyan also made a film called Hot Car Girls that year, and Richard Staehling in an essay called 'The Truth About Teen Movies' calls him "one of the teen-flick greats".

IVY: It's kinda like a Reefer Madness of the '50s, where all these teenagers are whacked out on pot. All these cool and crazy '50s teenagers get high on pot and crack up their cars. There's dialogue like: "Oh, you don't know what it's like being hooked on the smoke!" The whole movie's in slang. It's ridiculous, Daddy-o!

The Devil On Wheels (1947)

(Lux carried a cassette of the sound track to this one around with him.)

LUX: Forget about all other stuff... 'Teenagers rack themselves up on the highway! It’s great! They all talk like Ed 'Kookie' Byrnes from 77 Sunset Strip. It's from 1947 and everything they say in it is rock'n'roll talk. It's all new language. Junior builds a hot rod and Dad says: Now don't race this. It's alright to build it but I don't want to catch you racing it." And the kid says: "Oh, I never would, Dad...the next thing you see is vroom! He's taking off at ninety miles an hour with his girlfriend next to him saying: "Come on, you chicken!" It's just the greatest; The kid's putting more and more carburettors on his hot rod. It goes on and on and all the time he's promising not to race. Towards the end of the film he hits a woman on the street and then he goes home and finds out his Mom was knocked down that day by a hit and run driver.

Hot Rods To Hell (1967)

Directed by John Brahm

Produced by Sam Katzman

(Legend has it that Sam Katzman coined the word 'Beatnik'. Other legends have it that he overheard one of his technicians using it and put it in a film pronto. In 1956 Katzman made four films. The titles: Rock Around The Clock, Earth vs The Flying Saucers, Rumble On The Docks, The WereWolf. What a legacy!)

KID: Hot Rods To Hell is about this gang of kids who terrorize a small town. There's this one scene where the guy's driving around in this convertible hot rod and his girlfriend's sitting on the ledge behind him, almost on his shoulders. She's got her hands in front of his face so he can't see and she's shouting: "Faster! Faster!" After that, how could you want to watch anything else?

Death In Small Doses (1957)

Starring Peter Graves and Chuck Connors

Directed by Joseph M. Newman

NICK: That's another real good one. It stars Chuck Connors who was The Rifleman. It's kinda like a documentary about truck drivers and speed. Y'know, the Bennie kind? And Chuck Connors is a beatnik truck driver who's on the road and on the go 24 hours a day. Every town he hits he just pops more pills and he's got a girl on each arm. His lings' real way out, like gonesville, Daddy-o! He ends up hallucinating and crashing his truck. It was made in 1957. I like it a lot.

Blood Feast (1963)

Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)

Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis

LUX: There are all these movies that were made by this guy named Herschell Gordon Lewis who owned a chain of drive-ins in the early '60s. He made them to show at his drive-ins. Blood Feast is about this weird guy who has an Egyptian temple in his basement where he sacrifices people, and Two Thousand Maniacs! It's real great. It's about a Southern town, and the first thing you see is a bunch of people putting up a detour sign at the crossroads. It turns out the whole town is full of people who came back from the grave after the Civil War. They were massacred by the Union soldiers and they came back from the grave after a hundred years looking for revenge. They lure all these vacationers into the town and get them to join in all these quaint backwoods sports like rolling down a hill in a barrel; except the barrel's lined with knives. Eventually they just return to their graves for another hundred years. That really is a great movie, and it still gets shown from time to time.

The Creeping Terror (1964)

Directed by Art J Nelson

LUX: The monster in that one is actually a rug; a rug over a car! it sort of looks like a turtle crossed with a giraffe. The head comes down and scoops people into the body. First of all it eats an entire hootenany, 40 kids out hootenanying in the woods. Then it eats an entire record hop. The first time it strikes there's a guy and a girl laying on a blanket. The girl's wearing a bikini and the guy's running his hands all over her. They see this rug coming with a car under it and the guy takes off and leaves the girl there screaming. And the girl's got high heels on too! A bikini and high heels! There's a censored version and an uncensored version the girl takes about five minutes to get eaten. It's so sick. It's the height of fashion, that movie. All the girls wear beehives and back-zip lurex pants.

IVY: Yeah, I had a pair of pants made that were inspired by that movie! And of course it's all jive talk because it's always teenagers that get snuffed by the monster. It goes to this place where there are all these teenagers making out in their cars and flips all the cars over. I'm not sure what happens in the end. I could never really follow it...

LUX: Like all good B movies it just kinda peters out. In the end it just gets boring. Instead of building to a climax, they run out of ideas and the action just disintegrates. But you can see that one. It's still around and it'll be a classic one day when people realise... Boy, it had the greatest fashions. The monster breaks through the wall of a gymnasium to eat the record hop – all these teenagers dancing – and what of course would happen at that moment? A fight breaks out! Amazing; It's probably a more true account of America in the early '60s than American Graffiti or any of that bullshit. It's the way it really was. Total insanity. A fight'll break out any minute – it wasn't all nice people and ponytails. It was the real fashions of the late-'50s and early '60s – incredibly sexy and tribal and outrageous!

IVY: It's all pointed bras, stilleto heels, skin-tight gold lame pants with a back-zip, ankle boots, ratty, beehive hair, and everybody twisting.

LUX: All the guys wore pants that looked like they were sewn on to them, and they'd never be able to take them off. The real hard-core hoods they were then; not punks, hoods! I grew up in a place outside of Akron, Ohio, and the only people that lived there were hillbillys that worked in the rubber factories. The dances that went on there and the clothes that people wore then, in the early '60s, were just the wildest, the absolute wildest! Beyond anything else. It was like a science fiction comic book, wild and bizarre and nothing to do with Pat Boone and all that stuff. Places away from the cultural centres, like northern California or the South or the Mid-west, is where it was the most extreme. Those were the places where people weren't afraid of doing something that wasn't in vogue or the new trend or whatever. I think that'll always be the case. The most crazy stuff, the most memorable stuff, will always go on away from the culture, away from the ballet and Broadway and things like that. I don't think that's really a good breeding ground for rock'n'roll or its abominations!

Paul Rambali, 1981

(via David Holleman)

UPDATE: Here are photocopies of 2 parts of the original article, the first part is missing...

(via Õlivier El Capitan)

Original Lux artwork for his brother Michael's 1st Band, called "Tea" ca 1968

original artwork by Lux, for his brother Michael's 1st Band, called "Tea" ca 1968
via http://wacka4macca.tumblr.com

LUX interview from GRAVYZINE

LUX interview from GRAVYZINE

http://www.gravyzine.com/LuxInteriorInterview.html

 LUX INTERIOR, the ultra slithery frontman of the legendary CRAMPS engages Sal of Electric Frankenstein in this sinful interview........

I noticed your last album was dedicated to Goulardi…He just past away, right?

Lux: Yup.

Out here Zacherly is pretty much THE Horror Host. Can you explain to our readers the difference between the two, I don’t think most people are too familiar with the horror hosts and that whole phenomenon.

Lux: They were different people, Zacharly and Goulardi. To say they were just Horror Hosts, they were much more than that, they were somewhere between a horror host and Hitler. Goulardi, he was just way out of control, always causing trouble, always in trouble but he was so powerful that he could get away with it. Kind of like Elvis Presley shaking his hips on television, he was so powerful he could get away with it, everyone was upset about it but they couldn’t do anything about it because it was bringing in too much money. When Goulardi was on TV in the 60’s crime just plummeted because no one was out, they were all watching Goulardi. He was just a totally rebellious character. A good model for young people and was one of the forerunners of what later became youth counterculture type thing.

They had a lot of audiences based on television more than let’s say the movies themselves.

Lux: Yeah,oh yeah. The movies were, of course those movies were great and everything and that’s part of it, but the part where they played music it was like a party, just the chance to go nuts, the music like Goulardi played "Poppa Ooh Mao Mao" by the Revingtons, wild great rock’n’roll records that he played during the time that he was on. He would blow up things. He was just a role model.

Have you seen any tapes of Zacharly’s show that he had in the 60’s with the house and the Standells and the Young Lions, they always used to play. I used to live near there when I was little.

Lux: Yeah, I’ve never seen Zacharly, I’ve seen the video tape of Zacherly introducing trailers and stuff which is great. I never saw his show but I’m always a big fan of Zacherly in the monster magazines. He was just an amazing. I think that Goulardi and Zacherly were probably really the best ones. I’ve always loved Goulardi and as a matter of fact we often play his hit single.

Our band did "Coolest little monster" with Zacherly on the B side of one of our singles. He got a new record deal so he redid that song. He originally was going to sing it with us but he couldn’t do it because of his contract, he was still signing by contract so he let us take from the original record the intro and the middle so on our record it’s him doing the intro….We see him all the time. Have you ever gone to the Chiller Theatre conventions.

Lux: No, We’ve always been too busy. I really would have loved to go to the Chiller conventions. It sounds great. I’ve seen photos of him there and he looks great.

We used to help around the convention with, Kevin Clement is the guy. If you ever want to be a guest just let me know, we can set it up.

Lux: Oh we’ll probably do that sometime, it’s just a bad timing thing. That’s ‘cause we’re always doing something right at that time so far.

I don’t know if you collect. Obviously by what you’re interested in musically you can see that you’re interested in obscure records and horror toys, I’m sure. Have you ever on tour found really good finds in any thrift shops?

Lux: Oh, all the time. We’re always out looking for stuff. It’s great because we go to a lot of weird places, we’ll stop on the bus, in-between here and there we’ll find amazing things. Fairly often, you know, the farther away you get from the 60s the harder it is to find things. Somebody just gave us two albums by the Jaguars in Montreal, amazing instrumental albums. Fans give us stuff sometimes and that’s really great. Right before we left we found a box with a bunch of jelly jars on top of it in a junk store and I piled all this stuff and looked in this box and something just made me want to see what’s in that box and I found just a stack of amazing 78s of all 50s, the real wild, obscure, crazy rock’n’roll stuff. Like Blues, R’n’B stuff, that was the latest thing that we found. But we find stuff all the time.

One thing I want to know about. Your lyrics are interesting and definitely entertaining, not exactly what draws your inspiration but what books or movies you particularly find that you can pull from that inspires them.

Lux: Well, all of them. Mainly horror movies and exploitation movies and a lot of stuff comes from those press books from those old movies. Lines out of old movies, comic books that we collect, all the old horror comics of the 50s, probably about the only comics that we collect are obscure horror comics, the real sick ones from the 50s. Some stuff comes from there but mainly just old records, old rockabilly records and that stuff, singles mainly, 45s.

50s comics have the greatest cover, those colors.

Lux: Oh yeah.

And the artists. It seems as though the artist who didn’t know how to draw made the coolest monsters.

Lux: Yeah, real archaic looking.

Our record covers, we try to make each one look like an old, crazy comic book covers. Have you got a hold some old, obscure horror film lately on tape that might be real interesting. I’m sure you got stacks.

Lux: Well the ones that I really like a lot are that I think will become more popular. At one time no one ever knew who Betty Page was and we really loved Betty Page and I can’t believe that now she’s as well known as Marilyn Monroe or somebody. I think that the next thing that might become popular are these West German horror movies from the early 60s. They’re just packed with cool stuff. They have all these weird camera angles, they go take a drink and it’ll show them looking at the bottom of the glass. And some girl stripping on the other side of a nightclub. They all take place in nightclubs or stripclubs. Just weird camera angles. Some of them look like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari where some of the angles are so weird and stuff. And they all have sexy girls in them and really weird stories. Titles like "The Head", "Phantom of Soho", "In on the River", just a lot of them early 60s West German horror movies. Klaus Kenski’s in some of them, Edgar Wallace. If you want to get one just to see what I’m talking about, "Phantom of Soho’s a good one".

I heard of a lot of these. The French and Spanish are easy to come by nowadays, and Italian ones, of course.

Lux: Yeah, you got to find a good rental place that gets good Sinister cinema stuff. The Something Weird Video stuff.

Yeah, those are always at the convention. They’re easy to get. Something Weird come out here all the time, they have a big huge table.

Lux: Yeah we’re real good friends with Mike Rainey!

Yeah, Mike’s real nice. We talk to him a bunch of times and we try and get clips from Kiss me Quick and other ones that have Frankenstein, those nudie cutie ones with Monsters and nudies in them. Those are pretty cool. We use some of those stills for our record covers.

Another question I wanted to ask. Your stage clothing, do you get them tailored or are they something you find in thrift shops.

Lux: Oh, half and half. If we find something that’s cool and sometimes we get things made. Works both ways.

Ivy’s outfit in NYC, everyone’s asking where she got it.  

Lux: The one that she just wore. That was given to us by Margaret, the guitar player of the Doll Rods. She wasn’t wearing that when the tour started and she pulled it out and said, "Hey, look at this She-Elvis outfit" and Ivy said "Ooh yeah" and she put that on and she looked good in it.

Lately, as far as listening, has anything been on the record player for awhile? I guess being on tour is kinda hard.

Lux: Oh all kinds of stuff. We listen to stuff all the time. We bring a CD player, 2 big boxes of cassettes and stuff, compilations I’ve made out of singles. That stuff we always take with us. Just a lot of Rockabilly stuff is kinda what we are listening to, it’s really our favorite thing. We did that interview in Incredibly Strange music talking about Bachelor Pad Music, that’s what they’re calling that these days, we listen to that sometimes, that’s sometimes a fun thing to listen to but our real passion is Rockabilly and 60s.

There seems to be lots of Rockabilly coming out. I mean I remember the first time in the 70s Rockabilly resurgence but now there’s so many, even more things coming out of the vaults. It’s like a time machine, people cranking them out.

Lux: There seems to be a lot of bands that seems to treat it too reverently. You know, they sing about boppin’ in the soda shop and all this kinda stuff and that ain’t what rockabilly is supposed to be about. It’s really supposed to be about sex. And I like Reverend Horton Heat, they do something new with it, and there are a few other bands that do. I wish that somebody would take Rockabilly a step further, and Psychobilly that’s not sexual enough, it’s too fast and not sexual enough most of the time. It’s kind of like Rockabilly mixed with punk. It seems it’s not as sexy as it should be.

Yeah it doesn’t really seem to be concerned with that. It seems to be concerned with the hair-do’s and basically how fast they can play. It’s not tribal enough or sensuous.

Lux: Yeah, I mean if Elvis was concerned about what came 30 years before him, he’d be doing the Charleston. It makes no sense.

It didn’t seem like they want to be rule breakers, like Elvis was more into breaking the rules, so was Jerry Lee Lewis and all the original people.

Lux: Yeah and I think that’s what Rock’n’Roll is really all about whether it’s R’n’B, Rockabilly, whatever it is. I think the Stooges were a great band. They did something brand new when they started, they were about breaking rules and every once in a while something like that happens. But I don’t see much happening since punk rock hit the 70s, you know the Sex Pistols and the Clash and the American bands like the Ramones, when that happened and when we started out, I think that was culture changing and people are still copying that, fashion is copying that and since than Grunge was just a copy of early 70s progressive rock. The thing that punk rock rebelled against – and retro - that’s just disco for the fifth time over again. I’d like to see a bunch of 16 year old kids do something exciting and new with R’n’R. That’d be great.

Yeah it seems like just now, maybe since MTV has stopped being a big focal point for people the young kids I’ve noticed in our audience, the people under 20 seem to be into rock’n’roll again.

Lux: Uh Huh, I noticed that too. Our audiences are mostly very young, kids under 20. They get the point right away. They understand.

Yeah, because they do it by feeling

Lux: It’s all the ones that are 30 years old or something that are trying to make some kind of big philosophy to understand what it is.

It seems like these young kids when I talk to them, they’re rebeling against the generation before them which was Hardcore and Rap and what they’re working on is music that has melody and lyrics that you can remember. That’s what’s good about The Cramps because always their songs were memorable.

Lux: Yeah that’s a good thing and besides that teenagers are always going to be into sex, so if anything good happens that’s probably the age group where it’s going to come from.

Your record covers went through different themes, an S&M clothes faze for awhile but now it seem slike you’re going towards more eclectic, right?

Lux: Well I don’t know, we haven’t had very many record covers so they were just some picture we took at the time. We have always been kind of interested in the same thing so I have no idea what our next record cover would be.

I was over at Epitaph when they were putting your record cover together – the new one – and then told me you guys are going to be coming out through them. Has it made any difference to you being on Epitaph? Sometimes labels are a little controversial with some people.

Lux: Well, that’s OK with me. They sell to the right stores, they sell vinyl and they sell CDs to the stores where a lot of people would go buy a Cramps record and that’s that’s good and they know what they are doing in regards to a lot of things. I just like the people there. The record company we were with before that was a label distributed by Warner Bros. And that was a real horrifying experience. Warner Bros. Was the only real major label that we dealt with so it’s really refreshing to be with Epitaph who are actual real people.

Yeah, I remember that you guys were having a lot of problems with IRS records. It’s hard to find a label to really care about what you’re doing and back you up. But with the Cramps all the fans I know of, myself included, were real concerned that you find someone who would really help you and back you up in a positive way.

Lux: Yeah, it really is because everybody sees something different in the cramps and there’s been times in the past where the record label would say, "Oh, you’re a freak show!", "You’re weirdos!" "We really got to push that freaky thing!", and that’s a part of it. Yeah, it’s a freak show to some guy in a polo shirt but who cares about them. It’s much better to have a record company who says we know who you are, we know who your fans are and this should be something sincere to everybody involved and honest and that’s the best thing to do.

Distribution is really important and things like that and they probably have a good distribution network.

Lux: Yeah they do.

I’ve seen you over the past dozen years and how the shows have changed live, sometimes it’s more elaborate. Like one time I saw you play at "Privates" in NYC and you had the spiders coming out and cobwebs all over the stage and everything. Is there a difference between how you set up the shows year by year, is it planned out how you wanna do it.

Lux: It’s not too planned out. I think some of it is just what we’re into at the moment. We try to have as few rules as possible and we try to leave it open to being unpredictable. So we don’t like having a lot of props around too much but sometimes we’ll we’ll do something because we think it’s fun or somebody gives us something, just like that outfit that Ivy wore. We didn’t plan it out and draw it on drawing boards…

Well I don’t mean it being planned out on paper but as far as wanting to express a certain thing during a certain period.

Lux: Yeah, it’s kinda just what we’re interested in at the time. It’s always different too, sometimes we have no time and we just have to throw something together and other times we have more time to plan something. It’s always different, it seems like we’re always busy. It’s hard when you are in a Rock’n’Roll band, as you know, it’s hard to just keep it above water.

Just the mail drives you crazy, when you get stacks of letters it gets to be very difficult, and you start to worry about the things people write you about. Do you get to play smaller clubs anymore?

Lux: Oh yeah, we play small clubs. It’s really fun. We just played in Montreal in a club that holds 650 people. It’s like two floors and the floor’s just like 10 feet from the stage, the bottom floor is right at the edge of the stage, and it goes all around the stage so I mean nobody was farther away than 20 or 30 feet. And there’s like 650 people crammed in there and that was just chaos. It’s like when you see in movies in the peevles?, it’s like the minute you step on stage, like cshhhhhhhhh. You could hardly hear the music it was just the shrieking going on. That was a ball. Like that showshow we did in NY, the first row of people was like 10 feet from the stage, or at least it seemed like it with all those lights shining, I couldn’t even see the audience half the time..And that’s fun too but the more intimate it is the more fun it is, the more unusual.

The lighting was great though, there in NYC, it was really dramatic.

Lux: Yeah, we only use red and white lights, we try to keep it as simple as possible and you can do a lot of things with that. We don’t have lights that look like disneyland, the color of the rainbow just going off for no reason.

Oh yeah it drives you crazy. You’re trying to play and lights turn green, purple, orange. And you can’t see the fretboard. And the strobe lights too, you do it tastefully, you don’t have it running through every song. When it does come on, everybody really savors those moments, it gets pretty cool. When you’ve been playing, basically the original days when I saw you at the CBGB’s theatre way back on the Bowery, did you ever think that you would still be playing from then till now?

Lux: Well, we didn’t give it that much thought I don’t think. I still can’t imagine not doing the Cramps at this point I still can’t imagine not doing it so I don’t even know what’s going to happen. We’ll just do what seems like the right thing to do. Back then I really don’t think we thought how long are we going to do this. The first time we played CBGB’s, the first time we auditioned I think we were thinking that we’d go out and nobody would like us that much and we’d only play once.

Yeah everybody thinks that the first time. The guitar that Ivy got when she played Human Fly, that Dan Electro was that a vintage one.

Lux: That is completely made, made out of a piece of wood. That was made by a guy in Washington DC, Steve Metts. He makes guitars for people, he makes guitars for ZZ Top, and when we were playing in Washingoton DC he called up Ivy in the hotel room and said, "Hey I made you a guitar I want to give it to you.", and she said "Oh, OK." It’s pretty amazing when you see it close up it has mother of pearl inlay in the fretboard, It has the Cramps logo and on both sides it has those trucker but flap girls. It’s really beautiful.

Yeah you could see it’s got a purple shine from where I was in the audience. I thought it was a Dan Electro the way it was shaped.

Lux: Well it’s a copy of a long horn, the same size and everything but it was completely made from scratch.

What do you think of, I noticed Guitar Wolf opened for you, that whole resurgence in Japan of that whole wild rock’n’roll.

Lux: Well I like a lot of those bands, of course we got Guitar Wolf, we sought them out to get them on the bill and it was difficult. It was difficult communicating with people in Japan most of the time. But I really like the 5678’s, they’re really one of our favorite bands. Have you ever heard their stuff?

Yeah I met them a few times, they’ve played down in NY.

Lux: Yeah and there’s some other bands from over there that are really good. The Cedrics? Yeah there’s a pretty crazy scene over there.

Have you been to any countries besides the usual ones.You've played in Japan and England and all that but have you played even further east? Asian countries at all like Thailand?

Lux: Yeah we haven't been to Thailand but we will probably do that soon. 

North Vietnam is having bands come there now.

Lux: Oh Yeah? I didn't know that. I heard that China and Thailand are having bands in there now and we plan to do that but I hadn't heard Vietnam.

Yeah you can go in to North Vietnam through Sweden and get in there and somebody told me that 10,000 people will come to a show, even old villagers because there's nothing else.  But they've been buying American Punk records through the mail now.

Lux: That would be really great.

I got a letter once and I sold bunches of singles, not just of my band but all different ones to people of North Vietnam.  I talked to someone from North Vietnam and they're telling me all these Swedish bands come, and how other bands come through there now that it's a little bit more relaxed. It might be cool to go there.


Lux: If the Cramps played there they probably wouldn't forget it for a while!

Yeah I read that in Thailand when they show Laverne and Shirley, at the beginning they say "Please do not copy these women - they are escaped from a mental institution and are not like how nice normal American girls act." I wonder if you come out to North Vietnam everybody will start emulating a Cramps look.

Lux: That would be pretty funny.

THE END