Normal people can’t do this couldn’t make it look hot are too chickenshit to try. If you can, well, welcome to the Cramps: They made sexy music for people who didn’t buy mainstream sex appeal, peering back at ’50s rockabilly and R&B through a big, dirty punk magnifying glass. Even Ivy’s name for the band has a sneer to it, a whiff of “female trouble,” sexual frustration, and constraint. She and Lux were obsessed with early rock’n’roll and all the contemporaneous artifacts of lowbrow culture: B-movie sexpoloitation flicks, serial killers, pin-up girls, the type of comic books that represent a contributing factor to juvenile delinquency. The things they left to the imagination-werewolves, UFOs, man-sized insects-were more fantastic still. Their work, Lux once said, was “a rallying point for certain kinds of people to come together and for certain kinds of people to stay out.” Songs the Lord Taught Us is the point of no return: the foundational document of psychobilly, a loud, theatrical, noticeably unpolished album with the tongue-in-cheek sense of the macabre that became the band’s signature.Īnd like John Waters or the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Cramps attracted a cult following. There were always four members of the Cramps, but Lux and Ivy’s bond made everything possible. The couple met in California, where a young Erick Purkhiser claimed he’d picked up Kristy Wallace hitchhiking. They hit on a shared love of the New York Dolls, moved in together, and started collecting records, combing junk stores for ’50s doo-wop, R&B, and the sped-up, country-fried sound of white Southern rockabilly bands.
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