"I kinda feel sorry for them because it means that they think it's a joke. "People think that we're funny," he said.
Though the Cramps were often depicted as a kind of grotesque cabaret act or a comic freakshow, Interior begged to differ. Both of them had an art-school background, and Interior had amassed a collection of 3-D cameras with which he liked to create artworks and collages. When not touring, Interior and Rorschach, both vegetarians, shared an Arabian-styled house in Los Angeles with their enormous record collection.
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Their most recent album was How to Make a Monster, a collection of rarities released in 2004. The Cramps' appeal was largely based on their pulverising live shows (critic Nick Kent described it as "a psyched-up shuddering splurge of adrenalin-pumping dementia" ), but highlights among their erratic album releases included Psychedelic Jungle, 1986's Date With Elvis (featuring What's Inside a Girl? and Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?) and 1994's FlameJob. They never broke through to mainstream audiences - though Rorschach insisted they wouldn't have turned up their noses at the opportunity - but they created a unique niche which guaranteed them a faithful audience for 30 years, and more recent arrivals such as the White Stripes, Primal Scream and the Raveonettes cheerfully acknowledge their influence. It was the shape of things to come, since the Cramps would feature continually changing lineups around the permanent core of Interior and Rorschach. Its raw, demented feel made it probably the band's finest long-player, and it influenced a mini-boom in British psychobilly represented by the likes of the Meteors.īryan Gregory quit after the Drug Train EP a few months later (he died in 2001), to be replaced by Kid Congo Powers from the Gun Club. The first Cramps album, Songs the Lord Taught Us, materialised in 1980, again helmed by Chilton and featuring band staples such as Zombie Dance and I Was a Teenage Werewolf. These tracks were released in Europe the following year as The Cramps Gravest Hits on Miles Copeland's IRS label, and the band accompanied Copeland's proteges the Police on a European tour. Now armed with their third drummer, Nick Knox, they cut some cover versions and their own song, Human Fly, but financial problems precluded an album release and the tracks were released as a pair of singles on their own Vengeance label in 1978. Their first appearance on disc required the assistance of the former Big Star luminary Alex Chilton, who declared the Cramps "the greatest rock'n'roll group in the world" and took them down to Ardent studios in Memphis.
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However, by the time the band began performing in earnest, Miriam Linna had taken over the drumkit, and this lineup played several seminal shows at CBGB's as well as landing bit parts as a gang of thugs in Amos Poe's 1978 movie The Foreigner. The original lineup featured the emaciated voodoo fetishist Bryan Gregory on second guitar and his sister, Pam "Balam", on drums (they didn't have a bass player). Rorschach's boots, fishnets and bikini, coupled with her rugged and raucous guitar-playing, made her one of rock's most distinctive female icons. They were also more inclined to exploit costumes and theatrics, creating their own visual mix of sci-fi outlandishness and mock-Gothic sleaze. The Cramps's rabid souped-up rockabilly, soon dubbed "psychobilly", set them apart from their artier brethren (Ramones excepted). There was a teeming punk and new wave music scene erupting in New York at the time, centred around the clubs CBGB's and Max's Kansas City, and the Cramps stormed to notoriety alongside the Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith and Television. They bonded over their shared love of 50s rockabilly and surf music, and moved to New York and formed the Cramps in 1976.
Interior - real name Erick Lee Purkhiser - was born in Ohio, and met his future wife and co-founder of the Cramps, Poison Ivy Rorschach (the former Kristy Wallace), in California in 1972. But that didn't mean there wasn't a waspish intelligence at work, which was capable of rhyming "linguini" and "martini" (in Eyeball in My Martini) or of plundering the occasional line from Shakespeare. "We're revolutionaries." Interior, who has died aged 60 of a heart condition, probably made the comment with tongue in cheek, since his music was a riotous amalgam of American trash culture and lurid sex rather than a bid for highbrow respectability. 'Gauguin said there are two types of artists, revolutionaries and plagiarists," Lux Interior, lead singer of the Cramps, once commented.
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