The Cramps - Gravest Hits (1979) A step back…
In that car, that evening, one of the most beautiful love stories of all time is born.
On that convertible cruising towards the sunset with Adkins' music whipping through the air, that evening, the Cramps are born.
Erick (who later becomes Lux Interior) and Kristy (renaming herself Poison Ivy) will spend the next 37 years together, until his death, but they will never marry, even though everyone will continue to call them husband and wife.
Yet they will celebrate that union every second of their lives. Morbidly attracted to the same things, driven by the same passions, obsessed with the same phobias. Dangerously identical, extraordinarily perverse.
That’s why the Cramps will become, without a doubt, the most erotic band in the history of rock ‘n roll. Rock ‘n roll, folks. Not that pantomime of muscles and grimaces from weightlifters that is rock, but ROCK ‘N’ ROLL: manic bewilderment, hormonal effervescence, sweat, fun, desecration, nihilism, and subversion of the rules of good taste.
“I know a place, far from here, where the do-gooders won’t dare disturb us,” Lux Interior will sing years later. There you go. The Cramps will live for 35 years in that very place.
Perched in their castle like Dracula, they fuel sinister legends, instill terror, and incite hate.
Gravest Hits is considered their debut, but in fact, it is not.
It is a mini-LP put together by I.R.S. to celebrate the signing of the contract with the most talked-about band in the New York punk scene. A strategic marketing operation to introduce the world to the first two singles of Lux and Ivy’s band, already privately pressed on the Vengeance label (for the second, there is a version with glow-in-the-dark ink: if you own it, you’re safe from any pension reform, NdLYS): Surfin’ Bird/The Way I Walk and Human Fly/Domino. The fifth added piece is another cover, a lopsided song written in 1958 by Baker Knight and brought to fame by Ricky Nelson: Lonesome Town.
The record has a derailing sound. One helplessly witnesses the rape of Surfin’ Bird by the Trashmen just as one is devoured by the damned buzz of the fly-man, the first character of the long horror saga of Lux & Ivy.
Forget teddy boys and bananas.
The Cramps humiliate rockabilly. The Cramps are the skeleton of rock ‘n’ roll, not its muscles.
The Cramps have bad teachers.
The Cramps are unhealthy, annihilating, paradoxical, grotesque, sacrilegious.
Maybe they are really evil inside, or maybe not.
But anyone who sees them play early in their career, within the walls of CBGBs or inside the common area of some psychiatric hospital, feels a shiver in their pants. No one goes home the way they were before, after a Cramps show.
And when you put a Cramps record on the turntable, it’s as if you let your seed splatter on a piece of Hell. Always.
