The Cramps - Smell Of Female

One gets the feeling from the title and cover art alone that if the Cramps could have released this live document in Glorious Smell-o-Rama they would have jumped at the chance. Even without it one can almost sense the whiffs of perspiration and energy the group was cooking up; recorded at New York's Peppermint Lounge with Kid Congo Powers on guitar, the quartet slams out a then mostly entirely new set of songs with, as expected, appropriate covers as needed. The wonderfully profane take on Hasil Adkins' "She Said" surfaces here, with Interior sounding like he's about to die more than once. The Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" and the perfectly appropriate "Faster Pussycat," taken from the legendary Russ Meyer film of the same name, also give the band more than a little something to chew on. As for the originals, the usual mess of swampy rockabilly and industrial strength noise comes together in just the right way from the start. "Thee Most Exalted Potentate of Love" gives Interior the chance to do his undead but still wired loverman thang right from the start, while Ivy and Powers hit the twang hard and Knox keeps everything going just right. "Call of the Wighat" is another highpoint, with Knox showing that he's up to more involved pounding and percussion when the need arises. A studio cut, "Surfin' Dead," surfaces as a ringer at the end; if not quite the Cramps go Beach Boys, it arguably forecasts the Jesus and Mary Chain's "Kill Surf City" just enough.

The Cramps - …Off The Bone

This British compilation includes the entirety of the Cramps' first release, the Gravest Hits EP, along with selections from Songs the Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle, Smell of Female, and a live version of "You Got Good Taste" (shortened here to "Good Taste"). It covers the years 1979-1983, a formative period in the band's long career. Ten of the tracks can also be found on the domestic compilation Bad Music for Bad People, which was released the following year. Although the bulk of the material consists of covers, you can hardly tell (barring an intimacy with any of the originals). Once the Cramps get hold of a song, they always make it their own; even the more recognizable numbers like "Surfin' Bird," "Lonesome Town," and "Fever" all benefit from Lux Interior's vocal prowess. He's a proto-punk screamer like Screamin' Jay Hawkins or the Sonics' Gerry Roslie on the rockin' numbers, but can caress a ballad like mid-period Elvis when the need arises. None of the songs sound as if they could possibly have been written any time after the '60s. Alex Chilton produced the first ten tracks, the Cramps the remaining seven. [The cover art for ...Off the Bone has varied over the years; the 1987 Illegal edition is rendered -- appropriately enough -- in 3-D.]

The Cramps - A Date With Elvis

Released in 1986 (originally only in The UK) A Date With Elvis was the fourth studio album by The Cramps, and solidified their particular take on psychobilly, mixing the band's usual influences from early rock'n'roll, rhythm and blues, surf music, horror movies and vintage Americana to frequently macabre effect. Tracks like How Far Can Too Far Go?, People Ain't No Good and Kizmiaz captured The Cramps' untamed spirit, with trademark twangy guitar riffs and pounding drums providing a suitably gritty backing for Lux Interior's distinctive, primal vocals. A Date With Elvis maintained the band's fascination with all things taboo and subversive, with songs exploring themes of lust, obsession, and the darker side of rock'n'roll culture, while the questioning Can Your Pussy Do the Dog? and What's Inside A Girl? Show cased the band's irreverent and frequently unhinged approach to song writing.

When Kirsty Wallace and Erick Purkhiser met and fell in love at college in Sacramento in 1972 they changed their names to Poison Ivy Rorschach and Lux Interior and moved to New York in 1975 to catch the start of the CBGB punk scene and welcomed into the dirty, steam-filled, night time streets, the screaming monster that was The Cramps. You either get the 50s kitschy, B-movie, fetish-inspired aesthetic they created or you don’t, and it’s that simple. Primitive rock'n'roll stripped back to its bare sexy voodoo bones with the addition of some X-rated sci-fi and horror imagery, and of course, a good risqué double-entendre lyric.
For some, the band and their music may have more in tune with The Rocky Horror Picture Show than Spinal Tap, and that’s fine, there is a connection. But a large number of metal heads and classic rockers do get it. However, it was the alternative kids, the punks and the goths, and the outsiders, that ran with it and were inspired to bring the Cramps influence into the bands they formed across numerous underground genres. Even the band themselves unintentionally created the ‘psychobilly’ scene by using the phrase from a Johnny Cash song on early fliers, simply to draw in an audience. A line can even be drawn from The Cramps through the Gun Club, to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and The Sisters of Mercy. From punk to Alternative to Goth. Without Bryan Gregory, their founding guitarist, there may have been no original 80s Batcave goth image as we know it. And in turn, a lot of what gets called alternative rock music that followed.
Strictly speaking, this is not the Cramps best album. It is a great album, but it’s not their best. They have darker, rawer, and more dangerous sounding material. And were a more dangerous band before this album was released. Go and watch early videos. It is however their most accessible, and highest charting album. And it contains two of their more notorious and well known song titles in Can Your Pussy Do The Dog? and What’s Inside A Girl? It’s not a perfect album, or without its faults, but it is definitely a fun album with a unique feel and a great fitting DIY production that still stands up today.
A lot of bands have covered Cramps tracks, which is ironic considering a lot of The Cramps material is covers of old rockabilly, blues, doo wop and chicken-fried country songs. Although this, their third album (or fourth if you count the early singles compilation Off The Bone) is where they started to release albums with more original songs than covers, all written by Lux and Ivy. From Ivy’s squawky, twangy, more Scotty Moore than Chet Atkins, with a bit of Bo Diddley thrown in, rocking guitar, in conjunction with Lux’s best reverb soaked, Elvis stuttering hiccup, on the most salacious of lyrics, The Cramps did nothing new, but they made it sound new by reviving the original underground elements of rock'n'roll, which had a lot more in common with punk than people would like to admit. Yes, there is a lot of humour and sex in the music and image, as there was in that original underground rock and roll sound, but the band couldn’t have done the music justice if they hadn’t been serious about it. And they were. All driven by Ivy, musically and business wise. The uncrowned queen of rock'nroll who had all the gum-chewing, ice queen, dominatrix outfit-wearing moves, and riffs, but watched as all the guys in the band got the credit for it.
There will never be another band like them.
 

Psychedelic Jungle

Here, Kid Congo Powers and Ivy form just as fine a team as Brian Gregory and Ivy did on earlier releases and if things aren't always as flat-out fried as on Gravest Hits and Songs The Lord Taught Us, the same atmosphere of swampy, trashy, rockabilly-into-voodoo, ramalama reigns supreme. The song titles alone show the band hasn't really changed its sights any: the opening two tracks are covers, "Green Fuz" and "Goo Goo Muck," while originals include "Caveman," "Can't Find My Mind," and the brilliant "The Natives Are Restless." Then there's "Don't Eat Stuff Off the Sidewalk," which almost sounds worthy of a Frank Zappa freakout (at least lyrically). Other legendary tracks like "Primitive" and "Green Door" get the Cramps makeover this time out, with the proper mix of respect and hot-wired energy, while "The Crusher" sounds like Interior's on the verge of going completely insane. The Cramps themselves take over the production this time around, resulting in a cleaner, crisper sound (especially when it comes to Knox's drums) that isn't quite as wired, for better or for worse. As commanding showmen, though, the quartet's style comes through big time, with Interior throwing in appropriate yells, yipes, and other sounds where appropriate; his antics at the end of "Goo Goo Muck" are especially gone. If anything, the moodier strutting throughout increases the creepiness of what's afoot; if things aren't psychedelic in the commonly accepted sense, it's certainly not easy listening. Interior sometimes sounds almost normal, but with the sense that something strange is lurking just around the corner and Ivy is still one of the best guitarists around, her snarling reverb worth a thousand fret-shredders.

The Cramps - Songs The Lord Taught Us

Continuing the spooked-out and raging snarls of their Gravest Hits EP, the Cramps once again worked with Alex Chilton on the group's full-album debut, Songs the Lord Taught Us. The jacket reads "file under: sacred music," but only if one's definition includes the holy love of rockabilly sex-stomp, something which the Cramps fulfil in spades. Having spent Gravest Hits mostly doing revamps of older material, the foursome tackled a slew of originals like "The Mad Daddy" and "TV Set" this time around, creating one of the few neo-rockabilly records worthy of the name. Years later their songs still drip with threat and desire, testament to both the band's worth and Chilton's just-right production. "Garbageman" surfaced as a single in some areas, a wise choice given the immediately catchy roll of the song and downright frightening guitar snarls, especially on the solo. The covers of the Sonics' "Strychnine" and Billy Burnette's "Tear It Up" not to mention the concluding riff on "Fever" all challenge the originals. Interior has the wailing, hiccuping, and more down pat, but transformed into his own breathless howl, while Ivy and Gregory keep up the electric fuzz through more layers of echo than legality should allow. Knox helms the drums relentlessly; instead of punching through arena rock style, Chilton keeps the rushed rhythm running along in the back, increasing the sheer psychosis of it all.

The Cramps - Gravest Hits

Few bands actually spawn entire genres of music but The Cramps did that and their sound spawned what is now referred to as psychobilly. They mixed punk rock, surf, rockabilly, and garage rock to create a sound unlike anything else at the time. On top of that, the band’s performances were a thing of legend with enigmatic frontman, Lux Interior, writhing around the stage while his wife, Poison Ivy, hypnotized the audience with her guitar work. They were quite a spectacle both visually and audibly. The Cramps put out two singles on their own label, Vengeance Records, before signing to IRS Records, who compiled them on a 12″ EP titled Gravest Hits. This just so happened to be the first Cramps record I bought and I fell in love with it.

This first release by the Cramps shows the group laying out many of the aspects of their curious style in rudimentary fashion. Raw, slashing guitar playing derived mostly from rockabilly and somewhat from psychedelic and 1960s garage pop (the group would have no bass player until the mid-'80s) and primitive drumming provide the platform for Lux Interior's eccentric singing, which is best described as a hyper-crazed, reverb-drenched, exhibitionist rockabilly style complete with groaning, shouting, growling, and hiccuping effects. The only song written by the band here is "Human Fly," a skulking mid-tempo fuzz-guitar number with monster movie lyrics; the line "I got 96 tears/And 96 eyes" is a sly reference to the ? and the Mysterians garage band hit. The other selections are covers of classic 1950s and 1960s songs; these include a bizarre version of the Ricky Nelson crooning hit "Lonesome Town" that peppers the musical texture with stray guitar interjections, and a rip-snorting version of the Trashmen song "Surfin' Bird" that ends with a long, noisy improvisation section of doubtful tonal focus. The cavernous sound quality here lends a certain bleak feel to the music, but distortions on the vocal in "Human Fly" and drums on "Lonesome Town" merely sound poor. This unpolished but effective release is worth hearing.

The Cramps - File Under Sacred Music

When the Cramps first surfaced on the edges of New York's nascent punk scene in 1976, they were a band with a genre all their own; the word "psychobilly" hadn't been coined yet, and while "voodoo rockabilly in the key of death" was accurate enough, it didn't exactly roll off the tongue. The death of Lux Interior in 2009 finally closed the book on the band after more than three decades, but to the last they were an act with a sound and style all their own, a gleaming monument to perversity of all sorts that tapped into rock & roll's most primal influences, presenting its beating heart for all to see. Licensing issues have prevented a comprehensive, career-inclusive Cramps anthology from happening (unless anyone knows better), but Munster Records have delivered a worthwhile assessment of the group's first and most musically satisfying era with the compilation File Under Sacred Music: Early Singles 1978-1981. True to its title, this disc pulls together the A- and B-sides from ten singles the Cramps released during their first few years before differences with I.R.S. Records led to a five-year layoff from the recording studio. Since the band's first two singles were compiled on the EP Gravest Hits, most of the remaining tunes later appeared on the albums Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle, and the collections Off the Bone and Bad Music for Bad People both featured a number of B-sides and oddities, there is precious little here that can honestly be called "rare," outside of the hard-to-find "Twist & Shout" (not the Isley Brothers classic) and "Uranium Rock" (a Warren Smith cover), but if you're looking for 67 minutes of primal howling, twanging guitars, and echoing madness, you could hardly do better than this set. The Cramps made more than a few fine records after this period (particularly the albums A Date with Elvis and Stay Sick!), but they were never as consistent as they were in their first era with Nick Knox behind the drums and either Bryan Gregory or Kid Congo Powers on second guitar, and these 22 songs still wail as loud and as wild as they did when they were first recorded. As an introduction to the Cramps or a reminder of their curious ascent into the spotlight, File Under Sacred Music is remarkably close to perfect.