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RIP, Lux Interior, 1946-2009

music

image of lux interior of the cramps screaming into mic

“Rock ’n’ roll has absolutely nothing to do with music. It’s much more than music. Rock ’n’ roll is who you are. You can’t call the Cramps music. It’s noise, rockin’ noise.” --Lux Interior

How does one mourn the loss of a god?

Lux Interior, the 62 year-old frontman for The Cramps, died on Wednesday. He’s survived by the rest of the planet and Poison Ivy, his wife of 34 years and Cramps’ guitarist. The band site has gone black.

The NYT obituary is good... I think I can come to terms with “zombie rockabilly” although I really think they had a unique vision and expression that wasn’t so dependent on the specifics of music history.

Michelle’s favorite band is The Cramps. Our second date was to a Cramps show on 2 November 1997 (our ten year anniversary is in April). And I was pretty much in love after that show. The Demolition Doll Rods opened, and they sucked... mostly naked with skulls hanging from pasties; they couldn’t play their way out of a paper bag.

The second act, Guitar Wolf, was like nothing I had ever seen before, even having played death metal for a number of years in high school (I played drums with double bass). Guitar Wolf is a greasy trio from Japan that are each totally insane. They rock, hard... so hard, in fact, that the lead singer was kicked out of the club about halfway through their set!

Needless to say, I was pumped when The Cramps came on. They were a tight four-piece with a wicked hot guitarist, Poison Ivy, and an impossibly skinny singer, Lux Interior, who was wearing something that was impossibly tight. They played killer song after killer song... “I Was A Teenage Werewolf”, “Human Fly”, “Drug Train”, etc. Each song seemingly ten times better and more raw than the last.

We move to Berkeley for my graduate school and we saw The Cramps three more times, each on a Halloween evening in the 2000s. One of which the newly formed Eagles of Death Metal opened up... and, to everyone’s surprise, their drummer was none other than Josh Homme of Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age. After that amazing show, I was surprised to find Sarah Ellinger, a SIMS student and someone I mistakenly took for a timid soul, at the front of the stage basking in the rock.

Rest in Pumps, Lux.

UPDATE [2009-02-06T10:59:45]: OMFGWTF... Chelle just pointed me to this crazy recording of The Cramps live in California in 1978 at the Napa State Mental Hospital:

(Image courtsey of canderson)