The Bloody Gears of a Boppin' Machine

The 1st couple of months of 2009 have been rough as 2 of the greats have checked out. 1st Ron Asheton passed away in January followed by the passing of Lux Interior this month. The music that these two individuals created has had a huge influence on my musical tastes, music creation and outlook on music in general. I will not waste any cyberspace on singing their praises; go look them up buy their music and get educated yourselves. Instead I just wanted to share a brief tale of my first encounter with the music of The Cramps.

I was somewhere around a whopping 14 years old and had recently been exposed to "different" music from what the local rock stations were cramming down everyone's throats. My friends and I had already found DeVo, The B-52's and The Ramones. While each of these bands are great in their own right none of them possessed the danger; the shock or the kind of sound that would really make adults around us cringe from the music we were soon to hear.
I was over at a friend's house one afternoon goofing around looking for trouble to get into. I remember it was raining so going out was not in the cards. My friend's older sister and her boyfriend came over and brought some records that for some reason the let us hang out and listen too. The boyfriend was already considered by most to be a neighborhood weirdo; he had a spiky haircut, wore torn up clothes and hand drawn t-shirts with lotsa safety pins. Keep in mind that this was nearly 30 years ago and you could not find this look pre-packaged at the mall; no Hot-Topics, no internet, nothing. The records he brought over were as follows: Black Flag: "Nervous Breakdown", The Dead Kennedys: "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables", Angry Samoans: "Queer Pills" and The Cramps: "Gravest Hits". I could write several treatises on each of these records, however of the four I have continued to listen to The Cramps year after year. All at once The Cramps were loud, dangerous and in contrast to the other bands, sexy. While I loved the aggression of the other records The Cramps were darker more seething and made you wanna dance and not necessarily beat someone up doing so. I saw them play a half a dozen or more times over the years and they were always great. They turned me on to tons of music I would have never found through their endless covers of long lost garage, rock-a-billy, psychedelic and generally strange nuggets. Years later in college I would become a huge fan of The Stooges
which the late Mr Asheton provided the bludgeoning guitar work for, however I still owe it all to hearing that first Cramps record. RIP guys. I know you're now teaching Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix how to properly write a rock song.