Lux Interior, 1948-2009

I think the first song by The Cramps I ever herd was "Human Fly", back around 1987, after years of staring warily at their many lurid album covers in local record stores, wondering what the hell this band was all about. And everything I heard from them since then was positively smashing. Their version of "She Said" made me seek out albums by Hasil Adkins (former Cramps drummer, the wonderful Miriam Linna and co-founder of Norton Records, sent me a Hasil record with his original version on it, thinking I might like it better than the one I was initially looking for... and she was right!) and I finally got to see The Cramps live in 1993 at the Boathouse, which was probably still to this day the largest grouping of familiar faces from the local scene I had ever witness at a live show. And probably my all-time favorite band interview ever is the one with Lux Interior and Cramps lead guitarist Poison Ivy in their home surrounded by their music collection in RE/Search's Incredibly Strange Music Vol. 1, which brought back so many memories of Joe and me back in college, traveling around looking for records, our car loaded up with music, eager to get back home and listen to it all. Lux was my kinda guy. I could relate to him. He seemed like good people.

Tributes, all around. An early Cramps performance in 1978 at the Napa State Mental Hospital in California. I'd say it was one of the strangest audiences I'd ever seen for a show if I hadn't have seen some allegedly sane people behavior at a variety of other gigs from my past.



And to round things out, a later music video from the 1990's called "Bikini Girls With Machine Guns" which actually topped at #10 on the US Modern Rock Charts.



R.I.P. Lux my Love. Thanks for the good times and memories.

xxx