EULOGY FOR LUX INTERIOR

Oct. 21st 1948 - Feb. 4th 2009

Lux Interior, wild lead singer for legendary punk/psychobilly band The Cramps died from a pre-existing heart ailment this afternoon.  He will be sorely missed by anyone remotely interested in rock'n'roll, B-movies & the glorious underside of American popular culture. ILV web curator Charles Lieurance contributed this eulogy.

I nearly typed in my usual celebrity RIP -- which I'd been doing too frequently lately -- into the proper fields on Facebook & Myspace & then I stopped myself & said aloud, "Fuck that." I know death in horror films, in horror rock, in horror comic books, is a cartoon of death. I've seen real death, know it's not usually quite as bloody or inventive, but somehow always much sadder. So I don't want to be flippant about Lux Interior's very REAL death, but what in the world did Lux have to do with REAL death? He catered, for a grue-spattered lifetime, to the shambling, decomposing undead in all of us. He was Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee & Rondo Hatton conjoined to Elvis Presley, Charlie Feathers, Hasil Adkins & a dozen booze-petrified Creature Feature hosts, lounge singers & midnight creepers, by some unholy surgery that let all the scars & bandages & suture seepage show proudly. And while The Cramps were a caricature, a misshapen funhouse mirror of pop culture, they were also terrifying & never cartoonish. They did with rockabilly's primal essentials -- reverb, melodrama, echo, nonsense -- what Sonic Youth did with No Wave, Prog & Post-Punk. One listen to their cover of Little Willie John's "Fever," their epic, sprawling version of The Trashmen's two-minute shitstorm "Surfin' Bird," or "TV Set" restlessly entombed on their Cleveland demos from 1979, reveals The Cramps to be artists & fuck 'em if they wouldn't cop to that for all the viscera they could eat.

Lux & his partner Ivy had to dig for the dirt on this culture, had to exhume it in the wee hours in Cleveland, in New York City, in Los Angeles, when only knuckle-walking somnambulists (like kindred spirits Lester Bangs & Michael Weldon) had any interest at all in such things. Now you just log onto your internet & every oozing cult item is immediately at your disposal. You don't have to battle creepy record mothballers for 45s of Warren Smith's "Uranium Rock" or "The Crusher" by The Novas in some record store slash pawn shop in the Bowery. The Cramps did that for you. You don't have to stay up all night to fucking watch "I Was A Teenage Werewolf" or "Shanty Tramp" through migraine-inducing bad reception on WWOR in NYC. The Cramps did that for you. And boy do you owe them. They dug up items more essential to our counter-cultural well-being than a third bullet in the grass at Dealey Plaza or the very contract in which Robert Johnson signed away his soul to the devil. What they found could, in a normal society, be used to blackmail a culture for all it's worth, but to them & to their fans these were spectral treasures, crazed points in a radiation-sick manifesto. So I didn't type in Rest in Peace. Well, I did, but I corrected myself. Lux Interior, do not rest in peace. Don't rest at all. Shake the gravedust off. Death was always your bitch, so why go down easy? We're all ghouls tonight & we're waiting to see if you can mindfuck the spirit world the way you mindfucked this one. Stick that microphone down your tight leather pants, shimmy, frug, gobble deliriously & stay sick. I mean, now you're sicker than ever, right? Turn blue. Now you're bluer than ever, right? Those lyrics of yours, from "Surfin' Dead":

Now life is short and it's filled with stuff
So let me know baby when you've had enough
Oh do the dead, turn blue
Yeah the surfin' dead, as dead as you
There's nothing on the radio when you're dead
There's nothing at the movie show when you're dead
There's nowhere left for you to go when you're dead

Prove 'em wrong, Lux.

--Charles Lieurance, February 4, 2009

And, from MTV.COM:

Cramps Singer Lux Interior Dead At 62
Singer died early Wednesday of an existing heart condition.

By James Montgomery and Jem Aswad

Lux Interior, lead singer of influential garage-punk act the Cramps, died Wednesday morning (February 4) due to an existing heart condition, according to a statement from the band's publicist. He was 62.

Born Erick Lee Purkhiser, Interior started the Cramps in 1972 with guitarist Poison Ivy (born Kristy Wallace, later his wife) - whom, as legend has it, he picked up as a hitchhiker in California. By 1975, they had moved to New York, where they became an integral part of the burgeoning punk scene surrounding CBGBs.

Their music differed from most of the scene's other acts in that it was heavily steeped in camp, with Interior's lyrics frequently drawing from schlocky B-movies, sexual kink and deceptively clever puns. (J.H. Sasfy's liner notes to their debut EP memorably noted: "The Cramps don't pummel and you won't pogo. They ooze; you'll throb.") Sonically, the band drew from blues and rockabilly, and a key element of their sound was the trashy, dueling guitars of Poison Ivy and Bryan Gregory (and later Kid Congo Powers), played with maximal scuzz and minimal drumming.

Because of that - not to mention Interior's deranged, Iggy Pop-inspired onstage antics and deep, sexualized singing voice (which one reviewer described as "the psychosexual werewolf/ Elvis hybrid from hell") - the Cramps are often cited as pioneers of "psychobilly" and "horror rock," and can count bands like the Black Lips, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the Reverend Horton Heat, the Horrors and even the White Stripes as their musical progeny.

Over the course of more than 30 years, the Interior and Ivy surrounded themselves with an ever-changing lineup of drummers, guitarists and bassists, and released 13 studio albums (the last being 2003's Fiends of Dope Island). They also famously performed a concert for patients at the Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978 (which was recorded on grainy VHS and has since become a cult classic) and appeared on a Halloween episode of "Beverly Hills, 90210." Their video for the song "Bikini Girls With Machine Guns" also drew rave reviews from Beavis and Butt-head on a memorable episode of the show.

Despite the band's long history, fans generally agree that the group's peak was in the early '80s, with the albums Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle. Many clips of the Cramps' chaotic live shows from the era can be found online; look for their version of "Tear It Up" from the 1980 film "URGH! A Music War." One memorable (and typical) show in Boston in 1986 found Interior, clad only in leopard-skin briefs, drinking red wine from an audience member's shoe, and ended with him French-kissing a woman (who wasn't his wife) for 10 full minutes with his microphone in their mouths.

Due to their imagery, obsession with kitsch and dogged dedication to touring - they wrapped up their latest jaunt across Europe and the U.S. this past November - the Cramps commanded a loyal fanbase, and even earned a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the form of a shattered bass drum that Interior had shoved his head through.