Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the passing of Lux Interior, the great frontman of The Cramps, one of the most influential bands of the last 40+ years. Lux lived up to all expectations and truly walked it like he talked it in such a way that he just might be in a group of one. As has been written by myself and a great many others, this band created a style. Not just music, but in every area of life from film subcultures to sexual freedom and just about everything in between, whether they planned to or not. And it’s showing no signs of stopping.

As we learn over and over again, with the Cramps, when we think there’s nothing left to find, something always pops up! Yesterday on the actual anniversary of Lux’s passing, this rare, very early unheard 1981 interview from radio station KALX appeared! This is an early (and interesting) interview as it was done right when guitarist Kid Congo Powers (who is still going strong and making incredible records) joined the band. So let’s transport ourselves 38 years back in time and listen to the beginning of a journey. Who can conceive of a band like this happening now??
 

 
And to quote that 50s rockabilly song, “Rockin’ Bones,” made popular in the punk era by The Cramps:
 

I wanna leave a happy memory when I go
I wanna leave something to let the whole world know
That the rock in roll daddy has a done passed on
But my bones will keep a-rockin’ long after I’ve gone
Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well, there’s still a lot of rhythm in these
Rockin’ bones
Well, when I die don’t you bury me at all
Just nail my bones up on the wall
Beneath these bones let these words be seen
This is the bloody gears of a boppin’ machine
Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well, there’s still a lot of rhythm in these
Rockin’ bones

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘We’re the best of the worst’: The Cramps on B-Movies, sex, drugs & rock-n-roll
At home with The Cramps: Lux and Ivy give you a tour of their stuff

 
The story goes that Lux Interior of the Cramps was an inveterate maker of cassette mixes for his friends. (CD mixes, much less online playlists, were not a thing in Lux’s heyday.)

Kristian Hoffman was one of those who was lucky enough to receive mix tapes from Lux, one of which was an inspired collection of Christmas songs with the title “Jeezus Fuck, It’s Christmas!!!” On Friday, Hoffman posted a picture of the cassette cover listing the songs on the mix on his Facebook page, with this note:
 

Lux Interior used to make holiday cassettes for me, and so many of his friends. As odd as it seems, he was all about sharing. Listening to this one right now.

 
 
Here’s the cassette cover:
 

 
It didn’t take long for news like that to travel fast. Within hours a blogger with the memorable moniker of Kogar the Swinging Ape took this precious information and helpfully put together two zip files containing mp3s of the songs for those of us who didn’t happen to be on Lux’s distribution list of chums. You can get those files by going to his page at WFMU Ichiban.

As Cramps fan Sharon Penny put it, “Lux came back for Christmas to stick his tongue in our earholes and it’s THE BEST THING EVER.” Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Tip of the hat to Ned Raggett.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Lux Interior and Ivy Rorschach’s McDonald’s job applications

A nice shot of the custom Poison Ivy and Lux Interior figures by an artist known as “N TT” over at Figure Realm. YES!
 
There are times when I’m out and about on the Internet looking for new and exciting things to bring to all of our dedicated Dangerous Minds readers, and occasionally (or always) I come across something I wasn’t looking for in the first place. And that’s how I happily ended up finding a bunch of different DIY figures and dolls based on the gothy likeness of Robert Smith, the one and only vocalist for The Cure, as well as Poison Ivy and Lux Interior of The Cramps. According to the person behind theses figures, artist “N TT” over at Figure Realm, it was noted that the six-inch version of Lux was made out of an action figure of Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe. Way to make the world a better place by recycling, N TT. Well done.

If you keep up with me here at DM, you know I have a deep affinity for all things action figures and the like. So stumbling on these figures by N TT was kind of like winning the action figure lottery for me. Anyway, good-old N TT has created some pretty fantastic DIY dolls/figures such as Robert Smith, Ivy and Lux (with Mr. Interior wearing a pair of black heels no less) and Jack Nance in character from the 1977 film Eraserhead. And since I know you’re wondering, though it’s not entirely clear, it would appear that N TT occasionally sells the tricked out figures that are posted on this page at Figure Realm.
 

Custom Lux Interior and Poison Ivy figures. Nice.
 

 

This disturbing interpretation of The Cure’s Robert Smith is based on the video for “Lullaby” from 1989. YIKES!
 
Many more after the jump…

Jello Biafra at Mabuhay Gardens, SF 1978
 
Jim Jocoy and his family left their home in South Korea and arrived in the town of Sunnyvale, California, when Jocoy was only 17. He enrolled at UC Santa Cruz, but later dropped out once he discovered the burgeoning punk scene that was exploding all around him. Jocoy got a gig at a Xerox store, hung out at punk clubs by night and started up a punk zine with his friends called Widows and Orphans. That’s when Jocoy decided to pick up a camera and started shooting photos of his friends and bands whenever he happened to find himself someplace interesting. Jocoy found himself in lots of interesting places.
 

Olga de Volga of the San Francisco band VS., Geary Street Theatre, SF 1980
 
Jocoy’s remarkable photos ended up in a book in 2002 called We’re Desperate. I reached out to Jocoy in an email, and the photographer graciously agreed to answer a few of my questions about his days growing up as a young punk in California.
 

Sid Vicious, San Francisco, January 14th, 1978
 
Tell me about your now infamous photo of Sid Vicious.

Jim Jocoy: The photo of Sid was taken after the last Sex Pistols show in SF. They performed at Winterland on Jan. 14, 1978. He took a cab to my friend Lamar St John’s apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district. I was outside as the cab pulled up. He was alone and got out and pissed in the middle of the street before going into the apartment. I ran into him in the hallway and asked if I could take a Polaroid photo. He nodded yes and that was it. He spent most of the evening in the bathroom with a couple of “fans”.
 

William Burroughs at his 70th birthday party in San Francisco, 1984

I understand that you presented a slide show of your photos to William Burroughs in honor of his 70th birthday. How did that go?

Jim Jocoy: The party was held at a warehouse in the Mission district belonging to the artist Mark McCloud. He was known for his (real) LSD postage stamp art. Burroughs allowed me to take a photo of him that evening. He wore an nice blue suit and had his briefcase in hand.

What’s your favorite memory of a show you saw back in the day that really blew your mind?

Jim Jocoy: I would have to say it was the first Ramones’ show in SF at the Savoy Tivoli on August 19th, 1976. It lasted about 30 minutes without a break, only “one, two, three, four!” between songs by Dee Dee. It was such a sonic boom of pure rock energy as I had never heard before. It was in the tiny back room of the bar/restaurant. It was like ground zero for launching the punk rock scene in San Francisco. A few weeks later, many of the seminal SF punk bands started performing regularly at the Mabuhay Gardens, the first main punk rock venue in the city.
 

Punk girl in leather skirt, SF 1978
 
Jocoy’s photos were only shown in public twice (one of those times was at Burroughs’ birthday party), and then were stored away for almost two-decades before seeing the light of day once again between the covers of We’re Desperate. So here’s a glimpse of what punk rock looked like back in the late 70s and early 80s, through the lens of a simple 35mm camera with an oversized flash taken by a guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Many thanks to Jim Jocoy for the use of his photos and captions (written by Jim) in this post.
 

John Waters at the Deaf Club in SF, 1980
 

Johnny Genocide, Geary Street Theatre in SF, 1980
 

Poison Ivy of the Cramps in the dressing room of Mabuhay Gardens, SF 1979
 
More young punks after the jump…

 
Before there was Kim and Thurston, there was Poison Ivy Rorschach and Lux Interior, one of the most charming, happiest, long-standing (together thirty-seven years) collaborative couples in music. They gave a recently rediscovered interview to Dutch public radio station VPRO around 1990 during The Cramps’ Stay Sick tour.

In the hour long interview, Poison Ivy and Lux talk about the gyrations involved in dealing with major and independent labels, overseas distribution deals, their invention of the word “psychobilly,” the ‘80s war on drugs, voodoo, religion, war, sex, B movies, and how they “Crampified” original classics such as “Bop Pills.” Their encyclopedic knowledge of rockabilly and B movies, which they rattle off effortlessly, is incredible. Lux outlines the history of American B movies for the interviewer:

Lux: The thing that’s so great, I think, about B movies is that when you watch a movie like that, they were made so quickly and usually by fairly amateur filmmakers that what you’re seeing is much more of the reality of the time and place where they were made than a motion pictures studio like MGM or Paramount or something like that. You’re actually seeing people who can’t act very well, so you see them as people, and they usually take place in somebody’s real house and on real streets and things, while all the other movies were being made on sets. There’s a slice of reality you don’t get in regular movies with those. I don’t know what it is.  Once you’ve developed a taste for that, you can’t go back somehow.

Poison Ivy: A lot of sexploitation [movies], just even titles, influence our songs. The dialogue from a lot of those movies is in our songs. “Hot Pearl Snatch” is the name of a movie, “All Women Are Bad” is the name of a movie. They’re powerful titles to us enough that we felt like writing songs about them. Also they’re in lines of our songs.

Lux: “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns” could be a B movie. The line in that, “This stuff’ll kill ya,” that’s a title of a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie about moonshine. Our songs are just loaded with B movie titles and lines out of B movies. In “What’s Inside a Girl” I say “In the bottom of the bottomless body pit,” like that, and that’s out of a movie called—

Poison Ivy: “The Love Butcher.” That was actually a line of dialogue out of that movie. It’s hard for us not to use these lines because we’re just kind of submerged in these movies. We think that way. They don’t sound like dialogue to us.

Listen to The Cramps on VPRO radio

 
Below, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy interviewed in Amsterdam, 1990:

 
Thanks to Kogar!

 
While he was waiting on death row, John Wayne Gacy painted a number of portraits of cartoon characters, clowns and famous people, often at their request, including Lux Interior of The Cramps.

Apparently Gacy never actually listened to The Cramps but wrote (typos included) this on November, 15 1987:

I don’t look at people has hero’s nor do I write to lux interior as fan mail, we have just become friend via writing to each others, he expresses his view on things and I do the same. I don’t try to change people or get them on my side, I let them believe what they want and then if I get a new trial they will see where I am coming from. But I do answer some questions if I feel I can help them out by explaining it. By the way I have never heard Lux Interior music but I don’t pass judgement on it either as I believe his kind of musci make a statement too. I have hread he was dead too, but I think thats just bad rummor. I haven’t heard from him in a month or so but then thats not unusual for him. I just wrote to let him know that a painting he asked me to do is finished. He has been an admirer of my art work and owns four of them now, not including two I have just sent to him and the one I just finished.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Lux Interior and Ivy Rorschach’s McDonald’s job applications

 
This image, making the rounds on Facebook via the For the Love of Ivy page, purports to be an early long-haired image of Cramps’ main man, Lux Interior.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

The Cramps’ Lux Interior and Poison Ivy photographed in 1972 when they were hippies!

 
The Cramps perform some toonz and Lux and Ivy discuss photography, cars and gardening in this nifty concert/interview made for Croatian TV in 1998.

I have always argued that if it were not for rock ‘n’ roll many of its practitioners would have gone insane or ended up in jail. In the case of Lux and Ivy, it seems to have been the glue that kept them happily together for 37 years. You can see it and feel it in this clip - a love supreme.
 

 
Boing Boing just directed me to a 2002 episode of SpongeBob SquarePants where Cramps’ frontman Lux Interior provides the voice for the lead singer a band called the Bird Brains. Gotta share. Awesome.
 

Lux
 
“Don’t forget Ronald McDonald is John Wayne Gacy.”

Click on the application for a bigger image and more.
 

Ivy
 
Via Plazm.

 
This vintage photo of The Cramps’ Lux Interior and Poison Ivy—taken in April of 1972—is starting to make the rounds on Facebook. Consider my mind blown.
 
Source: Michael Murphy