In the early 90s, my friend Oberon Sinclair and I decided that we were going to host a once-a-week party in Los Angeles. She’d moved here from London, I’d relocated from NYC and we both thought the nightlife in El Lay was lacking. The idea was to do something “different.” Something glamorous (her department) and also something deeply weird (mine).

We’d found a venue (Leonardo’s on La Brea, a tacky Mexican nightclub with red gingham table cloths and anti-bug candles everywhere) and we’d chosen a name for our event (“Good Evening”) and the image for the invitation (the cover of the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore album of the same name).

We’d also found a yodeling senior citizen drag queen accordion player, a completely freaky fortune teller and a group of Beatle imitators named the Mop Tops (that’s another story) to entertain our guests, but we needed more than that, which is how we came to be seated at the Brand Chicken Restaurant on Brand Ave in Glendale, CA.

The Brand Chicken Restaurant was a fast food joint that was decorated to seem like it was part of a chain, but it obviously wasn’t. There were the familiar sort of molded furniture booths seen in McDonald’s, Wendy’s and KFC, except that the place was decked out in lurid pink and green.

We were at the Brand to meet up with “Rockin Robbie B” an Elvis impersonator who had just moved to Glendale from somewhere in the deep South and was seeing what opportunities might await him here in the entertainment capital of the world.

Rockin’ Robbie B lived above the restaurant and quite literally sang for his supper with a portable karaoke machine. They paid him in chicken sandwiches. The two Sikh brothers who owned the place might’ve been his landlords too. In a sense they were his artistic patrons.

With the exception of a diamante-encrusted “TCB” belt buckle Robbie didn’t dress like Elvis, at least at the restaurant, and looked more like country singer “C.W. McCall” than he did the King of Rock and Roll, but he did do a very, very good Elvis impression, with one tragic flaw: He lisped. Badly. And when he sang, he sprayed.

Let’s just say we were quite happy to be seated near the back of the place with our chicken sandwiches when we heard the opening bars of “Suspicious Minds” on his karaoke machine! He also did covers versions of songs not by Elvis, but as if Elvis covered them (like “Ghostbusters”) and he did “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as “I Want to Bite Your Hand” in a Bela Lugosi voice.

This was already a fairly surreal mise-en-scène but what happened next made it even better: Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach walked by, knocked on the window and waved excitedly to Rockin’ Robbie B who turned around on his stool and warmly greeted them back.

I tell you this tale to lead into an amazing peek into the home Lux and Ivy shared in Glendale. In it you’ll get a glimpse of their legendary record collection and some of their STUFF.

They’ve got good taste, so sit on my…
 

 
Thank you kindly Erleen Nada!

 
Earlier this year I posted what I described as the “second best” Cramps footage out there and owing to the reaction, I think that many of our readers agreed with that assessment. The #1 best Cramps footage is them playing at the mental hospital, of course, but that Mudd Club gig that I called to your attention is fucking primo Cramps.

And so is this, what I reckon is the third best Cramps show to be found on the Internet and so far it’s had fewer than 250 views!

This absolutely stunning Cramps show was taped at the fabled City Gardens in Trenton, NJ on November 3, 1982—a smoking hot Kid Congo Powers era set that’s pretty high quality (sound and vision) for something of this vintage that was probably taped on VHS.

Dig the shamanic trickster god (and “most exalted potentate of love”) Lux Interior in the prime of his performing career backed by Poison Ivy, Kid Congo Powers and stickman Nick Knox. The Cramps were always a truly great live band, but at this point (around the time of their classic live Smell of Female EP recorded at the Peppermint Lounge) it still wasn’t completely clear how much of their act was “showbiz” and how much of it was them just being completely insane evil people on bad acid.

No band will ever have an “edge” quite like The Cramps ever again. It’s just a fact. Sorry young people!
 

The Cramps, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy
 
I’ve been an admirer of Atlanta-based pop artist Zteven for a while now and own many pieces from his pop culture-inspired soup can series (Lemmy Kilmister-flavored Bouillabaisse anyone?). In an interview earlier this year, Zteven cited the very moment his artistic inspiration was born after he saw Andy Warhol’s appearance on The Love Boat (which incidentally aired on October 12th of 1985 during season nine/episode three). The young Zteven was instantly mesmerized by Warhol’s “awkward coolness.” He developed an insatiable appetite for comic books, music and TV magazine, as well as the occasional tabloid while accompanying his grandmother to the beauty parlor.

Zteven is an 80’s kid to the core, and his artwork celebrates the many highlights of this glorious decade that often gets a worse rap than it deserves. Sail on over to Zteven’s Popmania! Etsy shop to see more.
 

Devo
 

Marc Bolan
 

‘Strangers with Candy’
 

Divine and Edith Massey
 

‘Pink Flamingos’ triptych
 

Tura Satana
 

Little Edie and Big Edie from ‘Grey Gardens’
 

David Bowie

 
The pop music show The Tube ran on UK’s Channel 4 for five years in the 1980s. Hosted by, among others, Jools Holland and Paula Yates, the program showcased live (as in actually live and not mimed) performances by three or four emerging bands every week, including, in March of 1986, some high badassery from the legendary rockabilly/horror/sleaze/punk band The Cramps.
 

 
This was a transitional time for the band. Since the departure of guitarist Kid Congo Powers, The Cramps—wildman singer Lux Interior, fuzzgrinding guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach, and drummer Nick Knox—were unable to find a permanent replacement guitarist, and elected to add a bass to their lineup for the first time ever, only to find themselves unable to settle on a bassist. They were also tweaking their image, tilting their focus away somewhat from their ghoulish b-movie horror side towards a more colorfully cartoonish and kitschy hypersexuality. In accord with that change, representative song titles from that year’s A Date With Elvis LP include “The Hot Pearl Snatch” and “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?” both of which are featured in their Tube set, along with the single “What’s Inside a Girl?” The bass player issue was settled, for their tour, at least, with the addition of Hollywood Hillbillies’ Fur Dixon, who’s seen playing in the videos below. She certainly fit the bill visually!
 

 
More bad music for bad people after the jump…

 
This might not be the very best footage of The Cramps you’ll ever see—that designation would probably be bestowed upon the infamous video shot at the Napa, CA mental hospital in 1978—but it’s most probably the second best. Oh yes…

This is The Cramps—Lux, Ivy, Nick Knox and Kid Congo Powers—caught live at the Mudd Club in NYC, at their prime, in 1981. The source for this was a broadcast of Paul Tschinkel’s Inner-Tube and it was apparently taped off the air. Recently it turned up on the Dime a Dozen torrent tracker and then on YouTube. I’ve owned—for about 25 years—a really good low generation dub of the final three songs, so to see the entire set is pretty glorious.

A few years ago, Paul Tschinkel teased the Internet by releasing a little bit of what he’s got and here’s what I wrote:

Since I was only ever able to catch a few of them on TV (I moved to NYC the year it went off the air), I was always on the look-out for bootlegs of a cable access program called Paul Tschinkel’s Inner-Tube, perhaps THE greatest (I can’t imagine what would compare to it) underground video archive of late 70, early 80s punk, post-punk, No Wave and New Wave music that exists.

The Gun Club, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, The Cramps, Blondie, Talking Heads, James Chance and the Contortions, Johnny Thunders, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, The Dead Boys, The Ramones, Siouxsie and The Banshees… the list of bands seen on Inner-Tube goes on and on and on. Shows often shot in color, with two cameras and sound board audio. Performances taped at CBGB, Mudd Club, Danceteria, Max’s Kansas City, Irving Plaza and usually the camera was right up front.

Inner-Tube ran for ten years on Manhattan Cable (meaning that you could only watch it if you lived in Manhattan, the outer boroughs didn’t get it, TV Party, Midnight Blue or The Robin Byrd Show, either). Seriously, it was the best of the best. Unbelievable shit.

I’ve been waiting in vain for years, hoping for a proper DVD release of the “best of” Inner-Tube, but the rights issues would probably make that a nightmare. Now it looks like Tschinkel is starting to put some on YouTube. This should be encouraged!

I wrote that two years ago. Since then Paul has released precious little of his treasure trove on YouTube. Hopefully he’ll note the interest in this Cramps post and give us some more? Pretty please???

The sole downside of this amazing video is that Poison Ivy spends much of the time behind a big pillar, hidden from the camera. You do see her, but not as much as you might want to.

Set list:
“Don’t Eat Stuff Off The Sidewalk”
“New Kind Of Kick”
“The Green Fuz”
“Can’t Find My Mind”
“Goo Goo Muck”
“Natives Are Restless”
“TV Set”
“Sunglasses After Dark”
“Voodoo Idol”
“Human Fly”
“I Was A Teenage Werewolf”
“Beautiful Gardens”

If this doesn’t get you off, then you don’t like rock and roll… and get the fuck off this blog.
 

 
Gregg Foreman’s radio program, The Pharmacy, is a music / talk show playing heavy soul, raw funk, 60′s psych, girl groups, Krautrock. French yé-yé, Hammond organ rituals, post-punk transmissions and “ghost on the highway” testimonials and interviews with the most interesting artists and music makers of our times…

Legendary guitarist Kid Congo Powers is this week’s special guest. Kid has played with The Gun Club, The Cramps, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds and his own group, The Pink Monkey Birds (touring the US in February, don’t miss them!)

Listen in on the conversation as Kid discusses how Poison Ivy once asked him if he was willing to sacrifice a finger to be in The Cramps… How playing with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds inspired him to quit drinking…. and how he learned to play the blues from Jeffery Lee Pierce.
 

 
Mr. Pharmacy is a musician and DJ who has played for the likes of Pink Mountaintops, The Delta 72, The Black Ryder, The Meek and more. Since 2012 Gregg Foreman has been the musical director of Cat Power’s band. He started dj’ing 60s Soul and Mod 45’s in 1995 and has spun around the world. Gregg currently lives in Los Angeles, CA and divides his time between playing live music, producing records and dj’ing various clubs and parties from LA to Australia.
 
Setlist:

Mr.Pharmacist - The Fall
Shot Down - The Sonics
Bert’s Apple Crumble - The Quik
Rx Intro Part One - Blind Man Can See It - James Brown
Kid Congo Interview Part One
New Kind of Kick - The Cramps
Jaguar Shake - Les Jaguars
Akula Owu Onyeara - The Funkees
I Heard it Through the Grapevine - The Slits
Rx Intro Part 2 - Sliced Tomatoes - Just Brothers
Kid Congo Part Two
Preaching the Blues - The Gun Club
The Brother’s Gonna Work it Out - Willie Hutch
Stand Up and Be Counted - The Equals
Caress - The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Kid Congo Interview Part Three
Deanna - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Rx Intro Part - Jumping Jack Flash - Ananda Shankar
Kid Congo Interview Part Four
Bo Bo Boogaloo - Kid Congo + The Pink Monkey Birds
Liberation Conversation - Marlena Shaw
Justine - Don & Dewey
Oh Oh Mojo - Volcanoes
Rx Outro - Big City - Spacemen 3
Mr.Pharmacist - The Fall

 
You can download the entire the show here.
 

“Haunted Head” by Kid Congo and The Pink Monkey Birds. Directed by Rob Parrish.

 
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

 
In the city of Cleveland, people of a certain age get all misty-eyed when the name “Ghoulardi” is uttered in their presence. He was a mysterious, anarchic, goofy “degenerate” Beatnik character who hosted a Friday late-night horror movie show from 1963 to 1966 on WJW-TV, Cleveland’s channel 8. Ghoulardi was more daffy than scary. You can see traces of Lenny Bruce, Soupy Sales and Ernie Kovacs in his shtick—the Bruce influence is evident in Ghoulardi’s slogan, which was “Stay Sick!”, whereas the Kovacs influence was demonstrated by Ghoulardi actually appearing in the monster movies thanks to a camera trick that superimposed him over the film chain. He would also use sound effects, shoot off fireworks and employ his own soundtracks for comic effect, often “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” by The Rivingtons. The Soupy Sales influence came with the general anarchy on the live TV set and Ghoulardi’s jabberwocky catchphrases like “Cool it with da boom-booms!” and “Turn blue!” There might have been a soupçon of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in the mix, too.

Many of Ghoulardi’s baby boomer fans might be only dimly aware that Ghoulardi—real name Ernie Anderson—was also the father of some big-shot director who’s been making waves in Hollywood lately, P.T. Anderson or something like that? That’s right, Paul Thomas Anderson’s production company is called “The Ghoulardi Film Company” in honor of his father. Ernie Anderson died in 1997 and the movie Boogie Nights is dedicated to his memory.
 

 
Given how fondly his fans remember his show, Ghoulardi’s tenure in Cleveland was surprisingly brief—but this was an era in which television dominated everything (and with far fewer distractions). Ghoulardi was a huge influence on The Cramps, so much so that they titled their 1990 Stay Sick album in homage to him. When Anderson died, they dedicated their 1997 album, Big Beat From Badsville to the memory of Ghoulardi. David Thomas of Pere Ubu once complained that The Cramps were “so thoroughly co-optive of the Ghoulardi persona that when they first appeared in the 1970s, Clevelanders of the generation were fairly dismissive,” but from the vantage point of 2013, as John Petkovic wrote earlier this year in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ghoulardi (and his rock and roll progeny) “altered the gene pool, leaving a legion of freaky followers to continue in his wake.”

Ernie Anderson left Cleveland for the warmer climes of Los Angeles, where he became a respected voice-over artist and more or less the voice of the ABC television network. In 1983 he demonstrated some of his voice-over artistry on Late Night with David Letterman.

This November 1 marks the start of the three-day Ghoulardifest in Cleveland to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the show.

Catch some of Ghoulardi’s comedy stylings from 1963. Only 18 minutes of his programs actually survived. In this clip he opens up his mailbag, a format that Letterman himself would later make hay with. Ghoulardi gets away with an “racy” joke about poker that wouldn’t make an 11-year-old blink today.
 

 
After the jump, the Emmy-winning Ghoulardi documentary, ‘Turn Blue: The Short Life of Ghoulardi’

 
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.
 

 
Kristy Marlana Wallace aka Poison Ivy.
 

What’s inside a girl?
Somethin’ tellin’ me there’s a whole other world.”

 
On the fourth anniversary of the passing of the dearly beloved Lux Interior, I present The Cramps performing in Trenton, New Jersey in 1982 at the legendary City Gardens.

We’re always asked how long we can keep going. But it’s not really an issue for us. Besides, what else could we do? We must be among the world’s most unemployable people. If we hadn’t been in The Cramps, I can’t imagine the trouble we’d be in. We often find ourselves wondering about the difference between what we do and being locked up. It’s a pretty thin line. Rock ‘n’ roll is the greatest way for weirdos like us to find a purpose in life. In that sense, our goal has never really changed. We just want to carry on getting away with it. Not getting caught – that’s our only ambition.” Lux Interior, NME.

 
This is for the weirdos out there.
 

 
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.
 

 
The first time I saw The Cramps they were opening for The Ramones at CBGB IN 1977. It was the original lineup which in addition to Lux and Ivy included hot rebel girl Miriam Linna laying down a deep voodoo groove on drums and the diabolically dashing Bryan Gregory strafing the audience with his deadly guitar. They were a fucking dynamite combination. But as much as I loved the band as a whole, I found myself particularly drawn to Bryan Gregory. While Lux was funny scary, Bryan was really fucking scary. And sartorially speaking, I always thought Bryan was the best-dressed Cramp (a tough call).

Bryan left The Cramps in 1980. He worked as a tattoo artist, did bit parts in horror films, managed an adult book store and re-entered the music scene with several bands, none of which really caught fire. There was a bit of buzz and excitement surrounding his collaboration with Andrella Canne in Beast (sounding a lot like Siousxie and The Banshees) and a decade later The Dials, but that phase of Bryan’s musical career got snake bit when Canne became too ill to continue performing and The Dials broke up. And bad luck followed Bryan when he suffered a heart attack at the age of 49 just as he was putting together a new band called Shiver. While most heart attacks are unexpected, Bryan’s shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to anyone close to him. His health had been lousy for awhile and he wasn’t doing anything to make it better. His body was breaking down and whatever death spiral he was in had begun to spin out of control. The heart attack didn’t kill him, it just weakened him beyond what he could handle. Bryan died of “multiple system failures” in a hospital in Anaheim, California.

Gregory never achieved the kind of fame that his undeniable star quality warranted. He had a vibe, a style and presence, that was as magnetic and intensely mesmerizing as any guitar player I’ve ever seen. Only artists as charismatic as Lux and Ivy could share a stage with Bryan and not be overshadowed. When he left The Cramps, the band felt less dangerous without him.

There’s not a lot of video footage of Bryan out there. Here’s something that was shot for Memphis TV when The Cramps were recording their debut album, Songs the Lord Taught Us, at Sam Phillips studio with Alex Chilton producing. The quality is lousy and the bits with Bryan are brief but you take what you can get.
 

 
Bryan Gregory and The Dials after the jump…