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

 
“Somebody told me you people are crazy! But I’m not so sure about that; you seem to be all right to me.”—Lux Interior

On June 13, 1978 The Cramps gave a free concert at the California State Mental Hospital in Napa. It is, simply put, one of the single greatest rock and roll moments ever captured on videotape (in this case, on a half-inch open reel Sony Portapak by Joe Rees and his Target Video outfit). Also on the bill were The Mutants from San Francisco.

One hundred years from now this video will be as iconic as The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. But enough description, HIT PLAY AND WATCH IT, ALREADY!

Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard meticulously recreated this event (and the video itself) as an elaborate art project at the ICA in London in 2003. Forsyth and Pollard’s “Cramps” also performed in front of an audience comprised of psychiatric patients in their “File under Sacred Music” re-staging of the infamous 1978 gig.
 

 
As journeyman guitarist, Kid Congo Powers has played alongside of three of the most outrageous and notorious front-men of the post-punk era: The Cramps’ Lux Interior, Nick Cave, and of course, his longtime collaborator in The Gun Club, Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Two of these men are dead, the third is very lucky he isn’t… Kid Congo Powers has also added his Satanic magic to the mix collaborating with Jim Thirlwell, Lydia lunch, Die Haut, Annie Anxiety, Julee Cruise, and The Swan’s Michael Gira.

Currently living in Washington DC, Kid’s writing a memoir of growing up in Los Angeles and the early years of that city’s nascent punk scene. The gunslinger guitarist claims he gets more done in the staid, uptight District of Columbia simply because there’s not a lot to do there.

Dangerous Minds caught up with Kid Congo Powers after he and his crack band, the Pink Monkey Birds (named after a line in David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” song) played a right rave up on the stage at Waterloo Records’ parking lot in Austin, TX during the SXSW festival. The Pink Monkey Birds sound is a spicy gumbo of 60’s Chicano rock, Booker T. and the M.G.s, bad LSD trips and seedy psychedelic go-go romps. They even threw in a couple of Cramps and Gun Club favorites.

As the bandleader, Kid is an engaging and charismatic front-man. The Pink Monkey Birds are Kiki Solis on bass; Ron Miller on drums; and Jesse Roberts on second guitar. Their latest album is called Gorilla Rose. If they come to your town, GO SEE ‘EM, they put on a fine show.

New York Night Train’s exhaustive Kid Congo Powers feature with in-depth accounts of life on the road with The Cramps, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and The Gun Club.
 

 
“Catsuit Fruit”:
 

 
“A weed is a plant out of place.”
― Jim Thompson, “The Killer Inside Me”

As a teenage renegade straight out of the rock and roll heartland of Ohio, Miriam Linna was the drummer in the “Cramps first lineup which played forty-odd dates over an eight month period from the first show on All Saints Night 1976 through July 13, 1977, the date of the NYC blackout.”

I was lucky enough to see The Cramps open for The Ramones at CBGB in April of 1977. The original lineup, Miriam, Bryan, Lux and Ivy, were always my favorite configuration of that great band. They really had it goin’ on. Their look, their intensity and mad energy was alchemical; an exhilarating voodoo that could spook an audience while simultaneously sending them into the throes of rock and roll ecstasy. They got under your skin and fucked around with your spleen.

The Cramps opened up a door that led to a mother lode of forgotten bands and singers that had been residing in the shadows, left behind by deejays, music critics, record labels - the mole-like gatekeepers of pop culture. While radios spewed their acrid breath, Cramp acolytes like myself followed Lux and his bandmates, lurching steadily ahead like the freshly exhumed living dead in Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie, into the heart of rock’s dark and tangled jungle, excavating and unearthing lost vinyl treasures and musical artifacts that contained real magic.

The Cramps, and the second wave of garage bands that followed in their wake, were as much musical anthropologists as they were rock and rollers. Like punk pioneers Patti Smith, The Ramones, Blondie and The Dictators, The Cramps were on a mission from god to revive the roots of rock at a time when what was being called rock and roll was mass-marketed product that had about as much in common with Little Richard and Gene Vincent as Lana Del Ray does with The Del- Vikings.

From her early days in New York’s downtown music scene to archivist of all that is hep, Miriam Linna was, is and always has been a rock fanatic . She, along with the fabulous Billy Miller, created one of the coolest record stores and record labels on the planet, Norton Records, and her love for the distilled, cut-to-the-chase, blunt energy and gutbucket prose of pulp novels led her to start her own publishing company Kicks Books.

Having published work by Nick Tosches, Sun Ra, Andre Williams, Eddie Rocco and with upcoming titles from Harlan Ellison and Kim Fowley, Linna is bringing the same passion and intelligence she brought to Norton Records and Kicks magazine (with Miller) to the world of book publishing and, as usual, she’s doing it in her no-bullshit way.

Dangerous Minds:  From playing drums with The Cramps to being a co-founder of Norton Records and now a publisher of books by Sun Ra and Andre Williams, you’ve forged a path of being a champion for music and literature that might have gone undiscovered without your help. What first inspired you to explore the world of outsider art and obscure rock and roll?

Miriam Linna:  I don’t consider the music, movies, or books that make my life worthwhile “outsider art”. Actually, I’m repelled by what the expression represents and have no association whatsoever with anyone who is involved with it. Like most people, I like what I like. On top of that, I’m curious, obsessive and refuse to be told what to do and how to do it.

DM:  In spite of all the talk of the publishing business dying and the emergence of electronic books, there seems to be a movement toward a return to books you can hold in your hands kind of like the resurgence of interest in vinyl records. Would you agree?

ML:  There is no charm in digital anything.

DM: I like the format of your books. The fact they fit in your pocket is like old style pulp paperbacks. What prompted that design decision?

ML:  I’ve always considered “hip pocket paperbacks” the perfect book format. I like paper, I love books. I’m a nut for Signet- style “talls” and find a slim, unique book capable of causing all sorts of visceral reactions extremely appealing.

DM:  How did you come upon the poetry of Sun Ra?

ML:  Music historian and Sun Ra archivist Michael Anderson contacted us when he discovered a large cache of Sonny Blount dictations and recordings on tape. Norton records had issued three albums of early Sun Ra music, and followed with three spoken word albums culled from these newly discovered recordings. I transcribed the audio, plus several additional tapes’ worth of lost poetic dictation. This material trashed my horizontal with its consistency—here was a cohesive collection of poetic writings—pretty much all attitudinal science fiction with a serious political bent.  Afro-futurism at its earliest and most intentional. 

DM: Given your involvement with Norton Records, you’ve obviously grown to know Andre Williams over the years. Did he bring you his novel and short stories?

ML:  Andre had no novel or short stories until he went into rehab a couple of years ago. He called me when he went in (not of his own volition), saying he was going to bust out. I told him if he did that, he would not live to see the end of the year. We started talking and he said if he was going to stay he needed something to do, that he was going stir-crazy. We got around to talking about him writing, and I suggested he write some fiction. This was a new concept for him, but I knew already from his brilliant plot-rich song lyrics that he was a class-A storyteller. Over the several weeks of his rehabilitation, Andre and I spoke at least every two or three days via collect phone calls, with him faxing in drafts and outlines. Right off the bat, I was shocked by the fact that he was writing from the first person vantage point of a fifteen year old girl named Sweets, a kid who gets in trouble, becomes a prostitute, a madam, a drug runner, and everything in between.  Andre’s storyline was part fever dream, part wishful thinking (loaded with cocaine and sex), part autobiography. I promised him that if he could stick with it and finish a short novel, that I would publish it.

DM: Nick Tosches wrote one of my favorite rock books, “Unsung Heroes Of Rock and Roll.” You recently published his “Save The Last Dance for Satan.” When did you and Nick meet?

ML:  I’ve known Nick for many years. He wrote the intro to “Sweets,” and he and Andre read together at the book launch at St Mark’s Church here in New York.

DM: You published “The Great Lost Photographs Of Eddie Rocco” in 1997 and it has since become a collector’s item. Any plans for a second edition?

ML:  Plans, yes. Something definite - not at the moment.

DM: Where do you see the business of music heading? It’s getting harder and harder for bands to exist when their art is so easily downloaded for free on the Internet. Do you ever despair for the future of rock?

ML: I’m not worried. Real music will always be made by real people for real people. Real records will be made so long as they can be manufactured. Should the day come when all manufacturing ceases, well, we have countless great existing shellac and PVC discs of various sizes spinning at various speeds to discover and thrill to. And if they stop making phonographs, then they will become a commodity, but those who need them will be able to maintain them. Maybe some enterprising individual can reinvent the wind-up pre-electricity phonograph for when the power grids go down and even the download monsters and children of the damned Internet can wallow in silence while the analogue minions crank up wax by candlelight. Now there’s an Escape From New York for you!

DM: Are you still playing music?

ML: I play drums in my long time band the A-Bones and my not-so-long-time band the Figures of Light.

DM: What’s in the pipeline for Kicks Books?

ML: Harlan Ellison’s “Pulling A Train” and “Getting In The Wind”... Kim Fowley’s “Lord Of Garbage”... Andre Williams’ sequel “Streets”... and in a larger book format “I Fought The Law (The Authorized Biography of Bobby Fuller)” by Randy Fuller and myself… and eventually my “Bad Seed Bible.”

You can follow Miriam on her ultra-groovy blog Kicksville66, where the writing is fast and furious. You can also visit Norton Records Records website “where the loud sound abounds.”

 
Niall unleashed some Cramps earlier today as I was preparing this and so I thought I might save this post for another time. But then I figured what the hell you can never get enough of The Cramps. So here goes.

Lux Interior was 60 years old in this performance footage and still the hardest working white man in show business.

This was filmed at the Lokerse Festival in Belgium on August the 7th 2006. One month later The Cramps played their last gig at the House Of Blues in Las Vegas.

Watching this I was reminded that Lux and Ivy were together for 37 years! True love. Amazing.
 

 
More Cramps at Lokerse after the jump…

 
In the first video, The Cramps tear it up in Germany 1998. This was broadcast on German TV network Viva II. The audio sounds like a half dozen feral cats thrown in a blender. But watching Lux and Ivy in super fine form makes up for the deficiencies in sound quality. It’s amazing footage. Lux destroys the stage like a one man horde of Mongols. And Ivy and her man’s mating dance is bootlicious.

Harry Drumdini on drums and Slim Chance on bass in both videos.
 

 
This second video is The Cramps on Croatian TV also in ‘98.

Imagine being a kid somewhere in Croatia and seeing this on TV. Nothing’s goin’ on in your shitty life, you live in a country the size of West Virginia and just as polluted, heroin is everywhere, jobs are hard to find. So you turn on the TV to escape and bang there’s this band tearin’ things up and going wild and it feels real good and the two members of the band start talking about rock and they make it sound so liberating and beautiful and exciting and you decide maybe to get a guitar and you do end up getting one and you learn to play 3 chords but that’s all you need and suddenly you’re feeling free and you’re not as angry and you’re starting to dig life a little bit more yeah it’s not so bad and you start thinkin’ maybe I could do what The Cramps are doing going on the road traveling making music believing in something doing something real not just talk not just politics not just shooting the shit with your friends who are too fucking afraid to be real because they haven’t received the message from on high the gospel the teachings and that’s when it it hits you that’s when you realize that yes Lux and Ivy were talking to you and everything they said they were saying to you and that just makes you more determined more fucking driven to be a rock and roller, a punk whatever, a revolutionary for love and music and energy because fuck man you’ve been chosen rock and roll has chosen you!

“Rock and roll chose us.” Ivy Rorschach.
 

 
The Cramps make an appearance on the exceedingly cool Chicago public access kiddie show Chic-A-Go-Go. Late 1990’s.

Lil’ Ratso goes nuts!

“Our next letter is C.”
 

 
The Residents on Chic-A-Go-Go after the jump…

 
New York’s The Groupies were badass. Infamous for their live shows, but unable to get a break when it came to their recording career, the band never achieved the success they deserved. This was mainly due to the fact they were in constant self-destruct mode. ‘Primitive’  was released in 1966 on, believe it or not, Atlantic records. The song went nowhere. Too fucking hip. This is one of the greatest garage rockers of all time. No question about it.

In the first video, a perfect marriage of garage to grind, Blaze Starr emanates her goddess-like powers and your world will never be the same. In the second, The Cramps do their take on ‘Primitive’ with subliminal Jello at the top.
 

 
The Cramps get primitive after the jump…

 
Manhattan cable television in the late 70s/early 80s was a viaduct for some of the wildest shit to ever invade the American airwaves. From porn to rock and roll to goofy infomercials and call-in shows, it was some of the most fun to be had at 2 a.m in the morning in NYC. If you weren’t actually in the clubs, bars and sex pits of Manhattan, you were watching it on cable.

Paul Tschinkel’s Inner Tube may have been low rent, but it was one of the grooviest TV rock shows in the history of the medium. On a zero budget, Paul managed to capture the raw energy of what is arguably the last great era in rock and roll. He filmed seminal performances from musicians like Klaus Nomi, Lydia Lunch, DNA, The Contortions, Johnny Thunders, The Blessed, The Cramps and many many more.

Here’s 12 minutes of great footage of The Cramps at the Mudd Club in 1981. If you were living in Manhattan at the time, you could’ve watched it on the tube.

Lux, Kid Congo, Nick Knox and Ivy.

Warning; this kicks in loud, so adjust your speakers or risk waking up the neighbors.