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The Cramps' Lux Interior would have scoffed at the whole notion of resting in peace. But even if the man born Erick Purkhiser doesn't return to walk among us as a zombie, we'll sorely miss his Z-movie voodoobilly trash aesthetic--and we offer our deepest condolences to his better half Poison Ivy. Mat Snow met them early in 1990 and filed this account of his encounter.--Barney Hoskyns, RBP Editorial Director

In a high security Illinois penitentiary languishes a gentleman by name of John Wayne Gacy, a former employee of the Baskin Robbins ice cream corporation of whom no one might ever have heard had he not taken it into his head to do away with 33 of his fellow citizens in the Chicago area.

There Gacy sits on Death Row, perhaps consoled by the occasional missive from his pen-pal, no less a celebrity himself in his particular field, which is to be found at the more eccentric end of the rock 'n' roll spectrum. Trading under the nom de kitsch of Lux Interior, the singer of the Cramps toasts his absent friend in one of Hollywood's less salubrious Mexican bars.

"I really like the guy," he reveals in a tone of everyday ghoulishness not unreminiscent of TV's Herman Munster. "I don't care if he killed 33 people. But," he adds lest any misunderstanding should arise, "there are people I like who didn't kill 33 people. And there's people who didn't kill 33 people I can't stand. So I don't know what the f***.

"I've written to him quite a bit. He writes very interesting letters back and painted a picture of me that I like very much. But I heard he wrote a book which published a couple of my letters." Lux frowns at the perfidy of human nature. "I thought we had a kind of sacred thing going...

"He'll get fried," he sighs into his margarita, sorrow perhaps not untinged with gloating.

The Cramps are that rare thing, the new wave novelty act that refused to die. Chiefly influenced, in Lux's time--hallowed words, by "plastic and LSD", The Cramps are to night what the B-52s are to day. Their gleeful recycling of the more grotesque portions of 1950s and '60s trash culture has earned the Cramps an audience which emerges from the woodwork with every fleeting appearance, on record and tour, its loyalty seemingly at odds with the throwaway Americana which the Cramps so hilariously glorify. Psychobilly, the Batcave Club (brief horror movie/trash culture flirtation in the mid-'80s London clubs) and the Goth scene (for all of which they have been held at least partially responsible) may have come and gone, but you can be sure the fans will be there in all their ghastly finery, even travelling to the Continent in coach parties of such debauched dedication to all things Crampish that one might almost call these fiendish pilgrims Undead Heads.

In 1990 the Cramps celebrate what guitarist "Poison" Ivy Rorschach describes as "13 lucky years" in the underbelly of rock 'n' roll with a new American record contract--their first for eight years--and Stay Sick!, their first album since 1986, from which is taken a new single, 'Bikini Girls With Machine Guns.' Connoisseurs of the cruel and unusual might care to note that this tune features quotes from the killer Henry Lucas, and long-term Crampophiles will be further reassured to know that the band continues to stalk that fine line between the distinctly weird and the distinctly rude, its son-of-Sun Records voodoobilly sound diminished not one whit by any mellowing of age.

And while the mainstream will doubtless continue to turn a blind eye to the rumpus kicked up by the Cramps in rock 'n' roll's crypt, no less an authority than Ringo Starr recently assured viewers of America's Arsenio Hall Show that they are his favorite band. Indeed, it is in those 3-D, chrome- trimmed, tail-finned '50s so beloved of the former Beatles that the Cramps' origins might be distantly traced.

It was then that young Lux--born Erick Purkhiser--was growing up the son of a foreman at Goodyear in the rubber-manufacturing city of Akron, Ohio, and tuning into an actor who briefly specialized in monocled Nazis before turning his hand to jockeying discs--one Pete Myers, better known as Mad Daddy. "He played the most noncommercial rockabilly, the wildest stuff," Lux slips into fond reverie. "He'd take amphetamines and talk non-stop for 20 minutes in rhyme until he was gasping for air. Completely nuts."

And then young Erick was styled Angel, teen gangster with the Aristocrats, who busied themselves with car and boat theft and sledgehammering open phone booths. "We wore bowler hats but called them derbies, carried and listened to the Trashmen. We called ourselves hoods and we had three cars, including a '48 Plymouth with Oldsmobile taillights, if I remember rightly. We were the richest kids at our high school." But by '67 he had relocated to Sacramento, California.

"I think I was evading the draft," he mistily recalls, "Was I a hippie? I was a hell of a hippie! Every weekend you could go to the park, drink jugs of wine and dance around and play one-string guitar for hours out of your mind on drugs."

Today styled "Poison" Ivy Rorschach, back then Kirsty Wallace was Sacramento's "Hopgood High School Queen, a teenage love machine." For kicks she'd blow up Barbie dolls with firecrackers and build paper villages and burn them down. "That's one of the things I got caught at school with. I was avant-garde but not a criminal. But the consensus was I was a bad influence--so scram!"

Already at the age of 14 this misunderstood avant-gardist was "getting high" on Owsley's legendary Orange Sunshine LSD--though it was "just pot and pills" at junior high. Erick and Kirsty met when he picked her up hitchhiking, and they have been rock 'n' roll's oddest couple ever since, cementing their troth when local police interest in their activities spurred them east to Ohio: "In Sacramento everybody was into witchcraft, mysticism and acoustic music." Ivy lets the full enormity sink in. "They used to laugh at rock 'n' roll! Nothing good ever came to that godforsaken East Jesusburg."

A stint making circuit-boards ("It didn't last long. We're not the most employable people in the world") financed the vision that now fuelled these unreconstructed rockabilly, doo-wop and blues fiends--The Cramps (as in the American idiom for menstrual pains). They moved to New York just as new wave began to stir and soon were a hot ticket. "When we arrived we went to see the Talking Heads at CBGBs because we liked the name," Lux recalls. "They played '1,2,3 Red Light' by The 1910 Fruitgum Company. Talking Heads is one of the few bands left that I really like." Some new wavers, however, regarded the Cramps as "hillbillies, real kind of hayseed," Ivy sniffs. "We were sophisticated in a different way."

"We never did fit in there, except that every place we played they had to turn people away." Lux rebuffs the snoots. "The whole scene was really fun. I loved the Ramones and Talking Heads and Blondie. We had a good time with them."

By then the Cramps had been introduced "by a mutual dead friend" to their drummer, Nick Knox (born Nick Stephanoff), today the epitome of wise-cracking black-clad cool.

"The first time we saw him he was wearing purple hot pants in Canton, Ohio, at an amusement park with the greatest rollercoaster you've ever been on and the best New York Dolls concert you've ever seen. man!" raves Lux. "The first thing I said to Ivy was, Wow! Look at that guy!"

But original co-guitarist Bryan Gregory, wittily described as "the handsomest man in rock 'n' roll", contrary to appearances, didn't quite fit in. "This was a guy that liked the Hollies more than us!" Lux splutters. "He was great but he didn't recognize it."

Bryan Gregory's greatness was recognized by the Cramps' first fans to an alarming degree. A cult within a cult, his horrifically ravaged mug adorned the trendiest of T-shirts, and wisps of his peroxide hair became prized memorabilia. Onstage he alarmed audiences with such Paul Daniels-style antics as swallowing lit cigarettes, and between gigs he would replenish a phial he carried about with earth from whichever graveyard was nearest the hall or hotel. It all ended when, according to Cramps legend, Bryan flipped out after a gig and disappeared into the night without a word, eventually resurfacing in San Francisco after rumors of suicide. "We smoked opium. I said goodnight, went to bed, and next morning he was gone," Lux explains sweetly.

"What wasn't known publicly was at that point we wanted to finish off the tour and then say no more Cramps," adds Ivy. "We had a hopped-up vision of The Cramps and we weren't changing--and still haven't--but he was."

"He wanted to be like The Clash and write songs about the Sandinistas," snorts Lux. "He just wanted to get rich quick. Bryan Gregory would go out and do his stuff, but we had to pull it out of his a**h**e, in the words of Sam Phillips. We had to demand he play these leads, which he thought were stupid and dopey. He liked the Bee Gees! He barely played on any of our records. I hate to destroy it for fans, but the guy was fighting us the whole time. He was a dumb glue-sniffer from Detroit, and that's all it amounts to. Not that I've got anything against glue-sniffers or Detroit."

Another eccentric to enter the Cramps' orbit was the former teen star with the Box Tops in the '60s and cult legend with Big Star in the '70s, Memphis's Alex Chilton.

"We met him in New York and didn't know much about him," Ivy recalls. He said, How'd y'all like to go to Memphis to record? We went b-yoiiinggg! Rilly? Wow!!!"

And so to Sun Studios to cut their first singles, "The Way I Walk"/"Surfin' Bird" and "Human Fly"/"Domino" (collected in the UK on the Gravest Hits EP). There they met a good ol' boy called Don "Rooster" Ezell, a local cab driver and friend of Sun's Sam Phillips. Now dead, he told the Cramps a tale that had somehow bypassed Albert Goldman and was sure to prick up their obsessive ears: that Elvis first got access to the boys at Sun Records by supplying them with amphetamines.

"I believe it because not only was Elvis a truck-driver but his mother was severely overweight, and back in the '50s the only treatment anyone ever got was diet pills--and that's what probably killed her," Ivy speculates. "What Don Ezell said Elvis was...I believe he used the term 'n***er queer'. It meant to a Southerner that Elvis hung around on Beale Street, he dressed flashy. Most of these guys on Sun were farmers, sharecroppers, redneck types. What does a redneck think of a teenager in a pink suit who wears mascara and hangs out on Beale Street? What would they have in common? A love of speed. But I don't think Elvis was a hustler; he was just a sweet kid whose love and passion was for gospel and the blues. That's all he cared about."

Surfing on the cult reputation of those Chilton-produced sides--followed in 1980 by the excellent debut LP Songs The Lord Taught Us--the Cramps first toured the UK a decade ago, supporting, of all people, their label-mates on Miles Copeland's IRS label, the Police.

"It was such a thrill for us, and The Police were incredibly nice and hospitable and let us have soundchecks, which I've heard is not typical at all," Ivy gives due credit. "I've heard in this business you're really lucky if people are nice to you. And their audience found a facet to us that was entertaining, whether it was morbid fascination or whatever. We have had hassles with other bands. Bands have actually sabotaged us. A band from England tried to get us thrown off the tour in Houston."

And the name of this band?

"Something like the Buzzcocks--but it wasn't," teases Lux. "They didn't even punch Ivy."

"They didn't even shove me against a wall, the chickens," she sneers. "And then you go out onstage and the tube's been pulled out of the amp."

Such problems are now a thing of the past. The Cramps tour when they want, and, after reaching a settlement with IRS which precludes public disclosure of the nature of the acrimonious dispute that hog-tied the band's LP career in the early '80s, now finance their own records to avoid being over-beholden to a record company, and expect to sell 250,000 per LP. Ivy manages the whole shebang.

"Compared to her," Lux beams fondly, "every other manager has been slug on top of slime."

"Whatever you heard, I did not pull my d*** out!" protests the man who has been no stranger to airing his unmentionables on the public stage--and, indeed, parking his lunch on it too. "Every other time we played I threw up. I could do it on cue," he once recalled, his personal highlight being flown out from LA to Leeds by the organizers of the Futurama festival, a particularly bilious yet gratifying show: "That's when I knew I was a success--I got paid $15,000 to throw up!"

Lux, however, is referring to the particular occasion when the Cramps played the "halfway ward" of the Napa Hospital, a mental institution in California. Legend has it that the patients responded with unbridled enthusiasm; clearly at last having found a band they could call their own. "Those people at Napa Hospital were less unusual than some of the crowds we've played," Lux deadpans, "though the guy filming couldn't point his camera at the inmates because he couldn't show them escaping."

Paying audiences, however, have not been shy at showing their appreciation at what is widely recognized as the most reliably wild and crazy live act in rock 'n' roll. Lux has followed in Iggy Pop's footsteps by walking on the upturned palms of the front stalls a full 50 yards towards the back of the Hammersmith Palais, and at the same venue closed the show by exiting neither stage left nor stage right, but stage centre--ripping up the floorboards and disappearing amidst a shower of splinters. Then, at Brighton's Top Rank, there was the occasion when even the diehard fans were shocked: after the final encore all the band left the stage but for Lux, stark naked, staring-eyed and rubbing his monitor with his microphone for a full five minutes until Nick returned with a towel and bundled him backstage. This "gibbering wreck" impression went down so well that Lux did it again for several more nights.

In the Cramps tradition of visiting the more offbeat venues, this year they will play at Minnesota's Stillwater State Correctional Facility at the request of Sounds Incarcerated, the prisoners' organization founded by Pat Hare, a blues guitarist who backed Muddy Waters and Junior Parker. "And," according to Ivy, "he had a record out on Sun called 'I'm Going To Murder My Baby', his biggest hit. Later he did, er, murder his woman, and ended up in Stillwater.

"They said we can play there any time," she adds; "they're not going anywhere..."

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