DISGRACELAND - The Cramps: Zombies, Teenage Werewolves, and Rock ‘N’ Roll Saviors

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

The Cramps, led by the husband and wife team of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach, had one one mission: To save rock n' roll from the corporate monsters who threatened its destruction. The band blended rockabilly, blues, garage rock and the aesthetic of 1950s B-movies into a wholly unique and singular rock and roll concoction that set them apart from their punk contemporaries. But as they began their climb up the music industry's ladder of success, they encountered hordes of brainless zombies who didn't understand their music or their mission, swarms of radioactive bootlegging cockroaches, and a coven of blood-sucking vampires hellbent on destroying the only thing the Cramps held sacred: rock n' roll. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠. This episode was originally published on October 14, 2024. If rock n' roll is defined as low down, dirty, fun music for teenagers, what band made the greatest rock n' roll in your estimation? Let Jake know at 617-906-6638, [e-mail], or on socials @disgracelandpod. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠disgracelandpod.com Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠X⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠ ⁠TikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history,

including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis.

Well, hello, ghouls and goblins and salutations to all you creepy cats and kittens. a special Halloween episode of Disgraceland on the one in only kings and queens of rock and roll, the cramps. This is, if you can try to imagine, a fun, not so serious look at sexually charged burning corpses, 17-story suicides, zombies who can't dance, human flies, and teenage werewolves. This is not a scholarly look at the cultural significance of Lux interiors and Poison Ivy's musical output. This is, like I said, nothing more than a Halloween hoot inspired by the incredible music and wild career of the original Halloween heads, The Cramps. Hope you can dig it. Mellow Chalk! This is the story of one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time, The Cramps.

A band whose singer Lux Interior and guitarist Poison Ivy Roershack dedicated their lives to the mission of saving rock and roll, a mission that was challenged by soulless zombies, confused by burning corpses, bled dry by a vampire, and for a time smothered by giant radioactive cockroaches. But it's also a story about great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show,

that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop for my Melotron called Shah, Shah, Shosh, Shosh, Shatusi M.K. 1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to shadow dancing by Andy Gibb. And why would I play you that specific slice of sunken nut cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on June 13, 1978. And that was the day the cramps played a live set at a mental institution in Northern California,

creating a myth that would challenge the definition of what it means to be rock and roll. On this episode, zombies, corpses, vampires, radioactive cockroaches, and saving rock and roll with the cramps. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgraceland. If something is done and done quickly, rock and roll will cease to exist. Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery is not your average cemetery. Located six miles outside Hollywood, it's the eternal home to some of the biggest names from Tinsletown's famed history. There is Sammy Davis Jr.'s headstone. Sammy, the known Satanist.

And there's Errol Flynn's grave. Back in the early days of Hollywood, Errol was one of the movie businesses' biggest stars. He was also a pedophile. Some believe Walt Disney is buried here. He has a burial plot, but most believe his head was severed from his body after death, cryogenically frozen, and stored in an undisclosed location in Disneyland. Lon Cheney, the Phantom of the Opera, rests anonymously in an unmarked grave. And Lonchaney's son, Lonchaney Jr., who famously played the werewolf in Universal's

1941 classic, The Wolfman, well, his body does not rest anonymously next to his famous fathers. Old Launcaney Jr. donated his body to science after drinking a pinocalada at Trader Vicks. The cramps frontman, Lux's Interior, and his partner not just in crime, but in life, in love, and in art, Poison Ivy. The cramps in imitable guitarist and, for all intents and purposes, producer, this duo knew about donating their bodies,

their lives even, to something bigger than themselves. Lux and Ivy loved each other, but for the better part of two decades, they sacrificed everything for the one thing in this world that they both loved the most, rock and roll. Put more specifically, the cramps dedicated their lives to saving rock and roll. Life, though, was fleeting here in Glendale, in their apartment near the cemetery, as they carefully cruise through their well-cultivated record collection. A rock and roll archive is a dream. Thousands of obscure 50s and 60s 45s,

organized by niche genre, rockabilly, bop music, beat combos, duop, garage, novelty, and surf by the likes of artists like Charlie Feathers, Bo Diddley, the Paramounts, the flamingos, the sonics, the trashmen, and link gray. A lifetime's work of collecting. Most of these artists were already long gone,

as dead as Sammy and Lon Cheney Jr. and the rest. But their music lived on. Rock and roll was still very much alive, as long as Lux and Ivy had something to say about it. But death was in the air, literally. That smell, like burning tires, but with a strange sweetness to it, something was on fire.

Ivy called the fire department, which responded quickly and reminded Ivy and Luxe and lugs ominously of how close they lived to the cemetery. The burning smell was the crematorium. That strange, sweet scent was burning flesh. It coated their neighborhood some nights, brought down an eerie, depressing feeling.

But not as depressing as the television. Television used to be hours and hours of horror movies and monster flicks, B-films that aim their subversiveness at teenagers coming of age in the early 1960s, taking their cues from the subversive comics of the 40s and 50s, the vaults of horror and the tales from the Crips. But now, aside from the occasional off-market creature double feature, the fun and fantastical monsters were hard to come by. TV was 24-7 cable news, hateful narratives spun by squares to trick you into thinking your neighbors were the monsters. TV was hair and makeup evangelists hypocritically moralizing from the pulpit.

TV was the dreaded MTV. MTV, music television, a concept that started out pure back in the early 80s, back when the cramps were a young band, back when some of the cramps friends and quote-unquote punk rock contemporaries, Blondie and the go-goes, to name a few, were themselves young bands. MTV helped rocket these bands into superstardom, but had now, a decade later, evolved or devolved, depending on your point of view,

away from the heady avant-garde fringes of the television medium into a corporate advertising behemus. To Lux and Ivy, that meant MTV was dead, as dead as those bodies burning out beyond their backyard. MTV had nothing to do anymore with the rock and roll, who came up through the punk and new wave scenes. These days, MTV truly had nothing to do with rock and roll at all. Sure, MTV buttered its bread with rock artists, but not with rock and roll.

Rock and roll was sex. Rock was stiff. Rock and roll, in Lux's estimation, was meant to horrify adults and please teenagers. Rock was billboard charts and big business. Rock and Roll was supposed to separate the squares from the cool people. Rock, bands like You Two and the police in Genesis, bands MTV featured regularly now. These bands were so square. And their square minions in the rock press called the cramps sexist

because of their dangerous rock and roll song titles like, Can Your Pussy Do the Dog? Which was ironic given that the cramps were the very definition of feminism. The co-creation of one of the greatest, female rock and roll guitar players ever, whose creativity shaped the cramps into a singular and wholly unique band within the history of rock and roll. Ken Your Pussy Do the Dog wasn't sexist. It was rock and roll. It was dangerous, the way rock and roll is supposed to be, the way Iggy Pop and Rufus Thomas and Big Mama Thornton meant

for it to be. Rock and roll wasn't supposed to be staying on MTV accepting a fucking award for his humanitarian efforts for saving some goddamn rainforest. Lux turned the TV off and disgust and went back to his 45s. He grabbed a less obscure title. The Flamingos' 1959 hit, I Only Have Eyes for You, and he put it on the turntable. The eerie duop baritone vocal behind the duop duop duop chorus was dirty. It affected him like a drug, an aphrodisiac, actually. The trippiness of the track brought him back.

Back to a time when rock and roll reigned supreme. Back to his teenage delinquent days in suburban Ohio in the early 60s. The clothes were tight and black, all black. Lux, back before we invented the moniker Lux interior and still answered to his God-given name, Eric Perkheiser, dressed as his older brother and his older brother's friends did. Which is to say they dressed like Marlux's interior and he was. Marlon Brando in the wild one, but darker, meaner. The style had as much to do with Brando as it did with the Brando-inspired bike gang from outer space

in the Twilight Zone episode entitled Black Leather Jackets. But even that description doesn't quite do the look of Lux and his hoodlum friends justice. They wore all black, no blue denim, and they blacken their hair with thick pomade and engine grease. The drugged out 60s and sexual freedom of the summer of love, hadn't yet arrived. So Lux got high off the tripped out sounds of the flamingos and turned on by the girls in the dance hall at the local hop doing the bug. Lux unsteadily stood on the old wooden beer bottle box peering in the window. He and his hood friends were too much trouble to be allowed

into the dance. Case in point, his hoodlum buddies were off behind Lux at this moment, popping the hubcaps off the cars in the dance hall parking lot to fence for cash. Lux didn't care about the money. It was the thrill of it. Stealing hubcaps was a gas. But nowhere near as thrilling as the girls inside that dance hall right now. Just as Lux and his friends donned the tightest clothes they could fit into, the girls at the hop did the same.

The girls flailed around to Chev Woolie's hit, Purple People Eater. The novelty song, with its one long horn with one big eyes, subversively contextualized sex for horny teenage boys like love, and it drove the girls in the dance hall nuts as they did the bug. The dance, the bug, like the song, was also pure sex from Lux's estimation. These girls writhing about, their hands feeling all over their bodies for the figurative bug, attempting in all of their hot vanity to locate the bug on their breasts, on their bellies, on their thighs. Searching, touching, grabbing.

It drove young Lux nuts. Pure sex, pure rock and roll. As thrilling, dangerous, and scary as the sound of the police siren coming from behind him. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends.

I'm Anna Sinfield. And in this new season of The Girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands.

I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the Girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face,

and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says, she's gone, she's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday

on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie to Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You, from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the criterion closet?

Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream. shop with an extra P and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form.

I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over it, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lux's car raced down the highway. He saw her hitchhiking on the side of the road,

and he slammed on the brakes immediately, brought the car to a halt, and then jammed the shift in a reverse, burning rubber backward to pick up the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. Big hippie hair, halter top, the shortest, tightest shorts you could imagine. Her name was Christy. Almost instantly, she loved Lux,

who was still going by the name Eric, and she was jazzed by their immediate mutual admiration, a connection that matched the intensity of their shared love for rock and roll. Out West and Sacramento, where they had both escaped the square influence of the zombie conformists from their respective hometowns, his and Stowe, Ohio, hers and San Bernardino, there was plenty of freedom to explore that love. It was 1972. The hippie movement lurched on. They ate mushrooms and contemplated God as a Bo Diddley riff.

They drank wine and had lots of great sex. They smoked grass and went on a quest to find every 45 single ever issued by Sun Records, the legendary record label that first released Elvis Presley's music. Elvis, back in the Sundays, was a rock and roll freaks freak. Died black hair, black eyeliner, pink suits, armed with his mama's pill prescription so he could get all the session players at Sun High and therefore be allowed to keep his annoying little teenage ass hanging around. Elvis did what he could to keep one step ahead of the zombie norms

that tried to keep him down. So Lux, Eric, and Christy did the same. That meant making music themselves, making rock and roll themselves. But there was no way they were going to be able to make the rock and roll they loved out west in the middle of the hippie movement, where everyone seemed to be trying so hard to seem like they weren't trying. It was a movement that was supposed to be about freedom, but the now had its own set of social norms.

How you were supposed to look, talk, even think, definitely what you could listen to. It was a movement quickly consumed by its own kind of conformist zombies. So in 1975, Eric and Christy split from the coast from New York City. All they had with them was their record. collection, their rock and roll spirit, and a name they would call their new band, The Cramps. Hustlers, thieves, homicidal maniacs, garbage everywhere, junkies, homeless Vietnam vets eating out of trash bins, buildings on fire, a skyrocketing crime ray, rapists lurking

around dark corners, gangs getting wild in the streets, muggers, a city on the brink. Mid-70s New York City was beautiful. The perfect place to start, a bare-bones sexually-fueled, violently dangerous rock-and-roll band. The cramps were the mastermind creation of Eric and Christy, who had now started introducing themselves around town as Lux's Interior in Poison Ivy Roershack. Lux and Ivy quickly hooked up with a fellow rock-and-roll ghoul, Brian Gregory. Brian fashioned himself after the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, but more like Brian Jones in 1975, which is to say dead Brian Jones.

Brian Gregory looked deathly and mean, scary with his super high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. His polka-doc guitar offset the nasty look, which matched well with the cramps drummer, Brian's sister Pam, who was quickly replaced by drummer Nick Knox, another musician who leaned into at the dark gothic side of Southern rock and roll for fashion inspiration. Both musicians perfectly suited the new image portrayed by Lux and Ivy. Ivy's style combined classic burlesque with the commanding presence of the Duchess, the female guitarist who played in Bo Diddley's band. And Lux appeared as though he crawled out of your television set back in 1956

during one of those long-running horror flick marathons and landed in the rough trade section of Manhattan's meatpacking district. Luck stuck to his skin-tight black jeans, rail thin and tall. He seldom wore a shirt on stage, but he did wear high heels. His hair, of course, was dyed black and teased high to give him a Frankenstein monster effect. The cramps looked hillbilly and cosmopolitan at the same time. They looked, in a word, scary. and their music matched their look.

The first recorded cramps music, as with most recorded cramps music, walked a fine line, just like the band's look did. They sounded incredibly dark, but also incredibly exciting. Loose and fun original songs about teenage werewolves and drug trains and great covers by the likes of Johnny Burnett, the gay lads, and too many awesome and obscure 50s and 60s rock and roll artists to mention, all funneled through a slapback jungle boogie of early rock and roll production updated for the blank generation. The covers were songs The Cramps made their own, songs that indicated a unique understanding of and reverence for a mysterious slices of American music that had slipped through the cracks.

Rockabilly, garage, novelty, songs that the Cramps eventually turned the burgeoning New York punk scene onto. It was a time where other New York fans, including Blondie, Ramones, television, and the talking heads were creating undeniably unique takes on rock and roll themselves. Then it was also a time when the cramps would create one song in particular that would cause New York to take notice. Lux's interior walked down the dirty Manhattan sidewalk. It was early. Unlike the rest of the city, which was up early and headed for work, Lux wasn't coming. He was going. Going home after a long night in one of New York's rock and roll. clubs. If it was CBGB's, Lux would likely not be in a great mood. The crowd at Seabies in those

early days didn't take to the cramps. An audience of hipsters, zombies, conformists just the same as the hippies out west in the squares back home. But if it was Max's Kansas City the night before, then there was a good chance Lux was in a better mood. But that mood was about to change. That morning's post headline read, Human Fly Climes Towers Towers. It was about some brave but clearly insane thrill seeker who climbed all the way up one of the World Trade Center towers. Scaling buildings was on the collective mind of Manhattan at the moment. Six in the morning, Lux was almost back in his apartment. The garbage trucks were out full force.

Lux rounded the corner toward his building and there, sirens, cops, an ambulance, medics frantically moving about. A crowd of early morning gawkers quickly passing rubberneckers and in the middle of the fray, bloodied on the sidewalk the mangled and contorted body of one of Lux's neighbors who just pitched himself off the next door roof plummeting to his death some 10-plus stories below, having taken all that this city could give. Lux took it as literal inspiration from above and went to work with Ivy on writing a new song. The human fly with the lyrics, I spell it FLY. I say buzz, buzz, buzz, and it's just because, because I'm a human fly, and I don't know why I got 96 tears and 96 eyes.

The song was brilliant. A perfect combination of retro rock and roll cool with its question mark in the Mysterian's 96 Tears reference and modern weirdness with Lux's novelty-esque vocals by way of Iggy Pop and Charlie Feathers as Buzz, Buzz, Buzz. Human flies stood out among the cramps songs. The band caught the eye of the former big star and box-top songsmith from Memphis, Alex Chilton. Almost overnight, they were on their way south

to make music in the cradle of rock and roll at Memphis's Ardent Studios, with Chilton helming the production. The singles produced with Chilton led to label attention, from Miles Copeland, brother of Stuart Copeland, drummer for one of England's hottest up-and-coming bands at the time, the police. Miles Copeland managed the police and sold and distributed their music through his independent record label IRS Records.

Miles Copeland was keen on signing the cramps. Little did the cramps know. Miles Copeland was a vampire. We'll be right back after this world, word, word. There's two golden rules. that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.

And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands.

I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories

and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits,

and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. you know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the exactly right network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie de Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien.

And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You, from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the Criterion Clause? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film grape I got to. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form.

I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you have, figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear

Movies I Love You on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Miles Copeland couldn't believe the stories he was hearing about this American band. He'd of course seen them live already. A scorcher of a set. In London, the band was at the

peak of its voodoo horror sex power in front of a European crowd that was mad for Lux and Ivy's brand of wild, horny Americana. Lux, nearly naked up there with his leather pants sliding off of his skinny ass, fillating the microphone with his rockabilly hiccup, Ivy nailing every riff with her violent cool in that thousand-yard stare to freeze any and all aspiring creeps, with Brian Gregory resurrecting Brian Jones and Nick Knox beating the devil out of his kit with his Dale Hawkins Swampfoot. London didn't know what hit them. The cramps were propelled by the adoring crowd. The adoration was a far cry from the comatose zombie dance of the New York hipster crowds the band was used to.

But Miles Copeland heard that the cramps delivered this show every night, no matter if the audience was a packed-out, rock-and-roll star of crowd like the one in London, or 10 scenesters in an abandoned dance hall in a Washington, D.C. suburb. Then, there was the story about the cramps in the mental institution. The cramps newly released single, The Human Fly, caused New York City to take notice. It got the band booked into CBGBs in Max's Kansas City with some regularity. But as previously noted, those crowds were lame. Zombie hipsters.

They barely moved, while the cramps poured their souls out on stage. age. Lucks literally bled, cutting himself with broken glass crawling across the floor to deliver the most honest form of rock and roll he could conjure. Ivy took a job as dominatrix to avoid the straight world so she could make enough cash to keep the band going. Brian Gregory took up heroin and plunged into drug abuse. Such was his commitment to the Brian Jones bit, while Nick Knox held on for dear life. The cramps were the real deal, but New York City didn't appreciate them. Not like they did television or Blondie. But while the cramps were derided in the New York rock press,

the traveling British press thought otherwise. In a feature published by the New Musical Express on June 10, 1978, entitled Psychobilly and Other Musical Diseases, British journalist Paul Rimbali, he praised upon the cramps' unique brand of vintage horror-influenced rock and roll. But he also noted that the cramps are regarded as at best a joke, at worst an artless conniving fraud. In the process, the British press also gave the cramps style of music a name,

Psychobilly. It was now official. The cramps had made something wholly unique, creating their own subgenre of rock and roll in their quest to save rock and roll. It was more than anything New York had given them. So the writing was on the New York City wall for Lux and Ivy. They needed to go west. Upon doing so, they encountered more zombies in Los Angeles, not hipster zombies, but hardcore

authoritarian masked as punks, music fans who were actually violent and hateful at their core. In need of a gig, the cramps were hip to an institution several hours north of L.A. that would allow them to play and provide an enthusiastic audience. The Camarillo State Mental Hospital in Napa, California. A mental institution. The Nut House. It was perfect, Lux thought. Where else could the true spirit of rock and roll be more alive than inside the drab institutional walls of a loony bin?

Real rock and roll was made by Looney's. Elvis was out of his fucking mind, and that Bo Didley riff, there's no way any sane person would have created the Bo Didley riff. Charlie Feathers sang like he swallowed his science experiment. Roddy self-sang like he lit his hair on fire. And Link Ray played like a man possessed. Yes, the insane. Hell yes, a mental institution. This, this is where the cramps would become one with the perfect audience.

From their first notes on stage inside the psychiatric hospital in front of the patients, or the inmates, as Lux would later recall, Lux's intuition was proven correct. As Lux, Ivy, and Brian and Nick bashed away at their instruments, the patients, well, went... The patients went nuts. They were banging. their heads, po-going, doing all kinds of dancing, actually, working themselves into a frenzy.

And when the first song rapped, Lux introduced the band and said to the audience, Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I'm not so sure about that. You seem to be all right to me. If there had been any question about whether or not the crowd was with him, Lux answered it with that comment. The patience went at the next song and the rest of the set with even more fervor, responding the Lux's empathy. They rushed the stage, screaming into the microphone, hugging Lux, diving off the stage, humping the floor, humping each other, chasing each other around the dance hall, making out. For a moment, and though they were locked up in an institution, there was

total freedom, such as the power of real rock and roll. Some patients actually escaped during the confusion caused by the rock is set, and they eventually returned of their own volition. The gig at the mental institution gave wings to the growing myth of the cramps. Word spread to London that rock and roll might be saved after all. And if it was going to be rescued from the clutches of the hipster zombies on both coasts, the cramps might be rock and roll's best hope. Miles Copeland signed the cramps to his IRS record label. The excellent album Songs the Lord taught us was recorded at Phillips Recording in Memphis,

the studio run by the legendary Sam Phillips, who founded Sunwrector. and first recorded Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and other rock and roll pioneers. The album was produced by big stars Alex Chilton, and by any standard, production shortcomings aside, Songs the Lord taught us is a rock and roll masterpiece. It brought growing fame to the cramps in the UK and throughout Europe, made possible with the new backing of IRS and Miles Copeland. A second record was needed imminently to capitalize on the cramps' new momentum. New York City was done. dead. Los Angeles, despite its hardcore zombies, was the next best bet for geographic inspiration.

The cramps relocated and replaced Brian Gregory with Gun Club guitarist Kid Congo Powers. The recording of their second album was on deck, but that's when the vampire fully emerged. As far as rock and roll businessmen go, Miles Copeland, the third, looks like a vampire. He's always looked impossibly young, Anglo, with a parasitic glow about him. He's a suit with an inherently intimidating stature born of privilege in class. Miles's main priority was his brother's band, the police, and for good reason, since their inception, the police were in the ascendant. Granted, they started on third base. Miles' father was perhaps also a vampire. That is an unknowable fact. But what is knowable

is that Miles Copeland II was a founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency. better known as the CIA. Rumors were rampant that the cramps new manager, Miles Copeland III, was himself a CIA cutout and that the bans he'd signed to his record label, including the police, the go-goes, R.E.M. and the Bengals were mere tools to disseminate disinformation to influence American youth on behalf of the CIA. Perhaps this explains the differences that arose quickly between Miles and the cramps, who fell out over creative and financial differences

around the time they were to begin recording their second full-length album. Rock and roll bands can be a lot of things, but unwitting tools of government disinformation is one thing they cannot be. Regardless of what Miles Copeland was or wasn't, it's clear that he was hell-bent on sucking the rock-and-roll life out of the cramps. From their differences, a lawsuit emerged. And the stipulation of that lawsuit was that until Miles' name, and the cramps worked out their legal issues,

the cramps were court-ordered not to release or sell any new music. The well-heeled Miles Copeland the third used his financial resources to drag the case out, putting pressure on the cramps to come to a settlement that favored Copeland. The cramps didn't back down. But again, this meant the cramps couldn't release any new music, and this meant nearly three years of professional death. The band played live as a means to make ends up.

and to keep up some momentum, and their fans flocked to shows, but they were starved for new music as Copeland the vampire bled the cramps dry. Then the cockroaches came out, big, radioactive, nuclear-powered bootlegging cockroaches. They crawled out of the woodwork and smothered the cramp's career, flooding the market with illegal live recordings from the band's many live shows, live shows that were now necessary to keep the band afloat. But the blue, the blue Footleggers were so persistent, so prolific that the cramps were forced to stop performing their new original songs for fear that the cockroaches would record their tunes prematurely and release them to the public before the cramps could get out of their lawsuit and release those

songs themselves. The only move the cramps had left was to perform covers during their live shows while waiting for their legal troubles to resolve. Miles Copeland the vampire had taken a healthy bite out of the cramps, transfiguring one of the most original rock and roll groups on the planet into a cover band. Back in Lux's apartment, years later, with the smell of burning flesh from the nearby crematorium blanketing his and Ivy's Glendale neighborhood, the cramps singer continued to cruise his collection of 45 records, looking for something to put on the turntable while keeping one ear on the television tuned to MTV in the background.

Lux was curious to see the cramps new video on the idiot box. The song was hot shit, as was the video. It was a new song, of course. It had been a few years since the cramps finally overcame the bootlegging cockroaches and broke free from the legal clutches of the vampiric Miles Copeland, and were once again allowed to record and release new original material. First, they did so after satiating fans with the excellent live album, smell of female from New York's

Peppermint Lounge in 1983 and then with the 1986 studio album, A Date with Elvis. Both records were critical if not commercial hits. But the single and video bikini girls with machine guns from their latest long

player, stay sick. They were too good for the song not to be a hit, or so thought anyone with rock and roll ears. Sadly, those people were wrong. Sure, the song got played on MTV and even received some radio play, but it wasn't a hit. It didn't matter how great the song was, and it was indeed great.

Bikini Girls with Machine Guns culminated a years-long rock and roll obsession. With this song, Lux and Ivy finally Frankenstein their uniquely specific brand of rock and roll into something truly monstrous. The song had everything, a massive hooky chorus, killer energy, and strong. swing, a stinging, heroic anti-gatar hero guitar solo from Ivy, and an undeniably unique lyrical POV. I mean, what in the world could possibly be better than bikini girls with machine guns? Nothing. That's what? First of all, they're girls. Second of all, they're in bikinis. And third, they've got fucking machine guns, man, all right? Sorry, forgive me for indulging my inner beavers and butthead. And back to saving rock and roll. As far as Lux and Ivy's goal of bringing

rock and roll to the masses, to the mainstream media outlets needed to disseminate the cramps brand of mad teenage bob, to the radio, to television. Well, finally, finally, the cramps had sound and production on this single, worthy of the band's originality. And by the time the cramps recorded bikini girls with machine guns, they'd abandoned the two guitar assault they'd used in their early days and added Candy Del Mar on bass, and that new bottom added a level of modern sophistication to the cramp sound that a great song like bikini girls with machine guns demanded. And the video, weirder than weird and cool as fuck. Lux and skin-tight black latex and high heels.

Ivy and her burlesque belly dancer best firing off a machine gun with her panties sliding down to her high-heeled ankles. The video oozes violence, booze, sex, and cool. You know, all the things red-blooded American teenagers are pretty naturally driven toward. This stuff will kill you. It's a loaded with fun, bikini girls with machine guns, as the lyric goes. Pure awesomeness. But Lux didn't see his video on TV that day.

Just another repeat of Sting's ridiculous video for We'll Be Together Tonight. Luck shut the TV off and went back to his 45s. Because for all the awesomeness of bikini girls with machine guns, it didn't matter. None of it mattered. Didn't matter how great the song was. It was too late. Didn't matter how great the video was because it was too late.

It was a different time. It was 1990. Had bikini girls with machine guns been written and released earlier, say back in 1983, I believe it would have made the cramps a household name and perhaps rock and roll would have been saved. Back in the early 80s, MTV was jammed with idiosyncratic rock and roll videos.

Take Cindy Lopper's hit, Sheeot. There's Cindy, with her orange hair, bouncing around your television screen, singing about female masturbation. Or the go-go's early 80s hit, We Get the Beat. The Go-Gos. IRS records cleaned up their punk image a tad for the cameras,

but there's Belinda and the girls, Lux and Ivy's L.A. punk contemporaries, taking the piss out of Smokey Robinson's going to a go-go with the updated We Got the Beat. Take off your punk rock hipster hat for just a minute and try to see Cindy Lop and the go-goes We Got the Beat and the cramps Bikini Girls with Machine Guns as a Midwestern or suburban teenage kid in 1983 would have.

There's not that much of a difference. Broadly speaking, the big difference is timing. She-Bot and We Got the Beat emerged when MTV leaned into weird rock and roll. By the time the video for Bikini Girls with Machine Guns came out in 1990, MTV was busy broadcasting self-serious rock music by Sting, U2, Genesis, and others. But in the early 1980s, when the She-Bob and We Got the Beat videos were released, the cramps were effectively stuck in music jail. The window to break on MTV for a band as weird and idiosyncratic as the cramps

had come and gone during the hit-making network's nascent years from 1981 to 1984 when the cramps were legally prohibited from recording and releasing new material. The time they spent during that era, battling a music industry vampire and combating radioactive bootlegging cockroaches, was time they could have spent inspired and perhaps writing and releasing songs like bikini girls with machine guns during an era when the mainstream public would have been receptive to their brand of rock and roll weirdness.

Had that happened, perhaps Lux and Ivy's mission of saving, rock and roll from corporate rock would have succeeded. But that didn't happen. Bikini Girls with Machine Guns was just a modest hit, and only in the UK. But it did keep the cramps going as a band. They continued touring and making great music throughout the 90s and early 2000s. Lux and Ivy never gave up the ghost. They kept on.

Their music, their rock and roll, inspired countless younger bands in the so-called psychobilly category, a subgenre of rock and roll that the cramps unintentionally created. Rock and roll archivists around the world, serious scholars of various genres, most notably garage, rockabilly, punk, horror rock, and novelty records owe a significant debt of gratitude to the cramps for their inspiration. Same goes for the goth girls on TikTok and for the horror core kids. And also, for the former Disney star Jenna Ortega. who brought the cramps to the forefront of pop culture in 2022 with a dance the actress choreographed herself

for an episode of the wildly popular Netflix series Wednesday. During the dance, Ortega's Wednesday character owns all 96 of the teenaged eyes gloop to her as she twitches and struts through the high school dance to the cramps song, Goo GooMuck. It's an inadvertent 21st century homage to the bug from back in Lux's childhood. Shout out to music supervisor Jen Malone and ex-Goth herself

for having the taste in good sense to include the cramps in this modern hit television series. The cramps influence spread far and wide because the cramps created something wholly unique in rock and roll through the dedication that they put into their music. Unfortunately, that dedication came to an end when Lux died suddenly in 2009 from heart failure. Ivy, after losing the love of her life and her creative partner disappeared completely from the public eye.

The cramps gave their lives to saving rock and roll. But that didn't happen. Rock and roll is dead. Dead. Just like the efforts of the zombie conformists and the music biz vampire and the bootlegging cockroaches. But the cramps' music is alive. It's alive. And that is anything but a discreet.

I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. All right, that was a fun one. Happy Halloween, everybody. Hope you dug it this week's question of the week. In honor of the cramps, is this, what band made the greatest rock and roll music ever? You know the drill, one band and one band only. Tell me why.

Rock and roll to me is low down, dirty, fun, guitar-driven music for teenagers and or music that makes you feel like a teenager. So, loosely based on that definition, I guess, What band in your estimation made the greatest rock and roll music of all time and why? I already know my answer and it's pretty basic, but I want to know your answer. 617-90666-6638. Leave me a voicemail, send me a text and let me know. You can also reach me at Discreaceland Pod as well on Instagram, X, and Facebook.

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at YouTube.com slash at disgraceland pod. Rockerola. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target.

He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that, trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever.

My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yello. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things, Tena Mongeau, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court.

On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history, including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.