The Cramps – Illegal Records – 1979

Human Fly / The Way I Walk / Domino

Surfin Bird / Lonesome Town

Super fine fare from The Cramps. This debut U.K release is a 12″ compilation of the first couple of super rare 7″ singles that were recorded and released in 1978 on the Vengeance Record label.

Absolutely stunning band, and for most people who know of The Cramps, the first couple of bars to ‘Human Fly’, the first track I heard by the band, are instantly recognisable. A marvelous night out to boot…

Text below from the L.A. Times about the sad loss of Lux Interior…and following on a biography from allmusic.com. 

L.A. Times Obituary:

Lux Interior, the singer, songwriter and founding member of the pioneering New York City horror-punk band the Cramps, died Wednesday. He was 60.

Interior, whose real name was Erick Lee Purkhiser, died at Glendale Memorial Hospital of a heart condition, according to a statement from his publicist.

With his wife, guitarist “Poison” Ivy Rorschach, Interior formed the Cramps in 1976, pairing lyrics that expressed their love of B-movie camp with ferocious rockabilly and surf-inspired instrumentation.

The band became a staple of the late ’70s Manhattan punk scene emerging from clubs such as Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, and was one of the first acts to realize the potential of punk rock as theater and spectacle.

Often dressed in macabre, gender-bending costumes onstage, Interior evoked a lanky, proto-goth Elvis Presley, and his band quickly became notorious for volatile and decadent live performances.

The Cramps recorded early singles at Sun Records with producer Alex Chilton of the band Big Star and had their first critical breakthrough on their debut EP “Gravest Hits.”

The band’s lack of a bassist and its antagonistic female guitarist quickly set it apart from its downtown peers and upended the traditional rock band sexual dynamic of the flamboyant, seductive female and the mysterious male guitarist.

The group was asked to open for the Police on a major tour of Britain in 1979 and reached its critical apex in the early ’80s with such albums as “Psychedelic Jungle” and “Songs the Lord Taught Us.”

While the Cramps’ lineup revolved constantly, Interior and Rorschach remained the band’s core through more than three decades. The Cramps never achieved much mainstream commercial success, but instead found a reliable fringe audience for more than 30 years — they even played a notorious show for patients at Napa State Hospital in Napa, Calif.

“It’s a little bit like asking a junkie how he’s been able to keep on dope all these years,” Interior told The Times some years ago. “It’s just so much fun. You pull in to one town and people scream, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ And you go to a bar and have a great rock ‘n’ roll show and go to the next town and people scream, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.’ It’s hard to walk away from all that.”

The band’s influence can be clearly felt among lauded minimalist art-blues bands, including the Black Lips, the White Stripes, the Horrors and Primal Scream, whose front man, Bobby Gillespie, allegedly named his son Lux.

The Cramps’ most recent album, a collection of rarities, “How to Make a Monster,” was released in 2004, and the band continued to tour well into the later years of its career, wrapping up its most recent U.S. outing in November.

Interior was born in Stow, Ohio, on Oct. 21, 1948. A Times report in 2004 said that he and Rorschach (born Kristy Wallace) met in Sacramento, where they bonded “over their enrollment in an art and shamanism class and a shared affection for thrift-shop vinyl before hitting the road for New York City.”

In 1987, there were widespread rumors of Interior’s death from a heroin overdose, and half a dozen funeral wreaths were sent to Rorschach. “At first, I thought it was kind of funny,” Interior told The Times. “But then it started to give me a creepy feeling.”

“We sell a lot of records, but somehow just hearing that you’ve sold so many records doesn’t hit you quite as much as when a lot of people call you up and are obviously really broken up because you’ve died.”

All Music biography:

Conjuring a fiendish witches’ brew of primal rockabilly, grease-stained ’60s garage rock, vintage monster movies, perverse and glistening sex, and the detritus and effluvia of 50 years of American pop culture, the Cramps are a truly American creation much in the manner of the Cadillac, the White Castle hamburger, the Fender Stratocaster, and Jayne Mansfield. Often imitated, but never with the same psychic resonance as the original, the Cramps celebrate all that is dirty and gaudy with a perverse joy that draws in listeners with its fleshy decadence, not unlike an enchanted gingerbread house on the Las Vegas strip. The entire psychobilly scene would be unthinkable without them, and their prescient celebration of the echoey menace of first-generation rock & roll had a primal (if little acknowledged) influence on the rockabilly revival and the later roots rock movement.

The saga of the Cramps begins in 1972 in Sacramento, CA, when LSD enthusiast and Alice Cooper fan Erick Purkhiser picked up a hitchhiker, a woman with a highly evolved rock & roll fashion sense named Kristy Wallace. The two quickly took note of one another, but major sparks didn’t began to fly until a few weeks later, when they discovered they were both enrolled in a course on “Art and Shamanism” at Sacramento City College. These two lovebirds were soon sharing both an apartment and their collective enthusiasm for the stranger and more obscure sounds of rock’s first era, as well as the more flamboyant music of the day. Their passion for music led them to the conclusion that they should form a band, and Kristy picked up a guitar and adopted the stage name Poison Ivy Rorschach, while future vocalist Erick became Lux Interior, after short spells as Raven Beauty and Vip Vop. Ivy and Lux hit the road for Ohio, and after living frugally in Akron for a year and a half, they made their way to New York City in 1975 in search of stardom.

While working at a record store, Interior made the acquaintance of fellow employee Greg Beckerleg, who had recently arrived from Detroit and also wanted to form a band. Beckerleg transformed himself into primal noise guitarist Bryan Gregory, and even persuaded his sister to join the nascent combo as a drummer. However, Pam Beckerleg didn’t work out on traps, and so Miriam Linna, an Ohio transplant who had gotten to know Lux and Ivy during their sojourn in the Buckeye State, finalized the first proper lineup of the band they called the Cramps. Between Ivy’s twangy single-note leads, Bryan’s shower-of-sparks reports of noise, Lux’s demented banshee howling, and Miriam’s primitive stomp, the Cramps didn’t sound like anyone else on the budding New York punk scene, and the foursome soon began attracting both crowds and buzz with their shows at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. After about a year of gigging in and around New York, Linna left the group (she would later co-found frantic cultural journal Kicks Magazine and exemplary reissue label Norton Records), and another former Ohioan, Nick Stephanoff (known to his fans as Nick Knox and previously a member of infamous Cleveland noise terrorists the Electric Eels) took over behind the drums, and this version of the Cramps released the group’s first recordings, a pair of 7″ singles recorded in Memphis with Alex Chilton as producer and issued by the band’s own Vengeance Records label.

In 1979, Miles Copeland signed the band to his fledgling new wave label I.R.S. Records, and their first 12″ release was an EP featuring the material from their self-released singles, entitled Gravest Hits. That same year, the band traveled to Europe for the first time, playing as opening act for The Police and stealing the show from the peroxide-addled pop stars many nights. The Cramps returned to Memphis with Chilton to record their first full-length album, 1980’s masterful Songs the Lord Taught Us, but what should have been a triumphant U.S. tour following its release was scuttled when Gregory unceremoniously quit the band by leaving unannounced with a van full of their equipment; at the time, a story circulated that Gregory left the Cramps to pursue an interest in Satanism, though in later interviews Lux and Ivy said there was no truth to these rumors and his actions were more likely the result of his addiction to heroin. Lux, Ivy, and Nick opted to move the band to Hollywood, CA, and recruited Gun Club guitarist Kid Congo Powers to take over as second guitarist in time to record their second long-player, Psychedelic Jungle.

In 1981, the Cramps filed suit against I.R.S. Records over unpaid royalties; the court case prevented the band from recording new material for two years, and when they returned to America’s record racks, it was with a live album, 1983’s Smell of Female, recording during a pair of dates at New York City’s Peppermint Lounge.