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THEY CAME OUTTA Sacramento, California, and Akron, Ohio, their heads full of B-movie violence, cut-throat rock ’n’ roll and fetish-mag filth. They were the Cramps. The men looked like creeps and killers. The woman, Poison Ivy, looked like a high priestess or a Fifties movie queen. In a flip of the usual showbiz dynamic, the singer wore high heels and ended almost every gig naked while his partner — the woman — ran the show. She produced, managed, wrote the music, played the guitar and frequently reached over to tune the guitars of her bandmates.
They might have seemed deviant, but the Cramps nevertheless played all-American music — the kind of music that had rocked the country before the British Invasion — a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together out of the blues, doo-wop, rockabilly, country, R&B, exotica, garage rock, psychedelia, instro-surf and more. The Cramps were rock ’n’ roll as remodeled by Roger Corman, Russ Meyer and John Waters. Their sound — and that of the music they popularized and reintroduced — echoes in the movies of Quentin Tarantino and haunts the soundtracks of Angelo Badalamenti.
They hung out with the Ramones and toured with the Police. The White Stripes owe them. Queens of the Stone Age covered them. Nick Cave nicked two of their band members. My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields told Guitar World that he formed a band because of Cave’s the Birthday Party and the Cramps. Fugazi/ Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye once claimed that a Cramps gig kick-started the D.C. hardcore scene.
They were an influence on
