The Cramps
Psychedelic Jungle
1981, IRS Records
I fucked up Halloween this year. Past Octobers for me have been blizzards of horror movie watching and reviewing. A little Bela Lugosi on Tuesday, a little Peter Cushing on Wednesday, something from the Netflix junk heap on Thursday and so on. I also always get in at least one silent movie, one Hammer film, one slasher, something from the 60s drive-in, and a little 70s Eurotrash vampire lesbian action. Here in Dallas, we also have great theaters with horror repertory screenings every week and I’m known to hit several of those and write about each and every goddamn one.
This year though, not so much–and I’m not even sure why. I’ve hardly watched any movies at all. Has writing posts here and playing with my recently adopted cats really taken up THAT much of my time? Maybe.
I’ll do better next year.
As for what I have done this month in the spirit of the season, I’ve been picking at H.P. Lovecraft stories, via the Whisperer in Darkness collection, by the bedside lamp at night and enjoying the oozy, creepy atmosphere. Dismember the Alamo was fun.
And I’ve been listening to The Cramps and making my quiet little old lady living room sound like a much cooler, more dangerous place.
I like all Cramps albums, even the later ones, when many people say that their schtick got old. Me though, I think The Cramps had one of the best acts for a band to grow old into. They were never angry young punks railing against the system. Instead, they were a band so steeped in 1950s rockabilly–husband-and-wife Lux Interior and Poison Ivy’s collection of vintage records and B-movies was the stuff of legend–that they sounded like they didn’t listen to anything else. They had the spastic front man, the outrageous look and all the edge that anyone could want in the punk/New Wave-era, but at the same time they also had old souls.
They didn’t play rockabilly like they were updating it for the 70s and 80s; they played it like this stuff was already freaky and they were only carrying on the tradition.
It helped that they never broke character. Lux Interior never put out a singer/songwriter solo album. Poison Ivy didn’t have a country side project. The Cramps never changed their style, never strayed from the vision. They took legendary 1960s Cleveland, Ohio horror host Ghoulardi seriously when he said his catchphrase “Stay sick!”.
(After Lux Interior died in 2009, I read an account from someone who met him while browsing the bins at a record show sometime in the 80s. They said he was wearing shorts and tennis shoes, which blows my mind a little; for me, Lux is forever in black latex and women’s high heels, whether he’s on stage or at the supermarket or seeing his family for Christmas.)
They were dedicated to one of the sexiest, most swaggering sounds there is, that rockabilly twang and drive. The music of hillbillies on the prowl and fearsome women. That unholy hybrid of country, blues, swing, monster movies and sex that the punk scene really needed.
The Cramps were a great band who wrote killer songs, had an unforgettable frontman and an equally iconic lady guitarist whose every chord sounds like a demonic hand rising from the grave, but they were also a window into another world. A vast world of underground kicks and little-known thrills.
That might be why Psychedelic Jungle is my favorite of their albums. Seven of its fourteen songs are covers of some of the weirdest, most rocking sides that Lux and Ivy dug up collecting records. They couldn’t make us all a mix tape so instead they made an album of their own no-nonsense, smoldering versions of the likes of “Green Fuz”, “Goo Goo Muck” and “The Crusher”. They were spreading the good word.
As great as those covers are though, this whole thing might fall flat if the band don’t bring their own songs to the table, so that’s what they do with seven tracks that are perfect fits with the rest. If anything, Lux and Ivy’s originals are even weirder and noisier with my favorite being “Beautiful Gardens”, a nightmarish acid trip song that earns the Psychedelic in the album’s title. It sounds like something that crawled out of the Memphis sewers and hid in Johnny Burnette’s pompadour and slowly dug into his brain.
This was the first Cramps album I ever heard. I was 19 and I still remember, instantly, from the very first song, feeling a little cooler just for having this in my life. “Here we come/ We’re comin’ fast/ All the others are in the past/ Jump to your feet, let us get you high/ We’re the Green Fuz”. Is there a better opening line of any song? (It’s a cover, by the way, from a mega-obscure Texas garage band called Randy Alvey and The Green Fuz. It was their theme song, but The Cramps make it their own here.)
Fifty-eight years later, I still love it and I still feel good when it’s on and I still consider this record vital to my pulse and blood pressure.
At the very least, when I screw up Halloween, I did one thing right when I put this on heavy turntable rotation.
Really good sincere review, thank you.