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The band was too old and those that hung on every concert, like most bands around for decades, were probably wing-nuts of some sort. You didn’t have to be an obsessed fan of the Cramps to understand and appreciate what they meant-in fact, obsessed fans were few and far between. Of course, there was also the possibility that they had a kind of vaunted mediocrity over thirty years that earned them respect as punk tried hard to reinvent itself, even though “real” punk might have been dead 28 years ago. But, thankfully, they were just too strange and balls-out to ever really attract a commercial endorsement in the ’90s (when even acts like the Butthole Surfers got into something via the dotcom hipster boom). The Cramps found a sub-genre and a few of their songs made it into college playlists and all that.
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The cramps poison ivy 2016 full#
Their stage was full of lurid sexuality (Lux was always near nude and showing his junk on stage while Ivy’s stiletto/see-through outfits elicited lusty pangs from males and females of all ages even as she sauntered on stage into her ’50s). Their brand of “psychobilly” was the “genre” that referenced alternative Americana a la Roger Corman, B (or Z) horror movies, extreme pin-ups, S&M, and a host of other strands of culture that went back decades but were really on the fringes until sort of embraced in the ’80s. They met randomly but shared a counter-cultural outlook that stemmed from their distaste for both hippies and the baby-boomers, whose culture had become a kind of hegemony by the late ’70s.
![the cramps poison ivy 2016 the cramps poison ivy 2016](https://songssmiths.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/poison-ivy-rorschach-with-the-cramps.jpg)
Lux Interior and his soul-mate Poison Ivy, who had relatively boring real names and came from the Midwest and the Central Valley of California, moved to New York in the ’70s and became regulars at CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City.