Standing Over By The Record Machine: The Cramps’ *Gravest Gravy*

I’m sure there were plenty of New York clubland denizens who spent the whole of 1977 trying to figure out whether The Cramps were the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in America or an elaborate practical joke being perpetrated on the entire concept of culture.

Which, of course, is one reason they were great.

See, when it comes to The Cramps, everybody remembers the horror-movie shtick, the graveyards, the B-movies, and the psychobilly-before-psychobilly thing. They remember Lux Interior looking like he’d escaped from a Tennessee Williams play after being bitten by radioactive wolves, Poison Ivy standing there cool as a switchblade, Nick Knox behind the drums looking like Roy Orbison’s reanimated corpse (pretty neat trick, considering Orbison was still alive back then), and Bryan Gregory and his deep acne scars rolling cigarettes around his mouth while abusing ten shades of holy hell fuzz out of a polka dot Flying V.

But what made The Cramps dangerous wasn’t the costumes. It was that they actually believed this stuff.

Most bands use trash culture as decoration. The Cramps treated it as sacred scripture. By 1977, punk was already generating its own orthodoxies, its own rules, uniforms, and cool kids. And here come The Cramps, who seemed less interested in punk than in every diseased little cultural mutation that led to it: rockabilly, teenage garage records, drive-in monster movies, sexploitation films, forgotten regional singles, songs recorded by people who looked like they might stab somebody with a screwdriver. They were archaeologists digging up America’s cultural mass grave, and every time they found a corpse, they plugged it into an amplifier.

Which made The Cramps the ultimate punk band, whether the hipsters ruining CBGB and Max’s at that moment recognized this fact or not. The Cramps were not horror-movie freaks. Rather, they were America’s weirdest preservation society. While everybody else was trying to save great art, The Cramps were trying to save the junk — the records in the fifty-cent bin, the movies playing at midnight, the songs your parents warned you about, and the singers who never got famous.

The Cramps cared about the entire discarded underbelly of 20th-century American culture. Which is probably why they connected so hard with Alex Chilton, once he washed up on the Lower East Side’s shores in ‘77, a refugee from the twin rock ‘n’ roll shipwrecks of The Box Tops and Big Star. Chilton understood losers, not in the self-pitying sense, but losers in the American sense. He understood the people who missed the train, the people history forgot, the people who cut one incredible record and disappeared into a ditch somewhere. Big Star was built on that sadness, but The Cramps celebrated it.

Which is why some of the most righteous moments on Gravest Gravy — a collection of recently excavated finds from the October 1977 Chilton-produced sessions at Memphis’ Ardent Studios, scene of all his Big Star triumphs — are those where Lux-n-Ivy-n-Nick-n-Bryan take the most painfully obscure rockabilly and amplify the psychosis until it screams and writhes all across the linoleum. We’re talking Lux cranking up the hiccup knob on Charlie Feathers’ “I Can’t Hardly Stand It” until it lives up to the chorus’ “you got me all tore up” payoff. Or Jimmy Logsdon’s “Rocket In My Pocket” finally sounding as nasty as its lyrics always did. Lux uncovers the hidden menace in lines like, “Let’s go someplace where we can rock a bit/I gotta rocket in my pocket and the fuse is lit.” And you suddenly fear for the lil’ filly he’s tryin’ to cruise, as Ivy and Bryan reduce the guitar action to the “Peter Gunn” riff.

To hear Ivy tell it in Dick Porter’s crucial bio Journey To The Centre Of The Cramps, they crammed the band, Chilton, and their then-manager into a drive-away car. They drove non-stop to Memphis, more than likely fueled on something considerably more high-test than unleaded. Between destroying 1000 paying punters at Memphis State University and being led on various dubious adventures by their producer — such as visiting a remote, moldering shack Chilton claimed was where “the real blues was born” — they piled into Ardent, laying down the five songs comprising their first two 45s as well as the debut Gravest Hits EP: “Human Fly,” “The Way I Walk,” “Surfin’ Bird,” “Domino,” and “Lonesome Town.”

None of those songs are here, save for a take of “Domino” that may or may not be an alternate. Gravest Gravy is the rest of the session.

Initially an abandoned late ‘80s project finally given fruition via the new The Cramps, Inc. venture between Ivy, In The Red Records headcheese Larry Hardy, and film producer Jimmy Maslon, and released by the newly reactivated Vengeance Records, Gravest Gravy is so great, it could have been the proper Cramps debut LP. It opens with a potent early take of “TV Set,” initially intended to be their debut single’s A-side. And while no one should complain about getting the mental wipeout that was their rendition of “Surfin’ Bird” instead, you have to wonder why this was laid aside. Nick’s pounding toms are the lead instrument, and Bryan’s atonal fuzz break is even more abstract expressionist in its original rendering.

Intriguing is how many Psychedelic Jungle highlights were in the repertoire this early. We’re talking “Jungle Hop,” “Can’t Find My Mind,” “Rockin’ Bones,” and “The Natives Are Restless,” the latter featuring an earlier lyric draft. And all with Bryan Gregory, rather than Friend of The ‘Stack Kid Congo Powers? Let’s not slight Kid here. He’s an all-time great, and his time in The Cramps is very special. But Bryan is the Cramp for whom everyone else was a stunt double. So he adds a Dimension X to those tracks that can’t quite be quantified.

And how about a hand for Nick Knox? He’d only had a weekend’s rehearsal with the band before piling into that car back in Manhattan. He played his first gig with the band at Memphis State. And if you hear any of the early rehearsals on the How To Make A Monster comp, then throw on Gravest Gravy, you know the leap with Knox is quantum. It’s like how the New York Dolls instantly improved with Jerry Nolan on the traps. That’s how crucial Nick Knox was. He made The Cramps.

Then there’s this throbbing take on Paul Revere And The Raiders’ “Hungry,” all fuzz, heavy Fender amp tremolo, and the deepest reverb known to man. You have to wonder why this disappeared from their repertoire so quickly. There’s also “Weekend On Mars,” “Problem Child,” and all kindsa other et cetras Crampsaholics all know and cherish. But you never heard ‘em like this. There’s even an aborted closing take of “I Was A Teenage Werewolf,” featuring Lux going off on an invader: “Man, NOBODY stops a fuckin’ take of The Cramps in the studio! Now get outta here! I mean it – get the fuck out! Can’t stand here doin’ this fuckin’ shit all night! This is costing me 80 bucks an hour! Please leave!”

This album is essentially the moment The Cramps became THE CRAMPS, in capital letters. Everything gels, in takes Chilton somehow coaxed out of the band between chemically-stoked bouts of passing out on Ardent’s mixing board, or pissing on a live electric cable, as Lux reported. (“He believes in the Lord, and the Lord sure as hell takes care of him!”) Assembled with care by Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye, and mastered by Nashville engineer Pete Lyman, Gravest Gravy is as crucial as anything The Cramps ever released. This is no cash-in or rip-off. It’s a fully-realized LP in and of itself, with a logic and flow that feels right, as fresh as the day these tracks were cut. This is the sound of a band arriving, a living, breathing, rocking beast of a combo. It’s a new Cramps album, and thank God. Take this, glue it to your turntable, and do not stop playing it. That’s an order!

This review appears in the current issue of Ugly Things, the 72nd issue, available at this link. Gravest Gravy is available this Friday, August 21, directly from The Cramps’ own official Bandcamp page.

You’re also reading this the day after the 49th anniversary of Presley’s death. Mind you, we also just revealed he never really died, here, here, here, and here. Go figure.

Point is, no other magazine would indulge this nonsense. Not CREEM, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, nor publications I actually write for, such as The Austin Chronicle. Well, Ugly Things features this very review in its current issue. So I suppose I’m at least one-quarter full of shit.

AHEM! But NOT EVEN MAGAZINES I WRITE FOR would allow me to imagine how my man Lester Bangs would have profiled The Replacements, had he lived. Or how a seven-year-old me would have reviewed the first New York Dolls album for CREEM. (Answer: Remarkably like I would have at age 60!) Or what it’d be like to have coffee and conversation with Bob Dylan or Keith Richards. (In Elvis’ case, he also made me peanut butter and banana sandwiches. But I’m here to tell you having four of those suckers will fuck you up, kids! Those fucking things are not for amateurs!)

But I also write about plenty of REAL THINGS, be they historic or current. And most of those, no publication would indulge the way I cover ‘em — with humor and insight no one else has.

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