Even the Cramps’ covers were original. In August 1980, in a performance filmed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the documentary Urgh! A Music War, they played “Tear It Up,” a cover and a classic from their recent debut, Songs the Lord Taught Us. The first “Tear It Up” is a twangy staple of Memphis rockabilly, recorded by Johnny Burnette and his Rock’n Roll Trio in 1956. The Cramps’ version comes from a different planet: It’s loud, fast, raw, so distorted as to be almost psychedelic. There’s no bass, but it feels like there is.
Six-and-a-half feet tall in heels, Lux Interior looms over the crowd, twitching and thrashing. He doesn’t sing so much as shriek, leaning on the original lyric—“C’mon little baby, let’s tear the dancefloor up”—until it becomes “let’s tear this damn place up.” Poison Ivy Rorschach stands stage left, mirthless, possibly chewing gum, and bends the central guitar riff through the song’s moods: fast to start, slower, fast again, then slower still as Lux sucks the head of the microphone into his mouth, gasping rhythmically and sliding his hands over his latexed crotch.
Normal people can’t do this; couldn’t make it look hot; are too chickenshit to try. If you can, well, welcome to the Cramps: They made sexy music for people who didn’t buy mainstream sex appeal, peering back at ’50s rockabilly and R&B through a big, dirty punk magnifying glass. Even Ivy’s name for the band has a sneer to it, a whiff of “female trouble,” sexual frustration, and constraint. She and Lux were obsessed with early rock’n’roll and all the contemporaneous artifacts of lowbrow culture: B-movie sexpoloitation flicks, serial killers, pin-up girls, the type of comic books that represent a contributing factor to juvenile delinquency. The things they left to the imagination—werewolves, UFOs, man-sized insects—were more fantastic still. And like John Waters or the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Cramps attracted a cult following. Their work, Lux once said, was “a rallying point for certain kinds of people to come together and for certain kinds of people to stay out.” Songs the Lord Taught Us is the point of no return: the foundational document of psychobilly, a loud, theatrical, noticeably unpolished album with the tongue-in-cheek sense of the macabre that became the band’s signature.
There were always four members of the Cramps, but Lux and Ivy’s bond made everything possible. The couple met in California, where a young Erick Purkhiser claimed he’d picked up Kristy Wallace hitchhiking. They hit on a shared love of the New York Dolls, moved in together, and started collecting records, combing junk stores for ’50s doo-wop, R&B, and the sped-up, country-fried sound of white Southern rockabilly bands. “I’ve just always liked obscure things, strange names—and once I found rockabilly I just couldn’t listen to anything else,” Lux told NME. To Lux and Ivy, early rock’n’roll held mystic power. It was visceral, erotic, almost transcendental. “Rockabilly should have inspired something to happen that was so great, so passionate, so sexual that it should have taken us to another place,” argued Lux. That it had instead faded out, been rendered obsolete by the likes of Pink Floyd and the Eagles, seemed unjustifiable.