Goodbye Lux Interior

by Gregory M. Kerwin

Mourning Lux Interior, lead weirdo of the Cramps, who died Wednesday at 60. The Cramps were a mainstay on the turntable at the Valencia Street Home for Wayward Boys. I saw them once, quite enough, at the On Broadway in 1980, a nice place in SF with a real stage. I saw them with Kid Congo Powers on lead guitar, one of the founders of Gun Club, who joined them on the Psychedelic Jungle album, their greatest. Powers was invited in after a show in New York where the Cramps had turned off the lights and lined the front of the stage with lit candles. Kid got too close and ignited his hairspray. The band pulled him up on the stage to pat his hair out and discovered he wasn’t just an ardent fan – he was Kid Congo Powers. After that the Cramps had to get him into the band. They never played with a bass. Lux, well over six feet tall, skinny, paper white, had on tight black leather pants and no shirt. He had a huge coal-black pompadour sprayed high over his head. He sweated throughout the show and the hairspray wilted until the hair was hanging down in his face. His dance and performance look borrowed a lot from Iggy Pop, writhing and snaky, but Lux had a great rock n roll voice that could do anything he wanted. His wife Poison Ivy played rhythm guitar. She had on a mini-skirt and a push-up bodice, ripped fishnet hose, needle-pointed boots and a permanent sneer, chewing gum with a smirk through the entire show, kicking adoring punk Johnnies in the head if they got too close to where she was standing at the edge of the stage. The drummer was Knick Knox, whose kit was one snare, one cymbal, and the kickdrum. The laziest drummer ever, he spent the entire show eyeballing everybody in the audience, smoking incessantly, keeping time with one hand and the kickdrum. He kept his other hand busy with the cigarette, spare foot propped up on the cymbal stand. Knox had a toy bat suspended on a rubber band from the front of the kickdrum that would bounce in rhythm whenever he’d hit the drum. Lux did his famous one-man vocal car crash – he deep-throated the mic, and while the rest of the band took a break Lux created an entire tableau of screeching tires, shredding sheet metal and crunching windshields with mouth and throat noises, the mic wire snaking out of his mouth while he swam around stage, flapping and waving his long arms like a huge cadaverous pterodactyl. One of a kind, excellent singer actually, a completely committed entertainer, funny all the time, funny as hell, spooky and just the coolest. Always.

Rubber Souldiers: birth of a band

January 22, 2009 – Berkeley, California: Rubber Souldiers live at Ashkenaz.  Three guys in front, Lorin Rowan, David Gans and Chris Rowan,  singing their hearts out and throwing down the jam.  It’s the Beatles catalog, songs everybody knows, but this is different.  This is deconstruction– shifting time signatures, riffs morphing into improvised rivers of tone, a hail of electric guitars join mandolins where pianos once played, but always that great singing.  This is the Rowan Brothers folks, with their new brother David, and those boys got the pipes.  The audience is up and dancing four bars into the first song, the driving Dr. Robert.  Rubber Souldiers they are, and plenty of 1965 is here: Girl, The Word, Norwegian Wood.  N-Wood shows what this band can do, departing from the original but always finding the handle again and giving us our Beatle kicks.  Zac Matthews, late of Hot Buttered Rum, joined in here, in fact wrote the arrangement, and lays in some ripping mando leads along with brother Lorin.  As the night grew deeper, darker, we felt the mood expand, and by the time they came through with the cosmic Day Tripper to close out the evening, we knew we had seen the beginning of something big.

Souldiers captured at Ashkenaz 1/22/09

Steve Goodman Rides Again – at Moe’s Books

IMG_4208 steve goodman jim and david

Originally uploaded by Look.

David Gans and Jim Rothermel rock the house on Steve Goodman’s “Elvis Imitator,” part of a touching and informative reading/rocking/remembrance of the late great Goodman. Spur of the event was Clay Eals, whose new book, “Facing the Music,” gives the garrulous Goodman his due—  four pounds worth. The whole affair was in the house at Moe’s Books, Telegraph Ave Berkeley, Monday July 28, 2008.

Standing on the Cast Iron Shore: PMC 7067 XEX 709/10 Mfg. in UK ©1968

The seawall along Elizabeth Walk is where I go when I want to lose the claustrophobia.  You see the ships in the harbor, you get the endless cricket green of the Padang; it’s never crowded.  I wander along, just saw a movie at the Capital with Rimmer and Steve.  I’m alone now, walking and smelling the salt and rotting seaweed. Soundtrack plays in my head and I synchronize my steps to it and it carries me along.  “Standing on the cast iron shore yeah,  Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet yeah…looking through a glass onion.”  This jammed up tumble of words is desperate, serious, but odd for sure. The singer just insists on sticking in those “yeahs” even thought there’s no room.  And the the word beat, the emphasis on certain syllables in “looking through a glass onion”  sound like Shakespeare, or a poet speaking in another language. Mr. Leonard tells me a glass onion is a monocle.

Santa Cruz Automatic Blues

Sunday May 25, 2008, Aptos, California. The sixteenth annual Santa Cruz Blues Festival was a bore. The musicians mailed it in, with a few notable exceptions. The staff was irritated and nasty, and the audience was disengaged– no doubt the whole thing has become an automatic walkthrough. Worst: Headliner Al Green’s Vegas act with pumped up arrangements that completely destroyed the spellbinding minimalist character of his 70s hits. Best: The Subdudes. Pure roots and blues artistry, with passionate singing and a glorious mix of woody/steely timbres pouring out of their exquisitely talented fingers.

Finished Guitar

W the Cecil

Originally uploaded by Monem

Roll Your Own – Building a guitar from scratch

Halfway there

Originally uploaded by Monem
Here we have the halfway mark on a Chris’s senior project: a mahogany/maple semi-hollow three pickup electric guitar (only two are laid out here, Gibson humbuckers.  The third is a Tom Anderson). This is an original design, Chris and I working it out on a sketchpad before cutting.

Right To The Center Of Your Head: PMC 7067 XEX 709/10 Mfg. in UK ©1968

“It’s mono.”

“It’s not mon…” I stop. I think about it. “You’re right, it’s mono,” I mumble, “well that’s a gyp.”

“It sounds pretty good though,” says Steve.

“I guess. But you don’t get that left-right swirling stuff like with Hendrix.”

Her hair of floating sky is shimmering, glimmering, in the sun.

As side two finishes with the soft, heart-melting Julia, we both take in the idea of a new record in mono. Is it less than? I am uneasy. I paid ten dollars and got mono. I pull the disc off the Thorens and look for the hundredth time at the label, the crisp sliced apple, hoping it says stereo and I just missed it before. It doesn’t. It’s mono, the sound that goes right to the center of your head and stays there, but I am driven to deny it. Oh well. Ten dollars for a good record is OK, mono or not. Still it takes it down a peg for me, and I have to admit I feel a little burned

Takes a Licking but Keeps on Ticking: The Sex Pistols at Winterland…

Or…The Great Johnny-Hoax/Paul-Stokes/Steve-Coax/Sid-Stroked Grand Finale

“Hey, rocket to Russia buddy!!!” The couple ahead of me in Ramones t-shirts and black leather are getting impatient. I’m getting impatient. The camera and tripod dig into my shoulder. Getting into Winterland on this chilly, January evening is glacial snailness. I am here to document an event that I expect will turn out to be seminal (please refer to both definitions) at worst, and transcendent at best. But the person taking my ticket informs me that cameras are verboten. Sighing, I check my ancient Bell & Howell 16mm with the box office staff and make my way into the smoky, cavernous hall.

Yeah, San Francisco, Winterland, January 14, 1978. What is all this about I am wondering? Opening the bill, The Nuns. They are indeed tongue-in-cheek hilarious, but with Alejandro Escovedo on board they can actually rock. They give us a good squeeze, substituting the lyrics in Suicide Child from “fascist bitch” to “fucking bitch.” The best moment is a piano/voice lounge piece performed by the black-clad vamp herself, Jennifer Miro. The line “I’m so lonely, I’m so lonely, so lonely…all the men in San Francisco are gay…” eliciting cat-calls and booing from the mainly male and mostly straight crowd. I’m entertained. Then The Avengers hit the stage with avengeance; great, tight and sexy Penelope Houston fronting a rocking power trio. I am hyped. They are the stars of the evening!

Ah, but the best/worst is yet to come…the set-change music is deafening…the Pistols emerge to hoots, cheers, delirium and derision and launch into a set that is even more deafening. Loud is not the word…it is EAR-RUPTURING! My cochlea still rattle 30 years on. They are not tight…they are loose as a goose…Sid slamming away at his bass (there’s no way he played on the album) oblivious to any specific notes…it’s all just a wash of low-frequency rumble; Cook and Jones trying to keep it together but to no avail…Johnny prowling the stage like a leopard in an icebox.

For thirty-five minutes an endless hail of objects arch their way onto the stage…at one point Johnny picks up a wristwatch yelling…“takes a licking but keeps on ticking.” For thirty-five minutes the house is almost as loud as the band, trading insults and witty banter with Rotten and Co. For thirty-five minutes I am in heaven, bouncing up and down, jostling leather and mohawks and trowled-on makeup. And then it happens…an arm reaches up from the crowd and right into Sid’s crotch. And there it stays for the rest of the set. The bass playing does not improve from this obvious stimulation. And almost as soon as it begins, it ends with the band walking offstage to Johnny’s taunting, “how does it feel to be cheated?”; Sid with blond, crotch-stroker Nancy Spungen (yes, it was Nancy) in tow.

Quite honestly I feel elated, not cheated. Like Thai kick-boxing, it’s the audience that makes the show….

photo: Roberta Bayley   photo: Chester Simpson

Los Lobos Santa Cruz Blues

Los Lobos and friend

Originally uploaded by Monem

Soquel, California. Los Lobos take the stage, headlining the Santa Cruz Blues Festival. David Hidalgo brought this girl up from the front of the crowd. She gyrated and twirled so beautifully to I Walk Alone. The boys were on fire (as usual) playing a generous set that included Rita, I Got Loaded and How Much Can I Do? For an outdoor venue the sound was excellent. I dig the guitar tones these guys get from the armada of axes they keep on stage– Les Paul goldtops (both humbucker and P90 versions), Teles, Strats and Explorers. At one point Dave Alvin came in for a jam, with his fearsome white Strat. Satisfying.