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.
