Hey man, this is love. Love you Lux, love you Ivy, love you Nick and Bryan and Kid Congo. Don't mourn, memorialize. Best to all, I can't convey what the Cramps have meant to me, I got kicked out of a Holiday Inn parking lot looking for this band. Aloha to Hell. "I've lost touch with reality."
Ivy, if somehow you ever see this, best to you, love, cheers however that comes.
I don't know where to stop with this. I could talk the Cramps forever. One of the greatest bands I've ever heard or seen, a band I felt physically related to those times when I was screaming animal noises drunk in the street but as songs. At the time I never saw not being a madman as an option, I felt like I was faking it. And here was Lux doing what I wished I could be doing, and I was "out there" compared to most people I knew, but not out there like the Cramps were out there. What a fucking blessing this band was. Whoever you are, whatever you are, you can be this. Release what's in you, let it out.
Of course it helps if it's musical, especially rockabilly/psychedelia.
Nick Knox was one of the best drummers I ever saw, and he could chain smoke an entire set, flipping his sticks between cigarettes.
I don't know how to talk about Ivy - every time I saw the Cramps I chose her side of the stage, got as close as I could, watched her shimmying shoulders while she played guitar. Sexiest goddamn guitarist I ever saw, and what a player, and this is supposed to be a tribute to her man.
Because Lux - there's no fucking describing Lux. Lux was everything I wanted to be. He was fucking insane, singing his ass off, all over the stage and amps, and if you ever saw that video where the Cramps played the asylum, Lux telling the crowd, "People say you're crazy; I don't think you're so crazy," and you know he's been hearing this and living this and it's funny, but it's also why I could relate. No matter how out there I was compared to my classmates, what had it been like for Lux in school?
They were sick, they were funny, they played great rock n roll and they never had a choice about becoming a part of the mainstream. They were always the Cramps, they couldn't be anyone else and no one else could be them.
Life stripped bare left them no choice but to make this noise, these noises. I'd say RIP Lux Interior but I don't think that's an option. Rock, Lux, wherever you are. As if you could say no.
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