In Celebration of the Marquis de Scum
If music is, indeed, “…the electric soil in which the spirit lives, thinks [and] invents,” my trashy quintessence constantly feeds from the galvanic mudpit made by the psycho-sexual smut parade that was The Cramps.
Fuck. I love that band.
They are one of the few bands that I recall exactly where I was the first time I heard them - riding shotgun in my best friend’s car, coming home from the Crow’s Nest, a now defunct record store. (Aren’t they most? I weep for the youth of today who don’t have indie bookstores and record joints to gestate their cool in.) We’d hung out with a rudeboy named Stephan. I obsessed over a lost cause of a crush named Derrick. Said merry chase was obsessed with a girl named Bubbles. I shit you not. I lost a sex battle to a girl named Bubbles.
Anyway.
The windows were rolled down. My feet were on the dash.
Nida said, “Hey, have you heard The Cramps?”
I said, “Huh?”
Nida pressed play.
“Bikini Girls with Machine Guns” came on.
Click to viewThe dark recesses of my heart turned to tiger stripes and PING, in the shimmer of a hoochie coocher’s sequined pasties, my world expanded. I knew no bounds. Anything, everything was possible.
Lux Interior was the lead singer of The Cramps. He was a luminary of lowbrow high art. He was the Elvis of Bad Eggs. The Most Exalted Potentate of Reprobates. He was a bizarre and extraordinarily talented front man who changed the world by stripping down, swigging often and sullying rock and roll back into its anarchic and Bacchanalian best.
Today is the third anniversary of his death.
All hail the cerebral scoundrel of psychobilly.
All hail Lux Interior.
Rest in heels you goddamned gorgeous man.