About the Cramps fame, or lack thereof:
What I meant to express in an earlier email is that I, probably stupidly, never regarded them as particularly pioneering, either, for some reason - unlike how I feel The Ramones, Pist0ls, Clash, etc., even if The Cramps started at almost exactly the same date of '75, if not a tad earlier (!).
Now that Lux Interior is dead, we're stuck with the corpus of what they made. Now I feel like The Cramps were unfairly taken for granted, just a kooky novelty band, so I think they never got their due. But that is how people felt about a lot of pioneer rock bands, like the New York Dolls; gimmicky, novelty bands.
But now that The Cramps will no more LPs, looking at what they did, it's really very unique. Southern fried rockabilly mixed with heavy metal, punk rock, and with the b-movie weirdness that now seems so cliche but in the mid 70s was not exactly played out. The opposite. The Cramps viral influence is hardly to accurately chart.
Also, I thought about Poison Ivy's guitar prowess. Think about it. She did the whole Duane Eddy twangy guitar thing but to punk, in an interesting, signature way. I also repeat my assertion that if they had just made two or three LPs in the late 70s or early 80s, then broke -- as 90% of punk bands did -- than reunited in 2005 for a tour, that would have been a big deal.
But since they kept chugging aong, they were just sort of a fixture one took for granted. Lyrically, it is not like Dead Kennedys or The Clash, but the lyrics are actually very clever in a Screamin Jay Hawkins way. We'll see how history bears out their reputation. It seems like it's time to review it, now.
Also, I shoud add you mentioned "cutural icons North of the Rio Grande" -- but Europe was something ese. Europe has always appreciated rockabilly and its variants way more than America these days. In Europe they were (are?) gods. Tons of bands European like The Meteors, Demented 13, Nekromantix,
-B.
PS. What's this "last gasps of punk in the 80s" business!? HMM!? :)
fcassia wrote:
"Maybe Lux and The Cramps were cultural icons North of the Rio Grande/Bravo, but at the Southern end of the Americas, Punk rock meant mostly The Ramones and The Clash for classic punk. Perhaps the Pistols or the earlier generations. Maybe it's an age thing, I was born ' 74 so I catched the last grasps of punk as an early teen. Or more probably, I don't know s*** about music. ;-)"