The Cramps were, indisputably and without exaggeration, the coolest band in the world. The brainchild of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy, two art school weirdos who fell in love in the late ’70s when he picked her up hitchhiking in Sacramento, the Cramps invented the so-called “psychobilly” musical genre, made a collection of glorious albums with a rotating cast of bandmates, and inspired glee, awe, and more than a little fear in the audiences who gravitated to their famously wild shows for more than 30 years. All that came to an abrupt end when Lux died, suddenly and tragically, of an aortic dissection in 2009 at age 62. No Cramps albums have been rereleased since his passing, and Poison Ivy has retired from public life. In the meantime, bootleg merch and recordings have proliferated, while unreleased Cramps recordings sat in Ivy’s garage in Los Angeles.
None of that sat right with Henry Rollins, former frontman of the legendary Southern California punk band Black Flag, now a spoken word artist, journalist, radio host, and TV presenter. In a piece that we published today, I interviewed Rollins about how he and a small group of schemers—including his best friend Ian MacKaye, of the equally legendary punk bands Minor Threat and Fugazi—came together to save the Cramps’ unheard music. Together, they’ve revived the Cramps’ legendary record label, Vengeance Records, and on August 21 will release a previously unheard album, Gravest Gravy, produced by iconic musician and producer Alex Chilton in 1977. Our two-hour conversation also saw Rollins reflecting deeply on his role in the famously violent Southern California hardcore scene, the so-called “manosphere,” the Cramps show that he and MacKaye have never stopped talking about, and the importance of preserving art in terrible times.
“If you lose culture in your society, the society dies,” Rollins says. “If you lose your art museums and your galleries, all you have is thugs and fighting and people being mean. In times of trouble, art gives us the backbone to keep fighting.” Amen.
—Anna Merlan
