The real wild stuff was either obscene or messy-sounding. “What I think of as the really raunchy rockabilly most people didn’t hear,” she explained to the Los Angeles Times. Ivy, a self-taught guitarist, modeled her playing on rockabilly icons Link Wray and Duane Eddy, but her tastes ran deeper. “I use your eyeballs for dials on my TV set,” he smirks on the opener, one of the album’s actual originals. On Songs the Lord Taught Us, he’s wired and fried, hoodling and howling his way through come-ons that sound like threats. Lux could sing deep and smooth, garnering comparisons to the similarly shirtless Iggy Pop, but he studied the judders and hiccups of ’50s singers like Carl Perkins, who wrote “ Blue Suede Shoes,” and Charlie Feathers, who wrote “ Can’t Hardly Stand It,” another song the Cramps would claim for their own. That it had instead faded out, been rendered obsolete by the likes of Pink Floyd and the Eagles, seemed unjustifiable. “Rockabilly should have inspired something to happen that was so great, so passionate, so sexual that it should have taken us to another place,” argued Lux. It was visceral, erotic, almost transcendental. To Lux and Ivy, early rock’n’roll held mystic power. “I’ve just always liked obscure things, strange names-and once I found rockabilly I just couldn’t listen to anything else,” Lux told NME. They hit on a shared love of the New York Dolls, moved in together, and started collecting records, combing junk stores for ’50s doo-wop, R&B, and the sped-up, country-fried sound of white Southern rockabilly bands. The couple met in California, where a young Erick Purkhiser claimed he’d picked up Kristy Wallace hitchhiking. There were always four members of the Cramps, but Lux and Ivy’s bond made everything possible. Their work, Lux once said, was “a rallying point for certain kinds of people to come together and for certain kinds of people to stay out.” Songs the Lord Taught Us is the point of no return: the foundational document of psychobilly, a loud, theatrical, noticeably unpolished album with the tongue-in-cheek sense of the macabre that became the band’s signature. And like John Waters or the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Cramps attracted a cult following. The things they left to the imagination-werewolves, UFOs, man-sized insects-were more fantastic still. She and Lux were obsessed with early rock’n’roll and all the contemporaneous artifacts of lowbrow culture: B-movie sexpoloitation flicks, serial killers, pin-up girls, the type of comic books that represent a contributing factor to juvenile delinquency. Even Ivy’s name for the band has a sneer to it, a whiff of “female trouble,” sexual frustration, and constraint. If you can, well, welcome to the Cramps: They made sexy music for people who didn’t buy mainstream sex appeal, peering back at ’50s rockabilly and R&B through a big, dirty punk magnifying glass. Normal people can’t do this couldn’t make it look hot are too chickenshit to try. He doesn’t sing so much as shriek, leaning on the original lyric-“C’mon little baby, let’s tear the dancefloor up”-until it becomes “let’s tear this damn place up.” Poison Ivy Rorschach stands stage left, mirthless, possibly chewing gum, and bends the central guitar riff through the song’s moods: fast to start, slower, fast again, then slower still as Lux sucks the head of the microphone into his mouth, gasping rhythmically and sliding his hands over his latexed crotch. Six-and-a-half feet tall in heels, Lux Interior looms over the crowd, twitching and thrashing.
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