On Feb. 3, 1979, a 16-year-old skateboarder named Ian MacKaye attended his first punk rock concert, a fund-raiser for the Georgetown University radio station, WGTB, held at the school’s Hall of Nations. The headliner was the Cramps, pioneers of psychobilly, a raucous blend of punk, rockabilly and surf music. “I still think about that show as being maybe the greatest show I’ve ever been to,” MacKaye, now 64, recalled in a recent phone interview.
The performance was joyful — and chaotic. “The show itself was such a cathartic explosion that tables and chairs were destroyed, and windows were broken,” MacKaye said. “I’m quite sure that whatever money was made that night went to paying for all the damage that was incurred.”
Two and a half months later, MacKaye and his best friend, Henry Rollins, went together to another Cramps gig in Washington at a small, stageless bar. Rollins, like MacKaye, was enthralled. He recalled Lux Interior, the band’s lanky, louche frontman, jumping up and down on the bar top, punching the ceiling tiles. “It kind of ruined me because I’ve been to a billion club shows since, and none of them were the Cramps with no stage,” Rollins, 65, said during a video call from his home in Nashville.
Rollins and MacKaye remain best friends and talk about that performance to this day. MacKaye cited the band as a major influence: “When I saw the Cramps, a lot of their songs are played on one string, and I thought, ‘I could do that.’” Both men went on to become highly influential underground musicians themselves, Rollins as the hard-charging singer of the Southern California hardcore band Black Flag and MacKaye as a founder of the D.C. groups Minor Threat and Fugazi.
Now Rollins and MacKaye are part of an effort to reissue the Cramps’s back catalog and release previously unheard recordings. First up is the album “Gravest Gravy,” a long-shelved collection of Cramps songs produced by Big Star frontman Alex Chilton in 1977. It will be released Aug. 21 via Vengeance Records, the Cramps’s own label, which had been dormant for years. There are also plans to put out rare videos of the band’s performances, as well as new official merchandise.
The Cramps were formed in 1976 by Lux Interior (born Erick Purkhiser) and his wife, the guitarist Poison Ivy (Kristy Wallace), who met as students at Sacramento State in California. In 1978, the group played a storied free show for patients at a psychiatric hospital in Napa, and in 1980 released “Songs the Lord Taught Us,” the first of eight studio LPs to come out during the band’s run.
Lux Interior, who at times could be seen onstage wearing no shirt, skintight rubber pants and high heels, and Poison Ivy, with her burst of curly red hair and her signature orange Gretsch 6120 hollow-body guitar, were the only constant members of the band, which released B-movie-inspired singles such as “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns” and “Creature From the Black Leather Lagoon.”
“They were collectors,” Kid Congo Powers, who played guitar for the Cramps from 1980 to 1983, said of the couple in a video interview. “They were aesthetes of the culture they loved, which was B-movie culture, rockabilly, psychedelic records, different oddball stuff. We could say ‘kitschy,’ but I think the Cramps would bristle at the word ‘kitsch’ because it was just stuff they loved.”
The Cramps came to an end in 2009 with the sudden death of Lux Interior from a heart condition. He was 62. A cult act in its time, the band found a whole new audience in 2022 when its version of “Goo Goo Muck” by Ronnie Cook and the Gaylads was featured in a goth dance sequence in the Netflix series “Wednesday.”
“A funny thing was that it was the first single off of the ‘Psychedelic Jungle’ album, and at the time we thought, ‘This is going to be a hit single,’” said Powers, who played on the early ’80s track. “And then it wasn’t. But some 40, 50 years later, it got to be a viral hit.”
Since Lux Interior’s death, Poison Ivy, who still resides in the Glendale, Calif., house she shared with him, has not spoken publicly. “She’s been very reclusive and into her Transcendental Meditation,” said the film producer Jimmy Maslon, a decades-long friend who directed several Cramps music videos. “And she’s very shy.”
Meanwhile, Poison Ivy did not tend to the Cramps’s business matters. “She’s let all of the records she controls, which is most of the back catalog, go out of print,” Larry Hardy, the owner and operator of In the Red Records and another longtime friend, said in an interview. “She doesn’t have a merchandise deal. She’s not making money on the band. As a Cramps fan, I know there’s a ton of bootlegs coming out.”
Last year Hardy and Maslon were able to convince her to partner in a new company, The Cramps Inc., and restart the band’s Vengeance label. Hardy and Maslon are handling all the logistics, and Poison Ivy is the main beneficiary. The musician intends to give some of the proceeds to charity, according to Maslon. (A press representative for The Cramps Inc. said that Poison Ivy was still not doing interviews.)
Poison Ivy had been housing the band’s master tapes in her leaky garage, Hardy said. She agreed to let him take the collection, which he discovered contained the “Gravest Gravy” sessions. “Once I figured out what we had, I was pretty overjoyed,” Hardy said. The Cramps had been working toward releasing “Gravest Gravy,” he said, but the project was abandoned when Lux Interior died.
Hardy handed over all of the tapes to his friend Rollins, a self-described “collector nerd” who has a climate-controlled storage facility at his Nashville residence, and asked him to go through the multiple takes of “Gravest Gravy” songs to pick out the best versions. Rollins’s initial reaction: “How did these songs escape capture by the tomb raiders — the bootleggers — and fans like me?” Among the highlights is a cover version of “Hungry” by Paul Revere & the Raiders featuring Chilton on organ.
After some intense listening sessions, Rollins sent along the mixes and his notes to MacKaye, whose ears he trusts more. “I said, ‘Let me know if I’m high on my own supply or if these are the takes,’” Rollins recalled. “And he went, ‘No, those are obviously the right takes.’” MacKaye, a founder and owner of the independent label Dischord Records, did some equalization and level adjustment on two of the tracks and tweaked Rollins’ suggested running order.
Neither Rollins nor MacKaye is getting paid for their work. “It just seemed like, Wow, what a gift! What a gift to be able to A) spend that kind of intimate time with their music, B) have a project to do with Henry, who’s my best friend,” MacKaye said.
“I have no financial motive,” Rollins said. “I just want to do right by the band that brung me to the dance.” He added that he hoped to ensure that Poison Ivy, 73, “is happy, healthy, and fed and peaceful” for the rest of her life.
The release of “Gravest Gravy” is bittersweet. The other two Cramps members who played on the record, the guitarist Bryan Gregory and the drummer Nick Knox, died in 2001 and 2018. Chilton passed away a year after Lux Interior, and Stephanie Chernikowski, the photographer who shot the image of the band on the front of the LP, died in April.
“It’s kind of insane when I look at that album cover and the person that took the photos is gone, and the band — all but one person — is not with us anymore,” Hardy said.
“You know, none of us are getting younger,” he added. “So that’s another reason why I was like, ‘Let’s get as much stuff out as possible.’ I want to see this stuff come out before I kick it.”
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