It is with a heavy heart that I must report that Lux Interior, founding member of prolific punk/psychobilly band The Cramps, passed away yesterday from an existing heart condition…
I found this in a music blog and I think it does a much better job that I would of relaying the feeling of the band and the loss that we will all endure.
Love, Respect, and Ride Safe,
ArtBiker
Cramps Singer Lux Interior Dead At 62
Singer died early Wednesday of an existing heart condition youtube songs download kostenlos.
Lux Interior, lead singer of influential garage-punk act the Cramps, died Wednesday morning (February 4) due to an existing heart condition, according to a statement from the band’s publicist. He was 62.
Born Erick Lee Purkhiser, Interior started the Cramps in 1972 with guitarist Poison Ivy (born Kristy Wallace, later his wife) — whom, as legend has it, he picked up as a hitchhiker in California medion apps. By 1975, they had moved to New York, where they became an integral part of the burgeoning punk scene surrounding CBGBs.
Their music differed from most of the scene’s other acts in that it was heavily steeped in camp, with Interior’s lyrics frequently drawing from schlocky B-movies, sexual kink and deceptively clever puns. (J.H. Sasfy’s liner notes to their debut EP memorably noted: “The Cramps don’t pummel and you won’t pogo. They ooze; you’ll throb.”) Sonically, the band drew from blues and rockabilly, and a key element of their sound was the trashy, dueling guitars of Poison Ivy and Bryan Gregory (and later Kid Congo Powers), played with maximal scuzz and minimal drumming internet explorer download chip.
Because of that — not to mention Interior’s deranged, Iggy Pop-inspired onstage antics and deep, sexualized singing voice (which one reviewer described as “the psychosexual werewolf/ Elvis hybrid from hell”) — the Cramps are often cited as pioneers of “psychobilly” and “horror rock,” and can count bands like the Black Lips, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the Reverend Horton Heat, the Horrors and even the White Stripes as their musical progeny.
Over the course of more than 30 years, the Interior and Ivy surrounded themselves with an ever-changing lineup of drummers, guitarists and bassists, and released 13 studio albums (the last being 2003’s Fiends of Dope Island) Download movies software for free. They also famously performed a concert for patients at the Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978 (which was recorded on grainy VHS and has since become a cult classic) and appeared on a Halloween episode of “Beverly Hills, 90210.” Their video for the song “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns” also drew rave reviews from Beavis and Butt-head on a memorable episode of the show.
Despite the band’s long history, fans generally agree that the group’s peak was in the early ’80s, with the albums Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle microsoft windows 7 herunterladen.Many clips of the Cramps’ chaotic live shows from the era can be found online; look for their version of “Tear It Up” from the 1980 film “URGH! A Music War.” One memorable (and typical) show in Boston in 1986 found Interior, clad only in leopard-skin briefs, drinking red wine from an audience member’s shoe, and ended with him French-kissing a woman (who wasn’t his wife) for 10 full minutes with his microphone in their mouths pdf cannot beed.
Due to their imagery, obsession with kitsch and dogged dedication to touring — they wrapped up their latest jaunt across Europe and the U.S. this past November — the Cramps commanded a loyal fanbase, and even earned a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the form of a shattered bass drum that Interior had shoved his head through.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgMStrdpzoM&eurl=http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/feb/05/cramps-lux-interior-dies]
And this from the Guardian.co.uk
It’s hard to think of Lux Interior as dead, despite what reports say herunterladen. Then again, it was always hard to think of him as alive
Some 30 years ago, with the King still warm in his casket, Lux rose like a zombie from the primordial swamp as a twisted, grotesquely libidinous, werewolf Elvis from Hell, and the mask – if it was a mask – never came off. The Cramps went one step further than punk rock: they didn’t merely go back to basics, they stripped rock’n’roll naked and flaunted it in its lethal distilled form: as a relentless sex beast, a psychotic release, a nihilist post-apocalyptic celebration, the ultimate in trash culture dell windows 10 herunterladen.
I was a teenage psychobilly fan with a blue flat-top, armed with Songs the Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle and Off the Bone, and the green-skinned Lux Interior on my Drug Train poster was like a super anti-hero, a deviant who would happily give a fuck in public. His wife, guitarist Poison Ivy, a bad-girl in full, burlesque glory on the Smell of Female cover, was his perfect lusty counterpart spiele zum herunterladen minecraft. It was her dominatrix work that funded the Cramps’ early releases.
The last Cramps gig review I read described Lux masturbating on stage and climaxing on the mike to Love Me as the set concluded. A typical show (Boston, 1986) found him clad in leopard-skin briefs drinking wine from an audience member’s shoe and French-kissing a random person in the crowd for a full 10 minutes with the microphone in their mouths download netflix app for free.
Lux actually wore his interior on the outside, it seemed – any skeletons that might have lurked in his closet were paraded on stage. But the most legendary Cramps performance was captured on a handheld camcorder, their 1978 gig in a California state mental hospital – bringing psychobilly salvation to the beleaguered, and the starting point for Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s recent ICA film, File Under Sacred Music.
No one managed to equal the Cramps stylistically, they were in a different league to the laughably macho Meteors and most of the British psychobilly scene, though Billy Childish’s Thee Headcoats and Nick Cave’s Birthday Party echoed their gothic-psychedelic edge.
In his sleeve notes to the rarities compilation How to Make a Monster, Lux complained about those who regarded the Cramps a joke. Lux and the Cramps were serious about rockabilly, horror, foot fetishes, sci-fi B-movies and 50s kitsch. They were all about keeping it pure, raw and minimal, but could never be described as revivalists.
They deconstructed rockabilly gems such as Surfin’ Bird, Jailhouse Rock, The Way I Walk and Love Me, and made them throb with playful menace. They came from a similar place to the Gun Club, whose declared mission was to “destroy rockabilly”, but the Cramps (for whom the Gun Club’s For the Love of Ivy was written) didn’t crash and burn or go through reinventions. Rather like the Ramones, who came from the same CBGBs scene in New York, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy clung to their buzzsaw sound and never diluted it.
Like the sexploitation, hammer horror and B-movie imagery they maintained to the last, the Cramps’ treasure chest is almost bottomless – from Tear It Up to Ugh! A Music War to the ridiculously camp surreality of Naked Girl Falling Down the Stairs. So has Lux Interior joined the ranks of the living (or surfin’) dead? Next full moon (on Monday), you might just hear him howl.