| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
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Sunday, August 11, 2002 ( 8/11/2002 08:23:00 AM ) Bill S. “LIFE IS SHORT & FILLED WITH STUFF” – Reprehensible. But if ever the Gadabout gets on its high horse about some lyrical anti-P.C. conceptual artiste like Eminem, I hope someone out there makes a point of reminding me that I once wrote a post in praise of The Cramps. This week’s dog park cassette is the tastefully titled live Cramps set, Smell of Female (Enigma). I used to own it on vinyl as a six-song EP. This version was reissued seven years later with extra cuts, including a studio track of Return of the Living Dead’s end song, “Surfing Dead.” It’s such a good tape that I took it twice to the park this weekend. I love this band for its collectorish appreciation of rockabilly and psychedelia, of drive-in horror and Russ Meyer movies. The genius of The Cramps is the way that they recreate this stuff without ever condescending to it: unlike, say, Southern Culture on the Skids, you never get the sense that the band is mocking their material. If anything, they sound like they've stayed up all-night learning their licks off deeply cherished 45's. Among the songs heard on the original set (none of which, to my knowledge, have been released by the band in studio form) is the theme to breastman Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, a cheesy paean to cycle mamas that’s sung by Crampsman Lux Interior with more conviction than the soundtrack’s original “who-the-hell-are-they?” band, The Bostweeds, could muster. Equally stirring is a remake of “Psychotic Reaction” with a psychedelic rave-up almost as deranged as the Count Five original. Aside from Interior’s suitably sinister non-voice, the prime appeal of this band lies in the guitarwork of Link Wray’s love child, Poison Ivy. Constantly playing on the verge of the song, swiping garagey fuzz licks or echoey rockabilly, Ivy is the one who regularly pulls the band away from its lead vocalist’s blathery bullshit. A live album, you get more of Interior’s interstitial nonsensical patter than you need or want, but then along comes Ivy with a suitably driving guitar riff and everything’s okay. For me, the best Cramps can be found in the band’s early studio elpees, Songs the Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle and A Date With Elvis. But Female, which predates Date by a couple years, remains suitably sordid fun. “I ain’t nothing but a gorehound,” our man Lux brags in the tape’s statement of purpose: the perfect soundtrack for the person whose idea of a meat-is-murder statement is Texas Chainsaw Massacre. # | |
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