SEVENTEEN TRIPS TO THE ALTAR OF THE CRAMPS
Lux Interior accidentally threw a microphone stand into Poison Ivy's head hard enough that everyone in the room thought we'd just watched her die.
by Kenneth Watson Whiteaker III
Tickets $22 G.A.
Vic Theater
3145 N. Sheffield Ave
Chicago
October 23rd, 2004
______
The Cramps were playing? Of course I'm going, more important than church. I expected a mob after seeing them sixteen times previously... Chicago, late October, Saturday night, a band like this? Only ~300 people showed up in attendance...
The low turnout meant we could push right up against the stage after the faceless, nameless opening band finished their futile set. I wedged myself against Ivy's side of the stage and prepared to take notes like a graduate student of bad decisions — close enough to study her guitar cables, her amp settings, her stagecraft, and — later — the color of Lux's drawers (ladies' panties, of course).
Though by then the room had already surrendered: they were on. The beat found your spine within the first thirty seconds of the next song as Ivy's guitar rolled off the stage in greasy waves... You didn't decide to dance, your body resigned from management and handled the matter itself.
And they didn't play: they performed a spell, a ritual that you couldn't escape, even if you wanted to. If you were in the room, you were caught, hypnotized. You would suddenly find yourself dancing although you'd normally never be caught dead dancing. Gearheads who looked like they spent their weekends rebuilding transmissions were suddenly shaking their asses as if they'd caught the Holy Ghost from a tornado-warning broadcast over a busted AM transistor radio. To the uninitiated it might appear as if you were having some sort of a fit that could be considered "unholy" in some social circles.
Halfway through the set, in the middle of a song (Papa Satan Sang Louie) Lux yanked the mic stand up over his head — the old kind, a steel pole screwed into a heavy, round steel base that was obviously built for either school assemblies or blunt-force murder. He raised it up over his head and began swinging it by the mic cord. Out. Around. Out. And around. Wider. Faster. Each revolution fed a little more cable through his hands until the base was cutting a great orbit through the room, sailing over our heads like some nocturnal, nefarious blessing, a good twenty-five feet of mic cord let out and then...
He let it go.
It flew back.
Right into Poison Ivy's head.
Base first.
She dropped to the floor.
We'd just watched her die.
I felt the impact from where I was standing. It happened like the horrible brain trick that occurs during a bad car crash — a hideous slow motion — when the mind has enough time to register every detail but not enough time to do any one useful thing about it.
Lux kept singing for a few seconds, apparently unaware of what he'd done. The band quickly ground to a halt. Nobody in the room moved and suddenly people came running from backstage. They lifted Ivy and carried her away, the band vanishing with them. Lux paced behind the backline with both hands clamped to his head, howling. Not performing. Not working the crowd. Eventually somebody came out and told us Poison Ivy was alive and conscious.
Fifteen minutes later, Ivy sauntered back onstage — head wrapped in wide white bandages, the big orange Gretsch slung over her shoulder. She plugged in, struck a chord. The rest of the band dutifully returned as though summoned to it.
Poison Ivy's glare could put the meanest dive-bar brawler on his best church behavior.
Twenty-something-year-old guitar players helplessly in love with cool chicks who played guitar were especially vulnerable to it. I tried my best to keep my jaw off the floor.
The look she gave Lux that night wasn't just anger. It was marital-grade hatred distilled to laboratory strength. You could've felt the chill from the street.
She played that big hollowbody like a Hasil Adkins voodoo doll lifted from the Graceland gift shop, each smack of a chord another pin stuck in, evil eye on full display and staring...
At Lux.
He looked like a man in the doghouse who had fallen down the stairs into the basement, which was knee-deep in dogshit. And hot..
They played three more songs and called it. Poison walked offstage and like that, it was over.
I didn't know it then, but it would be the last time I'd see them perform. I've never seen a band like them and I never will again.
—
The Cramps!
Three chords? Amplified guitars? A four-on-the-floor voodoo beat? And some lunatic from Ohio... weird enough to steal smoke and fire from the junkyard gods and carry it across America in a big-block Chrysler with a trunk stuffed full of flea-market 45 RPM vinyl records, picking up a real fine honey along the way, soon to be queen...
The Gospel According to Lux was never written down. It was passed hand-to-hand like hoosegow contraband. A whispered secret traded behind bowling alleys, truck stops, chicken stands, B-movie drive-ins and in bars with chicken wire over the stage and Hank Snow on the jukebox.
And the Book of The Cramps says rock and roll wasn't invented. It escaped.
I think that it clawed its way out of a ditch somewhere between Texas and Mars. Rode shotgun with Eddie Cochran in a "borrowed" rag-top Brougham. Smashed empty beer bottles in Elvis's garage. Followed Jerry Lee Lewis home and dared him to open the door. Then it disappeared into the night, looking for somebody weird enough to carry it further.
And The Cramps found it. Or maybe it found them. Either way they spent over thirty years passing the infection along. With no cure and no vaccine, no known treatment except to attempt exorcism by performing.
Seventeen times I sought treatment from them. I guess sometimes you gotta Stay Sick.
____
Lux is gone now.
So is Bryan Gregory.
So is Nick Knox.
Ivy now paints.
But somewhere tonight a kid is pulling a scratched-up copy of Songs the Lord Taught Us out of a $3 bin at some hillbilly flea market and that infection is going to find another lunatic soul to send out into the world and make strange.
The Cramps didn't leave a legacy, they left a lit fuse, lit like a Lincoln doing eighty through the American night — joints burning by the dashboard light, the AM crackling, bad shocks hammering the blacktop, something stolen rattling around in the trunk — and nobody at the wheel who gives a flying fuck where the road ends.
Seventeen times, I went to the altar.
I only wish I could go seventeen more.
_____
A note on dates:
I've placed this show at the Vic Theater, October 2004. Since writing it, a ticket stub surfaced for a Cramps show at the House of Blues, Chicago, May 2003 — same tour, same city, same band doing more or less the same set. I can't say for certain which night the mic stand found Ivy's skull. Seventeen trips to the altar blur a little at the edges. What I'm sure of is what happened, even if I'm less sure exactly when.
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