The Cramps Totally Destroy Seattle!

This album cover is of a pretty rare bootleg recording of pyschobilly/rockabilly/dirty punks The Cramps playing live in Seattle at Astor Park May 2nd, 1982. Astor Park was Seattle's early '80s rock club where bands that could draw a good-sized crowd, but not quite enough to play The Paramount would play. U2 played their first Seattle show here in 1980. Astor Park pre-dated me going to shows, but everyone from that era seems to recall it was a bar/club with crappy bathrooms, overpriced drinks, and often great shows. Local bands like The Cowboys, The Heats, Hi-Fi, The Allies and The Blackouts seemed to play there fairly often.

Anyway, back to The Cramps bootleg, it's a great live soundboard recording. The setlist is: Domino, Human Fly, Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White, I'm Five Years Ahead Of My Time, Primitive, Goo Goo Muck, Reality (Beautiful Gardens), TV Set, Sunglasses After Dark, Garbage Man and Psychotic Reaction. You can download a copy of it here.

Lux Interior of the Cramps has died. Crap!

The Daily Swarm has been reporting all day that Lux Interior of The Cramps had died. No one could find any other confirmation about it anywhere else on on the Web, so we were treating it as a false rumor. Sadly, now it sounds true, Billboard, Pitchfork, and LimeWire are now reporting it as well. Crap. Seriously, I think I'm gonna have to cry 96 tears from 96 eyes. This totally bums me out, more than most musician deaths, I've been listening to The Cramps for 25 years. It seems somehow appropriate that I repost the weird photo I took of Lux at the Showbox about 15 years where it look like he's crying... only today it's his fans that are crying.

Lux Interior of the Cramps cries for rock'n'roll!

OK, he's not really crying, but it sure looks like it. I've taken photos of easily over 1000 punk and rock shows, often I get a few unflattering ones, but occasionally I get ones that are just plain bizarre. Usually it's with drummers, drummers often have the weirdest facial expressions when they are beating away, so much so that for a couple month period I got obsessed with taking drummer photos every show and compiling freaky drummer photos.

This photo of Lux Interior I shot at the Showbox in Seattle when they were on tour in support of their 1997 album Big Beat From Badsville. If I remember correctly, The Demolition Doll Rods and Guitar Wolf opened up. Lux was giving it his all and climbed up on the speaker cabinet in front of me and laid half on the cab, half hanging out over the audience, singing out the lyrics.

The Cramps are a band I've loved since before I listened to punk rock, they are band that has combined punk, rockabilly and the blues since the '70s and their songs always have a great rockin' sound to them with hilarious lyrics generally revolving around sex, drugs, guns, space, horror and rock'n'roll. Their influence on other bands cannot be understated, it's huge. And the band openly admits a lot of their songs were reworked versions of blues, rockabilly and rock songs that came in eras before them that they proudly pay homage to. If you want to see a '70s band rock out live, don't go see the Rolling Stones tour, go see The Cramps. For music, tour dates and more, check out thecramps.com.