Today is the birthday of The Cramps’ Lux Interior. If he were alive, he would be 76.
Lux is the founding member of the American pyschobilly band The Cramps—the integral part of the early CBGB punk rock movement that had emerged in New York—from 1972 till his death in 2009.
Lux Interior’s name came “from an old car commercial”, after he previously flirted with the names Vip Vop and Raven Beauty. He met his wife Kristy Wallace (stage name: Poison Ivy) in Sacramento when he and a friend picked her up when she was hitchhiking.
The couple called the musical style psychobilly, conjuring a fiendish witches’ brew of primal rockabilly, grease-stained ’60s garage rock, vintage monster movies, perverse and glistening sex, and the detritus and effluvia of 50 years of American pop culture. Lux and Poison claimed the specific genre psychobilly was inspired by a Johnny Cash song, “One Piece at a Time” and later saying that they were just using the phrase as “carny terms to drum up business.”
Lux was known for a frenetic and provocative stage show that included high heels, near-nudity and sexually suggestive movements. His speciality was the microphone blow job, where he could get the entire head of an SM-58 microphone into his mouth.
Lux performed live with The Cramps for the final time in November 2006 at the House of Blues in Anaheim, California, before a relative period of inactivity for the band. Then, in February 2009, the sad news came that Lux Interior had passed away, aged 62, at the Glendale Memorial Hospital after suffering an aortic dissection.
Happy birthday, Lux Interior! We, bad people, wanna thank you for the bad music you gave to us!
• Read also LUX INTERIOR, PSYCHOBILLY, & ROCKABILLY VOODOO.
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Featured image via The Guardian.
