CASE OF THE CRAMPS

Everyone goes on about punk rock from the 1976-1978 period – that there was a full-on

Teddy Boy revival seems to get overlooked. I was a Ted rather than a punk and let me tell you it was just as exciting to discover artists like Jack Scott and Charlie Feathers whose music, in my opinion, was better than anything the Sex Pistols put out. Better still, we had our own bands! As well as those that emulated classic rockabilly we had artists like The Cramps from America who took elements of punk and blended them with rockabilly. I remember being shocked when I first heard them and somehow got my hands on their first two singles, pressed in limited numbers on their Vengeance label in the US. I still have these wonderful treasures and wonder what they are worth.

Ben Fuller via email

“Life is a B-movie,” Poison Ivy Rorschach, guitarist with The Cramps, told the Melody Maker in June 1979. By that time, Ivy and her partner in crime, Lux Interior, had invented their own musical life centred on a love of 50s and 60s music, fashion, TV shows and films. The duo met in 1972 and experimented with different names. “I picked the name I have now from a car ad in Ohio,” Lux told the American Search And Destroy fanzine around 1978. “I had other names before, Raven Beauty, Vipvop the one I used in California from an Old Marvin & Johnny song, one of the first rock’n’roll songs.” Moving around by 1976, The Cramps had played their first gig in New York at CBGB. As Lux related to the New Musical Express in 1980:

“We were completely out of tune for 45 minutes and the club owner Hilly Kristal told us we sounded like a total joke.” The Cramps were in a class of their own, blending rockabilly, garage and attitude with a line-up that included Bryan Gregory – who looked like a cartographer from hell – on second guitar and originally his sister on drums. The Cramps were impossible to put in any category – Interior sang and performed like a fusion of Iggy Pop and Elvis Presley – though Ivy was not bothered with labels, stating around 1979: “New wave is just a new word for real rock’n’roll. Rockabilly was the punk rock of the 50s.”

As they developed their sound, The Cramps attracted the attention of former Box Tops and Big Star member Alex Chilton, who recognised kindred spirits. It was Chilton who produced their first two singles in Ardent studios in Memphis in October 1977. As Interior later told Manchester’s City Life in 1980: “We’d been doing gigs in New York and he’d apparently been coming to them without us knowing who he was. We met through a mutual friend in New York and he started telling us how he really dug us. He was interested in doing a single – we’d tried it with someone else and it didn’t work out. Alex said he was from Memphis and that he could take us there. He had connections with studios there and said he would like to produce us. So we drove down to Memphis and did two singles at Ardent.” In fact, they liked each other so much that they also recorded the track Red Headed Woman in Memphis at the original Sun studio of Sam Phillips: “We backed up Jim Dickinson, who’s like an old Sun artist,” recalled Ivy. “Jim Dickinson with The Cramps – we should put it out, it’s great!”

The first Cramps single featured a cover of The Trashmen’s Surfin’ Bird on the A-side and a cover of the Jack Scott track The Way I Walk on the flip. The single was released on The Cramps’ label, Vengeance, with the aptly chosen catalogue number 666.

The attention to detail that Interior and Ivy paid to their look and the sound of The Cramps extended to the picture sleeve of their debut with the now-famous Cramps logo already in place. They followed this release with another Chiltonproduced single (668, 1978) on Vengeance with an Ivy/interior penned A-side, Human Fly, and a cover of a Sam Phillips song, Domino, on the flip. As the band began to stir interest, they were signed to the IRS label by Miles Copeland. The first Cramps product was a 12” EP released on IRS in the States and Copeland’s Illegal Records in the UK. Gravest Hits (ILS 12013) featured all four tracks from the Vengeance singles as well as an additional song, Lonesome Town. The initial pressing was on blue vinyl and is worth £30.

One reason Copeland had set up Illegal was to help his brother Stewart Copeland’s band The Police. The label released the group’s first single, Fall Out/nothing Achieving (IL 001, 1977, £40), in the UK before they signed to A&M. When The Police toured the UK to promote their first LP, Outlandos D’amour, in 1978, The Cramps supported them. They were soon to record their own debut LP, Chilton at the controls: Songs The Lord Taught Us (Illegal ILP 005, 1980, £30). UK test pressings are very collectable and worth in the region of £200 because they include the track Drug Train instead of TV Set, though TV Set appears on the released version.

The singles you own were probably imported to shops like Rough Trade in Notting Hill. Though there were re-pressings around 1979/80 both records have, from what I can see, never been officially reissued on Vengeance, making copies of first pressings worth around £150 each in Mint condition.

Finally, you are right about the Ted revival. I remember being at school in Hackney around

1976/77, and there were actually more Teddy Boys in my year – about seven – than there were punks (my mate Bobby). The Teds used to go down to Brick Lane market to buy records from a guy who sold classic rock’n’roll – as well as, probably, Ted Carroll’s famed Rock On stall and shop where, on her first visit to the UK, Poison Ivy bought in the region of 50 albums. Aptly, when Ted Carroll later set up Ace records, they signed The Cramps who went on to release classic

“THE CRAMPS WERE IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT IN ANY CATEGORY”