Well, you got good taste, and I ain't dumb Ah, ooh-wee baby, a-yum-yum-yum! Well my mama had twin babies On one sweet summer day She beat one in the head And I'm the one that got away
Ah, how I miss Ivy, Lux Interior and their morally impeccable playmates.
Tonight we’ve pulled in at the Cramps Smell Of Female drive-thru no-tell motel, to rent one of their rubber sheeted gigantic heart-shaped beds for an hour or two on our way back from church.
I picked up Smell Of Female in a charity shop in Belsize Park around 10 years ago but I was first aware of it when as a 16 year-old doofus I bought a cool picture disc mail order, it was the Cramps Faster Pussycat, not Faster Pussycat The Cramps, as I’d thought*; ‘totally unlistenable’ were my initial thoughts.
But I was young and innocent then, despite my very best attempts at being besmirched and I’m, well let us just say less so now. So the off-kilter off beat runs deep within my troubled soul these days and I’m right there for all the camped-up, ramped-up, sweaty lo-fi libidinous lunacy this 1983 live LP dishes out.
We kick off with the hammily Eastern-tinged ‘Thee Most Exalted Potentate Of Love’, which by pure random coincidence happens to be my pet name for my John Thomas. Word up.
By the time Lux introduces ‘You Got Good Taste’ I’ve acclimatised and the pounding rhythm, occasional audience shrieks and Poison Ivy’s chicken scratch guitar all makes perfect sense. Lux is in superb form, you can hear him selling every line, obscening it up all over the stage, somehow I don’t think he’s referring to his victim’s style preferences.
My fave track on Smell Of Female tonight is ‘Call Of The Wighat’, which is pure B-movie stream of unconsciousness hokum. Love it. Nick Knox really smashes his drums on this one with Kid Congo Powers powering it on through his rhythm playing.
Well, how do you keep a moron
In wighat suspense?
I’ll tell you that later
‘Faster Pussycat’, which I hadn’t realised was a cover, essays some West Coast lonesome geetar sounds and, hell, a bit of a tune. It’s okay but I prefer ‘I Ain’t Nuthin’ But A Gorehound’ where Ivy gets to strut her stuff over a zombified Duane Eddy twang beat. It’s the track here that best exemplifies their one band rockabilly trashpunk oeuvre, pushing taste so far to the south that it becomes pretty well psychedelic by default.
They close proceedings with a blast through ‘Psychotic Reaction’ that’s, well, a bit psychotic; Lux blowing a harmonica for the only time I can think of. It’s okay, maybe not quite as out there as the Count Five original, it hits a great groove but isn’t quite top ranking Cramps.
Smell Of Female is fine for a live EP, just about all you need from this lot without accompanying crime scene footage of Lux disporting himself whilst Ivy brings down a rockabilly storm impassively stage right.
In thrall to the unseemly cultural detritus of two decades before, the Cramps were as punk as it ever got; not that they sounded punk, they just used it as a justification and an enabler for their excesses of taste and style. Speaking of taste, I wonder if Mr Interior has anything to say about that, children?
Well, you got good taste, and I ain't dumb Ah, ooh-wee baby, a-yum-yum-yum!
1205 down.
*no L.A sleaze rock here, but a weird Halloweenabilly homage to a Russ Meyer film I wouldn’t get to see for another 4 years.
Do you remember? Picking up Smell Of Female In Belsize Park
Is that a Marduk reference?
Do you remember? Marching with swastikas in the snow
Do you remember? You never understood krakow
Saw the Cramps at the Volkshaus Zürich in 1986. Ivy and Lux were the perfect couple – he was inconceivable without her, she was inconceivable without him.
I’m so jealous you saw them! I had a chance late on but couldn’t afford it and just thought ‘I’ll see them next time’.
The Cramps show at the Volkshaus was radical, obsessive and dangerous. Lux had climbed the speaker towers up to the balcony and received a skinhead punch. Covered in blood, he climbed back to the stage, mumbled something into the microphone (“I saw worse things than that, boy”) and continued the show if nothing had happened. There was a woman lying on the ground in the pogo crowd, and when we tried to pull her up, she fought back in panic: she wanted to be down there and receive all the kicks. Pure masochism. That suited the Cramps like nothing else.
That stage show on a vinyl record may be the coolest thing I’ve seen all day…and I saw a junkie passed out, standing up, straddling a stolen bicycle.
Wow. I aim to please Bop. You do know the Cramps did a great track called Bop Pills?
In Canada? I thought it was just wilderness and carefully tended suburbs, with a friendly Mountie listening to Tragically Hip at every corner.