How Two Punk Icons Are Giving the Cramps a Second Life

One fall night in 1979, two best friends went to a small club in their hometown of Washington, DC, to see a band. The show was so extraordinary, the band so singular, that decades—and thousands of shows—later, even at “AARP age,” as one of them now puts it, they still talk about it. They were especially taken with the lead singer, a lanky, glamorous Frankenstein-esque character who, by the show’s conclusion, was up on the bar, crooning merrily as he punched through ceiling tiles while the club owner looked on and laughed. “I’ve never recovered from that show,” Henry Rollins recalls. “I’ve never gotten better. Ian and I talk every Sunday. We’ve been best friends for 52 years. We talk about that time we stood next to each other and watched the Cramps.” Rollins, now 65, was a frontman for the legendary Southern California punk band Black Flag and later the MTV mainstay Rollins Band. Since retiring from music, he’s been a spoken word artist, radio host, actor, journalist, and TV presenter. The best friend he mentioned is Ian MacKaye, who fronted Minor Threat and Fugazi and co-founded and still co-owns Dischord, one of the most influential DIY record labels of all time. Their friendship is the stuff of punk legend; they also worked at Häagen–Dazs together as teens. And like so many punks and rockabilly fans—and millions of other freaks and weirdos—Rollins and MacKaye fell fast and hard for the Cramps. The Cramps were the brainchild of singer Lux Interior (Erick Lee Purkhiser) and guitarist Poison Ivy (Kristy Marlana Wallace), who met as art students in Sacramento in the early 1970s, when Ivy caught a ride with Lux and a friend while hitchhiking. They became partners in life and art for the next 37 years, and the only two continuous members of the band until Lux’s death in 2009. The Cramps coined the word “psychobilly” to describe their music—a louche, wild, leering, slithering blend of surf rock, nascent punk, mutated doo-wop, and blues-derived guitar. This they combined with bizarro-Americana lyrical matter: teenage werewolves, bikini girls with machine guns, Elvis, witchcraft, B-movie horror flicks, insanity, lust, death, and the beyond. Lux and Ivy were the Cramps’ most memorable visual elements: tall, thin and cadaveresque, he would moan and writhe across the stage, often wearing high heels and lingerie—their song “I Want to Get In Your Pants” was, as Lux cheerily told interviewers, about his love for wearing women’s clothes. Onstage, Ivy would stand watchfully nearby—lithe, implacable and feline, with curly red hair and a constantly changing selection of vinyl, latex, and animal-print garments. (She’d previously worked as a dominatrix, she once said, and between that and being in the Cramps, she eventually developed a latex allergy and had to retire her collection of such garments.) She often played a Gretsch 6120, an enormous, hollow-bodied electric guitar, and is rightfully included in Rolling Stone’s list of best guitarists of all time, often cited as central in shaping the “primitivist” rock-and-roll style. By the time Rollins and MacKaye first saw them, the Cramps had played a show at Napa State Hospital, a mental health facility, that became an instant legend. They brought the house down to the extent that about a dozen patients were inspired to escape during the show. (“Those people at Napa hospital were less unusual than some of the crowds we’ve played,” Lux wryly observed to Dick Porter, whose book Journey to the Center of The Cramps is considered the definitive work about the band.) The patients found the Cramps fairly unusual, Porter wrote, screaming “Ward T” at the stage. Ward T was, the band later learned, was the section for lifers, “the ward no one comes back from,” Lux told Porter. The Cramps came to an abrupt end in 2009 when Lux, then 62, died suddenly and unexpectedly from an aortic dissection. Poison Ivy withdrew from the public eye: no interviews, no reunion tours with a stand-in singer, no reissues of Cramps records. Even so, the band’s legend continued to grow, attracting new generations of fans. Wednesday star Jenna Ortega had a surprise viral moment last year when her titular character, the Addams Family’s sullen Goth daughter, did an appropriately weird little dance to the Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck.” Bootleg albums and merch have proliferated. (Full disclosure: I may have a few off-brand Cramps shirts in my closet.) You can even buy a beer named after one of their most beloved albums, with a can that’s “a nod” to (translation: completely lifted from) the cover art. Earlier this year, Rollins and MacKaye began working with a small group on a secret project: reviving the Cramps’ own Vengeance Records and starting a new business, Cramps Inc. The first order of business for the reformed Vengeance Records is to release a 1977 album that had, until earlier this year, been sitting unheard on tapes in Ivy’s Los Angeles garage. Titled Gravest Gravy, it was produced by Alex Chilton, a beloved producer, songwriter, musician, and co-founder of the iconic indie band Big Star. The album will be released on August 21, and Cramps Inc. intends to reissue at least nine other Cramps records. MacKaye and Rollins are not being paid for this—in a meeting with Ivy, Rollins says, he told her, simply, “I would just love to be your archivist.” Cramps Inc. will also release merchandise—including t-shirts and highly sought-after colored-vinyl pressings of Gravest Gravy—to help Ivy benefit from the wildly popular, and mostly illicit, market for Cramps merch. “Of course Ian and I are going to work for free,” Rollins told me via Zoom. “No money was ever offered or asked for. I don’t want a dollar. I’ve got the bucks. Isn’t this what you spend money on? What would you rather do? Do fentanyl or work with a Cramps catalogue?” Releasing an unheard Cramps album required listening to every mix of every song on Gravest Gravy and trying to decide which were the best, a task Rollins says he undertook “with fear, trepidation and awe.” “This is not a small deal,” he says. “You’re now speaking for a band. One of the best bands ever, a band that means so much to me.” After listening to every version, he adds, “I sent my notes and mixes to Ian, whose ears I trust more than anyone I know.” (MacKaye offered his own notes, and adjusted the levels on a few songs, though they both found Chilton’s work nearly unimpeachable.) “I’ve never been more excited about a record and I’m not even on it!” he says. “We’re not on the cover. We’re in the fine print at the bottom and that’s the way I want it to stay. When you go to the Smithsonian and see the big T. Rex bones standing up, you know that’s a team of expert people who put that up in a dark night and vanished like dew on the hood of the car. You don’t know their names. That’s what it’s all about. Me and Ian, we don’t need a hurrah.” Besides Rollins and MacKaye, the group reviving Vengeance Records includes Larry Hardy, owner and operator of In The Red Records and longtime friend of Ivy and Lux, and Jimmy Maslon, a producer who made some of the Cramps’ music videos. Poison Ivy is described as the “major beneficiary” of the project, which Rollins says is being undertaken with her full permission, although she’s not deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of Cramps Inc. (She also is still not doing interviews, even if you all but beg, and have been pestering her PR reps intermittently for a decade.) “If you’ve ever been in a band, it’s a very intense relationship,” Rollins explains. “You get to know your bandmates more than you really want to. I’ve been in bands with people I love like family and you hope you never see them again. For Ivy, the Cramps were the past, and when she remembers them, it comes with a lot of memories.” It doesn’t immediately make sense that Rollins would be such a diehard fan of The Cramps, who inhabited a completely unique sector of the music world: outside gender, genre, and preconceived notions about what a “rock” band should look or sound like. By contrast, Black Flag, Rollins’ most famous band, became singularly associated with the violence of the 1980s Southern California hardcore scene, which was often incredibly hostile to women and nonwhite people. Rollins recalls women getting their shirts torn off at Black Flag shows and a disturbing influx of neo-Nazis and skinheads who were more than happy to pay a cover fee for the chance to beat up Black or Hispanic fans, sexually harass women, and sieg heil the stage. The band didn’t want violent thugs at their shows, Rollins says, but he’s not surprised they were attracted. “Did Black Flag set up a permission structure? Perhaps. Wittingly? No.“ “I’m sure our very presence, we bore some responsibility,” Rollins adds. “Could we have been better actors in that scene? I’m not sure. I’m not sure if there’s more we could’ve done. It’s been so long ago. I can’t accurately tell you.” Rollins says he responded to Nazis at Black Flag shows by mocking them. “I would call things out. I was the fake comedian. I’m getting sieg heiled by a bunch of overweight Anheuser-Busch fans between songs, and I said, ‘You can’t make Army boot camp, much less the Third Reich.’ The audience is laughing. The security has to get around me because now those eight knuckleheads want to beat me up. I made an enemy of those people very fast. I didn’t just let it go.” Rollins also keeps an eye on the so-called manosphere, and “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate, viewing them as targeting the same kinds of young, impressionable, angry, horny young men who used to populate Black Flag shows. “They’re being sold a bill of goods,” he says, bluntly. “What I beg young men to do is listen to and believe women.” He’s had to do so himself, he adds. “I listened. I paid attention. I read. I’m always trying to lose my primordial tail and the glistening gills that throb on my neck.” The meathead and white supremacist presence at Black Flag shows seemed to peak in 1986 or so, Rollins says, and those people didn’t come to shows for his next project, the Rollins Band, at all. “Either the tickets were too expensive or they hated the music. They simply stopped showing up.” Since retiring from music, Rollins has slipped comfortably into a role as a music archivist, moving to Nashville about three years ago to try to open a punk rock museum. Given the expense of owning or leasing a building, the “museum” is much more likely to be a series of pop-up events, Rollins says, with one planned for “later this year,” although he’s not yet ready to provide details. Besides the Cramps, he’s also now working with the “estates” of other great bands, he says. “That’s equally bitchin’ news for another time.” Having known Poison Ivy since the Black Flag days, Rollins says, he’s happy to be part of any structure that allows her to benefit from the Cramps’ legendary status while living the quiet, private, deeply spiritual life she wants. “I don’t need to speak to Ivy,” he says. “I need to work for the Cramps.” “We’ll be the historians,” he adds. “We’ll do the heavy lifting.” He means that literally. When Hardy, Ivy’s old friend, discovered that the tapes in her garage “were showing signs of moisture,” Rollins says, they needed to be moved, very quickly, to a climate-controlled environment. Rollins flew from Nashville to LA, rented a cargo van, and drove “30 hours and 45 minutes” back to Nashville, pounding energy drinks, the van sagging under the weight of the tapes. Rollins was pulled over in Arkansas for drifting across the white line. He told the cop, cheerily, “I’m riding the Red Bulls, sir!” and was let off with a warning. “I paid to do this!” Rollins said, referring to financing the trip with his own money, “Because in my mind I owe the Cramps a part of my life.” It can be hard, at this moment in time, to imagine caring deeply about something like a newly released album, no matter how legendary the band or thrillingly obscure the recording. The chaos of the second Trump administration has taken its toll on Rollins too. He’s a DC native, after all. He says he wept when Trump paved over the White House Rose Garden. “I try not to let any of this stuff get to me, but that got to me.” For years, Rollins volunteered with the USO, doing tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt, and visiting wounded soldiers in their beds at Walter Reed. (“You see a person half your age and half their face is gone…You do five hours of that and get back to me.” At the end of a day like that, he says, “I have no appetite. All I can smell is that antibacterial soap.”) He’s particularly outraged by the 13 American service members who have thus far died in the war with Iran. “Every day, Trump and Vance are covered in their blood like a patina.” But Rollins also argues that art still matters—even amid the chaos, outrages and endless travails of Trump 2.0. “No one will say ‘bad dog,’ for putting on a record in the middle of all of this horror,” he says. “If you lose culture in your society, the society dies,” Rollins says. “If you lose your art museums and your galleries, all you have is thugs and fighting and people being mean. In times of trouble, art gives us the backbone to keep fighting. It gives you inspiration…You want to rebel against this awful war and this awful situation we’re in, you don’t take your eyes off the ball. But it’s not bad to have a soundtrack. Keep your eyes on the ball and have a beat.” Art and culture are “what you have to lose with an administration like this,” Rollins adds. “They hate science. They hate literacy. They hate women. They hate nonwhite people. They hate LGBTQ people. Those aforementioned groups, they make things that make life great. They want to eradicate it and erase it. You can do more than one thing at once. You can entertain many things. And so you can be concerned and fight the good fight, and you can also put a record on and love the Cramps.”