Man, I'm sick of people I like dying all the time. So stop it, OK? Thanks.
Anyway, yesterday I was pretty sad to hear the news that Lux Interior, lead singer of The Cramps died at age 60. The Cramps were a huge influence on me musically and culturally. I even quoted their song "Garbage Man" in Hardcore Zen ("You ain't no punk, you punk, let's talk about the real junk").
I first heard The Cramps when I was a junior or senior in high school. My friend Dan Gaffney played me the record Psychedelic Jungle and it was a revelation. I never knew anything that scary and cool could exist. Lux's real name was Erik Purkheiser and he was from Stow, a suburb of Akron. His brother Mark played guitar in a band called Johnny Clampett and the Walkers (later re-named The Walking Clampetts) and ran a guitar repair shop across from Luigi's Pizza in downtown Akron.
Lux was one of those people I always figured I'd meet one day. I knew people who knew him and we obviously had a lot of shared interests in rock and roll and horror movies. I'm so sorry it never happened.
I liked Lux's approach of letting people believe he was evil and depraved when the truth was that he was actually pretty normal. My friend Steve used to see Lux and his wife Poison Ivy power walking in the hills of Glendale, a far cry from the image people had of him dwelling in a basement surviving on a diet of heroin and toadstools. It's always made me feel good when I've seen people presenting themselves in that warts and all way. It made me feel like maybe I was OK, that just the fact that I had a darker side didn't mean that's all there was to me. I guess that's a funny thing to take from a band like The Cramps. But there ya go.
There's stuff all over the web about Lux and his life and influence. So I don't need to add any more. I'll just leave you with my favorite video clip of the band on a Chicago-based public access show for kids called Chic A Go Go:
