The Cramps
w/the Lords of Altamont
Showbox, 1426 First Ave, 628-3151, Mon Nov 6, 9 pm, $15.

IS IT COINCIDENCE that the Cramps' delirious live album Smell of Female came out in 1983, the same year Beat Happening were hanging out in Japan? Both groups had a dark menace lurking behind the simple, minimal garage drumbeats and psychotic bursts of guitar. Neither the Cramps nor Beat Happening saw the need to use a bass. Both enjoyed their music stripped back to the bone (Off the Bone, as an early Cramps compilation put it). Calvin Johnson's formative Olympia group were given to the occasional burst of humor, although this was often endearingly naive. Lux Interior's version of rock's primordial ooze was altogether more knowing and almost fetishistic.

"You've got good taste/You've got good taste/You come in and sit on my... lap," he growled to his partner, lead guitarist Poison Ivy. (In 1983, the couple had been going out for 11 years.) I say almost fetishistic: It wasn't until they got older that the Cramps really started going for Russ Meyer's turf, dressing up in rubber cat-suits (Lux) and Bettie Page-style corsets (Poison). I say as they got older. Actually, one of the Cramps' most endearing tricks is that--like Keith Richards, Portland's Dead Moon, and Andre Williams--they never seem to age. Lux has always looked white as chalk, death warmed up and given spooky forms of expression. Rock's not dead--it's undead!

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the Cramps were into any sort of female exploitation, though: Despite all the sleaze and licentious asides during their richly entertaining live shows, Lux Interior never came across as the demeaning type. He was too into whatever he was too into for that, which is one of the reasons the Cramps, like Beat Happening (who never dressed up), were so influential, inspiring a whole generation of bedroom noise terrorists. Where would the Fall, the Birthday Party, and the genres of goth, psychobilly, and garage have been without them? Tacoma would have been a much duller place in the '80s without the presence of garage kings (and queen), Cramps-influenced Girl Trouble. This, despite the fact the Cramps only released one album in America through the whole of the '80s because of record-company hassles. Think about it: one album in 10 fuckin' years. If ever there were an unjust God.... Then of course there was the saga of ex-Gun Club and Cramps guitarist Kid 'Congo' Powers later going on to shake maracas with the Make-Up and play with Nick Cave's Bad Seeds.

The Cramps love to dress up. Every day is Halloween to Lux and Poison: Who knows what horrors might be lurking out there on the sidewalk, in the garden shed, down by the waterfront? The Cramps were writing and singing about horrors and attractions such as Ed Gein, EC Comics, and S&M long before they became trends or fashion accessories. American life has a rich, dark underbelly that will always attract scavengers and the morbidly curious. The Cramps saw nothing wrong in adding to it.

I saw the Cramps play live just once. It was 1991 or thereabouts, in the town hall of the isolated, terrifying, granite Scots city of Aberdeen. Lux must have easily been past 40 by then, but it hardly mattered. He was still leaping from speaker to speaker, PA stack to PA stack in his spray-on Lurex pants and stiletto heels, still folding his skinny, scrawny frame almost double into the audience's faces. All the songs you wanted to be there were there: "Surfin' Bird," "Garbageman," "Goo Goo Muck." Afterward, the very overwhelming Poison Ivy apologized personally to me for not playing "The Most Exalted Potentate of Love." That was 10 years ago, and do I reckon the Cramps will still be up there, rockin' their bones? Of course. Their music is like a fine, mulled blackberry wine--the brew gets headier and headier with age. I will say this to you once and once only: Do not miss. To this day, I still can't understand why the Cramps aren't feared and respected and sell millions of records across your land.