Tear it up: 40 years ago, the Cramps played the Napa State Mental Hospital
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โSomebody told me you people are crazy, but Iโm not so sure about that. You seem to be all right to me.โ
So uttered the late, great Lux Interior 40 years ago, when his shockabilly band the Cramps played Napa State Hospitalโs mental institution on June 13, 1978. This was obviously years before anyone owned smartphones, or even VHS camcorders, and the bizarre event was witnessed by only about 100 patients, a few staffers, and some punk-rock stragglers who had driven up from San Francisco. But thanks to an indie company called Target Video that captured 20 minutes of the jaw-dropping action, it will forever be known as one of the most legendary and infamous concerts in punk history.
โWeโre the Cramps, and weโre from New York City, and we drove 3,000 miles to play for you people,โ Interior announces to the belligerent, bewildered spectators in the grainy, black-and-white footage (which aired once on Targetโs Bay Area public access TV show and was an underground bootleg phenomenon for years until the advent of YouTube). โF*** you!โ is the audience response.
The clip shows that the crowd did eventually warm to the band, however. As Target Video co-founder Jill Hoffman-Kowal told Noisey, the gig โwas a beautiful, beautiful thing. What we did for those people, it was liberating. [The mental patients] had so much fun. They pretended they were singing, they were jumping onstage. It was a couple hours of total freedom. They didnโt judge the band, and the band didnโt judge them.โ
It wasnโt unusual for the Napa facility to host music events. As Bart Swain, the hospital employee who organized the event, told Noisey, he often booked classical, folk, and even other punk acts to entertain patients. (Swain hired the Cramps and another band that wasnโt filmed for unknown reasons, the Mutants, through a San Francisco punk scenester named Howie Klein, who would go on to become the president of Reprise Records in 1989.) Swain was concerned, however, by the unprecedented presence of cameras, which were a clear violation of patient confidentiality. But the patients themselves didnโt seem to mind.
It makes sense that the Cramps connected so well with what can only be described as a fringe audience. The band, formed in 1976 by Interior (real name: Erick Lee Purkhiser) and his guitar-playing future wife Poison Ivy Rorschach (Kristy Marlana Wallace) โ after Interior, as urban legend has it, picked up a hitch-hiking Rorschach โ themselves lived on the edges of society. And they were always the real deal. Despite all their smart-alecky double-entendres (with song titles like โCreature From the Black Leather Lagoon,โ โBend Over Iโll Drive,โ โTwo-Headed Sex Change,โ and โCan Your Pussy Do the Dog?โ), they were never a joke, a novelty act, Addams Family cartoons, or some kitschy art concept. They were a cult band in the truest sense of that term, and damn proud of it, right up to Interiorโs death in 2009.
To commemorate the fearless groupโs notorious mental hospital concert, weโve unarchived Yahoo Entertainmentโs 1997 interview with rock โnโ rollโs coolest, ghoul-est power couple.
Yahoo Entertainment: You seem to have always taken great pride in being outsidersโฆ
Lux Interior: Iโve heard it said a million times that the Cramps are โtrying to be weird.โ Weโre not trying to be weird. If people perceive us as weird, then we really are weird. Weโre just trying to be ourselves. Itโs not โweirdโ to us; itโs great! And we want to be appreciated for who we are. We enjoy being a cult band. We want it to be that way. Iโd prefer that than being a big huge band that all kinds of people like. Iโd like people to understand that we are not like them. We really are different from most folks. Weโve had a hard life. Weโve been through a lot of things. Weโve taken every drug in the book. Iโd like to think that people who listen to us have been through something too.
Poison Ivy Rorschach: We donโt feel like our music is for everybody. It is music for others who can identify with that โ being a hoodlum, an outsider โ whoโve taken risks. No one else should be expected to like it. Weโre not even trying to make music for anyone else. If youโre not from that world, youโre not going to get it. Those who would call it โkitschโ or โcamp,โ itโs because theyโre coming from a different place. They canโt begin to know the world, the reality, that this represents. โฆ Weโre not the same [as other people]. I was considered a hoodlum slut all my life. I had fights with my mother over it. Iโve made money from sex-related jobs, being a dominatrix. Lux has been in jail before. My sisterโs ex-husband killed a 17-year-old with a semi-automatic. These arenโt โconcepts.โ These arenโt fodder for funny songs sung in geezer fake Southern voices.
Interior: Ivy supported the Cramps for the first couple years [with dominatrix work], when we were living in New York, and we couldnโt have been supported any other way.
Rorschach: There wouldnโt have been a Cramps โ we wouldnโt be where weโre at now โ without the income I was able to make as a dominatrix. โฆ And I learned all about people, and money, and getting my way. It was business on a most immediate level. And thereโs nothing wrong with that. I think [some judgmental people would] call it prostitution. As if having some mind-numbing job isnโt? But no one who does it is doing anything they donโt want to do. Treating people rough was fun, having rich executives at my feet. I enjoyed that form of power. Itโs another world. I was just a different kind of person; I was loose. I liked what I did. It was very interesting work, very intimate โ and not just sexually. Itโs very interesting, being intimate with strangers. What a fascinating opportunity! Itโs just not for people from the outside to judge.
Yahoo Entertainment: So, do you think there are other โshockingโ bands out there that are all talk, with no gritty life experience to back it up?
Rorschach: Well, I feel really separate, really a world apart, from a lot of suburban college bands coming from another place, whose song is a โconcept.โ For instance, we see the adjective โwhite trashโ thrown around a lot to describe what we do. I think thatโs a really racist term; I canโt believe it still exists in our culture. Everybodyโs trash! People call us โwhite trashโ as theyโre munching their McDonaldโs burger. Thereโs middle-class trash, suburban trash, bourgeois trash. Youโre all f***ing trash. I just flat donโt get it. We would never, ever sing about โwhite trashโ as a concept. But if someone wants to call us that, fine; weโve been called names all our lives.
Interior: Thereโs some book with all of these bands listed in it, and it says, โThe Cramps give a funny, one-step-removed view of the real rockabilly culture.โ Now, growing up in Akron, Ohio, all of my friends were hoodlums. This music I grew up with. This is the only thing Iโve known. A lot of these college kids that write about us, theyโll talk about us like weโre what they are, just because thatโs how it appears. Itโs humiliating to us to be thought of as intellectuals who thought of this art idea of appropriating this weird music that has nothing to do with us. A lot of those rockabilly people were doing something really intense and original โ sexually intense. That was a part of my growing up. This is something people canโt know about unless theyโve been through that. If youโre a freak in a freak show, then you know what another freakโs gone through. So I donโt want people to think theyโre just like us, but we do want them to have some respect for who we are and not think weโre some kind of college kids with this idea. Weโve been through a lot of hardship to get where we got to.
Rorschach: Thereโs nothing that Iโve done that Iโm ashamed of. I donโt think people realize how real we are, and how different.
Interior: Just about everything we did was illegal up until the Cramps. My best friends in school are all in jail or dead now. One of my best friends was one of the guys who shot those people at Kent State. He wouldโve shot anybody for any reason. He also dropped a cement block off of an expressway onto a car one time and almost killed someone. His best friend, who I hung around sometime, blinded a guy โ he took his thumbs and pushed this guyโs eyeballs in. These were the hoodlums that I knew and gave respect to.
Yahoo Entertainment: OK, so your crazy concerts are world famous. How do you psych yourself up for the stage? Unlike with some bands, it doesnโt seem like there is much separate of your onstage and offstage personasโฆ
Interior: Itโs just fun! We donโt have to do anything to psych ourselves up.
Rorschach: I probably slip into some hypnotic state as soon as we step out there. Some people say weโre different on and offstage โ which oneโs real is for them to guess. Iโm sure we must slip into some state of mind.
Interior: Basically, we know itโs gonna be fun. Our audience and the place weโre playing is different every night, so itโs always different. Our audience is either totally weird and strange and entertaining to us, or theyโre really boring and still, in which case we think of it as a challenge to win them over by being really intense.
Rorschach: I think we cultivate being open to certain energies. I do these invocations, which could probably be interpreted as an invitation, of certain spirits that canโt be seen that can only enhance the energy at a show. Some performers just arenโt tuned in to that, and some are. But even if I didnโt do that, Iโm sure theyโd be attracted.
Interior: We really believe in magic and things you canโt see, and weโve always taken a lot of chances โ otherwise, we wouldโve never made it. This current staring-at-the-shoes style of performing is because at one point, โrock โnโ rollโ became โrock music,โ and everybody was suddenly an โartist,โ and performers started getting this mixed-up idea that they were doing โart.โ And if people wanted to pay money to see it, that was OK, but theyโre suffering and theyโre doing their โart.โ Thatโs not the school we come from. We come from the carnival side of things, the showbiz kind of thing, the burlesque kind of thing. If people are going to come pay money to see you standing on a stage, you should be doing something to entertain them. Thatโs only fair.
Yahoo Entertainment: You certainly donโt seem to be mellowing or slowing down with age.
Rorschach: If anything, weโre getting weirder, the longer weโre on this earth. โฆ Lux and I have always been reckless and sought out thrills, taken risks, probably blown our minds in certain pursuits. So wherever it is weโre at now, itโs from living that kind of risky life, not doing anything mainstream in any way.
Interior: On our last record label, we told someone we were going to France and playing to 40,000 bikers, the French version of the Hellโs Angels. Thereโd be live sex onstage and all these different biker clubs. We were telling this guy how much fun it was going to be, and the guy said, โWow, wouldnโt you be afraid?โ
Rorschach: I think this guy thought because Lux wears makeup and high heels, thereโd be some kind of conflict with the bikers. What he didnโt realize is, Lux is such a nut that anyone like that [the French bikers] would love him โ they would recognize what was in common, not what was different.
Interior: They appreciate that weโre weirdos, because theyโre weirdos.
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