Lux Interior

Art & Shamanism at Sacramento State

In 1972 Kristy Wallace, newly enrolled as an art student at the same campus, was hitchhiking home from class when Purkhiser and a friend picked her up. They compared timetables in the car, and she mentioned a course called Art & Shamanism. He turned up on the first day. "I was sending out psychic brainwaves of, like: 'Sit by me! Sit by me! Sit by me!'" she told The Independent in 1998. "And he did. He came straight to me and sat next to me." Two weeks after the class began they moved in together. She later took the name Poison Ivy Rorschach, and the Los Angeles Times described her in 2009 as his wife. John Robb's obituary in The Quietus called her his wife of 37 years, which also points back to 1972; no source consulted gives a wedding date.

The couple's shared project was records, the more obscure the better. uDiscover Music tells the story of the day they heard that Sun Records' warehouse in Memphis was selling 7-inch singles for 20 cents each: they drove 2,000 miles from Sacramento, broke down an hour outside Memphis, hitchhiked the rest of the way, spent every dollar on records, and had to wire home for the money to fix their 1961 Chevy wagon.

Vip Vop, Raven Beauty, Then Lux Interior

The stage name came in stages. He first went by Vip Vop, after a 1963 R&B single by Marvin & Johnny, then Raven Beauty, and finally Lux Interior, a phrase lifted from a run of car commercials that bragged about their "deluxe interiors". The Cleveland Scene glosses it as Latin for "interior light". Ivy named the band before it had any members: she wanted the gang feeling of The Kinks, and came up with The Cramps.

The Scene's account has the two going back to Akron in 1973, where they settled on the idea of a band, before heading east. uDiscover Music dates the move to New York to September 1975, with a jukebox as the centrepiece of a cramped living room on East 73rd Street.

The Basement of Musical Maze

Lux took a job at Musical Maze, a record store on the Upper East Side, and there he recruited a co-worker, Greg Beckerleg, who was renamed Bryan Gregory. Over the summer of 1976 The Cramps rehearsed in the store's basement. The first drummer, Pam Balam, was replaced after a few weeks by her roommate Miriam Linna, who had never played drums. "Lux handed me a brand-new pair of sticks and pronounced me the world's greatest drummer," she recalled. Linna knew the Dead Boys and talked them into letting The Cramps open for them at CBGB in November 1976, the band's first gig. Nick Knox, born Nicholas Stephanoff and formerly of the Cleveland band Electric Eels, took over the drum stool in 1977.

The line-up had no bassist, and the Los Angeles Times wrote that this, together with an antagonistic female guitarist, set the band apart from its downtown peers and upended the usual sexual dynamic of a rock band. The band itself was the thing that stayed fixed: whoever else came and went, Lux and Ivy remained its core for more than three decades, from the first CBGB show until his death. The Village Voice counted 32 years of records and shows.

Ardent Studios and the Vengeance Label

In October 1977 the band recorded at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Alex Chilton producing. Lux told NME in 1979 that Chilton had "done the most reckless suicidal things and gotten clean away"; Chilton, asked by Sounds in December 1977 what he was playing at home, called The Cramps "the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world". The first single, "Surfin' Bird" backed with "The Way I Walk", came out in February 1978 on the band's own label, Vengeance, and "Human Fly" backed with "Domino" followed in November 1978.

IRS Records signed them and issued the Gravest Hits EP in June 1979. That year the band opened for The Police on a major British tour. The debut album, Songs the Lord Taught Us, was recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis and released in March 1980. Bryan Gregory quit in spring 1980, and Kid Congo Powers, formerly of The Gun Club, became a full-time Cramp in November 1980. Psychedelic Jungle, self-produced at A&M Studios in Hollywood, arrived in May 1981. The Los Angeles Times named those two albums as the band's critical high point.

The Free Show at Napa State Hospital

On June 13, 1978, soon after the first single reached shops, The Cramps played a free show for the patients of Napa State Mental Hospital in California, with the San Francisco band The Mutants in support. One Sony Portapak camera filmed it. Lux opened with the line, "We're The Cramps, and we're from New York City, and we drove 3,000 miles to play for you people ... somebody told me you people are crazy, but I'm not so sure about that." When Target Video released 20 minutes of the footage on VHS in 1981 it became an underground staple. The Los Angeles Times obituary places the hospital in Sacramento; uDiscover Music, which gives the date and the support act, places it in Napa, and this article follows uDiscover.

The Funeral Wreaths of 1987

The band never had much of a mainstream hit, but the Los Angeles Times found that it kept a reliable fringe audience for more than 30 years. In 1987 a rumor spread that Lux had died of a heroin overdose, and half a dozen funeral wreaths were delivered to Ivy. "At first, I thought it was kind of funny," he told the Times. "But then it started to give me a creepy feeling."

The last Cramps album was How to Make a Monster, a 2004 collection of rarities. In its sleevenotes Lux and Ivy set out what they had been after from the start: "We wanted to be as shocking, sexy and original as the great culture-changing rock'n'roll pioneers were during the 50s and 60s ... Not imitators, but the same kind of rebels that they were in their time." The band kept touring and finished its last run of US dates in November 2006.

Glendale Memorial Hospital, February 2009

Lux Interior died early on Wednesday, February 4, 2009, at Glendale Memorial Hospital in Glendale, California. He was 62. NME put the time at 4:30 am Pacific. His publicist said the cause was a previously existing heart condition, and that wording is the only one this article repeats. The Village Voice headline gave his birth year as 1948, but the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Scene and uDiscover Music all give 1946, which matches his age at death.

His brother Mike Purkhiser, an Akron musician and sound engineer, told the Cleveland Scene: "He was always cutting his own path." Sean Yseult of White Zombie, who played bass in a later Cramps line-up, said: "To speak of Lux, I must also speak of Ivy, as they will always be one." The Los Angeles Times traced the band's sound into The Black Lips, The White Stripes, The Horrors and Primal Scream, whose singer Bobby Gillespie reportedly named his son Lux. No estate valuation for Lux Interior has been reported, and this article gives no net worth figure.

Sources

• Passages: Lux Interior founder of The Cramps | HeraldNet.com
• The Cramps, The Early Years: The Way They Walk
• Scene & Heard: Bad News For Bad People
• Lux Interior, 1948-2009 - The Village Voice
• The Cramps' frontman dies in hospital
• Erick Purkhiser, a.k.a. Lux Interior of The Cramps, Dies | Phoenix New Times
• Lux Interior Obituary And Tribute, By John Robb | The Quietus