clarkblog

THE CRAMPS: GARBAGE MAN

"Exhuming the bones of so-called trash culture and rearranging them to fit the punk times, the Cramps explicitly brought life to the late ’50s and ’60s era of exploitation, from B-horror to grindhouse sleaze, and set it to a rock ‘n’ roll beat with just drums and guitars." --  Denise Sullivan @ Crawdaddy

Here's a report from a wake held for Cramps frontman Lux Interior, who died in February. Still can't believe this guy is gone. One of the best performers I ever saw -- and I saw Elvis.

FLAMING LIPS: BORDERLINE

from Covered: A Revolution in Sound

SONIC YOUTH: KOOL THING

from Hal Hartley's 1992 film Simple Men

Sometimes you gotta look to the freaks for inspiration. I'm talking about the ones out there on the edge, pushing the envelope, letting their innate oddities stretch the creative barriers for the rest of us.

If you wanna be a good writer in Hollywood, you gotta look beyond what's boffo at the box office. You need to see foreign and indy films that don't adhere to the bullshit three-act four-quadrant six-figure screenplay template that's stapled to every telephone and light pole in town. You need to reach back and check out underground cult classics from decades ago. You need to let somebody like David Lynch rescramble your neurons every so often. You might not get it. You might not even like it. But it's fertilizer for your creative soul.

Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, spent decades writing and playing some of the most bizarre music imaginable, churning up blues and jazz and rock in great gnarly records like Trout Mask Replica and Safe as Milk and Doc at the Radar Station. You've seriously never heard anyone like him. Then he gave it all up to pursue painting and sculpture.

 

Beefheart's epic recordings have influenced musicians in all genres, from country to grunge to electro. I can't pretend to like all of his music. Some of it is truly ... out there ... and I just don't get it. But even his most challenging records are so rich and interesting and layered that I know it's probably my problem and not his. I'll spend the rest of my life listening to Beefheart because I suspect time is only gonna help me process and understand just what the hell he's doing. And somehow, on a sub-molecular level, it's gonna make me a better writer.

Here are Captain Beefheart's 10 Commandments for Guitar Playing. These are wild and wonderful and I think there are dozens of ways to apply them to writing or acting or gardening or whatever it is you love doing.

Here's a favorite:

5. If you're guilty of thinking, you're out
If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy on why he writes songs:

It doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s something I love to do, and it doesn’t hurt anybody. And the world probably doesn’t need any more songs, but I need more songs. It’s satisfying and lovely to do. I feel better, and as a band—I think I can speak for everyone—we feel better making something that wasn’t there ten minutes ago. Whatever spirit there is in the universe, I think that puts you closer to it. The act of creation, you know, it’s a very powerful thing, and very gratifying. I wish it on everyone. I wish everyone could enjoy making something that wasn’t there before.

Here's the latest fun meme. What's your rock band's first album?

Go to Wikipedia and click on random. That's the name of your band. Next, go to Quotations Page's Random Quotations feature. The last four or five words of the last quote on the page shall be your album title. Finally, go to Flickr's exploration of interesting photos from the last seven days. The third photo there is your album cover.

From the Rolling Stone Music Guide:

A staggering conceptual debut for singer/saxophonist Clark Perry, "Each Wins All" was released under his solo nom de plume Governor of Gibraltar. Recorded with an unnamed gypsy klezmer band Perry encountered during a stay at an East Berlin drug rehabilitation clinic, "Each Wins All" is a jazzy, surrealistic portrait of a 1920s German cabaret singer who poisons her devoted nightclub audience before committing suicide onstage. Critically drubbed upon its 1986 release, the album has since received public nods of admiration from David Bowie, Johnny Cash and Luciano Pavarotti.

I am immensely, hugely, deeply sad. One of the most electrifying rock performers has left the building: Erick Lee Purkhiser, better known as Lux Interior, lead singer of the psychobilly group The Cramps, died this week of heart complications.

I saw the Cramps perform four times but I wish it had been forty or four hundred times. They flat-out fucking rocked and they fucking knew how to put on a fucking show. With his collaborator and soulmate Poison Ivy (Kristy Wallace) on lead guitar, Lux merged roots rockabilly with cheesy B-movie subject matter and made music that was fun, danceable, and wonderfully twisted.

In interviews, Lux revealed himself to be a huge fan of old monster movies and his onstage persona -- a lanky, shambling, wild-eyed and athletic showman -- was a shout-out to horror movie fans everywhere. I always thought Lux would be perfectly cast as a zombie in some horror movie. You wouldn't even need that much makeup. Alas, the closest he came was when The Cramps contributed a fun song, "The Surfin' Dead," to the soundtrack of Dan O'Bannon's cult 1986 horror flick Return of the Living Dead.

In concert, Lux's crazy cavorting always thrilled me to the point of unbridled laughter. By the end of one show at an outdoor music fest in Tampa, Lux was wearing nothing but a g-string and cherry red high-heeled shoes, hanging upside from speaker scaffolding while he gave the microphone what can only be described as feral fellatio. That is showmanship, people.

I last saw them perform a 2006 Halloween concert at Hollywood's House of Blues, Lux wore black leather, huge black sunglasses, and screamed and sang and cackled from beneath a shock of bone white hair. As he aged, Lux became more spectral in appearance but no less physical onstage. He jumped and stalked and twisted his wireframe body like a caged animal set free.

A lot can and should be said about the deviant sexual vibe The Cramps payed homage to both in style and song. Whether Lux was frantically dry-humping the stage or Ivy was blazing a killer solo on songs like "Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?" or "Let's Get Fucked Up," the band's blatant hedonism spoke for itself. But there's something I haven't read a lot about, at least not yet, and that's the fun and playful approach these two core members brought to their music.

 

Monsters are everywhere in their songs ("When the sun goes down and the moon comes up / I turn into a teenage goo-goo muck") and sometimes they're mixed in with the carnal ("Creature From the Black Leather Lagoon"). Their record and CD artwork was often like a cross between Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters magazine and some cheapo girlie rag. Ivy always dressed like a stripper from Hell but she never danced or shimmied or spoofed her image, whereas Lux would strut like a speed-addled midnight horror movie host. Stalwart and rarely smiling, Ivy would mostly just walk back and forth playing the hell out of her guitar. He was the crazy one, she was the grounded one, and together they maintained a balance. They were at once darker and more playful than anything film director Tim Burton has ever done, and they never let their anger outweigh the sheer simple fun of kick-ass rock-n-roll.

The Cramps have many fine albums. I think Stay Sick is one of the best party records of all time. But the one that truly introduced them to me, 1984's Bad Music for Bad People, is a classic platter of lo-fi fuzzy stompin' that provided the core soundtrack to my undergrad college years. It's also one of my favorite album covers of all time.

You can and should watch the great video clips collected here. I highly recommend their controversial 1978 performance to patients at Napa State Mental Hospital. The video is grainier than a day at the beach and the sound is muffled beyond distortion, but it captures the crazy raw vibe of their live shows. "They tell me you people are crazy," Lux barks at these mentally disturbed but seriously groovin' people between songs, "but I dunno, you seem awright to me!"

In Lux's eyes, as long as we were dancing, everybody was awright.

Thank you, Lux, for all that great goddamned rock and roll.

Bruce Springsteen - Working on a Dream

The Boss is back. Again. More pop-oriented than his earlier Magic, but just as heartfelt and uplifting.

Various Artists - Love, Peace & Poetry: Turkish Psychedelic Music

A visiting friend heard a track from this and asked, "Oh my God, is this Jimi Hendrix when he was playing with the Isley Brothers?" The track listings revealed that we were listening to "Bir Yagmar Masali" by Nasil, a Turkish garage rocker from the 1960s. Every shimmering track on here is freewheeling, mindblowing fun. Part of a fine series of obscure and far-flung rock and pop gems.

Fever Ray - Fever Ray

Whoa! This is the creepiest little album I've heard in a long while, the kind of thing that would probably freak even David Lynch. Karin Drejier Andersson of Sweden's The Knife creates a forebounding soundtrack to a haunted childhood that both fires the imagination and tweaks the nerve endings. The physical CD doesn't arrive until March but you can purchase the download now at Amazon. Here's the hypnotic video for "If I Had a Heart."

BBC Radio 4 - The Day of the Triffids

A fine, fun 1968 radio production of the classic John Wyndham sci-fi novel wherein man-eating plants take over the planet. The concept sounds silly but trust me, it's a tense and gripping apocalyptic story. H.G. Wells may have been the first British sci-fi writer to threaten the Earth on such a scale, but Wyndham, in just a handful of novels, perfected the plan. Living through World War II probably helped.

The best show on TV begins its final run tonight. I'll be watching at a special industry screening in Beverly Hills. Yes, lucky me.

Variety has a great selection of articles about this landmark show: its meaning, its making and its impact. It's good to see the industry finally recognizing the incredible story being told while Battlestar Galactica is still on the air. For too long the show was frowned upon and ignored because that's what you do with genre stories in Hollywood (despite the fact that they make money like crazy).

Everybody on this show -- writers, directors, actors, costumers, etc. -- is firing on all cylinders. Sad to them coming down the home stretch, but I know it's gonna be memorable.

 

FREAK MAGNETS

Sometimes you gotta look to the freaks for inspiration. I'm talking about the ones out there on the edge, pushing the envelope, letting their innate oddities stretch the creative barriers for the rest of us.

If you wanna be a good writer in Hollywood, you gotta look beyond what's boffo at the box office. You need to see foreign and indy films that don't adhere to the bullshit three-act four-quadrant six-figure screenplay template that's stapled to every telephone and light pole in town. You need to reach back and check out underground cult classics from decades ago. You need to let somebody like David Lynch rescramble your neurons every so often. You might not get it. You might not even like it. But it's fertilizer for your creative soul.

Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, spent decades writing and playing some of the most bizarre music imaginable, churning up blues and jazz and rock in great gnarly records like Trout Mask Replica and Safe as Milk and Doc at the Radar Station. You've seriously never heard anyone like him. Then he gave it all up to pursue painting and sculpture.

 

Beefheart's epic recordings have influenced musicians in all genres, from country to grunge to electro. I can't pretend to like all of his music. Some of it is truly ... out there ... and I just don't get it. But even his most challenging records are so rich and interesting and layered that I know it's probably my problem and not his. I'll spend the rest of my life listening to Beefheart because I suspect time is only gonna help me process and understand just what the hell he's doing. And somehow, on a sub-molecular level, it's gonna make me a better writer.

Here are Captain Beefheart's 10 Commandments for Guitar Playing. These are wild and wonderful and I think there are dozens of ways to apply them to writing or acting or gardening or whatever it is you love doing.

Here's a favorite:

5. If you're guilty of thinking, you're out
If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.

THE MAGIC OF MAKING

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy on why he writes songs:

It doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s something I love to do, and it doesn’t hurt anybody. And the world probably doesn’t need any more songs, but I need more songs. It’s satisfying and lovely to do. I feel better, and as a band—I think I can speak for everyone—we feel better making something that wasn’t there ten minutes ago. Whatever spirit there is in the universe, I think that puts you closer to it. The act of creation, you know, it’s a very powerful thing, and very gratifying. I wish it on everyone. I wish everyone could enjoy making something that wasn’t there before.

I AM THE DJ

Here's the latest fun meme. What's your rock band's first album?

Go to Wikipedia and click on random. That's the name of your band. Next, go to Quotations Page's Random Quotations feature. The last four or five words of the last quote on the page shall be your album title. Finally, go to Flickr's exploration of interesting photos from the last seven days. The third photo there is your album cover.

From the Rolling Stone Music Guide:

A staggering conceptual debut for singer/saxophonist Clark Perry, "Each Wins All" was released under his solo nom de plume Governor of Gibraltar. Recorded with an unnamed gypsy klezmer band Perry encountered during a stay at an East Berlin drug rehabilitation clinic, "Each Wins All" is a jazzy, surrealistic portrait of a 1920s German cabaret singer who poisons her devoted nightclub audience before committing suicide onstage. Critically drubbed upon its 1986 release, the album has since received public nods of admiration from David Bowie, Johnny Cash and Luciano Pavarotti.

STAY CLASSY, MICHELLE MALKIN

LUX INTERIOR

I am immensely, hugely, deeply sad. One of the most electrifying rock performers has left the building: Erick Lee Purkhiser, better known as Lux Interior, lead singer of the psychobilly group The Cramps, died this week of heart complications.

I saw the Cramps perform four times but I wish it had been forty or four hundred times. They flat-out fucking rocked and they fucking knew how to put on a fucking show. With his collaborator and soulmate Poison Ivy (Kristy Wallace) on lead guitar, Lux merged roots rockabilly with cheesy B-movie subject matter and made music that was fun, danceable, and wonderfully twisted.

In interviews, Lux revealed himself to be a huge fan of old monster movies and his onstage persona -- a lanky, shambling, wild-eyed and athletic showman -- was a shout-out to horror movie fans everywhere. I always thought Lux would be perfectly cast as a zombie in some horror movie. You wouldn't even need that much makeup. Alas, the closest he came was when The Cramps contributed a fun song, "The Surfin' Dead," to the soundtrack of Dan O'Bannon's cult 1986 horror flick Return of the Living Dead.

In concert, Lux's crazy cavorting always thrilled me to the point of unbridled laughter. By the end of one show at an outdoor music fest in Tampa, Lux was wearing nothing but a g-string and cherry red high-heeled shoes, hanging upside from speaker scaffolding while he gave the microphone what can only be described as feral fellatio. That is showmanship, people.

I last saw them perform a 2006 Halloween concert at Hollywood's House of Blues, Lux wore black leather, huge black sunglasses, and screamed and sang and cackled from beneath a shock of bone white hair. As he aged, Lux became more spectral in appearance but no less physical onstage. He jumped and stalked and twisted his wireframe body like a caged animal set free.

A lot can and should be said about the deviant sexual vibe The Cramps payed homage to both in style and song. Whether Lux was frantically dry-humping the stage or Ivy was blazing a killer solo on songs like "Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?" or "Let's Get Fucked Up," the band's blatant hedonism spoke for itself. But there's something I haven't read a lot about, at least not yet, and that's the fun and playful approach these two core members brought to their music.

 

Monsters are everywhere in their songs ("When the sun goes down and the moon comes up / I turn into a teenage goo-goo muck") and sometimes they're mixed in with the carnal ("Creature From the Black Leather Lagoon"). Their record and CD artwork was often like a cross between Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters magazine and some cheapo girlie rag. Ivy always dressed like a stripper from Hell but she never danced or shimmied or spoofed her image, whereas Lux would strut like a speed-addled midnight horror movie host. Stalwart and rarely smiling, Ivy would mostly just walk back and forth playing the hell out of her guitar. He was the crazy one, she was the grounded one, and together they maintained a balance. They were at once darker and more playful than anything film director Tim Burton has ever done, and they never let their anger outweigh the sheer simple fun of kick-ass rock-n-roll.

The Cramps have many fine albums. I think Stay Sick is one of the best party records of all time. But the one that truly introduced them to me, 1984's Bad Music for Bad People, is a classic platter of lo-fi fuzzy stompin' that provided the core soundtrack to my undergrad college years. It's also one of my favorite album covers of all time.

You can and should watch the great video clips collected here. I highly recommend their controversial 1978 performance to patients at Napa State Mental Hospital. The video is grainier than a day at the beach and the sound is muffled beyond distortion, but it captures the crazy raw vibe of their live shows. "They tell me you people are crazy," Lux barks at these mentally disturbed but seriously groovin' people between songs, "but I dunno, you seem awright to me!"

In Lux's eyes, as long as we were dancing, everybody was awright.

Thank you, Lux, for all that great goddamned rock and roll.

RADIO CLARK PLAYLIST

Bruce Springsteen - Working on a Dream

The Boss is back. Again. More pop-oriented than his earlier Magic, but just as heartfelt and uplifting.

Various Artists - Love, Peace & Poetry: Turkish Psychedelic Music

A visiting friend heard a track from this and asked, "Oh my God, is this Jimi Hendrix when he was playing with the Isley Brothers?" The track listings revealed that we were listening to "Bir Yagmar Masali" by Nasil, a Turkish garage rocker from the 1960s. Every shimmering track on here is freewheeling, mindblowing fun. Part of a fine series of obscure and far-flung rock and pop gems.

Fever Ray - Fever Ray

Whoa! This is the creepiest little album I've heard in a long while, the kind of thing that would probably freak even David Lynch. Karin Drejier Andersson of Sweden's The Knife creates a forebounding soundtrack to a haunted childhood that both fires the imagination and tweaks the nerve endings. The physical CD doesn't arrive until March but you can purchase the download now at Amazon. Here's the hypnotic video for "If I Had a Heart."

BBC Radio 4 - The Day of the Triffids

A fine, fun 1968 radio production of the classic John Wyndham sci-fi novel wherein man-eating plants take over the planet. The concept sounds silly but trust me, it's a tense and gripping apocalyptic story. H.G. Wells may have been the first British sci-fi writer to threaten the Earth on such a scale, but Wyndham, in just a handful of novels, perfected the plan. Living through World War II probably helped.

DOWN TO EARTH

The best show on TV begins its final run tonight. I'll be watching at a special industry screening in Beverly Hills. Yes, lucky me.

Variety has a great selection of articles about this landmark show: its meaning, its making and its impact. It's good to see the industry finally recognizing the incredible story being told while Battlestar Galactica is still on the air. For too long the show was frowned upon and ignored because that's what you do with genre stories in Hollywood (despite the fact that they make money like crazy).

Everybody on this show -- writers, directors, actors, costumers, etc. -- is firing on all cylinders. Sad to them coming down the home stretch, but I know it's gonna be memorable.