Gravest Gravy, the Cramps’ primordial unreleased first album from 1977 with Alex Chilton, has finally been unleashed and sicced upon defenseless mammals and other critters some 50 years later. After all those decades, it comes across as a time capsule twice over. Lux Interior stutters and drawls like Elvis with an exponentially multiplied dose of amphetamines and Chilton amplifies the old Sun records reverb so that guitarist Poison Ivy sounds like she’s blasting out the surf riffs in a studio at the bottom of a well inside a garage. The band thumps, yodels and scrabbles through cracked Cramps originals like “TV Set” and covers like Charlie Feathers’ hiccupping “I Can’t Hardly Stand It”, flailing and stalking halfway between the bare-bones professionalism of rockabilly and the bare-bones amateurism of punk. Even the winking has the feral flash of a switchblade.
There’s some winking for sure—what else can you say about a guy who calls himself “Lux Interior” and bellows, “I’ve got a rocket in my pocket and the fuse is lit!” When the Cramps first crawled out of the mire onto dry land in the mid-1970s, the rockabilly craze of the late-1950s and early-1960s was a decade and a half past; the British Invasion, psychedelia, hard rock, punk, and other subgenres had bloomed and died. The Cramps—like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Creedence, the Clash and the Band and many another roots rock primitivists—were channeling authenticity by way of fandom.
More, like Mick Jagger pretending to be American, or Elvis pretending to be Black, or Ellas Bates pretending to be the outsize mythic Bo Diddley, the Cramps were performing realness by impersonating someone else. On Gravest Gravy this is pushed to its height on a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Domino,” with Lux replacing Orbison’s masterful cool with a series of unhinged shrieks. “He’s got cool black hair and a solid style/Long side-burns and a crazy smile” Lux yowls, describing a dead dress code in a dead ergot, like a zombie Frankenstein rocker composed of other’s body parts set to jerking via reanimated electricity.
In 1977, a lot of people who’d once bopped to Roy Orbison—like Lux and Ivy themselves—would’ve still been alive, and instantly recognized that when Lux hissed, “I got a sharkskin suit/alligator shoes,” or when Ivy hits those twangy, serrated riffs, they was referencing older songs and older styles.
The period from 1977 to 2026, though, is three times as long as the gap between 1964 and 1977. And from the long end of the tunnel, the things that separated Lux Interior from Johnny Burnette or Link Wray look blurry and hard to distinguish. Ronnie Self drooling “Ain’t I’m a Dog” with garbled grammar and utterly transparent intent (“forget about the danger/and think of the fun”); Wanda Jackson belting out that she’s a “Fujiyama Mama,”; Lux Interior hiring a detective because he “Can’t Find My Mind”—the weird humor, single entendres, and gleefully bad taste, not to mention the nasty guitar licks and big beat, are all of a piece.
Olivia Rodrigo isn’t thought of as a Taylor Swift nostalgia act, even though Swift is one of her major influences. She’s thought of as a confessional pop performer in a mode which remains relevant and popular a couple of decades later. That’s in part because Swift’s still alive and making records—but Elvis was alive and making records in 1977, too. In the 21st century, Lux and Ivy look less like the bastard children of Jerry Lee and Eddie Cochran, and more like their bastard peers. You’d like to think that Lux and Elvis are down there somewhere, whooping and hollering together in the grave, where 10 or 15 years passing doesn’t make much of a difference any more.