[SIZE=12]The Cramps - discography









-Nazibilly Werwoelfen

-Songs the Lord Taught Us

-Psychedelic Jungle/Gravest Hits

-Smell of Female

-A Date with Elvis



-Whats Inside A Ghoul - Not included



-Stay Sick!

-Look Mom, No Head

-Flamejob

-Big Beats from Badsville

-Fiends of Dope Island

-How to Make a Monster







TRACKLISTS









Nazibilly Werewolfen

Live Recordings In Palo Alto, California In 1979.

- - -

1. The Way I Walk

2. Everybody's Moving

3. Domino

4. Rocket In My Pocket

5. Human Fly

6. Rockin' Bones

7. Teenage Werewolf

8. Sunglasses After Dark









Songs the Lord Taught Us



1. TV Set

2. Garbageman

3. Rock On The Moon

4. I Was A Teenage Werewolf

5. Sunglasses After Dark

6. Strychnine

7. Mad Daddy

8. Mystery Plane

9. Zombie Dance

10. I'm Cramped

11. What's Behind The Mask

12. Tear It Up

13. Fever

14. I Was a Teenage Werewolf (w/false start)

15. Mystery Plane

16. Twist and Shout

17. I'm Cramped

18. The Mad Daddy









Psychedelic Jungle/Gravest Hits



1. Greenfuz

2. Goo Goo Muck

3. Rockin Bones

4. Voodoo Idol

5. Primitive

6. Caveman

7. The Crusher

8. Don't Eat Stuff Off The Sidewalk

9. Can't Find My Mind

10. Jungle Hop

11. The Natives Are Restless

12. Under The Wires

13. Beautiful Gardens

14. The Green Door



15. Human Fly

16. The Way I Walk

17. Domino

18. Surfin' Bird

19. Lonesome Town









Smell of Female



1. Thee Most Exaulted Potentate Of Love

2. You Got Good Taste

3. Call Of The Wig Hat

4. Faster Pussycat

5. I Ain't Nothin But A Gorehound

6. Psychotic Reaction

7. Beautiful Gardens

8. She Said

9. Surfin' Dead











A Date with Elvis



1. How Far Can Too Far Go ?

2. The Hot Pearl Snatch

3. People Ain't No Good

4. What's Inside A Girl ?

5. Can Your Pussy Do The Dog ?

6. Kizmiaz

7. Cornfed Dames

8. Chicken

9. (Hot Pool Of) Womanneed

10. Aloha From Hell

11. It's Just That Song

12. Blue Moon Baby

13. Georgia Lee Brown

14. Give Me a Woman

15. Get off the Road













Stay Sick



1. Bop Pills

2. God Damn Rock'n'Roll

3. Bikini Girls With Machine Guns

4. All Women Are Bad

5. The Creature From The Black Leather Lagoon

6. Shortnin' Bread

7. Daisys Up Your Butterfly

8. Everything Goes

9. Journey To The Center Of a Girl

10. Mama Oo Pow Pow

11. Saddle Up A Buzz Buzz

12. Muleskinner Blues

13. Her Love Rubbed Off (studio)

14. Her Love Rubbed Off (live)

15. Bikini Girls with Machine Guns (live

16. Beat Out My Love

17. Jailhouse Rock

18. Jackyard Backoff









Look Mom, No Head





1. Dames, Booze, Chains And Boots

2. Two Headed Sex Change

3. Blow Up Your Mind

4. Hardworkin' Man

5. Miniskirt Blues (w/ Iggy Pop)

6. Alligator Stomp

7. I Wanna Get In Your Pants

8. Bend Over, I'll Drive

9. Don't Get Funny With Me

10. Eyeball In My Martini

11. Hipsville 29 B.C.

12. The Strangeness In Me

13. Wilder Wilder Faster Faster

14. Jelly Roll Rock











Flamejob



1. Mean Machine

2. Ultra Twist

3. Let's Get Fucked Up

4. Nest Of The Cuckoo Bird

5. I'm Customised

6. Sado County Auto Show

7. Naked Girl Falling Down The Stairs

8. How Come You Do Me ?

9. Inside Out And Upside Down (With Me)

10. Trapped Love

11. Swing The Big Eyed Rabbit

12. Strange Love

13. Blues Blues Blues

14. Sinners

15. Route 66 (Get Your Kicks On)













Big Beats from Badsville



1. Cramp Stomp

2. God Monster

3. It Thing Hard-On

4. Like A Bad Girl Should

5. Sheena's In A Goth Gang

6. Queen Of Pain

7. Monkey With Your Tail

8. Devil Behind That Bush

9. Super Goo

10. Hypno Sex Ray

11. Burn She-Devil, Burn

12. Wet Nightmare

13. Badass Bug

14. Haulass Hyena

15. Confessions of a Psycho Cat

16. No Club Lone Wolf

17. I Walked All Night

18. Peter Gunn











Fiends of Dope Island



1. Big Black Witchcraft Rock

2. Papa Satan Sang Louie

3. Hang Up

4. Fissure Of Rolando

5. Dr. Fucker M.D.

6. Dopefiend Boogie

7. Taboo

8. Elvis Fucking Christ

9. She's Got Balls

10. Oowee Baby

11. Mojo Man From Mars

12. Color Me Black

13. Wrong Way Ticket











How to Make a Monster





DISC 1:

1. Quick Joey Small

2. Lux's Blues

3. Love Me

4. Domino

5. Sunglasses After Dark

6. Subwire Desire

7. TV Set

8. Sunglasses After Dark

9. I Was A Teenage Werewolf

10. Can't Hardly Stand It

11. Sweet Woman Blues

12. Rumble Blues

13. Rumble Blues (false start)

14. Rumble Blues

15. Rumble Blues

16. Lonesome Town

17. Five Years Ahead Of My Time

18. Call Of The Wighat

19. Hanky Panky

20. Journey To The Center Of A Girl

21. Junkyard Backoff

22. Everything Goes

23. All Women Are Bad





DISC 2



(Live at Max's Kansas City 1/13/1977)



1. Don't Eat Stuff Off The Sidewalk

2. I Was A Teenage Werewolf

3. Sunglasses After Dark

4. Jungle Hop

5. Domino

6. Love Me

7. Strychnine

8. TV Set

9. I'm Cramped



Live at CBGBs (1/13/1978)



10. Way I Walk, The

11. Love Me

12. Domino

13. Human Fly

14. I Was A Teenage Werewolf

15. Sunglasses After Dark

16. Can't Hardly Stand It

17. Uranium Rock

18. What's Behind The Mask

19. Baby Blue Rock

20. Subwire Desire

21. I'm Cramped

22. TV Set









The Cramps invented "voodoobilly" with Songs The Lord Taught Us (1980), a collection of macabre, manic, ebullient rockabilly numbers that emphasized the beastly instincts: a tribal and feverish rhythm, a tone of voice that bordered on shamanic and zombie-like, a catacomb echo dampening the sound. Disguised as mere B-series parody, Cramps' voodoobilly offered another poignant fresco of urban alienation and another effective fresco of junk culture. Turning to morbid and porno themes with A Date With Elvis (1986), Stay Sick (1990) and Look Mom No Head (1992), the Cramps devoted themselves to recreating the subculture of horror movies and high-school fantasies over and over again, elevating the most degenerate themes to the status of archetypes and semiotic signs.

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(Italian text translated by Eric Rucker)



The Cramps were born in 1975 from the union of a singing psycho, ‘Lux Interior’ (alias Eric Purkhiser) and a gutsy girl guitarist, ‘Poison Ivy Rorshach’ (alias Kristy Wallace, ex porno actress), he from Akron, Ohio and she from Sacramento, California, who hooked up with hobbyist blue-collar guitarist Bryan Gregory in Detroit and decided to start a band with no bassist and with an eclectic percussionist, willing to smash his bare hands to a pulp on the drums when necessary. White-rock’n’roll fanatics, mesmerized by horror B-movies, they decided to merge their interests in a kind of voodoo rockabilly which, after being taken under Alex Chilton’s wing a year later at CBGB’s (first concert, the 31st of October), became the most macabre, hardcore punk show in the New York scene. The band’s demonic, psychotic style and sinister power of suggestion were confirmed on their second 45, Human Fly, their chilling revisions of minor tracks from the ‘50s (the first single had been Surfin' Bird) and by Drug Train (1979), a pyschedelic dirge with a railroad rhythm.





Their first album, Songs the Lord Taught us (Illegal, 1980), is one of the masterpieces of the New Wave: Interior’s hiccuping, sepulchral, lycanthropic shaman-guru voice, wrapped in layers of echo, the surly rockabilly figures of Ivy, grotesque guitar anti-virtuoso, the crazed 6-string distortion of Gregory, heir apparent to the satanic perversion of the Stooges, and the occult and tribal primitivism of Nick Knox’s drumming, evocative of the most sinister jungle rites, along with an all-pervading air of amateurism (by their own admission they couldn’t play) are the ingredients of their shameless epilepsy, which sounds to have been torn from atrocious suffering and obsessive neurosis.



Their poses belong to the stereotypes of horror, but their truculence is so overblown as to descend into parody. Standout tracks in this esoteric kaleidoscope for their overdose of ferocity and black humour, are the unruly pounding of Zombie Dance, the rough and exhausting ‘danse macabre’ which is I Was A Teenage Werewolf and, above all, Sunglasses After Dark, an obsessive whirlpool of nightmarish horror where the murderous-sounding Interior, grotesque and sinister, accompanies Ivy’s menacing animalesque gallop and Gregory’s slashing lysergic discharges.





Their mix of consumer society alienation made up a murky hyper-realistic fresco of junk culture, linking Warhol with Hitchcock against a background of spasmodic absurdities, above all on TV Set, with its psycho-robot chanting and martial tribalism, and Garbage Man, a mini-concert of dissonances, concrete noises and demonic guitarring. Shockingly mad furibond dances like Mad Daddy and Rock On The Moon, with their sudden wrenches, overflowing with gibbering howls and electric squalls, are the soundtrack to this hallucinatory ceremony of the neurotic.





Gregory left in 1980, in the grip of a mystical crisis, to join a San Fransisco cult. Deprived of his demonic catalysm, but with Kid Congo Powers (ex-Gun Club and Ivy’s partner) on second guitar, on Psychedelic Jungle (IRS, 1981), their next record, the Cramps kicked back on tracks like Voodoo Idol, which approaches the sinister sound of swamp-rock, the jangling blues of Can't Find My Mind, and in two more breakneck vampiric revisitations: Goo Goo Muck and The Crusher.



After having been forced to take a short break by legal problems, in 1983 the band was back on the scene, taking its satanic show around the world (with Interior imitating a car, getting drunk, getting undressed, throwing himself into the crowd and re-emerging brandishing the torn shreds of a girl’s dress) and the crazed new live depravations of Smell Of Female (Enigma, 1983), like I Ain't and Call Of The Wighat (adding perverse covers The Most Exalted Potentate Of Love and Faster Pussycat to their catalogue) are more like parodies of the subculture that spawned them. The Cramps seemed to take the opposite road to that of many teenage bands of the times, from Devo to the Ramones: they become ridiculous the moment they stopped taking themselves seriously!



The noisy and magestic boogie of Can Your Pussy Do The Dog seems to hint at a return to the ferociousness of yore, but A Date With Elvis (Big Beat, 1986) reduces the rhythmic impact (adding bass to the line-up) in favour of a calmer and more morbid atmosphere and opens a completely new phase in their career: a sort of sexual concept album whose tracks (the tremolo ode How Far Can Too Far Go, the Kinks parody People Ain't No Good, the possessed swamp-country of Cornfeld Dames, the voodoobilly relic What's Inside A Girl and the obscene epic poem Hot Pearl Snatch) build up into an irreverent vein of spicy stories for hungry college kids.



It would be four years before the next Cramps album was released, but those who thought that in the meantime the group had given up the ghost was making a big mistake: the new album, Stay Sick (Enigma, 1990), indulged in the same comic ‘porno-rock’ which had taken the place of the earlier horror parodies, though naturally still with a rock’n’roll beat.



Their farces are as offensive as they are exhilarating, from the crazed Bikini Girls With Machine Guns (with one of the most amazing solos in Ivy’s career and with Interior’s characteristic hiccuping) to the fevered Creature From The Black Leather Lagoon (dance hall and insistent echo on Interior’s voice), falling into red-light delirium as on Journey To The Center Of A Girl where the music just doesn’t matter any more. The gangling procession moves between misogynistic blues (All Women Are Bad) and S&M quadrilles (Saddle Up A Buzz Buzz), with two fantastic old-stylers (Mama Oo Pow Wow and Muleskinner Blues) alternating with the usual semiotic swamp rock delirium (God Damn Rock'n'Roll) and country and western (Daisy's Up Your Butterfly).



After substituting Nick Knox with legendary drummer Jim Sclavunos, Look Mom No Head (Restless, 1992) continued the saga of A Date With Elvis and Stay Sick. The Cramps, like all the classics, are by now a citation of themselves. Their continued homage to Saturday night civilisation (horror movies at the drive-in, the small hours in the dancehall, sex on the back seat) is becoming a rock institution as though it were a subculture museum, an adulterated version of Dr. Caligari’s laboratory and Todd Browning’s freakshow. In their studied imitations of the sonic stereotypes of the 50s, Interior and Rorschach inject an electric venom which is their real trademark: Mephistopholes stole the souls of two hick kids and is now preaching evil to a rockabilly beat.



The fan listens with horror and lust to Ivy’s clamourous guitar psycho-thrash and Interior’s macabre rockabilly hiccuping emerging from the grooves of Two Headed Sex Change and Eyeball In My Martini, among images worthy of Bela Lugosi. And perhaps the most lasting aspect of their art is the good-time porno scenario, such as that of I Wanna Get In Your Pants (with the riff from Louie Louie) and Bend Over I'll Drive, which are, in their own way, moving odes to adolesense. Their motto isn’t ‘sex, drugs and rock'n'roll’, but Dames, Booze, Chains and Boots, the crowning hymn of this disgustingly peurile spectacle. Having reached a point of no return, the process