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Title: The Cramps - Songs the Lord Taught Us
Year/Genre/Sub-Genre/City: 1980, Punk, Psychobilly Garage Punk, New York City, New York 8/26
Condition: New (BC) | Members: Lux I (46' - 09'), Poison I (53' - ), Bryan G (51' - 01'), Nick K (58' - 18') | Producer: Alex Chilton
Cultural Facts:

1. Mental Hospital Show: In 1978, before their first album existed, The Cramps played a now-legendary free concert at Napa State Hospital, a psychiatric institution in California. Lux introduced the band by telling the patients that someone had said they were crazy, then added, “You’re not crazy, we are.” Grainy footage of the performance became one of the strangest and most human documents of early American punk.

2. Love Story: Lux Interior and Poison Ivy met in Sacramento in 1972 after Lux reportedly picked Ivy up while she was hitchhiking. They became romantic and creative partners for the rest of Lux's life, spending decades hunting obscure rockabilly singles, horror memorabilia and forgotten American pop culture together. The Cramps was essentially the strange world the two of them built as a couple.

3. Memphis Connection: For their debut, The Cramps went to Memphis and worked with Alex Chilton, the former teenage voice of “The Letter” with the Box Tops and later leader of Big Star. Recording at Sam Phillips' studio connected New York punk directly back to the Southern rockabilly and primitive rock 'n' roll records Lux and Ivy had spent years obsessively collecting.