The first mental images to come to the brain of the average Joe or Jane when mentioning Omaha, Nebraska, would likely be cornfields as far as the eye can see, Johnny Carson, steaks, a world zoo, Mutual of Omaha Insurance or tortured songsmith Conor Oberst. Now, if you happen upon a fan of the whacked out sub-genre of rock that I like to call surf Billy garage rock, Omaha conjures one prominent spector: the band that is Brimstone Howl.
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[Lux Interior, Nick Knox and Kid Congo Powers]
“I remember Lux as glowing,” writes Kid Congo Powers, recalling the late front man of the The Cramps on his blog yesterday. “The rockabilly howler, the psychedelic seer, the latex and high heels pervert, the late night horror host, the most exhalted potentate of love, the king of rock and roll. Lux was all these things and so much more.”
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Lux Interior as remembered by his friend Kevin Patrick
It took a bit of coaxing to get me to my first Cramps show. They played a club in my college town of Rochester, NY, and I wasn’t particularly into their first album, which they were touring on at the time. The argument putting me over the edge was based on logic: There wasn’t really anything else to do that night, a typical problem. Coincidentally, we had mutual friends in Eric and Mel Mache from NY. Eric recommended we go along, see them and say hello. So why not? Thank you Eric. It changed my life. I was never the same.
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With the sad news today that Lux Interior, founding member and lead singer of The Cramps is no longer with us, we thought it only right to pay tribute to the punk pioneer with one of the band’s most infamous performances. Here they are at the Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978.
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Late last night as we were packing up our computers, getting ready to head home for the night, we started to hear whispers from the West Coast that Erick Lee Purhiser, aka Lux Interior, the lead singer and founding member of the influential garage-punk act the The Cramps had passed away the night before. Frantic searches to verify or contradict this rumor came up empty and speculation was high. After all, these rumors have been spread before and any fan of punk knows the occasional fake death is not uncommon, so we left work hoping for the best, but sadly fearing the worst. By the time we got home, those fears were realized via a press release in our inbox. Lux Interior was 62.
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