The Staple Singers were an amazing band. Led by Roebuck “Pop” Staples, with his children Pervis, Yvonne and Mavis, they were the first family of soul. That’s right, suck it Jackson 5. Most of your albums were written and recorded by studio musicians. Taking into account that The Ramones weren’t brothers (nor did any one of them actually have the surname “Ramone”), one could make a credible case that The Staple Singers were the best family band period.
This musical supremacy is cogently demonstrated by their live cover performance of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” It’s an already powerful song (I’ve always loved the line “what a field day for the heat”) lent a greater urgency and edge by the Staple Singers stripped down sound. Pops Staples does more with a single electric guitar and handclaps than most bands can summon with a full instrumental backing.
Despite the pervasive presence of protest and social commentary in their music, The Staple Singers never came across as preachy or heavy handed. Their lyrics, while addressing overarching societal problems, were always really positive and emphasized the necessity of self awareness and individual change in order to effect a larger change. I find that refreshing.
Lux Interior died this month. He was the lead singer of The Cramps. He was one of the all time great rock & roll frontmen. He was a legend.
Below is grainy footage from The Cramps now legendary free concert for the patients of the Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978.
I can’t really fathom what compelled the hospital administrators to invite this band of depraved freaks to play at their facility. Maybe they thought The Cramps would fit in. They did seem to make a real connection with their audience. I really like Lux’s intro: “Somebody told me you people are crazy! But I’m not so sure about that! You seem to be alright to me!”
The Cramps were an amazingly innovative band. They are rightly credited as being one of the early architects of psychobilly, a combustible mix of punk and rockabilly. Along with bands like Television and The Ramones, they emerged from the nascent punk scene at CBGB’s in the late 1970’s.
Like The Ramones, they never stopped touring, which created the illusion that they would be around forever. The Cramps always seemed to be playing somewhere near you whenever Halloween rolled around. And also like The Ramones, throughout the life of the band, they never altered their aesthetic: a synthesis of 50’s and 60’s trash teen culture, early rock & roll, horror B-movies, lurid sexploitation, hot rods, deranged psychedelia and leather bound S&M fetishism. They pursued this with an impressively single-minded intensity, distilling and elevating kitsch Americana into a weird art form. It’s an obviously naïve and unrealistic notion, but I always secretly wondered whether the persona of both bands was the same on and off-stage. They just never seemed to break character.
Despite The Cramps’ eternal fascination with the seedy and low brow, their lyrics were always really smart and witty and involved a sometimes surprisingly expansive range of references: a little Man Ray here, a little Ed Wood there. On a basic level, their music has a really pungent sense of FUN. Without question, The Cramps have the some of the most radiantly awesome and funny song titles of any band in rock & roll history. Here are but a few examples:
“What's Inside a Girl?” “(Hot Pool Of) Womanneed” “The Creature From the Black Leather Lagoon” “I Wanna Get in Your Pants” “Let's Get Fucked Up” “Like a Bad Girl Should” “Bend Over, I'll Drive” “Dames, Booze, Chains and Boots” "How Come You Do Me?" “Eyeball In My Martini "Journey to the Center of a Girl"
The Cramps had a continuously changing roster of musicians. More than twenty musicians shuffled in and out of the The Cramps lineup since its inception in 1976, the most famous being Kid Congo Powers, who later played percussion with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and Sean Yseult, the bassist from White Zombie.
The only permanent members were Lux Interior and Poison Ivy. They were married. For over three decades. They were the sweetest rock & roll couple. And much unlike more conventional bands composed of spouses like Abba, Fleetwod Mac, The Mamas & the Papas or The White Stripes, Lux and Ivy’s musical partnership didn’t seem to diminish their romantic connection. As Henry Rollins warmly observed in his excellent remembrance of Lux in the L.A. Times, “You get the idea that there was something very decent about them, that there was something almost like your dad about how they were. And it seems to me that Lux and Ivy were fairly insular, away from the general roar of things, which makes them interesting to me.”
Here’s the music video for “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns:"
I remember the first time that I saw this NRA friendly music video when I was in junior high (broadcast on “Request Video,” an astonishingly diverse and forward thinking 30-minute afternoon alternative music video program on a shady UHF station beamed out from Los Angeles) and just freaking out. “What the fuck?! They let people make music like this?! Is that guy wearing a vinyl suit with ladies shoes?! Why isn’t everything like this?” They were wild and they were dangerous and they kind of blew my barely pubescent mind.
The Cramps will be missed. Lux Interior was a giant among men. A giant in patent leather pumps.
The Staple Singers were an amazing band. Led by Roebuck “Pop” Staples, with his children Pervis, Yvonne and Mavis, they were the first family of soul. That’s right, suck it Jackson 5. Most of your albums were written and recorded by studio musicians. Taking into account that The Ramones weren’t brothers (nor did any one of them actually have the surname “Ramone”), one could make a credible case that The Staple Singers were the best family band period.
