Reviews: The Cramps' 3 Vinyl Reissues

According to the mass of oversimplified punk histories, punk was the oversimplified backlash against the overcomplicated progressiveness that grew out of late sixties rock. It brought it all back home to a pre-Dylan/pre-Beatles age when words were monosyllabic, melodies were mono-melodic, and singers had mono. A lot of punk bands made the connection explicit, whether it was the rockabilly wallop underlying a bunch of Clash classics or the pre-British Invasion pop songs The Ramones chose to cover. But few bands of the punk era were as indebted to the garage spirit of early rock and roll as The Cramps. Head honcho Lux Interior swept his mane up into an altitudinous pompadour to hiccup trash about gooey monsters, human flies, voodoo, werewolves, and cavemen. But this was no Famous Monsters of Filmland-fit horror show for the kids. There was also real danger in the sex and drugs swamp all those creeps cavorted in. And with the swaggery rhythms that eschewed punk's usual sixteenth note onslaught, twang-a-billy guitars, and the total lack of a bassist to drive the whole mess forward, The Cramps were really their own thing, a sort of bespoke branch of the punk tree.

No Cramps albums better represent that scuzzy branch than their first couple. Taken together, Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle drop a welter of Cramps classics ("Garbageman", "TV Set", "I Was a Teenage Werewolf"),  crazy covers (The Sonics' "Strychnine", Little Willie John's deathless "Fever", Ronnie Dawson's "Rockin' Bones", Ronnie Cook's "Goo Goo Much", which really also qualifies as a Cramps classic), and sound advice ("Don't Eat Stuff off the Sidewalk"). But The Cramps also spewed some mighty fine singles that didn't make those long-players, and for that, a comp was necessary...you certainly don't want to do without "New Kind of Kick" or "Human Fly". In the UK, there was 1983's ...Off the Bone. In the US, we got Bad Music for Bad People and it's totally boss cover illustration.

The latter, as well as Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle, are now getting vinyl reissues via I.R.S./UMe. There's the standard black stuff and the more crassly collectible colored discs for Psychedelic Jungle and Bad Music for Bad People only available on uDiscover Music.com. The colored discs are also numbered, because they're  limited editions, and include "lithographs" (more like thin paper inserts) depicting their respective covers. My main concern was the colored Bad Music for Bad People, because that one is pressed on Glow-in-the-Dark vinyl, which has a tendency to be really noisy. Fortunately, there's only a very subtle background sizzle, much milder than I've heard on other G-i-t-D records. 

As for the mastering, it's pretty loud and there's extra emphasis on the bass, which gives Nick Knox's kick drum a new kind of kick since it's really the band's only bottom. Things can get a touch muddy in the low end, but Lux's voice and Poison Ivy and Bryan Gregory's guitars always cut through nicely. The cover images are pretty soft but the vinyl is flat and well centered.