The Cramps discuss the influence of B movies on their music
In 1972, Erick Lee Purkhiser and Kristy Marlana Wallace met, soon becoming a couple. Within a few years, they’d taken on the names Lux Interior and Poison Ivy and formed The Cramps, helping to pioneer what came to be known as ‘psychobilly’.
Discussing the band’s sound, Poison Ivy explained (via We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk), “The Cramps weren’t thinking of this weird subgenre when we coined the term ‘psychobilly’ in 1976 to describe what we were doing. To us, all the ’50s rockabillies were psycho to begin with; it just came with the turf as a given, like a crazed, sped-up hillbilly boogie version of country.”
The Cramps released their first album, Songs the Lord Taught Us, in 1980 before creating seven more over the next 23 years. Inspired by rock and roll, surf rock and garage rock bands, citing people from Dick Dale to Scream Jay Hawkins and The Sonics, The Cramps refined an iconic sound complete with a recognisable visual image.
One of the band’s main non-musical inspirations was B-movies – low-budget productions which became particularly popular in the 1950s. B-movies are primarily associated with science-fiction, horror and exploitation pictures, genres which are typically given less merit in the film industry.
Talking to VPRO radio station in 1990, the band revealed why they love B movies and how they’ve influenced their work. “The thing that’s so great, I think, about B movies is that when you watch a movie like that, they were made so quickly and usually by fairly amateur filmmakers that what you’re seeing is much more of the reality of the time and place where they were made than a motion pictures studio like MGM or Paramount or something like that,” explained Lux Interior.
He added, “You’re actually seeing people who can’t act very well, so you see them as people, and they usually take place in somebody’s real house and on real streets and things, while all the other movies were being made on sets. There’s a slice of reality you don’t get in regular movies with those. I don’t know what it is. Once you’ve developed a taste for that, you can’t go back somehow.”
Poison Ivy explained that a lot of exploitation movies have inspired their songs, such as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! providing the name for ‘Faster Pussycat’ and ‘Hot Pearl Snatch’, taking its title from the movie of the same name.
She said, “All Women Are Bad is the name of a movie. They’re powerful titles to us enough that we felt like writing songs about them. Also they’re in lines of our songs.” Lux Interior chimed in, “‘Bikini Girls With Machine Guns’ could be a B movie. The line in that, ‘This stuff’ll kill ya’, that’s a title of a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie about moonshine. Our songs are just loaded with B movie titles and lines out of B movies.”
