Twisted Suburbanites

Is this how you go to a business meeting, Lux?

Yeah, it cuts through a lot of red tape.

On the New York scene:

                    The Dead Boys, The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads were starting out, Blondie. They were all in the audience when we were playing, and when they were playing we were in the audience. It was great… [Then] it went down the tubes. Good rock-and-roll only seems to last a couple of years and then it fades away. And a few years later it rears its ugly head again. Everybody gets concerned and worried. For good reason… There’s no phony trends like the Manchester scene, which is no scene. You got your big business types trying to make this happen all over the place, but that’s not the way it ever happens. You get some nasty little 15-year-old kids who make music in their garage, and that’s the way it happens. They get tired of waiting for somebody else to do something for them, they do it themselves.

On European vs. American audiences:

                    [Europeans] act like it’s Saturday night and they just got paid. I think they do, oddly enough, understand the background of our music. Europeans seem to know more about American culture than Americans do, so they recognize the roots, what’s influencing our music. Whereas, maybe, Americans just judge it for the moment, and that’s cool too… In Greece there were some fans masturbating in the front row. That’s a little different from here. Sometimes you see rock critics here with typewriters.

On Ricky Nelson:

                    He was one of the first people to do rockabilly that wasn’t some out of control, wild, southern, hillbilly, crazed on some kind of drug or alcohol or something like that. He was just a suburbanite clean-cut kid that was twisted by this music. And he’d go on TV and do this every week, and was twisting up the rest of suburbia. It brought dangerous rock-and-roll into family living rooms.

The Cramps

(Interview circa 1990)