In my mind, one of the greatest things about loving music is the ability to completely geek out on it. When I was a kid, Patrick, our friend Chris and I would stay up late playing cards, swapping baseball cards and listening to music. All of the music: Dad’s, ours and a whole bunch of random shit from the radio.
But geeking out to me has always been about listening harder. Hearing beyond the initial drumbeat, the guitar solo, and catching something subtle. Slash’s guitar solo in “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is iconic, but there’s a stretch in the first half of the song where Izzy Stradlin’s rhythm guitar moves the song from good to sublime. More often than not, those subtleties are missed by the casual listener. To this day, there’s a section of Weezer’s “Holiday” where the guitarist runs up the fretboard toward the end of the song that literally takes my breath, lifts me out of my chair as a grin of eternal happiness spreads across my face.
I was stupid excited when I heard a whole slew of never-before-heard recordings by The Cramps had been unearthed and were being primed for release under the moniker Gravest Gravy — the October 1977 Ardent Studios sessions in Memphis, with Alex Chilton behind the board. But. What would be the difference?
“TV Set” is one of my favorite Cramps tracks of all time, and from the get, I knew something was up. We’ll set aside all of the differences in the production; that goes without saying. What I wanted to hear — what, if for no other reason, makes this record worth every penny — was how the band thought when it came to these songs, allowing for an addition to the ever-constant geekified debate between music nerds. The drums are different. I won’t bore you with some Vanilla Ice defense/distinction of bum-bum-bum-bumba-bumba vs. bum-bum-bum-bumba-bum (that’s pretty close to his actual defense), just to say they’re different.
Wait a minute — what’s that?! There’s no blues shuffle in the original version, and Ivy’s guitar in this is far crisper! But oh my, that blues shuffle totally changes the timbre of this. Where the original guitar sounded like a gauntlet thrown down, this new take feels slightly less confrontational, a bit more fun — if such a thing can be said about a song whose highlight is using someone’s eyeballs for dials on their TV set.
“Domino” is set in a whole different pitch — my musical geekiness couldn’t tell you the differences in keys, but my ear hears it. The Gravest Gravy version also feels about a half step faster, with Lux’s vocals, if possible, slightly more frantic.
And I’m starting to notice a trend.
Let’s look at “Can’t Find My Mind.” Again, the Gravest Gravy version is slightly faster, but the biggest difference is Lux’s use of reverb for the lyrics. I feel like I understand what he was going for here — what it must sound like inside the head of someone who’s losing their marbles. The version that most of us know was on the band’s 1981 release Psychedelic Jungle. That version feels more intentional, slower, slightly more sinister.
And this is what I love about being a hard-core music fan — the speculation, the endless banter with fellow music geeks trying to work out what the artist was working out when they finally put their stamp of approval on a release. We’ll probably never know, short of Ivy doing a series of in-depth interviews — sadly, Lux died in 2009 — to talk about their recording process and why these were shelved in favor of other releases.
To my ear, I hear the band crafting a sound, a narrative, and a mystique — one that used tempo against itself. Punk rock is notoriously fast, and The Cramps could get quick with the best of them, but they seemed to have understood that the menace was in the slow. Lux didn’t want to perform for you; he wanted to scare you a bit, make you feel just a little uneasy, whether you were listening to a record or watching one of their amazing shows.
To me, there’s only one miss on this album, and like all things music, this is totally subjective. The Cramps covering Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Hungry” was a dud in my mind. A glance at the liner notes tells me that Alex Chilton, producer of this haul of buried treasures, was the culprit behind the keys — Alex, hands on the board, off the organ! The Cramps don’t do organs, period. End of conversation.
So should you buy this record? Hell. Fuck. Yes. Hard-core Cramps fans are going to tie themselves into bows trying to decode what was going on inside the band’s brain when they zigged vs. zagged. Casual fans are going to hear a band, while not fully formed, right on the precipice, already better than a huge swath of what’s currently out there. And for the new listener — let me introduce you to this wonderful, wacky, sinister band … The Cramps.
