ILM Artist Poll No. 105 · THE CRAMPS · Results Thread

https://i.imgur.com/mkfX1fB.png
44. Caveman 2 votes, 37 points.
https://youtu.be/wyIIMKhBmig

https://i.imgur.com/yOkUwjM.png
TIE 42. Voodoo Idol 2 votes, 39 points.
https://youtu.be/94w2K4bj09g

https://i.imgur.com/3BnrLGw.png
TIE 42. The Creature from Black Leather Lagoon 2 votes, 39 points.
https://youtu.be/BdkEapVungU

https://i.imgur.com/pU3dCiE.png
41. Mystery Plane 1 vote, 1 Nº1 vote 40 points.
https://youtu.be/g9c9jvWlEOY

That’s it for today!

here for the moka banner designs. a+ work

Cosign, these are great!

"Voodoo Idol" and "Caveman" too low! (They were my #9 and #14, respectively.) (I also voted for "Call of the Wighat" - it was my #16.)

"How do you keep a moron in wighat suspense?" gets me every time, just like "then I'm gonna kiss your pineapple".

This Alien Sex Fiend cover of mystery plane that I never knew existed was linked from a cramps setlist I came across - I guess they just googled the first line: https://youtu.be/8-lMSGVK5zI

Great images, Moka.

I was the sole vote for "Mystery Plane" it seems. It really did need my help after all!

One of the greatest opening lines in the Cramps' whole discography ("My daddy drives a UFO!") but a just-okay song.

Started a Spotify playlist, if anyone else is into that sort of thing...

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/40nNK2KxBTp99gJBFqxrIf?si=K0LRyIiATleqVS-hWXccTA

I had forgotten how much I like A Date With Elvis. That crisp airy sound juxtaposed with pretty much anything earlier is faintly jarring in a playlist. But I got out ye olde CD for highway listening last week and was overcome with "I'm not sure there are many tracks here I *don't* want to vote for" type thoughts.

awww "Caveman" wuz robbed, that made it pretty high for me

on the whole I prefer Psychedelic Jungle's heavier low end sound to the (imo) sometimes monochromatic roar of Songs The Lord Taught Us.

"Elvis" was the first album where they moved to guitar, bass, drums, vocals. As opposed to guitar, fucked-up guitar, drums, vocals.

5 of Off The Bone's 6 votes are number 1s. I surmise that there are 6 Europeans voting since it was never released in North America.

nah it was mine as well, a perfect distillation

I kinda feel like there should be a separate poll of opening lines, but they factored heavily in my song ranking.

Thank you everyone! It’s a fun poll to run particularly in this spooky time of the year. A shame we didn’t receive another ballot, having 13 ballots would have been extra spookier.

As someone who knows the results I have to say the top 50 is overall pretty good, there’s a few songs missing though, I can say per example that based on Spotify’s top 10 most streamed tracks there’s one that’s not only missing from our own top 50, but noone even voted for it. But overall I think you all did a great job picking out a great compendium of Cramps gravest hits.

5 of Off The Bone's 6 votes are number 1s. I surmise that there are 6 Europeans voting since it was never released in North America.

Nah, it was available in the US and not super expensive. The first Cramps I owned was the cassette of Bad Music for Bad People, and maybe a year later when I saw Off the Bone's 3D cover I bought that. Then later I got the CDs of Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle/Gravest Hits.

Thanks Moka. Images are so great.

great rollout so far! two votes from our ballot showed up: all women are bad, and creature from the black leather lagoon

There's some things, baby, I just can't swallow / Mama told me that girls are hollow

...is possibly what I'd have opted for in an opening line ballot. :)

Pretty impressive that I was the sole non-first-place vote for Off the Bone. (Possibly due to some vague, misguided notion that I should favour a 'proper' album for the top spot. I'm such a square.)

Hahaha I didn’t vote for neither Off the Bone or Bad Music because of that same misguided notion that compilations are somehow less genuine and gave the Gravest Hits EP my #1 vote instead.
I made my ballot before charting the results so I wouldn’t affect them - I mean, that would’ve been cheating - but I was very tempted to change my Gravest Hits vote afterwards when I saw I had somehow doomed “off the bone” to the 4th spot by being a “purist”.

I mean changing my vote would have only meant it jumped from 4th to 3rd place but still...

I’ll post the sheet with ballots and results at the end, but in the meantime the full top 10 for albums/eps/comps was:

1. Songs the Lord Taught Us
2. Psychedelic Jungle
3. Smell of Female
4. Off the Bone
5. A date with Elvis
6. Stay Sick!
7. Gravest Hits EP
8. Bad Music for Bad People
9. Flamejob
10. How to make a Monster

Actually the 10. is a TIE with RockinnReelininAucklandNewZealandXXX

i did not end up submitting a ballot, but i think we especially like off the bone and psychedelic jungle and songs the lord taught us. smell of female, too, i think. tbh i'm usually not which album is which, but i like what i hear!

I'm still really confused about the songs that were released on Bad Music/Off The Bone in the period between Psychedelic Jungle and A Date With Elvis. Some of my very favorites, but I was never sure where/when/how they were recorded.

"Save It"
"Can't Hardly Stand It"
"She Said"
"New Kind Of Kick"
"Drug Train"
"Love Me"
"Uranium Rock" (on Bad Music only)

I only now realized that three of those tracks "Drug Train", "Love Me", and "Can't Hardly Stand It" are from a 1980 single!!

https://www.discogs.com/The-Cramps-Drug-Train/master/657559

"Save It" and "New Kind Of Kick" were the B-sides to 1981's "The Crusher" 12" which explains why I love them so:

https://www.discogs.com/The-Cramps-The-Crusher/master/806238

And "She Said" was the B-side to the 1980 "Goo Goo Muck" single:

This is kind of blowing my mind b/c I always thought of these songs as "later" in their arc. "Uranium Rock" appears to be the only track from after 1981.

oops:

https://www.discogs.com/The-Cramps-Goo-Goo-Muck/master/53337

https://i.imgur.com/0q45lsF.png
40. Rockin’ Bones 2 votes, 40 points.
https://youtu.be/PfRmE5ui7sk

late cut for me

https://i.imgur.com/wYSk4tH.png
39. Kizmiaz 2 votes, 41 points.
https://youtu.be/1UDhAj-_XI4

https://i.imgur.com/KOmIaSY.png
38. Bop Pills 2 votes, 42 points.
https://youtu.be/1sfLjeZkC8M

https://i.imgur.com/bOfsDI7.png
37. Journey to the Center of a Girl 2 votes, 44 points.
https://youtu.be/3ZrtRXI-9rs

https://i.imgur.com/4Bc5cTI.png
36. Mean Machine 2 votes, 46 points.
https://youtu.be/-83cmUpKfbk

"Bop Pills" is such a great example of their ability to find an obscure tune and then Cramps-ify it for maximum impact. The 1956 original is swingin'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQQm_LlUV7I

https://i.imgur.com/TAfq59Q.png
35. Beautiful Gardens 3 votes, 51 points.
https://youtu.be/VIjeL2YOItU

Xpost: yes! It lost value in the streaming era where a world of music is one click away but the amount of crate-digging for gems that The Cramps unearthed for a generation is impressive. Someone suggested that Lux and Ivy’s favorite could be a poll of its own and I agree.

https://i.imgur.com/q5KegUw.png
34. People Ain’t No Good 3 votes, 53 points.
https://youtu.be/We8qTPJ65rk

https://i.imgur.com/37nU8GB.png
33. Faster Pussycat 3 votes, 56 points.
https://youtu.be/PVtHrmj-3Dg

https://i.imgur.com/Fiov6PM.png
32. Save It 2 votes, 57 points.
https://youtu.be/cqdzCGoXOB8

TOO LOW

I love Lux's evil laugh as this starts

it was my #8

https://i.imgur.com/8puXep7.png
31. Strychnine 3 votes, 63 points.
https://youtu.be/_VooYj9WK1A

taking a small break will be back in 15 mins!

https://i.imgur.com/kAvbv24.png
30. Drug Train 4 votes, 66 points.
https://youtu.be/zOZtk5P7RCU

https://i.imgur.com/qRCjSEr.png
29. Can’t Find My Mind 2 votes, 69 points.
https://youtu.be/5iyKLnY4Mo4

huge favorite, my #3

I got a crystal ball
and a divining rod
magnifying glass
and a pack of dogs

this song exemplifies the difference in sound between StLTU and PJ, this is so much HEAVIER than anything on the debut

Seems my only selection to miss the 50 was "What's Behind the Mask?"

I'm guessing "Zombie Dance" was the Spotify favourite that received no votes here?

I misspoke! The song I was thinking was “Surfin Dead”. I had said it didn’t get a single vote but just checked and it did. It was our #59. “Zombie Dance” was our #60.

But yes. Both “Surfin Dead” (7th most popular on Spotify) and “Zombie Dance” (9th most popular) while both had single votes in here they weren’t very enthusiastic at all resulting in them missing from our top 50.

Flamejob is the only Cramps album not available in my country (no idea why) so maybe the Spotify top 20 varies from my country to other countries.

I have to notice how noone voted for songs from “Big Beat from Badsville” and “Fiends of Dope Island”. Spotify does have “Like a Bad Girl Should” from the former as their #15 most popular song.

I had never heard Fiends before checking it out while doing this poll. Really didn’t like it much.

It's interesting how a lot of people seem to grow out of The Cramps, and I don't just mean people mentioning it here as I have noticed it out in the wider world in general. It feels as if they are quite out of fashion currently. I don't listen to them a whole lot but when I do or when I (until recently) heard them played loud I would still get that same visceral thrill I did when I first heard them.

Flamey-shirt rockabilly subculture got so ossified and annoying in the 2000s, with Gen X/Guy Fieri/Betty Page/Pulp Fiction cliches, complete with a veneer of reactionary politics (Exene and Zoom from X being the highest profile manifestations...) that it may be a while before the fundamentals the Cramps gets re-explored. The band itself has the generous kink of the B-52s, but a lot of their followers did not.

Or maybe they won't get re-explored. The band that's made the best garage rock album of the year, LA Witch, played at this Cramps tribute last night

https://kathyvalentine.com/2020/10/26/upcoming-halloween-cramps-tribute/

The rest of that bill is olds. Did anyone watch?

One of the things that disappointed me about Flamejob when it came out was that I'd already dug up the obscuro track "Sinners", so even then, the culture they created was catching up with them. But I can't imagine ever drifting far from these records. They were just so transformative for me.

I didn't vote in this because I really only know Bad Music for Bad People and Stay Sick, but reading through the thread has inspired me to fix that.

As penance for my ignorance, I listened to the entire Miles Copeland episode of the Lefsetz podcast to see if he had any Cramps stories I could relate here, but it was about 5% Wishbone Ash, 5% the Go-Go's, and 90% The Police.

The podcast No Dogs in Space has this deep three-episode show on the Cramps that has plenty of IRS dirt, and a lotta details I didn't know. Never really occurred to me that Lux was old enough to have played in an original artyfacts Nuggets band, but it just took until 1980 to get an album out.

1972:

https://dangerousminds.net/content/uploads/images/made/content/uploads/images/luxivyhippies1bb_465_469_int.jpg

Love that pic.

Here's a great collection of pre-Cramps Lux and Ivy photos (with a couple other members thrown in there):

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=IvyTheCramps&set=a.496846107045336

The one of Bryan is great. Nick just looks like Nick.

The podcast No Dogs in Space has this deep three-episode show on the Cramps that has plenty of IRS dirt, and a lotta details I didn't know. Never really occurred to me that Lux was old enough to have played in an original artyfacts Nuggets band, but it just took until 1980 to get an album out.

― Julius Caesar Memento Hoodie (bendy), Friday, November 6, 2020 2:58 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thanks for that! I really like Marcus Parks but can't stand Henry Zebrowski. It was cool to hear Marcus and his wife enthusiastically and knowledgeably banter about music history.

This has probably been posted elsewhere, but seemingly not in a Cramps thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99VB2UEeOyM

My friend Peter, who (along with Robot A. Hull's Creem review of Songs) got me onto the Cramps), seems blasé; another friend, who doesn't really like the Cramps, considers their cover inferior to the original anyway.

I love it--they may even land on Billboard's Top 100, apparently, which is almost unthinkable.

(In his first close-up, her dance partner even looks a little like Lux.)

my 12 year old stepdaughter is Wednesday obsessed and now digs The Cramps because of this scene. i kept waiting for a hard edit but we got the whole song.

sadly it seems Lady Gaga is the one benefitting as it went viral on Tik Tok but ousting The Cramps in favour of a Gaga song. Bah!

I'm happy that Ivy might see some money, good for them (also the scene is great, have not watched the show but I will at some point)

there are some truly astonishing live videos of the 1981-era Cramps doing "Goo Goo Muck", check YT

i love this one, with Kid -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g17I907BAFw

(xxpost) Meaning they substituted a Lady Gaga song over the same scene? Lady Gaga's fine, but that makes no sense at all--boo.

xp yes that's the one

yes! or did a recreation of the scene using Lady Gaga.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2022/12/06/netflixs-wednesday-dance-goes-viral-with-the-wrong-song/?sh=ce2263e5c416

x post

xp yes that's the one

although i always thought the audience are oddly tame, but of course most of them are probably hearing it for the first time.

goo goo muck is still doing pretty well, it was the top trending song on tiktok over the past week

Interesting fact about their songwriting credits: Lux and Ivy wrote all their songs together, and neither of them ever co-wrote with anyone else.

Link Wray helped write a few of their numbers.

I’ve just seen the scene across the room while some other family members were watching Wednesday.

https://fox5sandiego.com/entertainment/netflixs-wednesday-makes-60-year-old-goo-goo-muck-a-surprise-hit-but-who-gets-paid/

that's fascinating, thanks

Ever since Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 classic “Pulp Fiction” made obscure 1960s rock ‘n roll cool again

ooof!

well it is Fox News