• Home
  • About
    • CultureCrash: The Blog
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Scott Timberg
    • Contact
  • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Book Events
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

CultureCrash

Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Death of a Cramp

February 4, 2009 by Scott Timberg


Well folks, normally i would not offer two posts on punk rock in the same week, much less the same day, but these aren’t normal times.

Today, Lux Interior, lead singer for the band The Cramps, died (fine LAT story here). ohio native erick purkhiser became part of the CBGB punk scene and moved to california. (when i bought a house four years ago i realized i lived one street over from him and cramps guitarist poison ivy — on the edge, natch, of one of LA’s biggest cemeteries) … the cramps combined punk, camp, rockabilly, surf guitar, sex, horror movie shtick and bizarre popcult references — it was screamin’ jay hawkins meets the ventures with punk-rock force. here they are with “tear it up.”
lux reportedly died of “a preexisting heart condition” at the age of either 60 or 62.
they cramps were among the first bands i discovered as a teenager moving on from my obsession with the beatles and dylan into a harder-edged and more contemporary sound… tho the world of the cramps was never my world. i remember the excellent liner notes to either “gravest hits” or “songs the lord taught us,” which described the band’s germinating in “the cold blue rays of 50s television,” or something. they captured the weird irony i came to love about the LA scene.
lux, RIP, we hardly knew ya!!

Photo credit Flickr user 17

Filed Under: cramps, glendale, punk

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

Follow Me

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

Archives

@TheMisreadCity

Tweets by @TheMisreadCity
February 2009
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
232425262728  
« Jan   Mar »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Scott Timberg Has Passed Away
  • Ojai Music Festival and JACK Quartet
  • What’s in a Name?
  • Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov
  • The Perverse Imagination of Edward Carey

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in