Interiors, by Jeff Gordinier:

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It shocked me yesterday to hear that Lux Interior was dead, because I was under the impression that he'd been dead for a long time. I don't mean that I had a memory glitch. I mean that Lux, the panting and frothing and writhing and moaning and crotch-rubbing and microphone-sucking frontman of the Cramps, played the role of the sexed-up rockabilly horror-movie zombie so utterly and brilliantly to the hilt that it never even crossed my mind that he might actually be a human being.

I mean, the dude never broke character. I own four or five Cramps albums and I don't even know what Lux's real name was, and I don't want to Google up the obituaries and find out, because I feel as though that would be oddly disrespectful.

It's better to remember Lux Interior for The Thing that he built with such dirty and beautiful precision: a creature from the black lagoon of American lust and fear and psychosis.

When I say that Lux Interior and the Cramps meant more to me than Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger and the rest of those boomer bores, I'm not exaggerating or striking a useful book-promoting pose. I mean it. I think the guy was one of the funniest, most riveting, most kinetic and inspired performers rock & roll has ever demon-spawned. (If you'd had a televised Battle of the Libidinous Yowlers between Jagger and Interior, I'm telling you, Lux would've won hands-down.)

Not long ago I came across a brief passage by Ian McEwan in which he observed that "literature almost always wants to return to ordinary speech," and, to make a chasmic leap here, I think that that's what Lux Interior and the Cramps set out to achieve. They restored rock & roll's simple indignity. They tossed it back into the goo-goo muck where it belongs.  I can't imagine what Lux was like "in real life," or if such a state of mind even existed for him, but on stage he came across as a quivering ambassador of depravity. He was totally sick - and seemingly sick with sex, infected by it. To watch him humping and slobbering at that microphone (shouldn't he have died from an electric shock 15 years ago?) was to think of sex as a virus, sex as a gamma ray from outer space, sex as a voodoo spell conjured up by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Ed Wood, Spade Cooley, and Mamie Van Doren over cheeseburgers at some Transylvanian greasy spoon. For me, a teenage Christian attending three or four Bible studies a week in a Southern California Republican enclave that had helped send Ronald Reagan to the White House, that made a whole lotta sense.

And so in spite of Lux Interior's camp showmanship, there was at the core of his oeuvre a brutal honesty. His music (call it "shockabilly," call it whatever the hell you want) had absolutely nothing to do with Maxwell's silver hammer or utopian archers in some sylvan glen, which might help explain why Gen Xers embraced the Cramps and the majority of boomers never seemed to "get" them. The music of the Cramps was about want. It was about the beasts we are. It was about being both exhilarated and creeped out by your own life force.

I remember watching Lux Interior and the Cramps at the Anaconda Theater in Isla Vista, California, and feeling happy, dumbstruck, proud to be an American. That was back in 1992; I still consider it one of the best shows I ever saw. I left the Anaconda donut-glazed in sweat and wondering how this pale emissary from the land of the undead had made a room full of people feel so pulsingly alive.

Jeff Gordiner, X Saves the World, Penguin, Penguin Books