Lux Interior

The Cramps’ biggest album was 1980’s Songs the Lord Taught Us, which, despite its underground popularity, proved that the Lord hadn’t taught them much at all. But what the band lacked in musical skill it made up for with absurdist humor and attitude. Most of that emanated from gender-bent front man Lux Interior, who died on Feb. 4 in Glendale, Calif. He was 62.

Interior, born Erick Lee Purkhiser, started the Cramps with his wife, guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach, in 1976. From the beginning, they were more an act than a band, their fusion of surf music, punk and rockabilly (psychobilly, as it was known) sounding better in theory than in sloppy 3-min. bursts.

But onstage, the Cramps were spectacular. Interior could stoke a crowd with writhing and pogo-ing that made Iggy Pop look like a folksinger, and when he opened his mouth to deadpan songs like “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” he could make the crowd laugh too. Perhaps the Cramps’ most perfect performance was a 1978 concert at the Napa State Mental Hospital in California. “Somebody told me you people are crazy,” Lux screamed from the stage, “but I’m not so sure about that!”

The Cramps’ lineup morphed continuously over the years, but Interior and Rorschach were constants in music and in life. They remained happily married for 37 years.