Forgotten For

How Two Punk Icons Are Giving the Cramps a Second Life

“If you lose culture,” Henry Rollins explains, “the society dies.”

By Anna Merlan, Mother Jones

Lux Interior performs with the Cramps at King's College, London, March 7, 1980. David Corio/Redferns/Getty

One fall night in 1979, two best friends went to a small club in their hometown of Washington, DC, to see a band. The show was so extraordinary, the band so singular, that decades—and thousands of shows—later, even at “AARP age,” as one of them now puts it, they still talk about it. They were especially taken with the lead singer, a lanky, glamorous Frankenstein-esque character who, by the show’s conclusion, was up on the bar, crooning merrily as he punched through ceiling tiles while the club owner looked on and laughed.

“I’ve never recovered from that show,” Henry Rollins recalls. “I’ve never gotten better. Ian and I talk every Sunday. We’ve been best friends for 52 years. We talk about that time we stood next to each other and watched the Cramps.”

Rollins, now 65, was a frontman for the legendary Southern California punk band Black Flag and later the MTV FINISH READING HERE

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