m: You're known for putting on a hell of a live show. Have you ever hurt yourself seriously during a performance?
l: Um, well I busted both my knees before, but I've never broken an arm or anything important that needed to be operated on or anything. I've fallen on my head enough times that it's caused serious mental damage. At least that's what people tell me. But I don't know, I'm still happy.
m:What's the strangest show you've done?
l:Strangest show? They're all pretty strange. We did one in Napa, California at a mental institution in the late '70s. That was pretty strange. There's a video out of it. It's pretty cool. It shows the inmates as much as it does us. And they're all on stage with us and it's a lot of fun to watch. It was really odd because there was no security or anything and they would just come up and grab the microphones and stuff. And at one point you see a guy behind us with his face to the wall. And it zooms in on him and he's actually licking the wall. It was definitely a weird gig, a bunch of them ended up escaping.
m:Do you think The Cramps have made that kind of a lasting impression on music? l:Yeah, it's kind of funny when we play. There are always some older fans there, but it seems most of them grow up, get married and get a job counting widgets or something. But the audience is usually made up of younger people. I guess it's kind of like Marcel Duchamp. He's now considered the guy who started modern art, and it took fifty years for people to realize this. He wasn't appreciated until the sixties. And then Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Dennis Hopper and people like that started to say, "This is the guy. This is where everything changed." And I kind of feel like that's what will happen with The Cramps. Sometime fifty years from now, people will be able to put it in perspective. Not that we're as great as that, but I think we are constantly being misrepresented as "the Addams Family of rock" or a bunch of hillbillies or something. And I think we'll be better understood further down the road.
m:How long do you think you'll be able keep The Cramps going? Do you see and end in sight?
l: Not really, I mean Chuck Berry is still out there playing. We never think about quitting. What I can't imagine is not doing it because we really dig doing it. But there are other things we could do if we weren't doing it. It's a huge part of our life, but we could stop doing it tomorrow and still be fascinated with doing a number of other things. And I think that's a good way to approach it. It seems like with a lot of bands, it's all they do. They play music and hang around with music industry types, and they only think about their career. And you can be turned into a real horrible creature that way quick. We don't want to be like that.
m:What has kept you going so far?
l:Well, I think we live in the present. Unlike most folks, we're not waiting to see the charts every day. I talk to some bands and they're like, "What do we have to do to make it?" And in The Cramps we just have fun from day to day. I think that comes from everything we went through growing up. We were always more interested in . . . I guess you would say philosophical things or art. It's like all-inspiring. Everything that happens is interesting to us and worth commenting on in a song. And this is the only thing we really care to do, so it's easy to keep doing it.
m: You started out only recording singles and some of your albums are just collections of previously released singles. Do you ever approach an album as a whole, or is it all just singles to you?
l: I don't think we ever have approached an album as a whole. It is always more of a collection of songs. But all of the songs on a given album seem to have some sort of unifying theme which is not something we plan on, it's more like they're postcards from where we are at and what we're interested in at a given moment in time. When we do an album, it's not stuff we've written over three years, it's usually written in like two months. So it usually has something to do with what we're interested in at the moment. Like with this album, it's got the Man Ray thing and it's got stuff about Marcel Duchamp all through it. Because that's what we've been interested in lately . But I could see doing some kind of concept album under a different name sometime. It would be fun to do one of these bachelor pad fifties music, strange exotica album sometime just for kicks. I think we could do a real cool thing like that, but it would be totally different from The Cramps.
