Fiends Of Dope Island

Here we go, once more with feeling, down the Hallowe'en Parade. In a time of interminable fluxed-upness and infinite variables, in an era of war, pestilence, famine and moral panic, in an epoch when everything that should run forwards runs backwards, signifiers cease to signify, clocks lie, rivers lose their riverality, trees their treeness, mountains their mountainism, well friends, you can always count on The Cramps.

Poison Ivy and Lux Interior and pals are not about to go techno, adopt the latest mall-rat fashions, cater to the base whims of the market-place, bleat that there’s always been a dance element to their music, gird the loins of their noise with industrial or rap trappings or otherwise compromise, dilute or water down their Roger Corman meets The Trashmen schlock one whit. As another great dirtbird of our times almost said, if you don’t wanna fuck ’em baby, you can fuck right off.

You know what you’re getting on a Cramps platter, and it reeks to high heaven. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but these people are far more interested in the substance from whence the rose doth spring. But let it be noted by the court stenographer, Fiends Of Dope Island is no better or worse than Psychedelic Jungle or Gravest Hits or any of those oft-told tales from the crypt. Yes, the threads are a little less threadbare, the production not quite as caked with stuff of indeterminate origin, but otherwise only the names have changed. Care for a spot of ‘Papa Satan Sang Louie’? No? How ’bout ‘Dr. Fucker MD (Musical Deviant)’? Or perhaps a dash of ‘Dopefiend Boogie’ or ‘Elvis Fucking Christ’?

The Cramps are not originals, but that’s okay – neither were/are the Stooges or The Pixies or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Rather, their special talent is the ability to Frankenstein together body parts too diseased for other bands to use, sew ’em up and cover over the cracks with heaped trowels of whiteface and panstick.

So, here be the most brazen magpies in rock ‘n’ roll, whether beachcombing for bits of crud thrown up by the surf boom, or lovingly retinting B-movie mondo mambo fodder like ‘Taboo’, or pushing shopping trolleys full of punk junk gleaned from the streets of the Bowery. But let’s not get bogged down in the source components of their wonderfully rambunctious mutations. The wise man he says, you don’t look up the chimney while you’re poking the fire.

And sometimes it’s prudent not to ask who exactly it was that donated you their organs.