The Cramps have always been such a powerful influence on me that it became easy to take them for granted, just as fish probably sometimes forget there's such a thing as water. Lux and Ivy's brand of rock n roll wasn't a brand of rock n roll, it WAS rock n roll. Incarnate. Solid and palpable as clay. The boiled distillation of everything that had come before them, from Robert Johnson to the Sonics to Captain Beefheart.

Lux and Ivy began The Cramps in 1973 and were innovators and pioneers from the getgo, inspiring countless millions of people on many levels. Testimony to just how innovative they were is the fact that they had only one bonafide hit record in their entire career - "Bikini Girls with Machine Guns", which was one of the most important philosophical statements of our lifetime, sayeth I without irony or hyperbole.

Part of what has me so thunderstruck about Lux's passing is that I literally somehow managed to forget that Lux was human. I thought of him as an immutable fact, a force of nature like electricity or light. In fact, I still don't believe he's gone. I can't really wrap my head around it. The ghost of Lux Interior is still right here, right now, as real and solid as it ever was. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

- JSH, Feb. 6, 2009, 1:17am