The Age of Innocence #8Lux Interior Dead at 62

The Cramps

I've just received word that The Cramps' wild frontman and rock and roll enthusiast extraordinaire Lux Interior has died from a heart condition at the too-early age of 62.

The Billboard obituary can be read here.

More info, and an incendiary clip of the band in its prime doing Tear It Up (from the concert film Urgh!: A Music War) can be found here.

The Age of Innocence #7

Patti Smith, at her most delightfully demure.

"Most of my poems are written to women because women are most inspiring. Who are most artists? Men. Who do they get inspired by? Women. The masculinity in me gets inspired by the female. I fall in love with men and they take over. I ain't no women's lib chick. So I can't write about a man, because I'm under his thumb, but a woman I can be male with. I can use her as my muse. I use women."
-- Patti Smith (from "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk", by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain)

The Age of Innocence #6: The St. Patrick's Day Edition

The Undertones

"Teenage Kicks is the greatest pop single of all time." - John Peel (R.I.P.)

The Age of Innocence #5

The Dead Boys, at their CBGB audition, 1976

"The Dead Boys had only been together a week. Before that we had a band called Frankenstein (in Cleveland), but we had broken up. We were just sitting around, mostly because we couldn't get a gig. Stiv kept saying, "Listen, in New York they're into what we're into. We're not weirdos there. We'd be normal there." -Cheetah Chrome

-taken from Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. If you don't have it already...what's your problem?

The Age of Innocence #4

The Modern Lovers (1970)

Years before he wrote songs about Roller Coasters By the Sea and Riding His Bike Past the Root Beer Stand, Jonathan Richman, through a mere handful of recordings in the early 1970s, established himself forever as the chronicler of bruised and triumphant adolescence. With his band, The Modern Lovers, he forged a Velvet Underground inspired rock, both wild and tender at once, that directly anticipated the damaged sensitivity at the heart of all Punk.

The Age of Innocence #3

The Damned, 1976

This is my first attempt to piggyback on a theme started by Tom, and when I saw it, I knew I had to get the jump on The Damned, who I've long credited as my second favourite band (we'll get to my first favourite later). I first heard about these musical miscreants in the pages of Creem magazine, a review of Machine Gun Etiquette I believe, and when I saw an import copy of their double-LP The Black Album in an indie record store for the then-ungodly sum of $20, I pounced on that puppy promptly. Granted, Wait for the Blackout may not in retrospect have the same impact of New Rose--the first official release by any of the original British punk bands, on Stiff Records in 1976--but I was hooked with the first power chord. But this photo comes from the sleeve of New Rose, the first broadside against the U.K. musical establishment, with its "Is she really going out with him?" intro and some of the coolest sounding raw fuzz guitar imaginable. On the label of the single sits the simple instructions 'Turn It Up' and the flipside is a metamphetamine cover of The Beatles' Help, played twice as fast and eliminating some of the lyrics, in a vain attempt to only pay half-royalties.

Plus you've got to love a band that somehow managed to combine Iggy and the Stooges and German Expressionism.

God bless The Damned.

The Age of Innocence #2

Sham 69

The Age of Innocence #1

Buzzcocks