JOE BONOMO ON “HUMAN FLY”
1. “Some guy had just climbed the World Trade Tower and the headline in the Post that day was ‘Human Fly Climbs Tower.’ I was out walking along the street at about six in the morning. It felt like Night Of The Living Dead the way all the people were wandering around. Somebody had jumped off the roof of the building next to ours and they were scraping him off the sidewalk. All of that made me go home and write the song.”
2. In 1972 Erick Lee Purkhiser and a buddy picked up a woman hitchhiking near Sacramento State College, in California. Erick and the woman, Kristy Wallace, later ran into each other on campus in an “Art and Shamanism” class. They hung out, soon fell in love, and commenced indulging mutual obsessions with early American rock and roll, B-movie imagery, and trash-pop aesthetics. They wanted to start a band and play rock and roll, so Purkhiser snagged a stage name from an automobile ad—“Lux Interior”—while Wallace received “Poison Ivy” in a visionary dream.
Lux Interior and Poison Ivy moved to New York City, following a two-year stop in Lux’s hometown of Akron, Ohio. The Cramps were hatched on The Bowery in 1976, with Lux on vocals, Ivy and Bryan Gregory on guitars, and Gregory’s sister Pam “Balam” on drums. They’d change drummers a couple of times (Miriam Linna replaced Pam; Nick Knox replaced Linna) and, when their lineup settled began playing regularly in the burgeoning NYC street rock scene. (Several personnel changes would occur over the following decades.) They stomped, growled, and grooved at CBGBs, Max’s Kansas City, and other area venues, celebrating horror movies and junk culture, mutating R&R and blues-based garage punk and rockabilly into something uniquely theirs: raw, morbid, and difficult to categorize. Lux dyed his jagged hair night-black and, often half nude, writhed onstage in high heels wearing daring, painted-on low-rider black leather pants, pushing his body past its limits, fellating the microphone when in the mood, hiccuping, moaning, yelping, howling. Ivy sported a flame-red teased-up hairdo, fishnet stockings, and go-go boots, on other nights a form-fitting dress or tight red-latex pants or a mini, wielding her guitar like a talisman. Eyeliner ruled the night. The Cramps mesmerized audiences with their “sexed up, swampy cocktail of swagger and spook.”
3. They cut a handful of songs in October, 1977 at Ardent Studio in Memphis, with Alex Chilton producing. Among the batch was Lux’s “Human Fly.”
“It’s not easy to get that sound—that ‘on the edge of distortion’ sound we had on ‘Human Fly’,” said Lux. “The trick is to use bad microphones.”
4. In 1958 20th Century Fox released The Fly, a science fiction horror film about the dangers of playing God. André Delambre (David Hedison), a brilliant scientist in Montreal, is working on a molecular transporter. He’s buoyed by early, successful experiments, and is eventually able to transport a piece of pottery by reducing it to its atomic level and then reconstructing it in a receiver across the laboratory. Delambre attempts to teleport himself, but a common fly enters the transporter during the process. Delambre’s and the insect’s atoms combine, and when André emerges from the machine he has the head and left arm of a fly. The fly, in turn, is cursed with Andre’s miniaturized arm and head, and burdened with André’s self-awareness.
André keeps the disaster from his wife Hélène (Patricia Owens) for as long as he can, though she eventually learns of the incident. She and her son, who’s innocent of his father’s ghastly transformation, attempt to catch the fly—identifiable by its tiny white head—in order to try and reverse the teleportation process, but they fail to do so.
Aware of the impossible fact of his mutated self, that he’s a creature never to be understood or accepted, a mutant fit only to be destroyed, André convinces his wife to help crush him to death in a hydraulic press.
5. “I’m a human fly / I spell F-L-Y / I say buzz buzz buzz / and it’s just because / I’m a human fly / and I don’t know why”
“Human Fly” is a song about a man who’s part insect. Or is he fully man-insect? (A mansect?) No origin story is offered, as he’s buzz-buzz-buzzing at the start, and though the song’s sinuous and sexy, there’s menace beneath the surface: he/it is a self-described “reborn maggot using germ warfare,” and his self-worth is made clear as his “garbage brain” drives him to the brink of madness. The winking reference to his “unzipped fly” and to ? and the Mysterians’ classic “96 Tears” (“I’ve got 96 tears / and 96 eyes”)—
From Detroit's 'Swingin' Time', 1966. *Watch 2011 performance here*: https://vimeo.com/user283485 If anyone wants to know who "Bill" is, the Disney character and link to this video is on this page: https://www.reddit.com/r/gravityfalls/comments/315yoy/im_bill_cipher_i_know_lots_of_things_ask_me/
—elevates the mood a bit, as does the guitar’s trebly-surf leads and the fuzzed out rhythm section which turn the freak’s lament into a dance floor jam: rock and toll transmogrifies into rockabilly mutating into psychobilly.
6. How do we categorize The Cramps? They waded through the muck of Garage, R&B, Surf, and Link Wray rawk over the course of their career, but early on popularized the term “psychobilly,” which stuck.
Ivy: “We never meant [psychobilly] as a style, different from rockabilly, it was just like a dramatic word. ‘Rockabilly voodoo’ is a phrase that we invented too. All it means is the magic of rockabilly.”
Lux: “That’s one of the prime ingredients of rockabilly, is that it’s got to be psychotic to begin with.”
Ivy: “The really good, lesser known and obscure rockabilly from the fifties was very psychotic in its day and really stands up as being psychotic by today’s standards—so all good rockabilly was psychobilly originally.”
Lux: “I've always thought of us as surrealists, right from the very beginning. I think anytime anybody gets too comfortable or decides to cleverly pigeonhole ‘the way things should be’…an artist is going to come along and turn the whole thing upside down. That’s always healthy. That means people are thinking; they’re not just doing what they’re told. It means they’re being moved by a spirit…. Gauguin said there are two types of artists: revolutionaries and plagiarists. We’re revolutionaries.”
Gothabilly? Punkabilly? Hellbilly? Ivy: “We’re the Kings and Queens of Rock and Roll.”
7. In an early experiment, André attempts to transport the family’s beloved cat, but the test goes horribly wrong and the cat vanishes into thin air, suspended bodiless and unseen, its cries echoing in the laboratory.
Later, André confesses to his wife, explaining that the cat “disintegrated perfectly, but never reappeared.”
“Where’s she gone?” an appalled Hélène wonders.
André sighs, gazing at the ceiling. “Into space, a stream of cat atoms,” he replies, adding, “It’d be funny if life weren’t so sacred.”
8. The tagline on The Fly’s movie poster was “The Monster Created By Atoms Gone Wild!”, which could’ve been the name of a Cramps song.
9. Are the Cramps too comical for Goth? They trade on kitschy sex and cartoonish evocations of mid-century horror and sci-fi imagery with a half grin and a wink against the gloom. Some find it hard to take the Cramps all that seriously given that their humor’s so out front and over the top, no matter how ghoulishly presented. There’s little that’s foreboding or sorrowful in the Cramps’ songs, and what’s feels ominous is usually leavened with camp. Representative song titles from their twenty-five year recording career: “Garbage Man,” “I Was A Teenage Werewolf,” “Goo Goo Muck,” “Don’t Eat Stuff Off The Sidewalk,” “Can Your Pussy Do The Dog?”, “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns,” “Two Headed Sex Change,” “It Thing Hard-On,” etcetera. (Sample lyric: “You got good taste, you got good taste, you, come here, sit on my…lap.” Borscht Belt Voodoo.) The band does earn a full entry and a mention in the “Gothabilly” note in Encyclopedia Gothica, though editor Liisa Ladouceur acknowledges that for some Goths the Cramps are too much fun.
Lux: “If people think that we’re funny—I kinda feel sorry for them because it means that they think it’s a joke. We’ve spent our lives searching out incredibly wonderful things that most folks just don’t know about yet.” Elsewhere, asked if rock and roll must be dangerous to succeed, Lux remarked, “We like the unexpected. Dangerous almost means that someone's gotta get hurt or it’s not rock ‘n’ roll…. Rock ‘n’ roll’s supposed to be fun. It isn’t supposed to be: See what kind of damage you can do to yourself or others. We’re asking [people] to come and be crazy and they never stop thinking up new ways to be crazy.”
Ivy: “We don’t take life seriously, we take ourselves seriously, and what we do, we’re just totally committed to it."
10. “I think “Human Fly” is an anthem—an anthem about being a human monster.”
11. The other victim of André’s tragic experiment—the tiny fly with the scientist’s head and arm—evades capture by Hélène and her son, only to inevitably fly into a spider’s web, where, immobilized, it waits in terror as the spider moves slowly toward it. “Help me!” it screams, so faintly to our ears that it sounds like nothing but a buzzzzzz. “Help meeee!”
12. Lux: “All my life people have told me I was a pest, something that looked ugly, smelled bad and ought to be gotten rid of, something that spoiled everybody’s planned-out fun.”
13. In April of 1978 the Cramps, armed with two hundred bucks, produced a promo film for “Human Fly” that went unseen for decades, acquiring legendary underground cult status. Allegedly, neither Lux nor Ivy possessed a copy. The video surfaced online in 2015.
Filmed on a rainy Saturday morning by Alex De Laszlo, it’s superb lo-fi horror, Nosferatu meets MTV. De Laszlo was a high school student who’d made a few 16mm experimental films, one, using Velvet Underground on the soundtrack, shot in “stark black and white, with jagged imagery and very much in the tradition of adolescent surrealist mischief,” De Laszlo recalls, adding, “The din of the Velvets soundtrack only added to the generally robotic and disturbed narrative.” A friend introduced De Laszlo to Steven Blauner, the Cramps’ first manager. De Laszlo was already a fan of the band, having dug them several times at CBGBs in late 1977 and early ’78. (He remembers Lux whipping out a TV Guide from his back pocket, whereupon some wag in the crowd asked, “What’s on TV tonight, Lux?” and he’d read a listing for a “4am, bottom of the barrel, z grade, low budget horror film, complete with a lurid TV Guide description.”) Blauner arranged for De Laszlo and Lux to speak on the phone, and “he talked about the movies he had made as a kid, his love of cheap horror movies, and how he wanted the film to look,” De Laszlo remembers. “He conveyed to me an aesthetic which I already appreciated and understood, having seen them perform and having been raised on a steady diet of surreptitious Late, Late Show TV viewings of The Incredible Crawling Eye and Attack of the Mushroom People.”
De Laszlo borrowed a Bolex 16mm camera and a couple of movie lights, and from MERC, a nonprofit film collective for independent and student filmmakers, snagged some mid-century military surplus film stock. Not only was this film cheap, but it approximated the lousy reception on a black and white TV. “The excessive age of the film stock meant taking a risk,” De Laszlo says, “but once Lux heard ‘1950’s,’ ‘low definition,’ and ‘grainy,’ he was all for it.” De Laszlo met the Cramps at their rehearsal space near the Bowery, and went to work. In the film Lux injects himself with serum that turns him into a monster; a transistor-radio-bopping Ivy accidentally trespasses Lux’s underground lair—cue the dangerously descending opening guitar line in “Human Fly”—where he and the other Cramps emerge from the shadows and initiate her into their dark ways. “Most of the footage was shot in very dank, dark, and close quarters, very little in the way of set design was required,” De Laszlo remembers. “Four hours later, we had our footage.” The film dramatizes the threat inherent in the song, but in B-movie irony. The glimpse of an Alfred E. Neumann poster on the wall says it all: this is terrifying stuff, but it’s also the Cramps.
Notes
1. Qtd. in Journey to the Centre Of The Cramps, Dick Porter
2. Qtd. in Encyclopedia Gothica, Liisa Ladouceur
3. Qtd. in Porter
6. Ivy qtd. in “Fasbinder 62’s Collection of Quotable Cramps Quotes,” T. Tex’s Hexes and in Porter; Lux quote via Jim Sullivan, former Boston Globe music critic
9. Lux and Ivy quotes via Sullivan
10. Lux qtd. in Porter
12. Qtd. in Porter
13. De Laszlo’s comments to the author
Joe Bonomo's many books include Field Recordings from the Inside (essays), Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America's Garage Band, and Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found. His new book No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing is out in May. Find him at @BonomoJoe and No Such Thing As Was.