Punk Turns 30

On June 13, 1978, The Cramps performed at Napa State Mental Hospital. That performance was legendary before it even began! Today, that performance is a piece of pop culture history that every music fan who has ever felt like an outsider has cleaved to their soul with a bit of ownership... who knew that Lux & crew would strike such a chord so early in the punk era? In the wake of Lux's sudden and untimely passing, clips of the performance have been circulating on the social networking sites... an homage to the band and their ingenuity. Videotaped memories are a result of more than the band in any scenario. It was Target Video , the collective from San Francisco, California - that documented the performance and released it on DVD for all to share and re-live. For those who don't know Target Video, it can best be described as the punk rock / indie art version of Andy Warhol's Factory . It was indeed the hotspot of the West Coast in the very same way the Factory was ...

Years before the birth of MTV, artist Joe Rees, together with Jill Hoffman and Jackie Sharp formed the organization Target Video and began taping and editing what would become some of the first conceptually and aesthetically driven music videos. Now, the venerable Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California includes the works of Target Video in the exhibition called CALIFORNIA VIDEO, which runs from March 15 through June 8, 2008. Visit the Getty online for more details. Just when the show at the Getty is set to come down, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) will present a special outdoor screening of Target Video's legendary club show Underground Forces, featuring rare footage of West Coast punk and New Wave bands; their East Coast, Canadian, and European counterparts; and a healthy sampling of the artists, groupies, punk rockers, and weirdos that populated California's underground scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Saturday, June 7, 2008 The Geffen Contemp...

Lux Interior of The Cramps, live at the Whisky A Go Go. Target Video's The Cramps Live At Napa Stage Hospital is one of the very best live music DVD products available anywhere.... I don't know if it will be part of this upcoming shindig..... but..... It is several months away - but save the date and mark your calendars! The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, CA is installing an exhibit called "California Video" which will feature the work of well-known video makers from California, including Target. Target's going to be showing it's classic footage at the show which opens March 15 and runs through June 8, 2008. Target's principals kinda laugh when I call it the Factory (as in Andy Warhol's) of San Francisco punk rock - but in my estimation, the Target team of Joe Rees, Jackie Sharp and Jill Hoffman were on the leading edge with their punk rock artist collective.

For more than 30 years, The Cramps have been held together by the bond that is Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach. Lux and Ivy are the dream-team of b-movie voodoo nightmares (a good thing), trash psychobilly rock n roll, complete with all the props and the musical stylings to support that fantastic freak show that's better than all the monster movies you've seen at the drive-in combined. A woman of few words but volumes of style and a guitar repetoire that keeps growing, Ivy has kept the Cramps sound together while Lux takes his stage show to new heights of mania. They haven't lost a bit of steam and still look as cool as they did when I first saw them when we were all kids. I first saw the Cramps in 1977 and was completely enthralled by their complete conviction and the last time I saw them, in 2004, they had a whole new generation of garage punk rockers in the palm of their hands. They were playing much bigger rooms but they still delivered a show as intimate as i...