The Cramps came to an end in 2009 with the sudden death of Lux Interior from a heart condition. He was 62. A cult act in its time, the band found a whole new audience in 2022 when its version of “Goo Goo Muck” by Ronnie Cook and the Gaylads was featured in a goth dance sequence in the Netflix series “Wednesday.”
“A funny thing was that it was the first single off of the ‘Psychedelic Jungle’ album, and at the time we thought, ‘This is going to be a hit single,’” said Powers, who played on the early ’80s track. “And then it wasn’t. But some 40, 50 years later, it got to be a viral hit.”
Since Lux Interior’s death, Poison Ivy, who still resides in the Glendale, Calif., house she shared with him, has not spoken publicly. “She’s been very reclusive and into her Transcendental Meditation,” said the film producer Jimmy Maslon, a decades-long friend who directed several Cramps music videos. “And she’s very shy.”
Meanwhile, Poison Ivy did not tend to the Cramps’s business matters. “She’s let all of the records she controls, which is most of the back catalog, go out of print,” Larry Hardy, the owner and operator of In the Red Records and another longtime friend, said in an interview. “She doesn’t have a merchandise deal. She’s not making money on the band. As a Cramps fan, I know there’s a ton of bootlegs coming out.”
Last year Hardy and Maslon were able to convince her to partner in a new company, The Cramps Inc., and restart the band’s Vengeance label. Hardy and Maslon are handling all the logistics, and Poison Ivy is the main beneficiary. The musician intends to give some of the proceeds to charity, according to Maslon. (A press representative for The Cramps Inc. said that Poison Ivy was still not doing interviews.)
Poison Ivy had been housing the band’s master tapes in her leaky garage, Hardy said. She agreed to let him take the collection, which he discovered contained the “Gravest Gravy” sessions. “Once I figured out what we had, I was pretty overjoyed,” Hardy said. The Cramps had been working toward releasing “Gravest Gravy,” he said, but the project was abandoned when Lux Interior died.