"I dig that god damn rock & roll/The kind of stuff that don't save souls." Less than three minutes into 1990's
Stay Sick!,
the Cramps had summed up their entire aesthetic in a mere 16 words, and even if
Lux Interior hadn't bothered to wail that deathless phrase, the buzzy, reverb-soaked report of
Poison Ivy Rorschach's guitar and the primal earthquake stomp of Nick Knox's drums reminded us this band liked its music dirty, both sonically and thematically. If 1986's
A Date with Elvis was an impressive return to form after a long recording layoff, 1990's
Stay Sick! was in some respects an even more powerful example of
the Cramps' singular oozing psychobilly madness; with Candy del Mar, they had their best fourth wheel since Bryan Gregory left the band, a bassist whose solid, ferocious low-end thump made more room for
Ivy's feral guitar work, and the band rarely sounded tighter or more effective than it did here.
Songs the Lord Taught Us was arguably
Lux Interior's high point as a vocalist, but he rarely sounded as strong and committed as he does on
Stay Sick!, howling and hiccupping like a madman and keeping up with the band at all times. The
Cramps remained obsessed with sex at its least wholesome on
Stay Sick!, but "Daisys Up Your Butterfly," "Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon," and "Journey to the Center of a Girl" demonstrated they were capable of finding new varieties of perversity around every corner, and the opening cover of Macy Skipper's "Bop Pills" is on hand to reassure us that they hadn't forgotten about the importance of dangerous drugs. The production (by
Poison Ivy herself) is big and boomy but absolutely fits the outsized personality of the band, and these celebrations of all manner of bad behavior are funny, exciting, and suitable for exotic dancing.
Stay Sick! would prove to be the band's last album with Nick Knox on drums, and
the Cramps were never quite this good again, but these wild grooves are a pulsating reminder of what they could achieve at the height of their powers. [In 2014, Vengeance Records,
the Cramps' own label, reissued
Stay Sick! in a new edition that featured revised artwork -- the front cover picture of
Poison Ivy is a bit more modest -- and six bonus tracks, including live and studio covers of
Carl Perkins' "Her Love Rubbed Off" and a manic take on
Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock."] ~ Mark Deming