The Psychobilly Primer, Part I

by Hilary Crowe

I’ll never forget the first time I heard the word “psychobilly.” I was bored, and it was a sticky Florida summer Sunday night when a friend called, the only other punk in the neighborhood.

“Hey, wanna see a psychobilly show? It’s only five bucks. At the Pegasus.”

Since she was calling from her car parked in my driveway, I didn’t have time to refuse, and when I asked her what “psychobilly” meant she just shrugged. It soon became obvious, however, even as we watched other Pegasus patrons smoke and cackle in the parking lot, that we were in for a treat that we would not soon forget. (The Pegasus Lounge is a seedy bar in an iffy neighborhood in Tampa – removed enough to feel like I wasn’t still a high schooler, but close enough for me to leave ten minutes before curfew and make it home on time.) Since then, the genre has been home to many of my favorite bands and provided a much needed escape from the pressure cooker of school.

Here’s what every self-respecting music nerd, punk, or trivia maven should know:

Psychobilly reflects the melding of 1970s punk style with 1950s rockabilly chord progressions, in Dead Boys-meets-Buddy Holly fashion. The genre draws lyrical inspiration from vintage horror flicks, violence, and pop culture taboos. Typically dealing with superlatives and excesses (sex, drugs, and rock and roll), lyrical topics are narrow, apolitical and mainly concern pinups, hook-ups and breakups. In short, psychobilly bands peddle questionable fables with lewd and lascivious flair. However, unabashed sexuality has always been a part of rock and roll; psychobilly simply distills such energy and influence from organic rockabilly beats and punk’s snarling attitude to mix a much needed, effectively sobering shot of primal hedonism that suspends one’s sense of propriety more fully with each twang, bang, and pluck per minute.

Chuck Berry, Link Wray, and Jerry Lee Lewis are early influences, but it was Screamin’ Jay Hawkins who inspired the forbidden, ghoulish, and certainly voodoo-feel in psychobilly construction with his only hit, 1956’s I Put a Spell on You. Alice Cooper serendipitously aided the birth of The Cramps when he and a friend (the man who would become the Cramps' vocalist Lux Interior) picked up then-hitchhiker, soon-to-be guitarist Poison Ivy. Lux Interior and Poison Ivy soon founded a band in Sacramento in 1972, but relocated first to Akron, Ohio and finally to CBGB’s in New York. The band whet the scene’s appetite for the vampy, sleazy sounds of urban decay, especially with albums Songs The Lord Taught Us (1980) – which later inspired Songs We Taught The Cramps (2000), a collection of the band’s influences – and Flamejob (1994).

Punks with a penchant for the dark side then gathered their telecasters and went to work. The Misfits remain a large influence; many bands today include at least one cover from their seminal album Static Age (1978) in their sets. The Demented Are Go injected more sleaze and speed into Cramps' songs with In Sickness and In Health (1986), as did the Nekromantix’s Demons are a Girl’s Best Friend (1996) and Mad Sin’s Amphigory (2000). Tiger Army’s eponymous 1999 debut is also noteworthy.

(For the rest of this essay, please scroll down, or check out Part II.)

(Photo of The Cramps performing live by jorge.hipster of Madrid, Spain via Flickr, using a Creative Commons license.)

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psychobilly
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