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By Root 836 0

needle tracks. The final pressing of the self-destruction button was a foregone conclusion, Sid and Nancy leaning blearily on each other as they left CBGB’s at night as if prematurely leading their own funeral procession, a pair of effigies. In a different decade, their lust for attention might have ensured their survival, a glimmer of self-interest staying his hand and diluting the heroin: the two of them pulling up just shy of death and entering rehab to co-star in a reality series upon their release from Dr. Drew’s custody. But then they wouldn’t have lived on in squalid legend, documentary makers three decades later still raising the question, “Who killed Nancy?,” as if she were the victim in the punk pulp novel James Ellroy never got around to writing, with Sid the fall guy, a patsy held suspended by a single puppet string until that, too, snapped.

Not that there weren’t macabre laughs to be had, even while so many on the scene seemed to wall-paint their moods a malevolent shade of black. As I wrote in the Voice in 1977:

“Love me,” sings Lux Interior of the Cramps, hunched over on the CBGB stage, his hands dangling near his knees. “Love me,” Lux demands, like a leper threatening tourists on the streets of Calcutta. He is flanked by guitarists Bryan Gregory, who turns his back and snarls over his shoulder at the audience, and Ivy Rorschach, who stands as sternly silent as a sentry with orders to kill. Behind them drummer Miriam Linna pounds away, her floor tom-tom propped on four empty kidney-bean cans. After his love begging leaves him empty-handed, Lux sings of the joys of strychnine and the torment of being a teenage werewolf (“with braces on my fangs”); later, they all don shades for “Sunglasses After Dark,” and Gregory disdainfully tosses his plastic rimmed pair into the gallery.

—“Can the Cramps Loosen Up?”

The Cramps began getting noticed at CBGB’s in 1976, it being hard not to notice a rockabilly band that was a cross between the Addams Family and inmates of a juvenile detention center, its lead singer named Lux Interior and the guitarist a Batman villainess called Poison Ivy, whose mushroom-cloud wig could cushion any fall, the five of them banging out a beat that lurched from side to side like skeletons swinging their bones. “I’m Cramped” may have been the band’s personal anthem, but “Sunglasses After Dark” (about how wearing a cool pair of shades turns every night outing into an obstacle course) was the song fans adopted as their passport. The band called the Sic Fucks—whose backup singers, Tish and Snooky (the Laverne and Shirley of the East Village), dressed onstage in nuns’ cowls and Bettie Page lingerie, were the entrepreneurial founders of the St. Marks Place landmark store Manic Panic—endeared themselves with such plainly felt sentiments as “St. Louis Sucks” and “Chop Up Your Mother,” the lead singer, Russell Wolinsky, doing a hilarious running patter between numbers like some Catskills emcee, mocking punk pretenders and crusaders (he could be scathing about the Clash and their commando attitude), the scene having evolved far enough to burlesque itself. But even these laughs seemed to have been scraped off the crusty sides of the tension in the air, signs of a decadent phase.

It wasn’t until the B-52s arrived from Athens, Georgia, like a megadose of vitamin D, that genuine smiles seemed to sunrise in people’s heads unaccompanied by sarcastic critique. When they first took the stage at Max’s and CBGB’s, they were greeted by giggles and hollow whoops, the suspicion being that they were some kind of joke band, what with Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson in beehive hairdos and the lead singer, Fred Schneider, apparently ready for a luau. But when they kicked into “52 Girls,” their sound was more tight-meshed and shone like silver foil, and there were actual harmonies—so wondrously alien to our jackhammered ears—and when Fred rocked out during the instrumental bridges, he moved his arms and legs around until we recognized what it was: something known as dancing. Would marvels never cease? Patti Smith