The last weekend
Everyday Is Halloween wraps on Monday, and cruelly the calendar forces us to rush through our 4-3-2-1 but dumping a weekend at a crucial point. Lux wouldn’t have wanted it that way.
Pyschobilly – for better or worse – exists because The Cramps willed it. Only New York could produce a golden-age/surf-rock hybrid, and naturally it would concern itself with werewolves, zombies, and a compulsively topless frontman named Lux Interior. The secret weapon was the contagious guitarwork of Poison Ivy, whose endless supply of reverbed chords could only have been a gift from below.
Goth seemed a strange place for The Damned to end up because, despite their name, their debut album (the first British punk classic) looked like the aftermath of a cake fight and rocked at warp speed. The Cure got simply too popular and, unlike Gene Simmons, once (most of) Robert Smith’s makeup came off it stayed off. In that regard, goth will always be the purview of Peter Murphy and Bauhaus, whose incorruptible search for meaning in the darkness made for equally compelling theater. Sorry, theatre. Peter Murphy plays Metro on November 26th.
October 30th
It’s Halloween tradition for someone to get ambushed by bigger kids with eggs or shaving cream, who might also steal your loot and make your parents suffer having a child who’s a perennial target for teepeeing. Such should be the fate of mascara-lined Twilight-saga pop-punks My Chemical Romance and AFI, whose shadowy affectations should include less Chris Kattan and more Bela Lugosi.
Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.
