Glendale Crescent is in Milford, close to Riverbourne Road.

I don’t know why it’s called Glendale Crescent. I’ve not been able to find any significant connection between the word Glendale and Salisbury.

There are a few places called Glendale in other parts of the world. There are ‘Glendales’ in Arizona[1], California[2], Northumberland and on the Isle of Skye.

I’m going to write a little bit about the Glendales of Northumbria and California. These are respectively the homes of Postman Pat and the Cramps.

Postman Pat and Lux Interior – together at last. Images from Amazon

Postman Pat and Glendale, Northumbria

‘Postman Pat‘ is a British stop-motion animation for children. It features the eponymous hero, Pat, and his black and white cat, Jess. They deliver letters and parcels around the area of ‘Greendale’. The series began in 1981 and seems to be still going strong – the last series aired as recently as 2008. Postman Pat has been hugely successful – he’s been translated into many other languages and Wikipedia lists 29 other countries in which Postman Pat has appeared. Longleat House has a Postman Pat village.

Although there is a similarity between the names ‘Greendale‘ and ‘Glendale, the connecton between the Northumberland Glendale and Postman Pat seems to be slightly doubtful.

The cheerily-named ‘Hello, Northumbria’ website says fairly categorically that:

Author John Cunliffe, who ran the Wooler mobile library service for a year in the early 1950s, took Glendale as his inspiration for the children’s story Postman Pat and the fictional village of Greendale[3].

However the ‘Lake District National Park’ website says that:

• Greendale was inspired by Longsleddale
• Greendale post office was inspired by Beast Banks post office, now closed, in Kendal. A plaque marks the building[4].

The writer himself, John Cunliffe, spoke out in an interview with the BBC:

I lived in a small terraced cottage on Greenside, up the hill from Kendal Town Hall. There was a little post-office at the end of my street in Kendal, and I often chatted to the friendly man who kept the shop.

I soon saw what wonderful people they were [around Kendal]; friendly and hospitable; always ready to help, or to offer a cup of tea to the thirsty traveller.

They were very much in my mind when I sat down to draw the map of Greendale.

However, thankfully Glendale is not left entirely out in the cold. Cunliffe goes on to say:

Thirty years before I wrote Postman Pat, I ran the Wooler mobile library service in Northumberland. This experience contributed a great deal to the TV series as well. [5]

The Cramps and Glendale, California

Glendale, California is a described by Wikipedia as both ‘a city in Los Angeles county’ and ‘a suburb in the Greater Los Angeles area’. It borders Sun Valley, Eagle Rock and Burbank.

Glendale isn’t geographically a part of Hollywood. However, in the more usual metaphorical sense it hosts a significant part of ‘Hollywood‘. Dreamworks Animation is based in Glendale’s Grand Central Business Park, and Disney have a large campus on the same park which incorporates the Muppets Studio, KABC-TV and its ‘Imagineering’ Divisions.

Glendale was also home to two of my favourite musicians – Lux Interior and Poison Ivy of the Cramps.

A Compressed History of the Cramps

The Cramps were the original ‘psychobilly’ band. Broadly psychobilly fuses rockabilly with punk – to quote one of the Cramps’ songs they were ‘one half hill-billy, and one half punk‘. The Cramps were particularly influenced by the guitarist Link Wray[6], and by Iggy Pop.

The band was formed by Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach[7] in New York in the mid-70s. Lux had allegedly met Ivy in 1972[8] when she was hitch-hiking[9]

Lux and Ivy continued with more-or-less the same rockabilly-punk sound[10], but with an ever-changing cast of bass players[11] and, latterly, drummers until Lux’s death in Glendale Memorial Hospital in 2009.

They were never a very well known, or commercially successful band. Their biggest UK hit ‘Bikini Girls with Machine Guns’ reached number 35 in the UK charts in 1990[12][13].

However, the Cramps were, for a time, big fish in the small ‘indie’ music pond.

They headlined both the 1981 Days of the Future Past/Futurama festival (headlining over Bauhaus, Echo and the Bunnymen, Altered Images and the Thompson Twins[14]) and the 1990 Reading Festival[15].

At their peak the Cramps sold out three shows at the Hammersmith Apollo and three nights at the Hammersmith Palais.

Some Cramps trivia

• Lux Interior did a song for an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. Lux said: “Our nextdoor neighbour does the background artwork. And he just came by and said, ‘I’ve told my boss that we live next-door and he asked if you would do a song for us.’ That simple. It was a lot of fun.”[16]




• Lux did some of the screams in Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula, but “not all of them. We did go to his house and record me screaming, sobbing and sighing for three hours. But I don’t think all the screams are me. Sofia Coppola is a really big Cramps fan and came up with the idea: ‘Daddy, The Cramps would do a beautiful job.’ “[17]




• The Cramps appear in an episode of ‘Beverly Hills 90210′ that was called ‘Gypsies Cramps and Thieves’[18][19] – the title is a neat reference to the Cher song ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves’[20]

Place and the Cramps – a psychobilly psychogeography

Coming back to Glendale, sort of, I’m going to write a bit about The Cramps and their sense of place. If this website has any wider theme than ‘Salisbury and Stonehenge’ it’s about the importance of ‘place’ and of individual places. I’m interested in the regionalism of a lot of American music – I don’t think I’ve quite got this right here, partly because I’m not American, but these are my thoughts.

Location, Location, Location

‘Location’ might not seem important in the world of punk or new wave[21]. The genre, I think, sees itself as ‘rootless’ and ‘cosmopolitan’. Punk declared a ‘year zero’ in music, epitomized by the words of The Clash:

No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones
In 1977

Similarly, The Clash came not from West London but just from ‘Garageland’ – from nowhere.

The Cramps were different. They were rooted musically, and they understood the importance of where they were from and where they were at.

The Cramps Home Towns – Akron, Ohio and Sacramento, California

Ivy was, as far as I can tell[22], a Californian Girl. I think that she grew up in Sacramento. I’ve not read anything about Ivy’s background or its influence on the band, but it could have had some bearing on their move to Glendale.

The city of Akron was more significant in the Cramps story. Lux and Ivy met in 1972, and then they moved together to Akron in 1974[23].

Akron is a medium sized city in Ohio. It has about 200,000 inhabitants[24]. Akron is, or was, an industrial city – specializing in the manufacture of rubber[25]. According to Lux, it’s the place ‘where you fall down on the sidewalk and bounce back up’[26]. The band said in interviews that their music was best suited to places where there was heavy industry.

Akron has produced an impressive number of musicians, including Chrissie Hynde[27], Devo, Pere Ubu and the Black Keys.

I don’t think the Cramps were part of an ‘Akron scene’, though. My understanding is that they knew they wanted to form a band, but didn’t actually do so until they got to New York[28]. However, Akron was a goldmine for record collecting – an important part of the Cramps’ lifestyle. Ivy said in an interview with ‘Guitar Player’ Magazine

What happened was that Lux and I were living in Ohio, just finding wild records. At the time, the only way you could find rockabilly was on the original 45s; there weren’t any reissues of it. We were finding some incredible records around the Akron area because a lot of people from the South had moved up North to work in the factories and dumped their records.[29]

New York

The couple moved to New York in the mid 1970s. This was an obvious thing to do. The punk/new wave movement was just beginning. Artists such as Blondie, Television, Patti Smith, Suicide and the Ramones were starting out – often playing on the same bill at clubs such as CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City.

The Cramps didn’t necessarily have much in common with any of the other bands in that scene but New York was where new American music was being played, and finding a market.

Lux said that, at that time,

every place else had bands like Silverwind playing Rolling Stones hits[30]

New York, on the other hand, had the ‘scene’ of mutually supportive acts

they were all in the audience when we were playing and then we were in the audience when they were playing[31]

Memphis, Tennessee

But the Cramps first records weren’t made in New York. They made their first record, ‘Gravest Hits’, 900 miles away – in Memphis[32].

They rented Phillips Recording Studios – the studios owned and run by Sam Phillips. Phillips was the man who discovered and first recorded Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis among others. The Cramps themselves clearly relished meeting Phillips:

When we recorded at Phillips Records in Memphis, Sam Phillips came walking into the place, and that was a real amazing shock. He was covered with grease all over his hands. The hedges had grown up over the sign in the front, and he was out cutting them with electric hedge trimmers, and the thing just exploded all over him. So he was covered with grease, and we all grabbed him and we were shaking his hand, getting grease all over ourselves![33]

New York again

The Cramps remained resident in New York for a few more years, but grew increasingly dis-satisfied with it:

Most of our New York friends had moved away or OD’d. We never felt like we were part of that scene. I think they looked on us like we were a bunch of hicks. And they’re right – we weren’t a bunch of art students like most of them. [34]

Their belief was that New York wasn’t a “rock and roll city”. The Cramps didn’t fit in:

That’s one thing we’re always accused of in New York, is being silly. It’s the reason no rockabilly ever made it in New York, y’know. For instance it’s the reason Elvis’s first five records never got played in New York. Always y’know Manhattan, it’s a great town its fun to be there but it’s also a very ‘cultural’ place that looks at anything from outside as being ridiculous and silly[35]

Glendale

The Cramps re-located to Los Angeles, specifically to Glendale, in the early 1980s. Ian Johnston, author of ‘The Wild Wild Worlds of the Cramps’ wrote this:

In a sense Lux and Ivy were coming home to where they had always belonged: the B-culture capital of America[36]

Ivy said that:

I think this place has much more to do with the Cramps than New York ever did. You can drive around in fast cars here. You can play tapes really loud.[37]

The Cramps were also attracted by the climate and the car culture:

We just got a really great ’56 Dodge, and it’s easy to maintain a cool car in L.A. because it doesn’t snow. I think it’s important to stay in a certain mood when you play music. I actually hear music better in the car, too. When I listen to cassettes in the car, I hear things that I never hear when I listen at home. When you’re trapped in your car, you’re forced to listen to more detail. That’s my favorite way of listening to music. And L.A.’s just a great place to drive and listen to music. You can learn a lot doing that.[38]

…and the history:

where we live is the place where Marilyn Monroe grew up and where the ‘Our Gang’ comedies came from and two blocks north of us is where Mickey Mouse was first drawn. It’s like a museum where we live, it really is and we’re crazy about that. The one thing I really love about England is its history[39]

Lux and Ivy lived close to the Forest Lawns cemetery. The cemetery is the last resting place of many Hollywood stars including Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Errol Flynn, Spencer Tracy, Walt Disney and Nat King Cole[40]

Ivy said:

“It’s unique, because the whole concept is that it’s for the living and not the dead. There’s music coming out of the trees. It’s great what you can find there”[41]

Lux died of an aortic dissection in February 2009 in Glendale.

Footnotes

1. Glendale, Arizona – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
2. Glendale, California – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
3. [↩]
4. Lake District National Park – John “Postman Pat” Cunliffe [↩]
5. BBC – Cumbria – History – Postman Pat [↩]
6. I shoe-horned a brief discussion of Link Wray into my page for Link Way [↩]
7. I shoe-horned a brief discussion of Poison Ivy into my page for Ivy Street and Ivy Place [↩]
8. Poison Ivy (musician) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
9. To be honest I’d always felt that the hitch-hiking story might not be entirely true, but in ‘researching’ this page, I found an article on Lux’s memorial service on the LA Weekly West Coast Sound blog that confirms it:
   

   Muted chatter ensued and in an unexpected twist, I met the guy who was driving the day he and Lux famously pulled over to pick up a hitchhiker, who turned out to be Poison Ivy. “I only knew Lux for about three years, but I knew Erick[Erick was Lux's real name] very well,” he said. “Back then, I was his psychedelic partner, you might say, and a few years ago I got an e-mail from him saying “you don’t know who this is” — of course I did — “but do you remember when we picked up that really pretty girl hitchhiker and your dog Wheezer jumped all over her? Well I’ve been jumping all over her for the past 35 years and we have a band called the Cramps.”

   and he offered her a liftThe Wild Wild World of the “Cramps” [Paperback] Ian Johnston, 1990, Omnibus Press, p62, Amazon link [↩]

10. Lux continually joked about this in interviews saying their next LP was going to be a ‘techno record about my feelings’ and so forth. The first time I saw the Cramps, he introduced their last song as ‘a synthesizer reggae tune for you now’. It was a cover of Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ [↩]
11. Actually for the first few years (I think many fans would say these were the best years) the Cramps line-up was drums, vocals and two guitarists [↩]
12. everyHit.com search results [↩]
13. According to a recent BBC documentary the Cramps were the favourite band of Rebekah Brookes, the former editor of the Sun. The documentary [BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - Profile, Rebekah Brooks] features a brief snatch of ‘Bikini Girls’ – probably the only time I’ve heard the Cramps on Radio 4 [↩]
14. Daze of Future Past Festival 1981 UK | Flickr – Photo Sharing! – the flyer had the Bunnymen above the Cramps, but I think I remember hearing that the order was swapped. I used to enjoy the Bunnymen, but they would have suffered following the Cramps. [↩]
15. Actually, in indie music 1981 to 1990 isn’t a brief period at all – this would make them veterans! [↩]
16. Interview: The Cramps | The Stool Pigeon [↩]
17. Interview: The Cramps | The Stool Pigeon [↩]
18. “Beverly Hills, 90210″ Gypsies, Cramps and Fleas (1995) – Soundtracks [↩]
19. “Beverly Hills, 90210″ Gypsies, Cramps and Fleas (1995) – Full cast and crew [↩]
20. Cher – Gypsys Tramps And Thieves – YouTube [↩]
21. I’m going to use the terms ‘punk’, ‘new wave’ and ‘indie’ fairly interchangeably here. I think there’s a distinction between ‘punk’ and the rest, and I don’t think the Cramps sit very well with either of these three labels, but I’m working on the assumption that anyone reading will know what I mean [↩]
22. There are conflicting stories about the Cramps, some propagated by the band themselves [↩]
23. Poison Ivy (musician) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
24. Akron, Ohio – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
25. Akron is known as ‘the rubber capital of the world’(one of the things I remember from my sole trip to the USA was that virtually every place between Memphis and New Orleans was world capital of something). The word ‘Akron’ derives from the Greek word ‘akros‘ meaning “highest, upper” (Akron is in Summit County) – as in acropolis. Because of the rubber factories, it always puts me in mind of ‘acrid’. [↩]
26. The Cramps Interview 1990 – YouTube [↩]
27. The Pretenders’ ‘My City is Gone’ is Hynde’s lament for Akron, which she sees as being destroyed by shopping malls. She said ‘Everything’s just huge masses of granite blocks, and everything’s outsized. It might look good on a drawing, but it doesn’t seem to apply to human life’ [↩]
28. They began performing as the Cramps in New York in 1976 according to the Poison Ivy Wikipedia page [↩]
29. Poison Ivy from Guitar Player Magazine [↩]
30. The Cramps Interview 1990 – YouTube [↩]
31. The Cramps Interview 1990 – YouTube [↩]
32. Apparently, Lux had done military service in the area. The website Memphis Music Confidential says that:

    Lux came to Memphis much earlier than that — as U.S. Navy enlistee Erick Lee Purkhiser[Lux' real name], he lived and worked on the base in Millington back in the 1960s.[Memphis Music Confidential » Blog Archive » R.I.P. Lux Interior]

    [↩]

33. The Cramps’ Lux Interior interview in Cosmik Debris Magazine [↩]
34. The “Cramps”: A Short History of Rock’ N’ Roll Psychosis [Paperback], Dick Porter Plexus Publishing 2006??Amazon [↩]
35. Rumble fanzine issue 2, 1984, published in Northern Island. There’s a scan of the cover here: Brain Steak Bikini – Far out with The Cramps: Twistin’ And Shoutin’ [↩]
36. The Wild Wild World of the “Cramps” [Paperback] Ian Johnston, 1990, Omnibus Press, p62, Amazon link [↩]
37. The “Cramps”: A Short History of Rock’ N’ Roll Psychosis [Paperback], Dick Porter Plexus Publishing 2006 [↩]
38. Poison Ivy from Guitar Player Magazine [↩]
39. The Wild Wild World of the “Cramps” [Paperback] Ian Johnston, 1990, Omnibus Press, p62, Amazon link [↩]
40. Forest Lawn Glendale: Stars’ Graves [↩]
41. The Wild Wild World of the “Cramps” [Paperback] Ian Johnston, 1990, Omnibus Press, p62, Amazon link [↩]