1. The CrampsA Date with Elvis

I know there are earlier records of theirs that people consider to be a bit better or a bit more classic, as it were, but this one, I really love the songs and the performances and I just love how chaotic the production is. The use of delay on this record is really, really aggressive and I think it makes the listening experience psychedelic and disorienting, especially considering how eccentric and wild a frontman Lux Interior was. He really abuses the delay quite a bit, with his insane vocalisations. And yet, despite the insanity of the sound of the album, to me the songs still translate really well. The Cramps are a group I’ve always admired for taking a really freaky and experimental and almost avant-garde approach to the tenets of rock & roll music.

The first time I got into The Cramps was in my teens when I first started getting into vinyl collecting. My first Cramps album was RockinnReelininAucklandNewZealandXXX, which was a live record of theirs which sonically is even more chaotic than this one. That album came out around the time they had written these songs so a lot of the songs there ended up on this record and I just ended liking the studio versions a little bit more. This was a time before the alleged vinyl boom so records, new and old, were all really cheap and with my restaurant job that I worked at week in and week out, I could buy a couple of records and not have to worry about not having gas money, a lot of stuff was $2, $3, $10.