In his top ten hit One piece at a time, Johnny Cash sang about a man working at an assembly line in the gutter of the automotive industry with the task of putting wheels on Cadillacs. Knowing that he will never be able to afford such a mythical vehicle of luxury and power, he conjures up a daring plan to steal one, screw by screw, one piece at a time, avoiding the risk of getting caught by his supervisors.

Beside offering a fresh deck of ingenious storytelling, not quite uncommon to the realm of country music, the song introduced the term ‘psychobilly’, describing the end result made out of parts of different Cadillac models, straight out of Doctor Frankenstein’s wildest dreams. The same expression was used by Lux Interior to promote his band The Cramps, a mixture of garage Americana and adolescent punk that scorched the earth of decency with its primordial noise-driven slapstick’n’splatter ethos. Thematically, the new subgenre combined standard rockabilly love of all things American with science fiction, pulp magazines and vintage horror.

The Cramps, who later claimed that branding themselves psychobilly was just a carny move to promote the band, always wreaked havoc a couple of steps ahead of the pack of countless imitators. From the pro bono tours of lunatic asylums and Lux Interior’s reckless head-through-the-drumskin stage antics, to the performance on the Halloween episode of teen TV series Beverly Hills 90210, they tight-knitted their own heritage of simple exploitation odes to oddball worshiping like I was a Teenage Werewolf, Can your Pussy do the Dog? and Bikini Girls with Machine Guns, songs that seemed to be crafted by demand of the fanboys of genres that found their home under the rug of pop culture.

On February 4th 2009, Lux’s nonconformist heart, the crux of his engine, twitched out its last cramp, while his spirit – wherever it may be – continues to relentlessly push the limits of his assembled car, much like the protagonist of Cash’s song. It’s in his nature.