THE CRAMPS > OAK CANYON RANCH, IRVINE SATURDAY, JULY 3, 2065 A.D. The Cramps will never die—but neither will anyone else, since they cured death back in 2032 and started sandwiching the suicide parlors between the space-liquor stores and the robo-welfare offices. But that was extra-nice for us: nobody has to waste time with new music, since we can keep the golden-oldie moldies alive until they can't turn a profit. We've liked the Cramps since before they were getting bad for the first time; we made the nurse droid park the hoverchair right up front, next to every chromed-out rocketcar from the Greater Orange County Penal Quadrant and every wrinkly rockabilly with black blotchy arms—were those old flaming-dice tattoos, or just melanomas? Didn't see too many young kids around—the last war wiped out most of the draftable generation, and besides, Misfits 2065 were booked into the Galaxy Concert Theatre, and they've always been big faves among the 4Fs. But us prunoids rattled our robo-walkers when the force curtain came up: former Electric Eel Nick Knox—well, a clone, actually; you can tell by the way the eyes don't focus—was back on the sparkle drum kit; to his immediate right, fuzzing around with a polka-dot guitar, was former Detroit—God, we miss Detroit; too bad they weren't able to cure those poor bastards!—factory worker Byron Gregory, reanimated special for the occasion. And then out rolled Lux Interior, a cryo-frozen head in a jar, flopping about between sultry guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschachs' fishnetted legs. He looked . . . firm. And Ivy continues to look BETTER year after year—wonder why, when all of us have steadily been deteriorating since the ozone vaporized in 2015? Must be something in the chemosphere she calls home. They marched through all their early material—pre-liver-spot days, y'know, including Jack Scott's attitude-adjusting “The Way I Walk,” on which Gregory's backup howls reactivated the dormant San Andreas—and they hadn't sounded so dynamic for most of the nearly 100 years since their inception. Maybe they can get away with this never-quit bullshit after all—if they're still plugging our mom's brain directly into her Tom Jones virtuo-matrix every night, we don't have to grow out of the Cramps. No one else was, anyway: the crowd (and their fat deposits) throbbed, and the Cramps oozed right back . . . well, mostly because Lux's nutrient vat cracked open during an encore of the Novas' “The Crusher.” We learned our lesson back in 2004, suckers: round jars don't fit in square holes!
