Listen to Henry Rollins Discuss The Cramps

Gravest Gravy in stores now via Vengeance Records

October 8, 2026October 8, 2026 Ron Hart 0 Comments 2026, Gravest Gravy, Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, In The Red Records, Lux Interior, Poison Ivy Rorschach, Rollins Band, The Cramps

A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of speaking with punk legend Henry Rollins for the third time in my career.

For this particular occasion, we discussed the work he’s currently doing alongside Poison Ivy Rorschach, In The Red Records proprietor Larry Hardy and film producer Jimmy Maslon in resurrecting The Cramps through an exciting new catalog campaign that mines the legendary trash rockers’ extensive archives.

Working in coordination with his lifelong friend Ian MacKaye, who are operating as RAM Prod., the duo are collaborating in coordination with Rorschach, Hardy and Maslon — working under the aegis The Cramps Inc. — to research and rescue unheard recordings from the vault spanning The Cramps’ career. The first archival release, the never-before-heard 1977 album, Gravest Gravy, produced by Alex Chilton, was released in July to universal acclaim.

The tracks stem from an October 1977 session with Chilton at Ardent Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, crafting material that would appear on 1979’s Gravest Hits, which included a cover of Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town” that would appear on the U.K. version.

What Cramps fans might not know was, at Ardent, the band had planned to record their song “TV Set” to be their first A-side, along with another track or two. Chilton told them that he liked to have a band play every song they knew and the best of the batch would be committed to vinyl. This was fantastic advice, and luckily for us, that’s what The Cramps did. This is how Lonesome Town found its way to Gravest Hits. But, there was more to the story of these sessions.

The Cramps *Gravest Gravy*, Vengeance Records 2026

By the late 1980s, Lux and Ivy sought to release more recordings from the October 1977 sessions that were to be called Gravest Gravy as a gift to the fans who had been with the band since the beginning. The couple mixed several tracks between June 14 and 30, 1989, at Present Time Recorders in North Hollywood. Alex Chilton mixed a few tracks in Memphis. The album had a title and a cover photo, shot by the late great Stephanie Chernikowski, but for reasons lost to time, Gravest Gravy was shelved until now.

In this exclusive audio interview, Henry talks with Rock & Roll Globe about Gravest Gravy, mining the vault of one of his favorite bands, getting back into the reissue game after Infinite Zero, the 35th anniversary of Lollapalooza 1991 and a host of other topics you can check out below.