Henry Rollins on The Cramps, Gravest Gravy and Why Records Still Matter | The Sharp Notes Interview

There are records that disappear because nobody wanted them, and then there are records that somehow manage to wait nearly 50 years for the right moment to arrive.

Gravest Gravy belongs firmly in the second category.

In October of 1977, the Cramps entered Ardent Studios in Memphis with Alex Chilton and recorded a body of material that would help define the earliest version of the band. Some of those recordings became the group’s first Vengeance Records singles and later appeared on Gravest Hits. Others remained unheard. Lux Interior and Poison Ivy returned to the tapes in 1989, mixed material for a proposed album called Gravest Gravy, chose artwork, and then, for reasons that seem to have disappeared into history, the record was shelved.

Now, in 2026, that record is finally coming out.

Helping bring it across the finish line are Larry Hardy, owner and operator of In The Red Records, and Jimmy Maslon, a film producer responsible for some of the Cramps music videos, and owner of the Herschel Gordon Lewis and Doris Wishman film catalogs, alongside none other than Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye, working together as RAM Prod. on behalf of The Cramps Inc., which has revived Vengeance Records and begun digging into the band’s archive. Rollins and MacKaye went through the surviving quarter-inch tapes, compared multiple mixes, worked with engineers at Inner Ear Studios and Infrasonic Sound, and helped shape the material into the record that Lux and Ivy had once envisioned.

For Rollins, there is also a much more personal thread running through all of this. He and MacKaye first saw the Cramps together in Washington, D.C. in 1979. Nearly half a century later, they are helping ensure that another piece of the band’s history finds its way into the hands of listeners.

Photo: Stephanie Chernikowski

So this conversation is about Gravest Gravy, but it is also about something larger: what it means to preserve music without embalming it, what survives when analog tape is properly cared for, what gets lost when music becomes just another file on a screen, and why records, record stores, labels, liner notes and all of the strange little clues surrounding recorded music still matter.

Henry Rollins has spent most of his life listening closely, collecting obsessively, tracing music backward and forward through history, and thinking seriously about the physical culture that surrounds it.

That makes Gravest Gravy a very good place to begin a listeners journey into The Cramps’ history and into the musical lineage that preceded it.