“We are the Cramps, we come from New York, and we’ve driven 3,000 miles to play for you,” and so began one of the strangest, punkiest punk rock concerts of all time, as The Cramps played to a crowd at a state psychiatric hospital in Napa, California. The date was June 13, 1978, and at the time Napa was known more for its hospital than its burgeoning wine industry.
Lead singer Lux Interior gave the introduction after the first song, “Mystery Plane.” The band played on a patio a few steps above the facility’s courtyard while friends of the band mingled with the roughly 100 patients in attendance.
“Someone said you guys were crazy, but I don’t think so,” Lux continues in the video. “You guys seem fine to me.” Indeed, most people seem to be having a great time, with some dancing like it’s a sock hop and others just raging.
It wasn’t the first band to play at the facility — hospital manager Bert Swain, who brought the Cramps to Napa, often invites musicians to broaden patients’ horizons — but that night a video camera was also brought in to record the performance. (Swain was concerned about preserving the anonymity of the residents.)
The other band scheduled to perform, The Mutants, didn’t have a video recorded, presumably because the sun had set by this time. Either way, this is a rare piece of punk history, not unlike when the Sex Pistols played Chelmsford Prison or when lesser known thrash metal bands The Gobstoppers played a Christmas party at a facility for children and adults with developmental disabilities..
according to Articles about this eventThough the Napa State Theatre still stands, it’s unlikely that a concert like this will ever be held there again — today, most of the theater’s occupants are violent criminals and mentally unstable, making it far too dangerous a venue for even the most punkish of souls to perform.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts, currently writing an artist-interview-based Funk Zone PodcastYou can also follow us on Twitter. Ted MillsAs for his other artworks, tedmills.com Watch his movies here.
