Lux and Ivy's Favorites Volume Seventeen

Here is the last Lux and Ivy’s Favorites; Volume Seventeen.

Over a year ago when I put up the Ez listening double CD together I had kind of made up my mind that it was going to be the last volume for a few reasons. The main reason being the increasing number of bootlegs “stealing” my idea. There have been at least 3, that I know of, CD’s (or now even LP’s) of material taken from my compilations and being sold on the market. The worst of these even have liner notes from some guy that writes for that bastion of musical excellence, Mojo Magazine (huh?). I believe the guy even picked the tracks for them too. Wow, what a lot of hard work that must have been! Spending years collecting information, tracking down rare tracks, identifying and going through old tapes….wow, he must be a busy guy! Oh wait; he did most of that with the click of a button….

The worst thing about these endeavors is that they use Lux and Ivy’s name to turn a profit. Something I’ve never done. Over the years I’ve gotten numerous requests from people wanting me to put these on vinyl. I was always adamant that I wouldn’t do something like that. I do these for fun and to expose people to music that they may not have known about. Some people do radio shows, I put together compilations. The idea of some record label making money off this is too much for me to take.

For that reason, this volume has no track listing.

 Now, any fan of the series that downloads this last volume should have a good idea of what artist does what song. How could you not recognize (NAME REDACTED)’s voice or (NAME REDACTED)’s guitar tone? Most of the songs have been on any number of other compilations and now that you’ve listened to 16 other volumes of this stuff, I would hope you would have gone on to buying copious amounts of music from your favorite online retailers or those things that still exist in some corners of the world; record shops. If Seventeen was going to be made available, I couldn’t just put the track listing out with it so that some douchebag could throw it on some future compilation. Though the risk is there that it will happen anyway, I guess, but I’m not going to make it easy for them.

Seventeen basically exists because it was nearly done back when Sixteen came out. Sixteen came about because a track listing fell into my lap and it was easy to find a lot of that Ez listening stuff pretty quickly. Meanwhile Seventeen languished in my car CD player.  A good portion of Seventeen came from a tape that Lux gave to someone back in the late 70’s. That person was kind enough to send it my way. It took a lot of work to get this original tape copied because he didn’t have the means to copy it! Then once I received it, I had to go thru it song by song to identify them (much like you will have to when you listen to Seventeen), track them down, and then make mp3’s out of them.

So since so much went in to actually finding the tape and having the tape transferred to another tape, and so much work had already gone in to it that I felt it should be made available. Plus it would coincide with the Lux Lives events being held all over the world.

And since I mentioned it, I figured I’d throw this gauntlet down for everyone that reads this blog, listens to The Cramps, or digs LAIF’s: throw your own Lux Lives events every year! Don’t sit around bitching that nothing like that ever happens in your town. If no one else is doing it, YOU do it! Have a party, get some friends together, watch some Herschell Gordon Lewis movies, listen to cool music, and celebrate the life of Lux and all that The Cramps have given you over the years.

Every year we have the media reminding us that this is the day Elvis died, or the day John Lennon died, etc etc; but for someone like Lux, no one’s going to keep his memory alive unless YOU do something.

Special thanks go out to Adam Fitch for working on the cover, Bruce Milne, Howie Pyro, Martin Hemmel, and MizzKizz for identifying/uncovering some of these tracks, and the fine folks at WFMU.

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