The Cramps LIVE AT NAPA STATE MENTAL HOSPITAL (MVD)

The title of this lost treasure pretty much says it all. Yeah, someone let the Cramps — the original, late-’70s line-up of the band, with mad-daddy singer Lux Interior, guitarist Poison Ivy, undead drummer Nick Knox, and the then bass-less band’s first guitarist, the very odd-looking Brian Gregory — into a mental hospital to play a gig. What’s even more amazing is that the staff of Napa State Mental Hospital then let the band leave. So for a little under an hour in 1978, the inmates, it would seem, were indeed running the asylum up in California wine country. It’s one of those insignificant yet absurd little events in rock-and-roll history that radiate twisted beauty.

I first caught this performance on a videotape released at least a decade and a half ago by Target Video. I’d stopped telling people about it five or six years ago because I’d begun to wonder whether it wasn’t merely a figment of my overactive imagination. But Music Video Distributors has just reissued the eight-song set, shot in black and white with hand-held camera, on DVD, and it’s every bit as wonderfully disturbed as I recall. Although the quality of the recording is anything but pristine, the rough-around-the-edges sensibility suits the Cramps’ gritty, garage-rocking, garbageman æsthetic, and the video isn’t nearly as out of focus as those bootleg versions of the Stones’ Cocksucker Blues that have been circulating on the Internet.

This is early in the Cramps’ career — their first album, The Gravest Hits EP (Illegal), hadn’t even come out yet. But all the elements of their psychobilly sound had come together, as had Lux’s shirtless, microphone-swallowing, leather-pants-wearing stage persona. And though much of this short set is pieced together from the obscure early cover tunes they relied on ("The Way I Walk," "Twist and Shout," and "Love Me," to name three), the set ends with a crazed version of their own "TV Set" that sets the inmates reeling. It makes you wonder who was insane enough to book this show.