Glendale Crescent is in Milford, close to Riverbourne Road.
I don’t know why it’s called Glendale Crescent. I’ve not been able to find any significant connection between the word Glendale and Salisbury.
There are a few places called Glendale in other parts of the world. There are ‘Glendales’ in Arizona, California, Northumberland and on the Isle of Skye.
I’m going to write a little bit about the Glendales of Northumbria and California. These are respectively the homes of Postman Pat and the Cramps.
Postman Pat and Lux Interior – together at last. Images from Amazon
‘Postman Pat‘ is a British stop-motion animation for children. It features the eponymous hero, Pat, and his black and white cat, Jess. They deliver letters and parcels around the area of ‘Greendale’. The series began in 1981 and seems to be still going strong – the last series aired as recently as 2008. Postman Pat has been hugely successful – he’s been translated into many other languages and Wikipedia lists 29 other countries in which Postman Pat has appeared. Longleat House has a Postman Pat village.
Although there is a similarity between the names ‘Greendale‘ and ‘Glendale, the connecton between the Northumberland Glendale and Postman Pat seems to be slightly doubtful.
The cheerily-named ‘Hello, Northumbria’ website says fairly categorically that:
Author John Cunliffe, who ran the Wooler mobile library service for a year in the early 1950s, took Glendale as his inspiration for the children’s story Postman Pat and the fictional village of Greendale.
However the ‘Lake District National Park’ website says that:
- Greendale was inspired by Longsleddale
- Greendale post office was inspired by Beast Banks post office, now closed, in Kendal. A plaque marks the building.
The writer himself, John Cunliffe, spoke out in an interview with the BBC:
I lived in a small terraced cottage on Greenside, up the hill from Kendal Town Hall. There was a little post-office at the end of my street in Kendal, and I often chatted to the friendly man who kept the shop.
I soon saw what wonderful people they were [around Kendal]; friendly and hospitable; always ready to help, or to offer a cup of tea to the thirsty traveller.
They were very much in my mind when I sat down to draw the map of Greendale.
However, thankfully Glendale is not left entirely out in the cold. Cunliffe goes on to say:
Thirty years before I wrote Postman Pat, I ran the Wooler mobile library service in Northumberland. This experience contributed a great deal to the TV series as well.
Glendale, California is a described by Wikipedia as both ‘a city in Los Angeles county’ and ‘a suburb in the Greater Los Angeles area’. It borders Sun Valley, Eagle Rock and Burbank.
Glendale isn’t geographically a part of Hollywood. However, in the more usual metaphorical sense it hosts a significant part of ‘Hollywood‘. Dreamworks Animation is based in Glendale’s Grand Central Business Park, and Disney have a large campus on the same park which incorporates the Muppets Studio, KABC-TV and its ‘Imagineering’ Divisions.
Glendale was also home to two of my favourite musicians – Lux Interior and Poison Ivy of the Cramps.
A Compressed History of the Cramps
The Cramps were the original ‘psychobilly’ band. Broadly psychobilly fuses rockabilly with punk – to quote one of the Cramps’ songs they were ‘one half hill-billy, and one half punk‘. The Cramps were particularly influenced by the guitarist Link Wray, and by Iggy Pop.
The band was formed by Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach in New York in the mid-70s. Lux had allegedly met Ivy in 1972 when she was hitch-hiking
Lux and Ivy continued with more-or-less the same rockabilly-punk sound, but with an ever-changing cast of bass players and, latterly, drummers until Lux’s death in Glendale Memorial Hospital in 2009.
They were never a very well known, or commercially successful band. Their biggest UK hit ‘Bikini Girls with Machine Guns’ reached number 35 in the UK charts in 1990.
However, the Cramps were, for a time, big fish in the small ‘indie’ music pond.
They headlined both the 1981 Days of the Future Past/Futurama festival (headlining over Bauhaus, Echo and the Bunnymen, Altered Images and the Thompson Twins) and the 1990 Reading Festival.
At their peak the Cramps sold out three shows at the Hammersmith Apollo and three nights at the Hammersmith Palais.
Some Cramps trivia
- Lux Interior did a song for an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. Lux said: “Our nextdoor neighbour does the background artwork. And he just came by and said, ‘I’ve told my boss that we live next-door and he asked if you would do a song for us.’ That simple. It was a lot of fun.”
- Lux did some of the screams in Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula, but “not all of them. We did go to his house and record me screaming, sobbing and sighing for three hours. But I don’t think all the screams are me. Sofia Coppola is a really big Cramps fan and came up with the idea: ‘Daddy, The Cramps would do a beautiful job.’ “
- The Cramps appear in an episode of ‘Beverly Hills 90210′ that was called ‘Gypsies Cramps and Thieves’ – the title is a neat reference to the Cher song ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves’
Place and the Cramps – a psychobilly psychogeography
Coming back to Glendale, sort of, I’m going to write a bit about The Cramps and their sense of place. If this website has any wider theme than ‘Salisbury and Stonehenge’ it’s about the importance of ‘place’ and of individual places. I’m interested in the regionalism of a lot of American music – I don’t think I’ve quite got this right here, partly because I’m not American, but these are my thoughts.
Location, Location, Location
‘Location’ might not seem important in the world of punk or new wave. The genre, I think, sees itself as ‘rootless’ and ‘cosmopolitan’. Punk declared a ‘year zero’ in music, epitomized by the words of The Clash:
No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones
In 1977
Similarly, The Clash came not from West London but just from ‘Garageland’ – from nowhere.
The Cramps were different. They were rooted musically, and they understood the importance of where they were from and where they were at.
The Cramps Home Towns – Akron, Ohio and Sacramento, California
Ivy was, as far as I can tell, a Californian Girl. I think that she grew up in Sacramento. I’ve not read anything about Ivy’s background or its influence on the band, but it could have had some bearing on their move to Glendale.
The city of Akron was more significant in the Cramps story. Lux and Ivy met in 1972, and then they moved together to Akron in 1974.
Akron is a medium sized city in Ohio. It has about 200,000 inhabitants. Akron is, or was, an industrial city – specializing in the manufacture of rubber. According to Lux, it’s the place ‘where you fall down on the sidewalk and bounce back up’. The band said in interviews that their music was best suited to places where there was heavy industry.
Akron has produced an impressive number of musicians, including Chrissie Hynde, Devo, Pere Ubu and the Black Keys.
I don’t think the Cramps were part of an ‘Akron scene’, though. My understanding is that they knew they wanted to form a band, but didn’t actually do so until they got to New York. However, Akron was a goldmine for record collecting – an important part of the Cramps’ lifestyle. Ivy said in an interview with ‘Guitar Player’ Magazine
What happened was that Lux and I were living in Ohio, just finding wild records. At the time, the only way you could find rockabilly was on the original 45s; there weren’t any reissues of it. We were finding some incredible records around the Akron area because a lot of people from the South had moved up North to work in the factories and dumped their records.
New York
The couple moved to New York in the mid 1970s. This was an obvious thing to do. The punk/new wave movement was just beginning. Artists such as Blondie, Television, Patti Smith, Suicide and the Ramones were starting out – often playing on the same bill at clubs such as CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City.
The Cramps didn’t necessarily have much in common with any of the other bands in that scene but New York was where new American music was being played, and finding a market.
Lux said that, at that time,
every place else had bands like Silverwind playing Rolling Stones hits
New York, on the other hand, had the ‘scene’ of mutually supportive acts
they were all in the audience when we were playing and then we were in the audience when they were playing
Memphis, Tennessee
But the Cramps first records weren’t made in New York. They made their first record, ‘Gravest Hits’, 900 miles away – in Memphis.
They rented Phillips Recording Studios – the studios owned and run by Sam Phillips. Phillips was the man who discovered and first recorded Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis among others. The Cramps themselves clearly relished meeting Phillips:
When we recorded at Phillips Records in Memphis, Sam Phillips came walking into the place, and that was a real amazing shock. He was covered with grease all over his hands. The hedges had grown up over the sign in the front, and he was out cutting them with electric hedge trimmers, and the thing just exploded all over him. So he was covered with grease, and we all grabbed him and we were shaking his hand, getting grease all over ourselves!
New York again
The Cramps remained resident in New York for a few more years, but grew increasingly dis-satisfied with it:
Most of our New York friends had moved away or OD’d. We never felt like we were part of that scene. I think they looked on us like we were a bunch of hicks. And they’re right – we weren’t a bunch of art students like most of them.
Their belief was that New York wasn’t a “rock and roll city”. The Cramps didn’t fit in:
That’s one thing we’re always accused of in New York, is being silly. It’s the reason no rockabilly ever made it in New York, y’know. For instance it’s the reason Elvis’s first five records never got played in New York. Always y’know Manhattan, it’s a great town its fun to be there but it’s also a very ‘cultural’ place that looks at anything from outside as being ridiculous and silly
Glendale
The Cramps re-located to Los Angeles, specifically to Glendale, in the early 1980s. Ian Johnston, author of ‘The Wild Wild Worlds of the Cramps’ wrote this:
In a sense Lux and Ivy were coming home to where they had always belonged: the B-culture capital of America
Ivy said that:
I think this place has much more to do with the Cramps than New York ever did. You can drive around in fast cars here. You can play tapes really loud.
The Cramps were also attracted by the climate and the car culture:
We just got a really great ’56 Dodge, and it’s easy to maintain a cool car in L.A. because it doesn’t snow. I think it’s important to stay in a certain mood when you play music. I actually hear music better in the car, too. When I listen to cassettes in the car, I hear things that I never hear when I listen at home. When you’re trapped in your car, you’re forced to listen to more detail. That’s my favorite way of listening to music. And L.A.’s just a great place to drive and listen to music. You can learn a lot doing that.
…and the history:
where we live is the place where Marilyn Monroe grew up and where the ‘Our Gang’ comedies came from and two blocks north of us is where Mickey Mouse was first drawn. It’s like a museum where we live, it really is and we’re crazy about that. The one thing I really love about England is its history
Lux and Ivy lived close to the Forest Lawns cemetery. The cemetery is the last resting place of many Hollywood stars including Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Errol Flynn, Spencer Tracy, Walt Disney and Nat King Cole
Ivy said:
“It’s unique, because the whole concept is that it’s for the living and not the dead. There’s music coming out of the trees. It’s great what you can find there”
Lux died of an aortic dissection in February 2009 in Glendale.
Footnotes
Source:
http://salisburyandstonehenge.net/streetnames/glendale-crescent-milford