The Cramps inLA, circa 1981: (l-r) Kid Congo Powers, Poison Ivy, Lux Interior and Nick Knox
AARONRAPOPORT/CORBIS/GETTYIMAGES; PETERNOBLE/REDFERNS
KID Congo Powers was still just Brian Tristan the first time he picked up a guitar. A teenager from LA who’d run away to New York, he found himself crashing at the apartment of no-wave icon Lydia Lunch. One day she announced that she was going to play drums and wanted him to accompany her. “She just screamed at me to play guitar. I told her I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what I was doing or even why she was asking. But she kept screaming at me, ‘Just make it up!’ So I did. That was the best advice I could have gotten, and I still take that advice whenever something seems too daunting.”