Lux Interior is dead. You don’t know who he was, maybe, but you know the sounds he made with The Cramps, and you know the CBGB crowd he ran with.

It’s been shocking to most of the people I’ve talked to about Interior that he was an astounding 62 years old, hardly an age associated with transgressive psychobilly music, but there it is. Interior was born in October of 1946 into a bland and banal postwar world, and founded the Cramps in 1973. Interior and his lifelong companion Poison Ivy were the among the first to blend punk or pre-punk ideas with rockabilly, and created a sound more or less all their own.

The horrible and sad thing is this: Arguably the most significant and important generation of American rock musicians came through CBGB in the early-to-mid 1970s, and they were mostly 20 to 25 years old at the time, and with some outliers were therefore mostly born between 1945 and 1955. These people were born into prosperous postwar America, with radio shows and Ed Sullivan and Elvis, and somehow managed to create something entirely new. It was these bands — the Cramps, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, Misfits, Dead Boys, Television, the Ramones, New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, and others — that shaped a good chunk of what’s interesting in modern rock music, and it’s these bands that are growing older at an alarming rate.

Losing Dee Dee, in 2002, and Johnny, in 2004 — both born in 1951 — was the first shock, but we’re in for some more. These guys weren’t choirboys, and the elder statesmen in the group are closer to 70 than 60 (John Cale and Lou Reed, both born in 1942; Sterling Morrison, born the same year, got cancer and died young at 53).

Go listen to something loud, weird, and incomprehensible to your parents, since God knows that’s what Lux would want you to do, and it’s probably what the rest of the CBGB crowd would like, too. (Even if many of them are older than your parents; Mrs Heathen’s mom is younger than Debbie Harry or Lou Reed.)

(Has the great CBGB musical documentary been made yet? It’s probably not punk rock to want one, but I sure as hell do.)

(Lots more Cramps goodness at The Daily Swarm.)