At least, they're honest: On the back cover of this two-CD retrospective is a small banner that reads: "Cramps fiends only!" How To Make a Monster features one disc of demos and one of early live performances. The demos are lo-fi recordings of their first songs, recorded with a revolving cast of musicians around vocalist Lux Interior and guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach. Only diehard fans will want crude recordings of already-crude Cramps originals and covers-- not many people need four versions of "Rumble Blues". These early recordings are a blueprint for the Cramps' sound, but Interior is a long way from finding his manic persona, sounding detached and mumbly through many of them.

The liner notes-- written by Lux and Ivy themselves-- are full of record-geek comparisons like "Carl Perkins meets the Shadows of Knight" or "Link Wray meets Dwight Pullens." The booklet essay describes trips to various records stores as much as the actual recording process. That's appropriate for a band who purposefully inspired punk's embrace of rockabilly-- their amalgamation of 1950s pop culture and obscure vintage rock was the careful and calculated construct of two crate-digging scenesters.

The second disc, comprised of two live sets-- one each from 1977 and 1978-- is more worthwhile, although there's a world of difference between the two shows. The first is the group's third-ever performance, a set at Max's Kansas City that sees the struggling band playing a handful of tunes to a cold and sometimes heckling audience. The longer second set, recorded at CBGB in '78, is a huge leap in sound quality, in the Cramps' confidence, and in crowd reaction. Lux Interior comes into his own as a frontman here, taunting and baiting the audience between songs, who respond with near-unbelievable squealing throughout opener "The Way I Walk" and songs like "I Was a Teenage Werewolf " and "Love Me" (which sunk like a cannonball in water in the earlier set). In one short year, the band apparently got a grip on their distinctive mix of garage rock, rockabilly, and crude humor-- and crowds were apparently taking notice.