
We Were There to Be There
In 1978, the punk band The Cramps played a free concert inside Napa State Mental Hospital, performing directly to patients rather than a paying audience. Grainy black-and-white footage of that show, including frontman Lux Interior climbing among the crowd and telling one dancing patient "you seem to be all right to me," anchors this documentary about how the gig came together and what it meant. Interviews trace the late-1970s San Francisco punk scene that produced the idea, with Columbia University's Lincoln Mitchell providing historical context on just how conservative the city still was at the time despite its counterculture reputation. The film treats the concert less as a stunt and more as a genuine collision between outsider music and institutionalized patients, asking who exactly was performing for whom. Archival photographs and firsthand accounts fill in details the surviving film reel does not show, reconstructing a night that has become one of punk's most repeated legends.