Robert Crumb
Robert Crumb is an underground comic artist most widely known for his creative work in the late ‘60s throughout the ’70s. Growing up in a military family, R. Crumb began drawing comics with his older brother to escape this style of living. During the period of the 1930’s through the mid 1950’s, comics were a big part of the American youth culture and R. Crumb very much enjoyed reading and drawing them. After he finished high school, he left home and moved to Cleveland to start a new life. He obtained a job at a greeting card company and his professional artistic career was under way. While employed for a corporate style company, he also concentrated on his own work at home and his skills in drawing were improving. After experimenting with drugs – as a lot of people did in the mid ‘60s - R. Crumb picked up and moved to San Francisco to escape the corporate world. This was a magical time in the Bay Area as the artistic scene was thriving in many genres. R. Crumb began producing his own comics and presenting them to local shops. It didn’t take long to catch on and soon he had national attention. With classic pieces like Stoned Agin’, Keep on Truckin’ and Fritz the Cat, R. Crumb was now at the top of his craft. Even legendary Hall of Fame rock singer Janis Joplin asked to him design an album cover for her band. From pent-up feelings from his childhood, R. Crumb began to explore topics in his drawings that may have seemed questionable to some people. He always maintained that these were from his personal thoughts and weren’t meant as any signs of disrespect. Throughout his career, R. Crumb always tested new areas of exploration in his art. He did a series of drawings on musical icons and completed The Book of Genesis… a book that took him four years to create. He now resides with his wife Aline, and family in France. I recently spoke with him in depth about his career.
R.V.B. – Mr. Crumb… how are you today?
R.C. – I’m okay… you?
R.V.B. – I’m doing pretty good. What’s going on over in France these days?
R.C. – It’s pretty quiet over here in the village. It’s quiet in the winter time.
R.V.B. – People are behaving themselves?
R.C. – My friend Jean-Pierre Mercier, who used to work at the Angoulême comics center –which is a big deal in France -- They have a festival every year in January. This year Macron showed up. I guess he was checking it out to see if it was worth it to keep funding it. It’s funded by the French government. Jean-Pierre had to have lunch with him. He was not the head of the place but he was the guy with the most knowledge of how it works. He was a bureaucrat for 30 years at this place. He’s a big comics fan. He used to translate my work for French editions. He said Macron was extremely arrogant. He came there like he owned the place.
R.V.B. – I guess that’s what politicians do. Your wife is from the Five Towns Area. Did you ever visit there?
R.C. – Yeah… sure. Aline grew up in Woodmere, but in the 1970s and ‘80s, her mother was living in an apartment in Hewlett with her second husband. Aline and I would occasionally visit and stay with them there.
R.V.B. – My family was from the Cedarhurst area.
R.C. – Yeah, that’s part of the Five Towns.
R.V.B. – My parents are buried on Rockaway Blvd.
R.C. – Aline’s grandparents lived in Far Rockaway. They moved to Florida in the ‘70s. The house that they had in Far Rockaway was built in the 1920’s. Remember that plane crash on Long Island two months after 9/11? The plane hit the house that her grandparents had lived in.
R.V.B. – Wow… I remember that happening.
R.C. –Aline turned on the TV and there is Mayor Giuliani talking about this plane crash. He was standing there with flames and smoke billowing behind him. She saw the street sign and thought “Oh my God… That was my grandparent’s house.”
R.V.B. - That’s kind of freaky.
R.C. - Strange.
R.V.B. – Your childhood… did you have any fun?
R.C. – I spent my childhood mostly drawing comics. It wasn’t a fun childhood particularly.
R.V.B. - Did you play any sports?
R.C. – No I did not. I was a complete nerd… a wimp. I was afraid of sports. I hated gym class. There were always some boys that took team sports very seriously. When the team captains were choosing the kids, I was always the last one picked. Nobody wanted me on their team. I never played football. My father was a U.S. Marine… a tough guy. He had three sons and he wanted us to be tough like him. “You’re better off in the world if you’re tough.” He would force us to go out and play football. I was just too wimpy. I wore glasses and had bad eyesight. I was a sissy. I cried when I got hurt. I got beat up by a girl when I was in third grade. She broke my glasses and I was crying. I said “I’m gonna go home and tell my mommy.” After I said that, she and her friends all laughed at me. “Oh yeah, go home and tell your mommy,” they’d said, laughing.
R.V.B. – That had to be pretty humiliating.
R.C. – (Hahaha) When you’re a wimp like that as a kid, you get used to being humiliated. I was made fun of all the time… called ‘goggle-eyes’ and ‘four-eyes.’ You get used to it and eventually accept that role.
R.V.B. – When you started drawing comics, were there any artists that caught your eye to lead you to do this?
R.C. –I was born in 1943. I was a child during the golden age of comics. Comic books were a very important part of our childhood… at least for boys. I don’t know about girls. Some girls read Little Lulu. I read Little Lulu also. It was a great comic. It was one of the best comics – story wise – that was put out in the ‘40s and ‘50s. My brother Charles – who was a year and a half older than me – was totally obsessed with comics. He was really big on the Disney stuff… Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. He started drawing comics before I did. Because he was a very dominant person, I kind of followed his lead. I had to draw comics if I was to be considered a worthwhile human being by my older brother.
R.V.B. – (Hahaha)
R.C. – He was a visionary. He had a very powerful imagination. The comics that he drew were quite good. I was always trying to keep up with him. He was kind of tyrannical with me about it. I had to make sure that I put in some work on those comics every day after school.
R.V.B. – How did you get ideas for this?
R.C. – We’d come up with our own characters. We imitated the funny animal comics. We were not interested in Superheroes. It was all funny animal and humor comics -- Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Little Lulu, Mighty Mouse, Felix the Cat… stuff like that. We didn’t have any interest in Superman or Marvel comics.
R.V.B. – Did any of your school teachers know of this interest?
R.C. – If they did, they held it in total contempt. Comics were looked down upon by school teachers. They considered comics a very bad influence on children for a few reasons.
One is, they thought that it would discourage children from reading real books. Another thing is they considered some of the content very questionable for children -- violence… crime… horror. In the mid ‘50s, Senator Kefauver had hearings about comic books, whether they were abetting juvenile delinquency. (Hahaha) In order to avoid being regulated and censored by the government, the comic book industry instituted its own Code. The Comics Code Authority was an industry invention. It was mostly instigated by Archie comics. They had censors who would go through the original art and study it very closely. They would censor anything that they thought was too violent or that might be a bad influence on children. It killed the crime and horror comics market.
R.V.B. – The television cartoon comics were pretty violent.
R.C. – Not quite like the comic books. Before the mid ‘50s, comics had much more freedom from censorship than animated cartoons. Television became fierce competition for comic books. By the end of the ‘50s, the comic book industry was greatly reduced from what it had been. The golden age was definitely over. Then you had a “silver age” which came with the rise of Marvel comics. Superhero comics made a big comeback in the ‘60s, which didn’t interest me at all but a lot of people liked them. Now the film industry is completely capitalizing on the Superhero comics. It’s a major source of film revenue. I believe the Marvel studio is the biggest and most profitable studio in the world. They make action hero blockbuster movies for 18 to 25-year-old boys. (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – What kind of music caught your attention in your youth?
R.C. –I mostly heard music on the radio when I was a kid. We had a cheap record player. My mother would buy those little Golden Records for kids. My mother listened to pop music on the radio. Before rock and roll it was like: Frankie Laine, Eddie Fisher, Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Perry Como and Leroy Anderson. That crap was so dreary and depressing. I remember it from my childhood, being very depressing. When rock and roll first started with Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley, it was kind of refreshing. It had more life to it. Being a weirdo with Asperger’s, I had a yearning to hear the music that I heard in old Hal Roach comedies and cartoons from the early 30s, the beginnings of the first cartoons. The Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang comedies that were shown on kiddie TV shows in the early ‘50s. I was very attracted to the music in those old movies. Later, in my early teens, I started looking for music that sounded like that on record. By the time I was in my mid teens, I was obsessed with trying to find records of this music. I couldn’t find it on modern records. Then I discovered 78’s. My brother Charles and I were always going around looking for old comic books in second hand stores. Those places also had stacks of 78’s. I started finding the music I was looking for. The music was on these old 78’s from the ‘20s. Then I became an avid collector of 78’s. I still am to this day.
R.V.B. – Judging by what you were collecting, some of them are quite valuable. The early jazz and novelty stuff. Did you come across any treasures?
R.C. – Absolutely! I was living in Delaware at the time I started finding these old records. A lot of them, I didn’t know what they were. I only knew the famous ones like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Benny Goodman. A lot of them were buried in history, forgotten and ignored. I’d find records by people like Tiny Parham. Who is this Chic Scoggin? There was nothing written about them. The music was great! Blues singers like Joe Evans… who’s he? Who’s Salty Dog Sam? They were great.
R.V.B. – What a great way to explore the arts.
R.C. – I was completely on my own, before I started to connect up with people who had more sophisticated and informed backgrounds – who were college educated – and had more knowledge than me. They had access to obscure magazines like the Record Changer that had some of this information. It was written for specialist collectors. I was in total isolation when I started with this.
R.V.B. – You’re getting some knowledge with music and you are someone who can draw things. How did you feel about your position at the end of high school… in the big scheme of things?
R.C. – I became increasingly serious about my artistic skills, in the 16 to 18-year-old period. I became so intensely preoccupied with that. That was basically my life… drawing and collecting old comics and records. I started fooling around playing music but it was mostly about drawing. As far as prospects in the world, I had no idea what I was going to do. It was 1961 and the comic book industry was dying. I had no idea what I was going to do, and I was deeply depressed. I was profoundly depressed and alienated. It was bad at home. My parents were always fighting.
R.V.B. – So you decided to pick up and get away from home. How did you feel when you moved out of your parent’s house and went to Cleveland?
R.C. – I remember the day very well. I took the bus to Cleveland and my heart was pounding with anxiety and anticipation about what was going to happen to me. I had no prospects. I went to Cleveland because I got invited by my friend Marty Pahls. He was college educated and much more sophisticated than I was. He had just graduated from Kent State University. I shared an apartment with him in Cleveland. We had been corresponding for years. He’d come to visit me in Delaware a couple of times. I moved in with him in the fall of 1962 and started looking for a job right away.
R.V.B. - What was Cleveland like back then?
R.C. – It was like a lot of American cities. It wasn’t quite rust belt yet. There was still some steel industry going. It was a big industrial hard ass town, divided into ethnic enclaves. On the east side – close to downtown – you had the black district. The west side was all redneck. Further east was the Jewish section… Cleveland Heights. The southeast side was Polish, Lithuanian and other eastern Europeans. They all worked in these industries. There were a lot of small places making machine parts.
R.V.B. – So here you are in a typical American industrial city.
R.C. – Yeah… like Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, all similar. There were a lot of these towns in Ohio. Youngstown and Akron were industrial cities.
R.V.B. – The air must have been terrible.
R.C. – (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – How did you go about getting a job there?
R.C. – First I applied for jobs at big department stores… being a stock clerk or whatever. I had no prospects. I wasn’t even thinking about getting a job with my art skills or what was I going to do with my art. Ohio had a state employment agency at that time, paid for by the taxpayers. It was a great thing. I went there and got assigned to a counsellor. I went to his cubicle. He was an old guy. He said “What are your skills… what can you do?” (Hahaha) I said “I can’t do much of anything. I draw and do some artwork.” “Did you bring any samples? Can I see what you do?” I didn’t think to bring any samples of my artwork. “Why didn’t you bring your samples??? We have a big greeting card company here in Cleveland and they hire young artists. They have a big art department. They usually want an art school graduate. Did you go to art school?” I said “No.” He said “Let me give them a call. I’ll call the personnel department.” So he calls them up (haha) and says to the personnel guy, “You’ve gotta see this kid’s work… he’s loaded with talent!” He was completely making it up. I was flabbergasted.
R.V.B. – (Hahaha)
R.C. – He got me an interview. He said “When you go to this interview, make sure you bring some of your samples.” (Hahaha) The interview was for the next week. I spent the next few days frantically making samples that I thought were typical commercial art. I made fake album covers... I made some lettering. I tried to use as much media as I knew how to use at the time. I was only crudely beginning to work in professional mediums.
R.V.B. – Were you mostly pen and ink?
R.C. – Pen and ink, and watercolor. So I took these samples and, lo and behold, they hired me. What I didn’t know was that I was being hired to do color separation. I wasn’t hired to do finished art. For nine months I did color separation, which was really grueling and highly technical work. It was the hardest I ever worked in my life. They would give you the original art by the artist. It could be a floral arrangement or a cute little puppy dog. It was just terrible artwork. You had to analyze the color values of the original, and, using overlays and airbrushes, and break it down to shades of gray, for the four-color printing process and do four grey-toned overlays… one each for red, blue, yellow and black. It would take me a week to do one card design that an artist had maybe taken an hour to make originally, a dashed off watercolor of a cute little puppy dog. (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – So you did that for almost a year?
R.C. – I was about ready to quit. Then these guys from a department that did humorous cards called “Hi-brow” noticed that all around my light table, I had doodled little cartoons. They hired me to draw humorous cards in the “Hi-brow” studio. Suddenly, I got a big raise, and the work was a hundred times easier. In the color separation department they had about a hundred artists sitting in little partitions. Many were displaced persons from Eastern Europe,who had come over after the war… to get away from the chaos of Europe. These people were highly skilled artisans who could make beautiful curly-q designs that they had done in Europe on documents. They ended up working in Cleveland in the greeting card business. They were grateful and happy to be in America. (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – Did you take in what these people were doing and adjust your style at all?
R.C. – Ah, no. I couldn’t do the stuff that they did. It was so far beyond me… the skills that these guys had. It’s like my great grandfather on my mother’s side -- who worked at the US Mint in Washington – making engravings for dollar bills or official government documents. It took a very advanced level of skill to do that work. It was so far beyond me… I couldn’t even conceive of it. All the time I was working at the American Greeting Card Company, I was still doing my own stuff at home. I was working on cartoons and comics. I did this book that got published later called “Oggie and the Beanstalk.” It’s based on the Jack and the Beanstalk story. I would get up at 5:30 in the morning and work on it before I went to work at the greeting card mill. I was so driven back then.
R.V.B. – Did you try and market your other work?
R.C. – I couldn’t market myself. All I knew how to do was draw. Then in 1964, I met Dana – my first wife; we got married and I gave “Oggie and the Beanstalk” to her as a present. I had just spent nine months working on it. After I became well known in the late ‘60s, she found someone to publish it. Otherwise it was just languishing… it wasn’t going anywhere.
R.V.B. – So you’re a young adult at this point – working for a living – did you go to night clubs and hang out?
R.C. – Marty and I lived in this neighborhood of Cleveland, which was between the black section and the university… Western Reserve University. It was like a mix of hip beatnik college students - Harvey Pekar lived right there – and there were some young black intellectual guys who were seriously into progressive jazz. I hung around with those people. Marty Pahls knew them. We met Harvey Pekar there and he was into progressive jazz. There were other guys we knew who were into that music. We would go to some of the houses of the guys who lived in the black neighborhood and listen to this music. Progressive jazz didn’t interest me very much. It didn’t move me… I was into the jazz of the ‘20s. But it was an interesting scene. Once in a while we would go to these black clubs on Euclid Avenue. We would hear the latest jumped up music that they were playing. There was also these proto hippy coffee houses where they would play folk music. That also didn’t interest me very much. I wasn’t particularly interested in Joan Baez or Buffy Saint Marie… or any of that Bob Dylan type stuff.
R.V.B. – They rammed it down our throats in school.
R.C. – (Hahaha) Really? How old are you?
R.V.B. – I’m 61. Everything was Buffy Saint Marie in elementary school… it was part of the curriculum.
R.C. – Oh my God… (Hahaha) I actually still liked some of the rock and roll of that period. I still listened to that sometimes on the radio. I liked The Four Seasons and Dion… stuff like that.
R.V.B. – The Four Seasons were a very good vocal group. Dion is still going strong.
R.C. – Yes… I would tune into radio stations that played stuff like that – basically top forty radio.
R.V.B. – How did you get exposed to drugs?
R.C. – Drugs… well in the proto-hippy culture, it’s strange. It seems as soon as I got involved with – mostly Jewish kids from Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights – they were into drugs, some of them were even into heroin. I knew a couple of 21, 22-year-old heroin addicts there. People were starting to smoke pot. Then in ’65, some friends of ours gave us some LSD. Me and Dana first took LSD in June of 1965. I think we took it on a Saturday. I had to go back to work on Monday. I was so blown away by the LSD. I went into work and the whole culture seemed like a cardboard sham to me. It just seemed so false. I was speechless. I couldn’t talk about it to anyone. I had no way to articulate it or characterize it. My co-workers there said “Are you okay… are you sick or something???” Everyone was just staring at me. I’d had my “Road to Damascus” experience. I got knocked off my horse by some mystic religious experience or something. It was a very, very powerful experience.
R.V.B. – Were you in any particular location when you took this?
R.C. –Me and Dana were in our bed when we took it… at our apartment. It lasted like eight hours.
R.V.B. – How did that experience change your artwork?
R.C. – LSD was still legal when we took it in ’65. It came from a psychiatrist. It was the good stuff from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. It was the best LSD. It was quickly outlawed in ’66. After that, whatever you got that was called LSD was highly dubious. You didn’t know what the hell you were getting after that. It was a shame they did that… it was stupid. The influence on my artwork??? It had a huge influence right away… immediately… a huge influence. I have sketch books in which I can trace exactly where I started taking LSD.
R.V.B. – You got a little more abstract… I presume.
R.C. - No… just kind of more - I don’t know - actually more imaginative, more visionary.
R.V.B. – So it helped matters?
R.C. – It opened up huge areas of my imagination. Before that, they were kind of shut down. By reality of life in America… life on planet Earth… I don’t know.
R.V.B. - Did the people at the greeting card company notice a change in your artwork?
R.C. – No… but I finally started talking about LSD. This was like ’65-’66, so there was a lot of fermentation going on in the culture of the youth. Some of these younger artists and other people at the greeting card company also started taking LSD. Everything shifted and changed very quickly in that time period. In the mid ‘60s, things were really changing fast.
R.V.B. – It was an interesting time period.
R.C. – There was a cultural revolution in the United States.
R.V.B. – What a time for you to go to California.
R.C. – I ran away in January in ’67. “I can’t take this anymore. I can’t take this married life… going to this greeting card company every day.” I met a couple of guys I knew in a bar and they said they were going to San Francisco. I was just coming home from work and I stopped at this bar. I asked if I could go with them. They said “Yeah… come along.” I just went with them. I didn’t go home. I didn’t take any of my clothes. All I had was my sketchbook and about $15 in my pocket. (Hahaha) I was around 22.
R.V.B. – Here comes the adventure. Off to – it wasn’t named at the time – “The summer of love.” What did you think about the scene in San Francisco when you arrived?
R.C. – My first reaction was that San Francisco as a city, seemed so nice and so sweet and gentle, compared to Cleveland… and other cities that I had experienced. I had spent time in Chicago… I spent time in Detroit… Philadelphia… where I grew up. I spent time in New York. I spent nine months trying to make it there… it was awful. I couldn’t cut it in New York. Harvey Kurtzman – the guy who started Mad magazine – he had a magazine going called “Help.” I had contributed some cartoons to it. His assistant editor Terry Gilliam was quitting and moving to England. Kurtzman invited me to come and take Gilliam’s place. I was very excited to do this because Kurtzman was my hero. I moved to New York with Dana. We got an apartment. I reported to the magazine “Help” on Monday morning. There was Kurtzman looking forlorn, leaning against the wall outside the office and guys were taking the furniture out. I said “What’s going on?” He said “Oh, the publisher decided to fold the magazine. Don’t worry, I’ll find you work.” He felt guilty towards me. I ended up doing artwork for Topps Bubble Gum Company in Brooklyn.
R.V.B. – What did you do for them?
R.C. – I did cards and promotional advertising for them. It was like the greeting card company. It was a big company with heartless owners. They paid shit wages. They had an art department there. They sold millions and millions of units of gum cards, baseball cards. I got to San Francisco - in January of 67 -with nothing. I had no prospects… nothing. I was in escape mode… running away. So I get there and these two guys I was with knew some guys that lived in North Beach. This hipster guy said we could stay at his place. We go to his place and he had this like, tiny apartment. We were just crashing out on the floor. After the third day I could see this guy - who just came home from work - look at us on the floor with utter disgust. I thought to myself, “I’m not staying here.” He said “You guys should go check out this new neighborhood Haight-Ashbury. That’s where the scene is happening. It’s not happening in North Beach anymore.” North beach had gotten too expensive. I walked over to Haight-Ashbury that very day. I’m not going back to this guys apartment. I went in this place called “The Psychedelic Shop.” There was all these kids kind of sitting on the floor along the wall in there. I just sat down with these other kids. I thought “What the fuck am I gonna do now? I got no prospects… I don’t know anybody here.” Then a guy walks in who I knew from Cleveland. He was a Jewish kid from Shaker Heights, Jeffrey Kessler. He said, “Crumb??? What are you doing here?” “I just got into town,” I told him. He invited me to come and stay at his house. I stayed with him for three weeks. I re-contacted American Greeting and told them what had happened. They said “We’ll give you freelance work.” They liked my work enough to forgive me for running off without even giving notice. (Hahaha) So they sent me freelance work. They would send me card jokes and I would do the illustrations for them. I never actually wrote any of the cards for the greeting card company. I called my wife Dana out of guilt. I felt very guilty for deserting her. She forgave me and came out. We rented an apartment and got settled in San Francisco. She was eternally forgiving me.
R.V.B. – It was a magical time period in San Francisco. Did you go to the Fillmore? Did you continue to experiment with drugs?
R.C. – I did all of that. I went to the Fillmore… I went to the Avalon. I really didn’t care for the music very much. Psychedelic rock music did not interest me at all. I was still hooked on the old music of the ‘20s… jazz and blues. Everybody was listening to the Beatles all the time. We used to get stoned and listen to the Sgt. Pepper album and look for psychedelic clues.
R.V.B. – Who did you see at the ballrooms?
R.C. – I saw them all… Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead… all that crap. It sounded all very boring to me. It’s bad music. I thought Janis Joplin was an extremely talented singer. She had a fabulous hillbilly shouting voice. Her band was farshtunken. I didn’t think they were very good.
R.V.B. – They had a hard time staying in tune.
R.C. - They did. I didn’t care for that psychedelic rock.
R.V.B. – How did you get the gig to do the Janis Joplin album cover?
R.C. – Janis liked the comics. Shortly after the comics first began coming out in 68, she started coming around. She would hang out and smoke pot at my place. I went to her place once or twice. Her place was too crazy. There were too many crazy people hanging around… too chaotic for me. One day she and the drummer David Getz came over and said “We need this cover for our album right away. Columbia/CBS did this cover with a photograph of us and we hate it. We need a new cover right away! Can you do it?” They offered me $600. I needed the money. I pulled an all-nighter. I took some speed and stayed up all night and got it done. They came the next day and I gave it to them.
R.V.B. – Were you self-promoting your own work on the streets at this time?
R.C. –Yeah, by that time I was. The comics had come out. We would take them to the shops on Haight Street and on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Sometimes we would just sell them on the street. At first, the shops balked at them. “What is this comic books??? We don’t sell comic books here.” It looked like a comic book. It didn’t look like a psychedelic magazine or newspaper. Zap 0… Zap #1. At some point they began to accept it and whattaya know, it sold. Then a “real” publisher got involved. The Print Mint, in Berkeley, said they would take care of all the printing and distribution. “All you have to worry about is the artwork.” That was nice. The first Zap Comix that we did in early ’68 was published by a friend of mine, Don Donahue. We had to collate, fold and staple every copy.(Hahaha)
R.V.B. – You’ve got to start somewhere so you’re starting in the garage.
R.C. – Yeah! But before that I had been doing comics for some psychedelic and hippy newspapers like “The East Village Other” and people liked them. There was a paper in Philadelphia called “Yarrowstalks.” The editor said, “People like your comics so much, why don’t you just do a whole comic and I’ll publish it?” I said “Wow! Great… okay.” I was thrilled. In the fall of ‘67, I set to work on Zap comics. I sent the guy – stupidly – the entire original art for the first issue, and I never heard from him again. I kept calling them up and asking, “What happened to Brian Zahn? He was going to publish my Zap Comix. They said “Oh man, he went to India.” “Where’s my artwork?” “I think he took it with him.” Fortunately I had made Xerox copies. The whole first printing was done from Xerox copies. Every printing since then has been done from these Xerox copies.
R.V.B. - Can you describe your studio in San Francisco?
R.C. – What studio? I made these comics on a table in the back room of my apartment. You don’t need a studio to draw that stuff. All you need is a desk.
R.V.B. – Did anything give you inspiration to come up with ideas?
R.C. – Mostly LSD, at that time. Of course the hippy environment was an inspiration. My past and childhood inspired certain things.
R.V.B. – You took some chances with your artwork. You touched on some subjects that were maybe not accepted by mainstream people. We’re you doing this just to be different?
R.C. – There’s a couple of reasons. One is comic books had always been a mainstream media for children. Their self censorship was quite strong. In the mid to late ‘60s, the sexual revolution was going on. All morals… all taboos… everything was up for grabs. In the hippy culture, everything was being tested… everything! “What is morality? We were all brought up with religious morality and bourgeois morality. “Is that the real morality? Is that what’s really right and really wrong?” It was all subject to question. I knew people who experimented in crazy ways with sexuality… every possible thing. After the first issue of Zap Comix came out, I met S. Clay Wilson. He was another artist about my age. His stuff was so anarchistic and crazy. Nothing was taboo in his comics. That inspired me to cut through any inhibition that’s in your mind, subconscious, swirling around your brain, and just let it out. Some people didn’t like it… even in the hippy community. It was violent and sexually pornographic. That created some hostility, even among the hippies.
R.V.B. – You’re going to have some people who like it also.
R.C. – Some people liked it and some found it objectionable. My sexual thing was highly personal. I was not interested in pandering to sexual tastes like pornography does. I was just expressing my own sexual zeitgeist. It was full of weird, twisted attitudes towards women. It was my own personal thing. A lot of people find that very disturbing. It’s kind of divided. There’re the people who find it kind of funny… kind of personal self expression, and those who find it repulsive, and disgusting, and awful. Critics and reviewers are divided down the middle. Even when the Crumb film came out in the ‘90s, Terry Zwigoff – who was my friend and made the film – was actually very sympathetic. Others were divided. “This is a great document of a personal artist’s struggle. How he deals with his inner demons.” Other’s would say the movie was about a disgusting pervert and his weirdo pervert family. (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – Here’s a rhetorical question. Do you think God made women too beautiful or just made men with a defect, with a lust for women?
R.C. – It’s always been about pro-creation. Why are bees attracted to flowers??? To pollinate flowers. Beauty is completely in the eye of the beholder. When I was young, I was so dazzled by the beauty of women, I was speechless in front of any woman I thought was beautiful. Especially if she was built a certain way that excited me. I was utterly tongue-tied. I had no way to talk. I used to marvel at guys who could talk up women… chat them up. Like my friend Marty Pahls, who I lived with in Cleveland. When I was still a virgin, he would say,“Let’s go to the art museum and pick up some girls.” I would say “What?” I tried to do it once with him and he chatted up some girl who was looking at a painting. It was kind of amazing to watch. The phenomenal gift of gab he had with women. I certainly couldn’t do it. I stopped going with him after that. It was too devastating for me to witness his skill at picking up girls. He was very successful. He was kind of good looking too-- that helped – and he was cocky, sure of himself. I was an extremely awkward geek. I could barely dress myself… tripping over my own foot. I didn’t have that much success with women until after I got well known in the hippy culture… with the comics. Then everything changed overnight… overnight with women… because of the notoriety, the fame thing. They weren’t particularly interested in the work, but they were really fascinated by the fame. (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – They’re drawn to that as well as talent.
R.C. – It’s an aphrodisiac. The fame… they didn’t so much care about the talent. They barely even looked at my work. I had this girlfriend in ‘69 who I was introduced to by this other woman, who was kind of in the comic scene – This young woman was so stacked and beautiful. She had a beautiful face and body… a magnificent creature. I got involved with her - and had hot sex with her– the whole gamut. She actually liked me. I just couldn’t believe this was happening to me. Suddenly it’s like you’re getting the cheerleader in high school as a girlfriend. One day she’s staring at me – looking me up and down. She said “What is it that makes you this cool guy in the hippy scene?” I laughed and said “I don’t know!!!”(Haha)
R.V.B. – (Hahaha)
R.C. – She couldn’t figure it out. She was baffled because I just didn’t look the part. I wasn’t cool. I didn’t dress cool. I didn’t like the music. I was just an out of it, weird character but she liked me for some strange reason.
R.V.B. – How did you meet Aline?
R.C. – Through my friends Spain and Kim Dietch. She had been living in Tucson. People kept telling me “You gotta meet Aline. She’s really just your type… a very voluptuous Jewish girl. She looks just like one of your drawings. So they brought her to a party. I was at a party at my girlfriend Kathy’s house. It was November of ‘71. I remember the moment I first saw her… flanked by Spain on one side and Dominic on the other. (Hahaha) We made out that night up in my girlfriends bedroom. She was downstairs partying with the other guests. Guess that wasn’t very considerate of me. Selfish selfish!
R.V.B. – It’s kind of strange that she resembled one of your cartoon characters and even shared the name.
R.C. – Honeybunch Kaminski… right. She looked like this type of hippy Jewish girl I’d been drawing in my comics. Lenore Goldberg or Gail Steinberger.
R.V.B. – I understand that she’s an artist as well. Did you trade ideas with her?
R.C. – We didn’t trade ideas so much because she had her own thing. She was just starting to draw comics. She had this very crude style. She didn’t grow up reading comics or drawing cartoons. She had gone to art school and was fooling around with art… trying to be a painter. A lot of underground cartoonists start that way. They try to be artists in the fine art scene.Aline found it very unsatisfying. She was a great storyteller. She started making funny personal comics about herself. She was like the first woman artist to ever do that… to make totally personal comics about herself. She quickly got involved in this women’s comic scene at that time, which was just starting up in San Francisco. It was kind of run by this woman, Trina Robbins. Her idea was to make feminist heroic models. She and these other women artists made comics with women as heroes… strong, fighting, resisting, don’t take any shit from men. Aline’s contributions were self-deprecating stories about herself… her own neurosis and her attitudes towards men. And they were funny. I got involved with her just as she was starting to do that. I gave her a lot of encouragement because I thought her comics were funny. The fact that they’re crudely drawn didn’t matter because the humor was there. She was savvy enough to make them readable. The problem with a lot of underground comics – especially at that time – is that they were indecipherable. They were so stoned that they couldn’t make the comics coherent and readable.
R.V.B. - Do you feel that your comics were readable?
R.C. – Yeah, they were because I’d been steeped in comics from an early age. I learned the fundamentals before I was like 13. I understood the fundamentals of storytelling… readability, coherence, humor, and all that stuff. My adolescence was spent on paper.
R.V.B. – Was there any kind of story behind “Stoned Agin?” What inspired you to do that piece?”
R.C. – Smoking too much pot basically inspired that. (Hahaha) In the initial stage of smoking pot, everything seems funny -and you’re bathed in this warm yellow glow - you have insights into life. But if you keep doing it persistently, every day… which I did because I lived in this environment where that’s what everybody did… every fucking day they lit up their joints or their pipes. I just went along with it until I finally stopped going along with it. That was in ‘74 or ‘75. By the time I drew that cartoon, I’d already been jaded on pot. It affected you by putting you into this very passive state. With smoking weed, you just sit there, you just go passive. You melt away.
R.V.B. – (Hahaha)
R.C. – (Haha) All of your motivation to do anything, follow any train of thought, just drifts away. After I stopped smoking, I had dreams for like 20 years that I was stoned again. The dream was always unpleasant. It was always like “Upp… here I am stoned again. Forget about getting anything done.” It was an inhibiting factor… getting stoned. “Here I am stoned… shit, forget about doing anything.” For 20 years I had dreams like that.
R.V.B. – Do you feel that while you were on drugs, you had a prolific output, or it could have been even more?
R.C. – I was prolific because I had this momentum going. By the early ‘70s there were all these little underground comic companies coming up. There was like five of them in San Francisco and many others around the country. They all wanted me to do work for them because my stuff sold well. My stuff was among the more readable and humorous comics, and they were very popular with college students in the early ’70s. I would stay up all night drawing comics and then during the day, deal with all the hippies that were hanging around the place. I could hardly get anything done during the day. I would work at night, sleep late, and crank out comics. I’m not sure they were all that great because I was just really churning them out. And also, getting stoned all the time meant that your story telling ability was impaired. So I don’t know about those comics. Then it all ground to a halt in the mid ‘70s. I burned myself out… all the pressure from everybody. Then there were the lawsuits over Keep on Truckin’. The mid ‘70s was a very confusing period. I contemplated stopping drawing comics all together. Things were getting too complicated for me.
R.V.B. – Did you expect the popularity and the notoriety of the Keep on Truckin’ piece?
R.C. – I had no idea… How could you predict something like that? I Just drew it and it caught on, and it was huge. People were taking the “Keep on Truckin’” cartoon and putting out all kinds of merchandise without paying anything. Then I got involved with this lawyer Albert Morris, who proposed to start suing these people and collecting the money. It became a horrible tangle because as I found out later, he was demanding way too much money - unreasonable amounts of money from these people – to use the Keep on Truckin’ thing. It became just a big legal nightmare. A fucking nightmare!!! which ended in a trial. I had to be a witness at this hearing and the judge declared that Keep on Truckin’ was in public domain. (Haha)
R.V.B. – That’s unbelievable.
R.C. – Later on they changed that decision.
R.V.B. – So now you have control over the merchandise?
R.C. – I gave up trying to control Keep on Truckin’. As you might know now, there’s like Keep on Trumping’ images all over the place… using my drawing. They basically put Trumps blonde hair on them. People say “You should sue them and tell them to cease and desist. You don’t want yourself to be aligned with those people.” I’m not gonna bother. I don’t want to fight with them… fuck it. I’ve allowed Keep on Truckin’ to go into public domain. Anyone who wants to use it… I don’t care. I JUST DON”T CARE!!! (Hahaha)
R.V.B. - Now the Keep on Truckin’ drawings were basically just another character that just happened to come out of you?
R.C. – It started with - in the psychedelic era. I just drew these guys truckin’ – taken from these 1930s cartoons and movies. You see, in movies from 1936-’37, there’re people truckin’ in those movies. (Hahaha) It was a popular dance in that period. So I just made these cartoon characters and used that phrase. It just caught on so hugely when it was published in Zap comics. It was amazing.
R.V.B. - How did the notoriety of your success change you?
R.C. – The biggest change was in my relations with women. Suddenly I had access to attractive women that I never had before. I didn’t have to be clever… I didn’t have to look cool… I didn’t have to do anything… there were attractive women available. So I just spent a huge amount of time chasing women. I didn’t care about money… I didn’t care about anything else. The access to women really turned my head about the whole thing. Then I had to deal with all these hustlers and business people who wanted to sign me up for exclusive contracts, stuff like that. People wanted me to draw for them. They wanted me to draw their ideas and their projects. That’s just never stopped… it’s just endless.
R.V.B. – Once the experimenting and the drug thing stopped, did you settle down? Did your life change?
R.C. – Yeah sure. I settled down with Aline. She was a crazy wild hippy when she was young but she turned out to be a tough and sensible woman who helped me to establish a household in which you could actually have an orderly existence… it wasn’t chaos. There wasn’t a daily crisis like there had been before. It was a workable home environment. It worked so well that we decided in 1980 to have a child. We had our daughter Sophie in 81. In that environment with Aline, I was actually able to do regular work. Things were just less crazy. There was also the decline of the whole hippy culture in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It left a lot of people in a state of confusion. “What are we supposed to do?” A lot of people went back to school and got into the money culture… the rise of the yuppies, the resurgence of the obsession with money. I witnessed that happen in the Reagan era. In my view, the ‘80s was a pretty awful decade in the United States. The Reagan period! Things were closing up again. There was a big anti-pornography movement. The Aids thing came along. It shut down the openness of the ’70s. The ‘70s was very wide open. The sexual revolution was wacky.
R.V.B. – Did the fads of the disco era… the new wave era… or punk music change your attitude in your comics at all?
R.C. – Nah… Not really… I was kind of fascinated by some of the punk attitudes and graphics. It did influence my work to a very small degree. The punk movement was very anti-hippy. The hippies were seen as stupid, soft headed, peacenik’ nonsense. Punk was more hard-ass… a surface element of being a hard ass.
R.V.B. – You’ve done some drawings for the music business, such as the blues and jazz artists. Was that gratifying for you to draw your Heroes?
R.C. – It was… yeah! It was basically my ode to those guys… paying homage to the musicians that I liked. And also, kind of evangelizing for them, turning the world on to those musicians.
R.V.B. – It was quite the time period. These record companies took chances to record these blues and jazz artists.
R.C. – Yeah. Back in the ‘20s and ‘30s they did take chances. Their business model was, if they record 50 obscure blues musicians, maybe a couple of them will have hits, and they’ll make some money. And it kind of worked. The depression more or less killed that experimentation. A lot of small record companies went under. And radio came along and killed the record business for a while. Records came back as an adjunct to radio, in the late ‘30s. Rather than fighting radio they became an adjunct to it.
R.V.B. – You dabbled with music a little, here and there.
R.C. – Well, I was not much of a musician really. I liked the old music and I played in a simple strumming style on ukulele. After some years I graduated to banjo and mandolin, just playing old time music. Me and my friends put out some records, calling ourselves “The Cheap Suit Serenaders.” We performed around and did a couple of tours. There was no money in it. I was barely scraping by in those days. A couple of guys in that band had high hopes of it turning into something that they could actually make a living from. It never really got to that point. The music was too obscure… We were an oddity. We used to play at coffee houses and small clubs. We had a modest following in the Bay Area.
R.V.B. – You guys were kinda like The New Lost City Ramblers?”
R.C. – Yeah but not quite as “folknik” as that. They were much more strict about their repertoire than we were. We were more eclectic. We also had a little more humor than they did, maybe. We did funny stuff and had funny patter in our performances.
R.V.B. – Give me an example of some of the music artists that you liked in the Classical area, jazz area and the rock area?
R.C. – I’m pretty indifferent to classical music. I kinda liked the baroque period of classical music. I don’t know a lot about it. I was so focused on the American popular music of the ‘20s and ‘30s, starting from the ragtime area and going up through jazz/blues and country music. From the 78’s, I got interested in ethnic music. Irish music… Polish music… Mexican music… Greek music… and stuff like that. I like some rock and roll from the ‘50s and early ‘60s. I like “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James and the Shondells” from 1963.
R.V.B. – Later on in your career you came out with “The Book of Genesis.” Did you think that it was going to ruffle some feathers?
R.C. – It was 2009… when that came out. I wasn’t sure if it was going to ruffle feathers. As I say in the introduction, I did it as a straight illustration job.– I tried to interpret the text as accurately as possible, according to my knowledge and understanding. I did a lot of research to make sure I got the best comprehension and understanding of the text, including looking at several Jewish sources. The Jewish Publication Society of the Torah, which is the standard version that most Jewish people are familiar with. That book is full of explanation and interpretation, book by book, of the Torah, the five books of Moses. I studied that very closely. I had other translations and books explaining stuff. There’s a lot of argument about what the words mean in Genesis, in the Torah. In the original language, which is old Hebrew, scholars argue endlessly about what the words mean.
R.V.B. – it sounds like a pretty big task. How long did it take you to complete that?
R.C. – Four years. The inking took the longest. No one will ever know how much work went into it.
R.V.B. – How did you end up in France?
R.C. – It was mostly Aline’s motivation. We started coming over to Europe for comics reasons… cultural events. Aline just liked France so much that she began promoting moving here… getting out of America… like I was saying about the ‘80s. She says, “I got tired of hearing you bitching and complaining about America all the time.” She basically engineered the entire thing.
R.V.B. – What do you have going on these days… what’s your current projects?
R.C. – I’m just dealing with my health and trying to limit rapid deterioration into old age. (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – You’re getting up there now… right?
R.C. – Yeah I’m 76.
R.V.B. – Are you feeling okay? Are you getting around?
R.C. – I get around okay. I feel sort of okay. With old age, there’s a lot of aches and pains. After sitting for a while you’re really stiff. You have to take a lot of naps. You just don’t have as much energy to do stuff, so I don’t get a lot done. I haven’t done any comics for a really long time. I do commissions and do drawings for people. I’ll do an occasional book cover or CD cover. Are you aware of this band in New York called “The East River String Band?”
R.V.B. – I think so.
R.C. – I’ve done covers for them. I actually play with them sometimes when I’m in New York. The guy is a record collector like me and likes the same kind of music.
R.V.B. – What are you proudest of with your accomplishments and your place in the arts?
R.C. – What am I proud of? (Hahaha) That’s a hard question to answer… I don’t know. I look at my work and sometimes I’m pleased with it and sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I think it’s really stupid and sometimes I look at it and say “Hey… that’s pretty good.” Any artist takes pride in accomplishments of their chosen craft. I always aspired to reach a level of quality in my work. I feel like I achieved that to some degree. It’s never perfect of course. I can’t stand to have any of my artwork on the wall. If I had to look at it every day I would just get so critical of it, I’d tear it up. I don’t put any of my own artwork on the walls in my house. I have drawings by my grandkids on the wall. I have paintings by friends of mine, by Aline, by my brother Max, and by Pete Poplaski.
R.V.B. – Your daughter is in the field also.
R.C. – Yeah… she’s a really talented artist and also a very talented musician. She plays guitar and piano. Now Sophie has three kids, so she mostly has to deal with her kids.
R.V.B. – I enjoyed the song that was in your documentary that you and your wife were playing.
R.C. – That was the documentary made in 1985 by the BBC. 35 years ago! Can you believe that?? She doesn’t play so much with me anymore. She can play good rhythm guitar.
R.V.B. – Thank you for all of the in-depth answers… I appreciate it. Have a nice rest of your day.
R.C. – You too… bye.
Interview conducted by Robert von Bernewitz
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