Interview: Robert Crumb

December 5, 2013

By Garth Cartwright

Robert Crumb opens the door to his medieval chateau in a village somewhere in the south
west of France and says – as Americans tend to – “Hey, nice to meet you.” He extends a long,
thin hand on a long thin arm and we shake. A droll look crosses his somewhat gaunt features,
suggesting this most private yet public of artists is perhaps a tad ironic in his welcome. “Come
in,” he says. So I do. And immediately we are plunged into shadow.

Crumb is celebrated for many reasons, most famously as “the father of underground
commix,” and his celebrity is such he’s retreated across the Atlantic to this idyllic village.
“From shack to chateau” he subtitled his 1997 R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book. The
chateau’s interior – narrow stairways, large rooms, cool against the afternoon’s heat and dark
– suggests our desire to have well lit homes was not a consideration a millennium ago.

Crumb, wife (and fellow artist) Aline Kominsky-Crumb and daughter Sophie shifted here in
1991, fortuitously escaping the release of Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary feature Crumb.
Brilliant as Zwigoff’s film is, it hugely inflated Crumb’s notoriety, establishing him as
perhaps the most recognisable American artist since Andy Warhol. Yet where Warhol courted
celebrity Crumb shuns it.

Watch on YouTube
R. Crumb: The Complete Record Cover Collection

Crumb leads me into his study. This is the room of legend, often photographed so to display
his magnificent, 5,000-strong 78 record collection alongside all kinds of toys, framed 78s (in
their original sleeves), black & white photos of blues and jazz musicians and licensed Crumb
memorabilia. In the far left corner sits his desk, drawing board, pens and pencils. Everything
is very tidy.

An old record player, one designed only to play 78s, occupies a prestigious space. There’s no
TV, radio or stereo system. And no computer. “I hate ‘em,” says Crumb when I mention how
strange it is to be in someone’s study and find it Mac free. “They’re a curse and now that
everyone can do their graphics using a computer package means individual, hand drawn
illustration is nearly extinct. No one learns to letter anymore. So everything ends up with the
same look. It’s too depressing to think about.”

No one learns to letter anymore. So everything ends up with the same look. It’s too depressing
to think about.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 30, 1943, the son of a Marine Corps father and
housewife mother, Crumb and his two older brothers rejected the hyper-masculine American
culture surrounding them, instead immersing themselves in comics, music (old
jazz/blues/country) and trash TV. Young Robert marinated all this in baroque sexual fantasy
(girls with robust thighs and a pronounced ass remain his preference). Add LSD and a shift to
Haight Ashbury to the mix and Crumb, formerly a greeting card designer, developed into a
remarkable satirist of the American Dream.

“About the only power you have is the power to discriminate,” Crumb has noted. “Living in a
culture like this, you have to make choices, and search out what has the most authentic
content or substance. As a kid I became increasingly interested in earlier periods of culture.
All the media of the time presented an image of a happy consumer America. The illusion was
the opposite of the sordid reality of everyday life, with stressed parents fighting each other
and worrying about paying the bills.”

Crumb believes vernacular music (both American and that from across the globe) is
humanity’s greatest creation and his passion for music leaps out of his art – he has issued
three series of playing cards that feature musicians (now collected into book form as R
Crumb’s Heroes Of Blues, Jazz & Country), drawn a series of strips on early blues and jazz
that are collected as R Crumb Draws The Blues and illustrated many album covers: these are
finally gathered in his latest opus, The Complete Record Cover Collection.

Crumb also plays music, having started out with The Cheap Suit Serenaders – an old timey
string band whose efforts seemed willfully out of sync in the 1970s but now appear very hip
considering almost every young American and British musician is attempting to play banjo
and dress in 1930s gear. When he relocated to France, Crumb joined Les Primitifs du Futur,
an eclectic string band who ranged across Gypsy jazz and Latin music, who issued two fine
Crumb-illustrated albums. He has contributed to several other bands and is now a member of
McCamy’s Melody Sheiks, a four-piece whose latest album, There’s More Pretty Girls Than
One, was recently released on Arhoolie Records, the Bay Area roots music label run by
Crumb’s old pal (and fellow 78 collector) Chris Strachwitz. Unfortunately, this effort does not
come with a Crumb cover.

Living in a culture like this, you have to make choices, and search out what has the most
authentic content or substance.

Crumb first came to wide public attention when Janis Joplin asked him to illustrate Big
Brother & the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills album. His brilliant cover (knocked off in a
single night’s sitting “on speed”) won Crumb a wide audience for his “head comix.” True to
form, he turned down offers from The Rolling Stones and other rock bands to do their covers
(as he loathes loud rock music). Instead, Crumb documented San Francisco hippie culture as
it briefly flowered then crashed and burned.

Since then he’s proven a droll satirist of rock culture while championing the timeless beauty
of acoustic music largely created pre-World War II. He agreed to this interview so long as we
focused on vernacular music and I didn’t pester him with questions like “didn’t you once meet
Jim Morrison?” or “do you still take LSD for inspiration?”

Watch on YouTube
Robert Crumb & The Cheap Suit Serenaders - Hula Girl

What first got you interested in music?

There were no musical influences around me at all but I remember having this really strong
urge to make music. I was always fooling around with music. When I met my first wife she
was part of the folk music scene in Cleveland so I kind of appropriated her guitar and started
figuring out a few chords. Then when I moved to San Francisco in ‘67 it was the first time I
got together with other guys who were serious about playing old time music and it was still
the folk era, so the jug band thing had some popularity. So I started fooling around with these
guys and we became The Cheap Suit Serenaders.

I was never comfortable with performance that much. Once I stated playing with these guys in
the ’60s they saw that we could get paying gigs because I had a name by ’68 and I went along
with it. Often the comic fans would turn up and they’d tell me, “Boy, your music is terrible!”
Laughs. “Hey, how about Mr Natural? Can you draw me a picture of Mr Natural?” [laughs]
Often we got that response. But ironically on the other hand every once in a while I get a
letter with a CD from young musicians who have been inspired by The Cheap Suit
Serenaders. To them we’re like what the old time musicians were to me.

I rarely go out to flea markets these days, partly because the supply of 78s has really dried up.

I’m a great fan of Hot Women and Gay Life In Dikanka, the compilation CDs of obscure
ethnic artists you have put together from your 78 collection and illustrated beautifully.

The old music that I love inspires me visually. That said, I’ll never do a compilation CD like
Hot Women again. It’s way too much work! When you take on a project like that the
producers want you to write extensive album notes. I had friends doing research on the
Internet but a lot of these people are very obscure. It took months of work – and all the
artwork! And getting the 78s re-mastered. I’m nervous about lending out my 78s and I had to
give them to this guy who took them to somewhere and then had to get them back.
Speaking of collecting, I’m guessing you knew both John Fahey and Joe Bussard (the
Virginia based collector whose 25,000 78s constitute the world’s largest collection of pre-
WW2 American roots music).

John Fahey – he was a crazy asshole. A psycho. Joe Bussard – a total madman! [laughs] He’s
completely obsessed with 78s. His wife finally left him. She put it to him – “either me or the
78s” and so he chose the 78s. He’s the most obsessed guy I know.

Are you still collecting?

Not so much today. I have so many records, such an embarrassment of riches. I rarely go out
to flea markets these days, partly because the supply of 78s has really dried up. You can still
find stuff from the 1950s – and there are collectors who will pay a lot for ‘50s 78s – but the
supply of ‘20s and ‘30s 78s has really dried up. I know a guy from western Pennsylvania who
still diligently collects and finds good things – he checks death notices and estate sales – but
he lives in a real good area, that Pennsylvania/West Virginia/southern Ohio region. A good
area for country, blues and gospel 78s. I’m amazed at the way he still finds good 78s around
there!

Watch on YouTube
Robert Johnson- Crossroad

Do you have a dividing line for when music went from being blissful to what you call a
more generic style?

With jazz and other pop forms it takes a sharp nosedive in the early 1930s. When it goes from
the “jazz age” to the swing era – Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, they get those smoother
sounding “sophisticated” sounds. Everyone was supposed to sound sophisticated as an
alternative to sounding naïve and country. “Country” was such a term of contempt. It sounds
like you’re a hick from the sticks. You’re supposed to be embarrassed by that. It was the death
of real, authentic rural music. Truly a cultural disaster.

What about blues then?

Same thing.

But you like Robert Johnson and he was recording in the mid-1930s.

He’s like the last of the old time blues sound to make it on to commercial records. There were
a couple of guys that recorded post-war who still sounded old time but they were complete
anomalies. Johnson was considered “old time” when he was recording – there were some very
slick guys around by the mid-1930s. I think the black population was like the rest of the US
and wanted to be seen as sophisticated, to embrace the prevailing urbanity.

What about the electric stuff like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf?

That doesn’t interest me at all.

Something has been lost in the push to make music modern and commercial and slick.
Because it’s electric or the way it’s recorded?

The difference between the stuff that I really like (the 1920s and early ‘30s) and that stuff is a
whole different mood, a whole different... I don’t know what it is… a magic that’s not there.
Maybe it’s a romantic thing. It conjures up visions of dirt roads and going deep into the back
country. Even if they work in factories they still have that sound of something old and
atavistic. Something that has been lost in the push to make music modern and commercial and
slick. Something has been lost in this, this whole commercialisation of music.

It’s not discussed enough... someone should write a book on it – how we really lost how we
make and listen to music with the onslaught of mass media. It’s changed so much – in 1933
there were 20,000 jukeboxes in America. By 1939 there were 400,000 jukeboxes! That
immediately eliminates so many live musicians – a juke joint – which is where jukeboxes got
their name from –would fire the barrelhouse pianist. “We don’t need you anymore! Got a
jukebox!” You have to go to somewhere like Serbia and a group like the Gypsies who are so
outcast they still value their music to really find that kind of music making today.

You grew up in the 1950s when rock & roll was first breaking through. Did you ever like
Elvis and that kind of music?

I did, yeah, I thought it was a breath of fresh air after Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney and
Frank Sinatra and all that crap. Jerry Lee Lewis and all that early rockabilly had something
atavistic in it. Once in a while Jerry Lee would do something syncopated on the piano and that
just thrilled me to hear. I loved that stuff with the early rockabilly guitar and dance feel to it.
That kind of wild, dance energy is lost now in American music. It used to be everywhere.
Rock & roll came from the small backwoods southern places and the Frank Sinatra generation
hated it. That’s why little labels like Sun flourished. I remember reading the Clive Davis book
about his career in the music industry and he talks about how – for the first couple of years –
the big companies resisted, thought it was a fad that would go away. Then they started seeing
Sun making money, so they started picking up on it and making it more digestible for the
middle classes. And lots of the songs were delinquent songs – stealing cars and mauling
sixteen-year-old girls! Frankie Lymon made that record “I am not a juvenile delinquent.”
[laughs]

To me the last great rock & roll record was Tommy James & The Shondells doing “Hanky
Panky” in 1966.

In the late ’50s they started up that TV show American Bandstand and around that time you
started getting this East Coast Italian thing with Fabian and Frankie Avalon. Wretched stuff.
Rockabilly lingered on but only in the South. I had a little radio by my bed when I was a kid
and I’d stay up late at night trying to find these tiny Southern stations that still played that
kind of music but it was getting harder and harder to find. To me the last great rock & roll
record was Tommy James & The Shondells doing “Hanky Panky” in 1966. After that the
psychedelic thing happened and it was all over for me, pretty much, as far as contemporary
pop music was concerned.

What did you make of the British invasion when it happened?

There was some interesting stuff but The Beatles never really excited me all that much, they
were a bit bland for my tastes. They had a good sense of melody but it just doesn’t reach me
as deeply as that old stuff. By the time all that came out I was already steeped in the old stuff.
When Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and all that folknik stuff came out, I just found it irritating.
Hated it. It sounded silly to me. Dylan was trying to be “raw” but not convincing. He was
inspired by Woody Guthrie and while I like some of Woody’s recordings he’s not nearly as
interesting as some of the earlier singers in the same genre as Woody, but they’re so obscure
and forgotten – Lake Howard and Goebel Reeves, two of my favourites, crazy hillbilly Okie
singers and guitar players from the back country.

As a collector and a connoisseur you have to make all these decisions about what’s good and
what’s not and that’s part of the fun of it.

What you realise when you get into that obscure old music is that just because you get to the
top of the charts doesn’t mean you are any good. Look at Charlie Patton – no white person
had ever heard of Charlie Patton until the ’50s and he had been dead since 1934. He was only
known in Mississippi and some other regions of the South where the few records he made
sold OK. No white people knew of those black blues guys at the time. I wonder how John
Hammond found out about Robert Johnson? Someone clued Hammond in about Johnson –
maybe it was Alan Lomax who had been running around the South – but no one knew about
Patton at all. As a collector and a connoisseur you have to make all these decisions about
what’s good and what’s not and that’s part of the fun of it. You have to make these choices.
You can’t listen to everything. You can’t collect everything.
You arrived in San Francisco in 1967 and saw the whole Summer Of Love/psychedelic
thing at its peak along with rock being transformed from clubs to stadiums and thus
becoming a corporate form. What was your take on all that?

More and more young kids wanted to be hippies so it was a boomtown. Guys like Chet Helms
are looked upon as heroes. He was this impresario who ran The Family Dog that started with
love-ins and special events and then became more professional, putting on regular concerts at
the Avalon Ballroom. I recently read this article calling Chet a hero and it stated “he was the
first person to let bands play as long as they wanted and as loud as they wanted.” My reaction
was “he should be spanked!” [laughs] “He should’ve been put in prison!”

But you created the cover for Cheap Thrills: did you like Big Brother’s music?

No. I did it because Janis [Joplin] asked me to and I liked her. She was a swell gal and a very
talented singer. Ever heard any of this pre-Big Brother stuff she recorded? She was great.
Then she got together with those idiots. The main problem with Big Brother was they were
amateur musicians trying to play psychedelic rock and be heavy and you listen to it now and
it’s bad... just embarrassing. But Janis had played with earlier bands just playing country
blues and it was much better. Way, way better. She’s singing well, not screaming, not playing
to the audience that wanted to watch her sweat blood. In the beginning she was just an
authentic, genuine Texas country-girl shouter. Too bad what happened to her. A shame...

It’s ironic you can’t stand the sounds of the Summer Of Love as you will forever be
associated as its chronicler!
Yeah, isn’t it though... There’s this story going around that I used to hang out with The
Grateful Dead, used to live with them in Haight Ashbury. What nonsense! I didn’t know them
at all.

Watch on YouTube
Robert Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders - My Girl’s Pussy

On one of your cartoons you wrote, “Music is the soul of human society”: care to
elaborate?

I don’t know where I got that idea. It’s something to do with the ear, how we respond to
sound, it’s very deep, deeper even than the visual response, it’s something to do with how we
respond to harmonic sound, that it can reach something so deep in us. To me, the buying and
selling of music, what they’ve done to it is a disaster on the scale of cutting down the
rainforest. It’s horrible what they’ve done... took it away from the people. You hear people
say “I can’t sing, I don’t have a good voice.”

Who has a good voice? What they mean is they don’t sound like a slick professional they hear
on the radio and on CD. It’s just professionalism and training, like opera singers. People have
lost confidence in themselves to make music for their own pleasure. They can only see
making music as a thing to be a star, to have a hit record. The mass media gods, strutting upon
the stage... and people seem to need gods, I s’pose. That’s not going to go away [pauses] but
let’s be clear, it isn’t really about music.

Yet you are also a celebrity? Admittedly, without being as famous as Madonna.

Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t understand it really. My books don’t sell like Stephen King or even
Alan Moore. I’ve become like this person who “represents the ’60s” which is odd as I was not
a big part of it. Underground comics did not become a big thing until the early ’70s.

Yes, but you recorded the rise and fall of the Haight Ashbury counter-culture. You were
there, you did the drugs, hung out with the freaks, knew the bands and reported on it
all. No one else did. Few novels came out of it. Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson
arrived later. Yours is the frontline reporting people turn to.

Really? You think that’s true? I hadn’t really considered that. I guess the only things on paper
that represent that era are the posters and the comics.

Robert, you’re the John The Baptist of the psychedelic era.

Oh no...