R.Crumb: Tells himself

I was still unknown, ignored and lonely. Why couldn’t I cut loose, kick off my shoes and dance in the grass... wear patchouli oil... love beads... dig the grateful dead? I just couldn’t get with that program at all. I mean... I was there. I believed in a lot of the same things. I was carried along on the wave of optimism. I was sympathetic to it, but I was just too physically and emotionally inhibited to be a hippie. I even had an intellectual criticism of the whole thing to a degree, but I, too, believed that the world was permanently changed, that as soon as the old farts died off it was going to be a better place. I also saw that a lot of it was just excessive. People were buying into the hippie style and ethic wholesale who were completely uncritical. Then they would be “hipper than thou” about it and go around judging people by how “turned on” they were. There was a lot of spiritual nonsense as well as left-wing nonsense. Can you imagine if people like Eldridge Cleaver or Abbie Hoffman had actually gotten into power? Jeezis! It’s frightening! There would have been prison camps full of people not hip enough and prison guards with big peace symbols on their armbands.

It still amazes me how enthusiastically the editors of underground papers responded to my stuff: “Oh yeah! This is great! Give us more!” of course, in the beginning, there was NO money. I don’t think many people got paid... probably the permanent staff...  all of three people. They paid themselves something. But the underground newspapers were produced on a shoestring budget. The office of The East Village Other in New York was quite a scene – freeloaders hanging around, sleeping on a couch or in a back room, always lots of cute young girls and there was a lot of dope being smoked all the time. People would take LSD on paste-up night at The East Village Other. The office was a fun place to hang out – people were running in and out. It was exciting. They would print anything that was halfway readable. There was no censorship. I could hand in a page like “phonus balonus blugs” or “all asshole comics” and nobody would blink. They would run it having barely looked at it. By 1967, they were happy to print anything outrageous! Porno Chic came out of that, around ‘69 or ‘70. Screw is still going. You could do whole tabloid-size pages or even covers for The East Village Other. Wow! It didn’t pay anything, but it was on the news stands a few days after you drew it. That’s a lot of power! You were really flexing your artistic muscles filling up those newspapers. Generally you got your artwork back. Sometimes things were stolen or misplaced.

When I was living in San Francisco, I had sent some strips in to a paper called Yarrowstalks published by a guy in Philadelphia, Brian Zahn. It was printed on good white paper stock and full of god-awful hippie artwork and long-winded treatises on eastern religion. Zahn came to see me and asked if I would like to do a complete issue, so I drew the whole issue of Yarrowstalks #3. Most of the stuff was just redrawn comic strips out of my sketchbooks. It was the convergence of a whole lot of things and reflected the peak of the hippie era. The hippies liked it, and it was the beginning of my becoming a counter-culture hero. Zahn then suggested I do a whole comic book which he would publish. After my “On the Road” experience during the “Summer of Love”, I returned to San Francisco and resolved to get to work. And that’s when I drew the first two issues of Zap Comix.

     Then the “Love” started to happen to me. It was 1968. People from around the Haight-Ashbury “Neighbourhood” started coming around... Janis Joplin and other members of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Janis liked Zap Comix and Snatch Comix. My comics appealed to the hard-drinking, hard-fucking end of the hippie spectrum as opposed to the spiritual, eastern-religious, lighter than air type of hippie. Janis asked me to do an album cover. I was flattered, but I wasn’t crazy about the music. I liked Janis ok and I did the cover. I took speed and did an all-nighter. The front cover I designed wasn’t used at all. They used the back cover for the front. I got paid $600. The album cover impressed the hell out of girls much more so than the comics. I got a lot of mileage out of that over the years! Viking wanted to do a book of my work. Head Comix came out... Then Fritz the Cat. Things started to happen thick and fast with Fritz, and Sleazy Hustling Businessmen wanted to exploit the character. It was a new ballgame for me, kind of scary. There was this one group of guys who paid my way to New York and wanted me to sign an exclusive five-year contract. They were guys in leather trench coats who got really annoyed when I laughed at them. I was naïve but luckily not stupid enough to sign something like that. These older businessmen types were trying to cash in just as fast as they could on the “Hippie phenomenon”. They were all over it looking for angles, money-making possibilities.

In 1968-69, as I traversed different cities, I noticed these “Comics Scenes” starting up. I didn’t know Jay Lynch until he sent me Bijou Funnies, but when I went to Chicago in 68 he, Skip Williamson and Jay Kinney, already had a comics scene going, the Bijou Publishing Empire. I met Spain Rodriguez and Kim Deitch in New York; they were doing comics on a regular basis for The East Village Other. Ann Arbor had something happening. Every college campus had its own little hip scene in those days, usually involving some kind of music nonsense, coffee houses, “underground “- style papers, and sometimes comics. And always, the drugs.

I remember in 1970 worrying whether I was part of the solution or part of the problem. Eldridge Cleaver had said you were one or the other. I had a lot of anxiety about it... Gee... Which am I? I don’t know. I never did decide. Later it became a moot point. Things were not as simple as we’d thought they were, unfortunately... or fortunately.