R.Crumb: Tells himself

I was still unknown, ignored and lonely. Why couldn’t I cut loose, kickoff my shoes and dance in the grass... wear patchouli oil... lovebeads... dig the grateful dead? I just couldn’t get with that programat 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 assoon as the old farts died off it was going to be a better place. Ialso saw that a lot of it was just excessive. People were buying intothe hippie style and ethic wholesale who were completely uncritical.Then they would be “hipper than thou” about it and go around judgingpeople by how “turned on” they were. There was a lot of spiritualnonsense as well as left-wing nonsense. Can you imagine if people likeEldridge Cleaver or Abbie Hoffman had actually gotten into power?Jeezis! It’s frightening! There would have been prison camps full ofpeople not hip enough and prison guards with big peace symbols on theirarmbands.

It still amazes me how enthusiastically the editors of undergroundpapers 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 manypeople got paid... probably the permanent staff...  all of threepeople. They paid themselves something. But the underground newspaperswere produced on a shoestring budget. The office of The East VillageOther in New York was quite a scene – freeloaders hanging around,sleeping on a couch or in a back room, always lots of cute young girlsand there was a lot of dope being smoked all the time. People wouldtake LSD on paste-up night at The East Village Other. The office was afun place to hang out – people were running in and out. It wasexciting. They would print anything that was halfway readable. Therewas no censorship. I could hand in a page like “phonus balonus blugs”or “all asshole comics” and nobody would blink. They would run ithaving barely looked at it. By 1967, they were happy to print anythingoutrageous! Porno Chic came out of that, around ‘69 or ‘70. Screw isstill going. You could do whole tabloid-size pages or even covers forThe East Village Other. Wow! It didn’t pay anything, but it was on thenews stands a few days after you drew it. That’s a lot of power! Youwere really flexing your artistic muscles filling up those newspapers.Generally you got your artwork back. Sometimes things were stolen ormisplaced.

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

Then the “Love” started to happen to me. It was 1968. Peoplefrom 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 thehard-drinking, hard-fucking end of the hippie spectrum as opposed tothe spiritual, eastern-religious, lighter than air type of hippie.Janis asked me to do an album cover. I was flattered, but I wasn’tcrazy about the music. I liked Janis ok and I did the cover. I tookspeed and did an all-nighter. The front cover I designed wasn’t used atall. They used the back cover for the front. I got paid $600. The albumcover impressed the hell out of girls much more so than the comics. Igot a lot of mileage out of that over the years! Viking wanted to do abook of my work. Head Comix came out... Then Fritz the Cat. Thingsstarted to happen thick and fast with Fritz, and Sleazy HustlingBusinessmen wanted to exploit the character. It was a new ballgame forme, kind of scary. There was this one group of guys who paid my way toNew York and wanted me to sign an exclusive five-year contract. Theywere guys in leather trench coats who got really annoyed when I laughedat them. I was naïve but luckily not stupid enough to sign somethinglike that. These older businessmen types were trying to cash in just asfast as they could on the “Hippie phenomenon”. They were all over itlooking for angles, money-making possibilities.

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

I remember in 1970 worrying whether I was part of the solution orpart of the problem. Eldridge Cleaver had said you were one or theother. I had a lot of anxiety about it... Gee... Which am I? I don’tknow. I never did decide. Later it became a moot point. Things were notas simple as we’d thought they were, unfortunately... or fortunately.