The pioneering comics of Robert Crumb are a perfect example of an artist writing what he knows.
In Crumb's case, they're the work of a man who knew what he didn't like, and the burgeoning San Francisco hippy scene that surrounded Crumb was a frequent target of his furiously scathing, yet hilariously insightful, pen. The hypocrisy of the hippies and their fabled "Summer of Love" were chronicled with the same brutal, unflinching honesty in which Crumb autobiographically presented himself. A nebbish, bespectacled figure, Crumb drew himself in full, unflattering detail as a prematurely old man already out of touch with the times. His most famous creations, "Keep on Truckin," Mr. Natural, and Fritz the Cat became iconic images of the '60s and '70s but for the artist himself, he was enraptured with an earlier era and the musical legacy it had left behind.
For Crumb and his collector contemporaries, early American recordings seem to have an air of almost magical importance. At the turn of the 20th century, music served a different role in society than it does today. Styles were passed person to person and most music was heard in the flesh, phonographs being a luxury item. The mournful guitar music called the "blues" that emerged from the rural South was revolutionary different from the waltzes and folk songs that had come before. The influential masters of the genre toiled away in obscurity, doing their best to convey the hardships of the times. It was a lifestyle that Crumb and other underground cartoonists could probably relate to.
Crumb's obsession with blues music and record collecting spilled over into the pages of his comics and beyond. In the 70s he played banjo and sang in a novelty group called R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders. Fellow Cheap Suit Serenader Terry Zwigoff would later direct a documentary about Crumb as well as encapsulate their mutual obsession with old music in the record collecting character Seymour for his 2001 film Ghost World. In one of the film's best scenes, Seymour tries vainly to explain his appreciation of authentic blues to an uninterested floozy. Luckily for Crumb, his massive success as an underground cartoonist granted him a little more influence than a loser in a bar.
Aside from diatribes about the importance and superiority of antique music, the most direct references to Crumb's musical fanaticism that occur in his comics are the illustrated biographies he did for several blues legends. In the 1984 comic "Patton," Crumb retells the hard luck life story of the obscure blues musician, rather than the famous general. While not currently as famous as contemporary blues musicians like Muddy Waters and B.B. King, in his own time Charley Patton was a man of some regard. He was as a much of a celebrity as a musician playing in bars for plantation working blacks could be. Thumb-plucking his bass strings and beating out a rhythm on the guitar's body, Patton was a lively performer who packed dance houses most places he went. His feverish performances and guitar tossing showmanship were only matched by his day to existence, which involved the classic blues vices of booze, women, and fighting. In the late twenties Patton began recording but his influence was much more first hand and he personally instructed fellow Delta musicians Son House, Howlin' Wolf, and Robert Johnson.
The Patton comic, along with an illustrated adaptation of Alan Lomax's Jelly Roll Morton biography and a piece on Kansas City Frank Melrose, have all been compiled in R. Crumb Draws The Blues, a compendium of the cartoonist's classic blue related pieces. In the early 80s, Crumb merged his three true loves, old music, drawing. and collecting into several series of trading cards. All three sets; "Heroes of the Blues," "Early Jazz Greats," and "Pioneers of Country Music", were made up of original illustrations by Crumb and brief bios on the influential, but often forgotten, musicians. In 2006 the trading card sets were released as a book, complete with an audio cd featuring Skip James, Charley Patton, the Memphis Jug Band, Blind Willie McTell, and many more artists whose original 78 recordings have eluded collectors for years.
Though Crumb's most famous album cover is undeniably Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills, he often did illustrations for the roots music compilations and reissues Yazoo, and its sister label Blue Goose, released. Many of these recordings were down to their last known copy when they made the digital conversion and became, for the first time, widely available. It's thanks to the tireless collecting, cataloging, and preservation efforts of early American music aficionados like Crumb and others that these historical documents still exist. They might not be any more appreciated now than they were in Crumb's heyday, but at least they're out there, waiting to be discovered, and thus inspire, a new generation of misanthropic nostalgics.
