R Crumb's Weird Americana

Dan Nadel's biography on the cartoonist is a must

I was vaguely familiar with Robert Crumb’s work the first time I saw Crumb, Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary on the cartoonist. I was about 19 and had seen the record cover he did for Big Brother and the Holding Company and recognized some of his illustrations from shirts and stickers popular with some of the older hippies I’d see from time to time. But the way my girlfriend at the time sold me on watching the film was telling me that Crumb sort of reminded her of me. I didn’t know how to take that at the time, but after watching it, I should have probably been more prepared for the girl to break up with me a week later. That dummy obviously wasn’t my Aline Kominsky-Crumb, but I didn’t find the comparison to the nebbishy Crumb that bad since I immediately became a fan of his after watching Zwigoff’s portrait of the artist and his…interesting clan. The documentary is so good that I figured not much else was necessary to understand the man and his work. Dan Nadel’s Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life proved that theory wrong. While Zwigoff’s Crumb is still necessary viewing, Nadel’s book tells an even wider story, and connects Crumb to all the culture he helped influence as it was bubbling up from the underground the same way he did in the 1960s. Raymond Pettibon, Gary Panter, the Hernandez brothers, and Art Spiegelman all get mentions in the book, highlighting how Crumb’s influence helped create another boom in comix and weirdo illustrations in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but also showing how Crumb has continued working and doing what he’s always done as new generations that he directly influenced keep springing up.

Despite influencing every new cartoonist that came after him in one way or another, one of Crumb’s most endearing qualities is his distaste of the new. His personal taste has always been for old, specifically sounds from the early part of the 20th century. Besides personal taste, Nadel recounts a conversation Crumb had with Stephen Calt, the biographer of seminal Delta blues figures Charley Patton and Skip James, which sums up Crumb’s own career:

Music’s recreation. I think what ruined music is when it got too commercial: all those hillbilly bands all started out just for family recreation…Now all the bands just shoot for the top and that’s it.

While there’s no denying the creepy nature of the way he has often portrayed women in his drawings (something Crumb has spoken about as his own personal insecurities coming out in the ink), I think it’s often lost that there’s also a sense of sweetness and innocence in his art, especially when he draws musicians. I’ve had a copy of his R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country for about as long as it’s been out, and he’s mostly known for drawing American artists from a hundred or so year back, but my favorite is his cover of the book Lament From Epirus : An Odyssey Into Europe's Oldest Surviving Folk Music.

The book itself is well worth reading for any music fan. Writer Christopher C. King’s obsessiveness is as fascinating as the stories of the centuries-old music from the area along southern Albania and northwestern Greece where he goes searching for the stories of a sound that stretches back to the B.C. times. Every face has a personality, the drawing makes you want to know what’s going on and who the people surroundings the orchestra were. He treats American blues and jazz musicians like Son House or Bix Beiderbecke with the same out of respect, but there’s just something about the whole portrait that I find myself staring at often. Crumb has so much great stuff and far more famous work, but there’s something about the illustration for Lament From Epirus that sticks with me. His work is usually rooted in or about old Americana, but his drawing of the Roma people from Europe nearly a century ago stands out because it shows how capable he is of finding the humanity in anybody no matter where they were from. He’s most famous for his grotesques or humorous stuff, but when Crumb does illustrations without any of his signature quirks showing through, I think that’s when he’s at his best.