![]() 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. I was never comfortable with performance that much. So I started fooling around with these guys and we became The Cheap Suit Serenaders. 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. ![]() 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. There were no musical influences around me at all but I remember having this really strong urge to make music. ![]() Unfortunately, this effort does not come with a Crumb cover. 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. 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. The illusion was the opposite of the sordid reality of everyday life, with stressed parents fighting each other and worrying about paying the bills.”Ĭrumb 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.Ĭrumb 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. All the media of the time presented an image of a happy consumer America. As a kid I became increasingly interested in earlier periods of culture. “Living in a culture like this, you have to make choices, and search out what has the most authentic content or substance. “About the only power you have is the power to discriminate,” Crumb has noted. 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. Young Robert marinated all this in baroque sexual fantasy (girls with robust thighs and a pronounced ass remain his preference). Yet where Warhol courted celebrity Crumb shuns it.īorn 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. Brilliant as Zwigoff’s film is, it hugely inflated Crumb’s notoriety, establishing him as perhaps the most recognisable American artist since Andy Warhol. 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.Ĭrumb, 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. ![]() “From shack to chateau” he subtitled his 1997 R. And immediately we are plunged into shadow.Ĭrumb 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. A droll look crosses his somewhat gaunt features, suggesting this most private yet public of artists is perhaps a tad ironic in his welcome. 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. ![]()
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