Robert Crumb was interviewed for a BBC Radio 3 program where he played some records from his collection and talked about them.
One song was particularly fascinating: a primitive attempt at the new fangled sound called 'jazz' by a French country musette band from the early 20th C.
Crumb explained that when early American jazz bands went to Paris in the 1910s, the new sounds caused a sensation when they performed in the up-market venues. So the country bands were aware of the new style of jazz but most people had never actually heard any and had to play what they imagined jazz to be, mostly based off verbal descriptions. I remember this record as a crazy sound, but brilliantly entertaining.
Unfortunately I can't point you to the song or the interview, but if anyone else can please reply :-0
> So the country bands were aware of the new style of jazz but most people had never actually heard any and had to play what they imagined jazz to be, mostly based off verbal descriptions.
This I find fascinating. Misunderstandings (i.e. partial or third hand accounts) of ‘exotic’ art forms have played a vital part in the development of western art: Picasso ‘misunderstood’ African art to produce Cubism. William Blake ‘misunderstood’ Michelangelo to produce his etchings. Van Gogh ‘misunderstood’ Japanese prints to produce his paintings.
The intro about him not liking the music reminded me of the Letter of Note entry when Crumb is sent an experimental jazz album and replies to the musician:
> I gotta tell you, on the cover of the CD of your sax playing, which is black and has no text on it, I wrote in large block letters, in silver ink, “Torturing The saxophone—Mats Gustafsson.” I just totally fail to find anything enjoyable about this, or to see what this has to do with music as I understand it, or what in God´s name is going on in your head that you want to make such noises on a musical instrument. Quite frankly, I was kind of shocked at what a negative, unpleasant experience it was, listening to it.
>> I just totally fail to find anything enjoyable about this, or to see what this has to do with music as I understand it, or what in God´s name is going on in your head that you want to make such noises on a musical instrument
When I was young, a music review like this would have 100% gotten me to buy the CD.
Hey, I'm 51, music is a big part of my life and I love hearing new things. Among other concerts, I visit few jazz festivals every year so I'm exposed to a lot of different music.
But let me tell you, I could easily write similar review for some (most?) jazz sax musicians I heard. It seems that sax encourages players to visit musical areas I don't understand and enjoy. Therefore, if I read a review like this, I would most likely totally believed it!
Jazz music is many things but in its essence it is avant garde. Some of the best music, like all art, can be difficult and challenging. To reveal their beauty and inspiration it may require some effort, but the rewards are worth it!
Check out these albums by avant garde saxophonists. You may hate them on first listen but I urge you to persevere and hopefully open your mind and soul to their brilliance.
I'm no stranger for persevering through dificult music if I have strong recommendations it will be worth it. I'll give a chance to all of that. Thanks!
One of my favorite bands (Igorrr), a friend described to me as "musical ADHD, they can't pick an instrument to stick with for more than 20 seconds on any given track."
I used to do that too, except typically it was hardcore punk and 1980s noise/industrial, but yes there were some Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy records in there too.
I finally realized that once I had satisfied my consumerist urge to be the coolest connoisseur, I now had to listen to the stuff, and I didn’t actually like it.
I had always know him as a visual artist so I was recently very surprised to learn that not only does Robert Crumb play music but he's actually been in a few different bands.
It's a bit too early in the morning for me to find the specific albums that I found enjoyable so I'll provide the links to the bands and perhaps others who know more about the musical performer side of Crumb can expand on this.
Crumb is from my small town in CA. During the fires, not so long ago, my mentor kept some of his old journals safe for his family. 10 or so notebooks full of doodles, all in one place. I can only imagine what that was worth! Much more, culturally, to be sure.
Anyone see the documentary about him: "Crumb" (1994)? Everyone in his family is a little off, but back in those days, you just did the best you could with what you got and if you were a gifted artist like Crumb, you turned being an odd ball into a career.
I strongly recommend the documentary. But "a little off" is an understatement. By the time of the documentary, his highly intelligent brother Charles is still living with his amphetamine-addicted mother in his late 40ies and rarely leaves his childhood bedroom. He admits on camera that he has "homosexual pedophiliac tendencies" and fantasized about killing Robert as a teenager, and complains that he cannot have an erection anymore because of his medication. Tragically, Charles killed himself shortly after filming of the documentary wrapped. Crumbs other brother Maxon [0], an accomplished and highly talented painter who earns money as a beggar on the streets, tries to find some peace of mind by living a zen-like life in celibacy, in a decrepit hotel room, full of meditation on a bed of nails, and is struggling with his intense sexual desire, several sexual harassment suits, and the fact that he cannot physically have sex, because the pleasure is so intense for him that it triggers epileptic seizures. All three brothers appear to have problems with extreme sexual desire, and Robert is the only one who seems to be able to function at all, although the documentary shows him several times in a trance-like, babbling state induced by the sight of a woman (in older age, he once said in an interview that he is "no longer a slave to a raging libido" [1]).
Little mentioned is the fact that the three crumb brothers had two sisters. Neither of them agreed to take part in the movie, and very little is known about them.
Wasn't one of the brothers also a (heterosexual) stalker with an Asian fetish and a habit of drawing art about it? Presumably that was Maxon. It's been a long time since I've seen the documentary.
TFA is also frankly pretty underhanded in talking up Crumb's love of inter-war blues recordings while saying very little about his forays into anti-black racism, including one example which is so notorious that the Crumb documentary confronts him directly about it.
the art was published underground because plenty of it was plenty offensive to lots of groups of people. .. that was the intention completely. Lots of R Crumb's art was controversial and outrageous by definition. Lots of reasonable and caring people had a lot of concern, volunteer censors appeared from many corners with torches and brimstone, and the art was published anyway.
There's a fuzzy but very real distinction between caricature in general and frankly racist caricature. Quite a few of Crumb's drawings of black people have been clearly over that line, and (polite warning) it would be pretty rash to try to deny that.
Along similar lines, Steve Buscemi's character Seymour in "Ghost World" (2001) is pretty clearly heavily inspired by Robert Crumb. Seymour collects old blues records and it put off by rock music, not to mention normal mainstream American culture. "Ghost World" was based on a comic book and was directed by Terry Zwigoff, the director of "Crumb".
The first record Enid looks at is actually by "R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders" that Seymour directs her away from to another selection. Zwigoff was a member of that group.
Is that where the subplot of the chicken poster in that movie came from? I was just thinking about Ghost World as I was reading the comments above, thinking, "now that's a subject Hollywood doesn't want to touch anymore."
Maybe you'd struggle to get widespread (physical) distribution, or to build an audience, or to make a living off it. I don't think anybody would stop you printing it, or take down your website or whatever.
It wasn't mainstream or uncontroversial in the '60s either.
It's not merely that 50 years is a long time. There's a profound cultural watershed between the Before Times, the overcontrolled, neurotic world of roughly up to the late '60s, and the narcissistic/sociopathic world of today. Robert Crumb, and the whole Crumb family, embody that change in an unusually extreme way.
and furthermore, "families that are a bit off" are still plenty today, and people still do the best with what they got.
I don't see the need to say that was that way then...
Agree, and the bizarre things that the family members were into have simply been replaced with a new set of things. Arguably the only difference is back then they weren't thrown out on the streets due to high rents
Yes, but they tend to be 'off' in quite different ways. Crumb's father was the kind of hyper-repressed figure who for most of us nowadays only exists as a boogeyman character in fiction, but who was much more of a reality in the pre-1970 world.
Jesus. I couldn't finish that documentary. I only knew him by his more popular art, but that film put me off anything he'd done. His family was a mess, and he himself is without a doubt the last person of it I'd ever want to meet. Every single interaction he had with a woman (even by proxy) on screen made my skin crawl. A creep of the highest caliber.
One of his co-temps, Gilbert Shelton made great comics - the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Furry_Freak_Broth...)
were my favorite. He had many characters in the FFFB, Norbert the Nark, Fat Freddy's Cat, Let My Chickens Free, and many others.
Gilbert Shelton is a comic genius.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXaHUMESoM4 His comic were creative and had very little NSFW and were the funniest thing I ever read, while much of the other UG comics were a lot more gross, some extremely so, his were like Scrooge McDuck humor - overlaid with generous marijuana use as well as a sprinkling of other drugs. Norbert the hapless Nark always came to grief in a funny way. Now we sell marijuana in many special state shops, while the feds think it = damnation.
It had no social effect on me - I am a non smoker = smoke zero combustion carried drugs, like Nicotine or THC from that day to this - I just enjoyed the vicarious thrashing of the man. As a cat lover = Fat Freddy's cat was my fave...
> As for Crumb’s depiction of that scene from the musical [the viciously racist depiction of a black woman], lets not even go there. Suffice it to say that a cover like that will not see the light of day today.
Especially if you're not completely avoiding Crumb's views on race:
> Asked about how a white guy connects so deeply with black music created in the 1930s, he answered: “I don’t know. There’s something so raw, kind of beauty that speaks to me in a deep and direct way. Personally I barely even know any black people and I can’t relate to lower class black culture very well at all. It’s very alien to me in a certain way, and people I’ve known from that black culture, I’ve never been able to get very close to, because their values are so different. So what is it about their music that speaks so directly? It has some universal appeal because it has had such a big influence on the music of the entire world.”
There's a straight line between "lower class black culture is very alien to me" and using darky iconography the same year MLK was shot - even in 1968 this was a deliberately racist provocation. There's also a line between Janis Joplin as a white blues singer and her approval of the artwork. And of course there's the straightest of lines between ignoring Crumb's racism while uncritically hagiographizing his connection to black music.
You can still tell a sympathetic story about Crumb: he is far from the only young avant garde American artist to use racist rhetoric to elicit cheap thrills and controversy. And unlike, say, Quentin Taratino, Crumb's later work shows a sincere understanding of and repentance for his earlier dreck.
But you can't claim to be telling the story of the album cover if you're whitewashing its most controversial aspect. What you're doing is spinning a fairy tale.
... just sounds honest, I don't get racist from that. I'd probably say the same thing today, though "lower class white redneck culture is very alien to me" would be just as true.
>> The Hell’s Angels used to stage concerts in San Francisco in 1967-68, and Big Brother & the Holding Company played in some of them. You can find posters promoting these shows on the web.
>about an artist who draws an album cover for a band he does not care for, playing a music style he does not listen to, appealing to an audience he does not connect with
"I am going over to meet Janis Joplin tonight… CAN’T WAIT!"
"Janis asked me to do an album cover. I liked Janis OK and I did her cover."
>playing a music style he does not listen to
"She wasn’t nationally known yet. I remember going to see her at the Avalon Ballroom and you could tell right away that she had an exceptional voice and she would go far. She started out singing old time blues like Bessie Smith. She was kind of a folknik originally."
>appealing to an audience he does not connect with
"But within six months Zap comics caught on and Crumb became known for his talent as an underground comics artist."
"Janis, James (Gurley, guitar player) and I were all big fans of his work, we loved his cartoons which were appearing in the SF underground newspapers and Zap Comics."
You're cherry-picking quotes. The whole point of him saying what he liked about Janis was that he didn't like Big Brother & the Holding Company, both as a style/concept and as musicians. The article is also full of quotes from Crumb himself saying how he didn't really like the hippie movement overall, even though he liked certain things about it, and the general impression is that no, he did not really feel connected with many of his own fans and fans of Big Brother.
Janis Joplin sang the kind of music he liked, but her current band did not. Keep reading the rest of the article.
> an album cover for a band he does not care for
> playing a music style he does not listen to
While he did not care for her current band and the psychedelic spin they took on blues, he recognized her ability to belt out the good ol’ blues: “Janis had played with earlier bands just playing country blues and it was much better. Way, way better. She’s singing well, not screaming, not playing to the audience that wanted to watch her sweat blood. In the beginning she was just an authentic, genuine Texas country-girl shouter.”
Getz adds: “The next weekend Crumb came to our show at The Carousel Ballroom, sat on the floor in our backstage dressing room and observed. He really wasn’t into our music but it didn’t matter.
Getz is understandably mild in his description of Crumb’s opinion of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Here is Crumb’s version, unadulterated: “She was a swell gal and a very talented singer. Ever heard any of this pre-Big Brother stuff she recorded? She was great. Then she got together with those idiots. The main problem with Big Brother was they were amateur musicians trying to play psychedelic rock and be heavy and you listen to it now and it’s bad… just embarrassing.”
> appealing to an audience he does not connect with
But Crumb came from another era, mentally, and to him this music was commercialism personified compared to the roots music from the 1920s and 1930s that moved him: “I had no patience for any of that psychedelic pop music or crap that came in the 60s: The Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison, The Doors, The Beatles, Bob Dylan. I had little or no interest in any of that. I thought I had found some music that was much more real, that came from the heart of people’s culture but had been wiped out by mass media and commercialism.”
He liked some aspects of the Hippie movement, what he termed as seeing through the hype of consumer culture. He valued how they strived to live simply and saw the ecology movement being sparked by that. But he quickly became disillusioned by the movement: “Since it was mostly children of the middle class, it was immediately something for them to be smug about. ’Oh, I have seen the light and you haven’t. I’m beautiful, I’m spiritual. I lost my ego and you haven’t.’ It became where in any social gathering everybody sat around trying to out-cool each other.” But as he admits, he never felt comfortable in that environment anyway, even when it was at its peak of innocence: “I couldn’t kick off my shows and go dance in the park. I didn’t have it in me.”
All those things don't come from Crumb, they are hallucinations by the article's author. If you stick strictly to what Crumb said about it, the story is quite different.
One song was particularly fascinating: a primitive attempt at the new fangled sound called 'jazz' by a French country musette band from the early 20th C.
Crumb explained that when early American jazz bands went to Paris in the 1910s, the new sounds caused a sensation when they performed in the up-market venues. So the country bands were aware of the new style of jazz but most people had never actually heard any and had to play what they imagined jazz to be, mostly based off verbal descriptions. I remember this record as a crazy sound, but brilliantly entertaining.
Unfortunately I can't point you to the song or the interview, but if anyone else can please reply :-0