the past is another country. They do things very differently in Fritz the cat's time. I don't think you could publish that now.
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.
I'm pretty sure it was banned (not anymore, as that Google It will show).
What would prevent you from publishing something like that today?
[0] https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Still-in-the-sh...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/07/robert-crumb-i...
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.
His art often portrayed people in caricature.
Similar to saying 'Van Gogh often painted sunflowers' instead of 'Van Gogh often painted flowers'.
Of course taboo-breaking was the point of underground comics.
Ghost World was such a rare film for me. The story wasn't anything I was expecting when I randomly turned the TV on that day.
https://lettersofnote.com/2015/12/17/torturing-the-saxophone...
> 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.
When I was young, a music review like this would have 100% gotten me to buy the CD.
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.
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!
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.
Anthony Braxton's 1970 masterpiece, For Alto, is a landmark of free jazz. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs9zwqXsceUikMH4R_yWvR62w...
New History Warfare vol 2: Judges by Colin Stetson, from 2011 is so deep, he created new landscapers of sound with his sax, but it is also sublime and beautiful. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnpQFjefXCROSKaSWDOtHyWEU...
And then for your next homework, check out the massive discography by John Zorn ;-) https://www.allmusic.com/artist/john-zorn-mn0000239329
It's perfect.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Crumb_%26_His_Cheap_Suit_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_and_John%27s_East_River...
What? None of that is true.
I'm talking about this one → https://musicaficionado.blog/2020/01/28/cheap-thrills-an-alb...
>an album cover for a band he does not care for
"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."
> 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.”
Also, https://www.janisjoplin.net/life/friends/robert-crumb/, mentions none of that.
But yeah, some random neckbeard's blog is more authoritative than Janis' own site, for sure!
(Also, if you knew a bit about Crumb you'd know it's the type of guy that just wouldn't do stuff he was not interested in.)
That site said it was made by super fans in 1998? Doesn't seem like go to source for critical quotes (not that an official site would be either).
Here's a source for the quote about him not liking her band from 2013, so no, it doesn't seem to have been hallucinated by the 2020 author:
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/12/robert-crumb-i...
Unless you're suggesting that the author literally made those quotes up?
> (Also, if you knew a bit about Crumb you'd know it's the type of guy that just wouldn't do stuff he was not interested in.)
He sounds like exactly the kind of guy who'd do a favor for a girl he wanted to fuck, despite not liking the band she was currently in.
Fantagraphics has you covered. I’m sure someone has shared a PDF if you don’t want to track down physical copies.
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
R. Crumb's Sweet Shellac - Early French Jazz Before Django: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHsqAK_kJ2o
You can find track list from here: https://www.organissimo.org/forum/topic/71710-r-crumbs-sweet...
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.
> 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.
In the "Crumb" doc he says something along "They're all wearing baseball hats. I'm getting out of here.", speaking about the US.
He also laments having taken too much LSD.
fly on the wall