R. Crumb
speaker
89 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
R. Crumb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Of course. Yeah, sure. I'm a normal person that way. Before those LSD experiences and I just decided to let that all out, I used to make those drawings and tear them up and flush them down the toilet. Oh, this is terrible. What's wrong with you? Why, you know? And also the... As I started doing it for publication, then the floodgates opened.
The crack just got wider and wider until I just let it all out. Let it all out there, all the dark side of myself. It's all out there. I have less of that impulse now. I think I got out of my system a lot of it.
Right, Mr. Cool Guy. It was very disorienting because I was quite young. I was only, like, 25, 26 when all that happened originally. And it was both, you know, thrilling to my ego, I had a big ego, but also very confusing and scary even because suddenly...
This whole element of people that I'd never, ever had any dealings with before were suddenly there, interested in me, wanting to hustle me, wanting this and that, everything. Sign me to a five-year exclusive contract, da-da-da-da. These people are trying to cash in on the hippie culture and the youth movement and make money off it. I was so young, I didn't know how to deal with all that.
But at the same time, it made me more attractive to women, so that part of it was nice. Yeah. It was. Before that, I was like this, you know, nerd that at a party no woman even noticed. I was just part of the shrubbery or something. But after that, oh, there's our crumb. You know, suddenly they were interested and that was nice.
Well, I guess, you know, the elements of that culture, like the music and the stylistic stuff, no, I didn't identify with that at all. I identified with some of the values, like the political values, some of like the Eastern religious stuff that people were into. I was attracted to that. And, you know, the drug thing, the psychedelic drugs, I was into that part of it.
And I also got caught up in the general optimism and hopefulness and idealism of that time, the late 60s, you know. But stylistically, I was always alienated from it. I hated the music.
Oh, especially Howdy Doody. Howdy Doody was really grotesque. Hi, kids. And Clarabelle the Clown and all. It was all very, very sinister and scary. And Buffalo Bob Smith. Did you ever see that stuff?
My wife, Aileen, actually, she grew up in New York. She actually got to be in the peanut gallery when she was a kid on the Buffalo Bob show and the Howdy Doody show. She said it was a defining moment in her life.
She was like eight years old or something, seven years old, and she saw the adult world behind the scenes of the Howdy Doody show and how these people were all kind of cranky and stressed. She said the seat of the pants of Bob Smith's outfit was kind of frayed. And he was like real mean to the kids when it was off camera. Kukla Farinalli was cuter, though.
Kukla Farinalli, that was a little bit, that was better than Howdy Doody that way. It was more lovable. You know, Kukla was kind of a cute little lovable guy, a little hand puppet. And Fran, the woman, she was like talking to the puppets. So it was a little more reassuring. It was cuter.
It was just creepy and weird. What the heck? What does that have to do with anything? He didn't look like a kid. He was supposed to be like a kid in a cowboy suit, but he didn't come off that way. He just came off as a creature, like from Mars. There's some underlying thing you can't quite define that was just disturbing and sinister and scary about it all, all that stuff.
Well, yeah, but I guess... Not for children, of course. I mean, it wasn't for children. Yeah. What I was trying to do was to uncover that sinister quality, the dark, sinister, strange, disturbing part of things, and not... hide it, not keep it hidden.
You know, I started doing that in 68, 69, putting it out there, the snoids, you know, they were these little creepy gnome creatures that I, in LSD, I would catch out of the corner of my eye sneaking around and giggling in the background of my life. You know, I had to show that.
I wanted to show that sinister aspect, that noir, dark side of things, and how it's almost like making fun of the veneer of cuteness or whatever it is that they think covers that. It's just all a veneer. It's not real cuteness. It's a completely fake attempt to cover up what life is really about. The whole mass media thing...
We're all, growing up in America, you're a child of the mass media, the pop culture, unless your parents guard you and protect you from that very conscientiously. My parents didn't. They shoved this in front of the TV. It's products of pop culture. So that's what you have to work with.
Hi, girls.
Yeah, unfortunately the LSD didn't really change much in my sexual fantasies, but I found a way to express them. made them metaphorical to me. I could solve them more metaphorically. On LSD, you see that life, everything in our world is a metaphor. Or as Allen Ginsberg said, things are symbols of themselves.
And so I saw my own sexual fantasies that way and tried to understand what they meant metaphorically. You know, otherwise, we just feel helpless in the face that things don't mean anything. We feel helpless. What does it mean? What do these fantasies mean? Where do they come from? Why do I have them, you know? I don't understand or express that somehow in some way. I got off drawing those things.
I got off drawing them. I admit it. I confess.
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