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
Often their best cards were censored and never used because everything had to pass by the approval of the wife of the guy who owned the Walgreen drug chain. And if she didn't like the cards, then they couldn't be distributed. So some of the best stuff never actually got distributed.
Right, right. Well... As a kid in the 50s, the comics were in decline. The TV wasn't that great. So I started looking for older stuff. And the first older stuff that peaked my interest was older comic books that you could find in Salvation Army stores and also old stuff on the kiddie shows on television. On TV, on these kiddie shows, they showed old cartoons from the 30s.
You know, old Betty Boop and Popeye and all that stuff. And the music was great. The drawing style was great. They were very, very appealing to me as a kid. This is like 53, 54, 55 in there. And the music was... I don't know, just grabbed me somehow. And then also you could see these really old Hal Roach comedies. Laurel and Hardy, this Our Gang, Little Rascals stuff.
I loved that stuff when I was a kid. And as I got into my later teens, I... I always looked for really early movies that were on TV, on the late show, movies from 1930, 31, 32. I just loved the whole style of the period. Somehow it attracted me deeply, the music and everything. And then I started looking for some other way to find the music of that period because I loved...
hearing it in those TV runs of those old films. And then I discovered old 78 records. I discovered that this old music was actually on these records that were sitting around in these same places that the old comic books were and other old stuff. And so I started buying old 78s and still collecting them today.
I had musical inclinations from childhood, and at first I tried to make myself a cigar box ukulele, but that didn't play so well. I couldn't really make it play efficiently and effectively. So then my mother, for Christmas when I was 12 years old, gave me a plastic ukulele, which was playable. I could actually tune it and play it, so I learned to play that. And then I graduated to the banjo later.
I was attracted to old music, you know. I was kind of out of it, nerd. I wasn't really much into rock and roll or things of my contemporaries. I don't know. Like I said, I'm not going to go negative.
Kind of exaggeration of who we really are, but not that far. It doesn't deviate that far from who we really are.
But also you're flamboyant. You're gaudy. You're crass, Jewish Long Island thing that you have, and you're bold, and I'm more kind of gray and goyish.
Right.
You tell your version, I'll tell my version.
What year is this?
I was drawn to her strongly, yeah. She had all the requirements. But, yeah, my initial interest in her was strictly, you know, oh, here's a cute hippie Jewish slut.
Shortly after I met her, because she had just started drawing comics at that time, and she showed me this stuff that she had done and this first comics, and they were so crazy and expressionistic. I immediately found them very interesting and compelling and so deeply personal. And I'd never seen any... Comics like that drawn by a woman before, deeply personal.
There was a few women at that time, Trina Robbins and others, who were drawing kind of feminist comics. But to me, there was two kinds. There was Trina's stuff, which was like feminist fighting hero types, you know, girl detectives and things. And then there was the hippie flowery stuff that someone like Willie Mendez was doing that's very sweet with unicorns and stuff like that. And here's Aileen.
It's like ugly. It's self-deprecating. It was... It was just very confessional. That was the first time I ever saw a woman do that, ever. And it probably was the first time a woman ever did that in comics. She's like the Jean Reese of comics there.
Donna Rickles, right.
Very, very few women thought they were great. Very few women thought they were great.
Tell the truth, Aileen.
What about all the sick sadism and all that stuff?
Showing 61–80 of 89 · page 4 of 5
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