ROBERT CRUMB: “COLLECTING IS CREEPY!”
“You collect ’60S psychedelic records?” asks an incredulous Robert Crumb as if I’d just let on that I had a house full of severed heads. “I hate that music. I think it’s one of the worst kinds of music that there ever was.”
Yes, this is the same R. Crumb who practically invented underground comics, who helped put the phrase ‘Keep on truckin’ ’ into the vernacular with a cartoon that hit college walls everywhere, and whose album cover for Big Brother & the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills was something of a psychedelic-era icon. More to the point, it’s the same R. Crumb who’s been collecting prewar 78s for the past three decades, and is seldom known to listen to anything else. His
roomful of shellac was proudly displayed in the biopic Crumb, directed by his friend and fellow enthusiast Terry Zwigoff. Crumb himself has recorded as the leader of the revival band Cheap Suit Serenaders, and many of his cartoons have referred to the spirit and the personalities of early jazz and blues.
“Collecting is creepy,” Crumb tells me with some degree of pride. “Record collectors put each other down for their various fixations. Everybody is convinced that his way of collecting is superior. They look down on casual collectors, who are just accumulators—the kind who’ll just pick up anything and let it pile up. A true collector is more of a connoisseur, and that’s the good thing about collecting. It creates a connoisseurship to sort out what’s worthwhile in the culture and what isn’t. Wealthy art collectors in this country have sorted out who the great artists are. If you’re collecting a lot of objects of one particular kind, you develop a very acute sense of discrimination.”
This, of course, doesn’t keep them from being creepy. “You saw the scene in Terry Zwigoff’s movie Ghost World—that about says it all,” he says—referring to the party scene where a bunch of geeky male collectors fondle each other’s collections while the two hip women in the room roll their eyes. “I know all those guys. Any of the younger guys who get into 78 collecting are quirky and oddball types, pretty maladjusted people. They’re not into hanging around in bars and picking up chicks or nothing. If they have a girlfriend at all it’s amazing. And the older collectors I know, a lot of them just have their little room down in the basement where
they go and listen. They don’t share it with anyone, and their wives don’t know anything about it. So when they die, the vultures start descending.”
Crumb’s collection is almost entirely shellac. He keeps vinyl and CDs around only when he wants a song he can’t get in the original format. “78 collectors have almost nothing to do with LP or 45 collectors; prewar collectors have nothing to do with postwar collectors. They don’t avoid each other, but they bully and pick on each other. That’s the problem, it’s lonely collecting records. You can share it, but there’s a vicious undercurrent there, the only person you can ever impress with that rare record you just got is another collector who’s looking for the same record. And the average person, I can show them the rarest record in the collection and they’ll say, ‘Yeah? So what?’”
This in fact happened to him in the ’70s, when a publisher demonstrated his eternal uncoolness. “I did try to share it with the world, I did comic stories about old musicians because I thought it was far superior to anything being done currently. In this case, I had done a comic story about Charley Patton, one of the great fathers of the blues, and the guy who published it was over at my house. So I took out one of my favorite 78s, Charley Patton’s ‘Down the Dirt Road,’ and I put it on. So I’m sitting there, having this great experience listening to this record, and he’s sitting there quietly, patiently. And after I took it off, he looks at me and says, ‘So, what did you like about that?’” Crumb laughs. “I mean, he wasn’t trying to be insulting, just curious, but what can you say to that? So I don’t try to convert people anymore.”
But the saddest, most tragic aspect of collecting, as he admits, is that it won’t get you any action. “Picking up chicks? Forget it! It never gets them hot, they don’t give a shit about collectors. I wouldn’t say that collectors are antisocial—that would imply that they want to do something harmful to society—but it’s not very sociable either. Very self-obsessed, kind of asocial. That’s why the world looks down on collectors, it takes a certain kind of personality. There is nothing sexy or glamorous about it. Women aren’t attracted to people because they collect. You can go up to them and say, ‘I’m an outlaw bandit’ and they’ll like that. But if you say, ‘I’m a collector’—no chance.”
His collection may be the stuff of legend, but here’s the surprise: it numbers only about four thousand 78s. By that standard, he’s pretty un-creepy for a collector: eight thousand songs is a reasonable amount to absorb in one lifetime, a small enough collection to keep in one room (Crumb stores his in some shelving he got for forty bucks in California). Having purged his collection a few times, and moved it across the Atlantic Ocean when he relocated to the south of France, he made the non-anal move of only holding onto the ones he expected to play on a regular basis. “I don’t like to have music on as background, or to listen while I work. That’s what I like about 78s, they force you to get up every three minutes and decide what you want to listen to again. It keeps you focused.”
And unlike the folks he’s just described, he can indeed sustain a relationship. “My wife had never heard any of this music, she was in her early 20s when we met. But she started
hanging around my little cabin in the country. I played her some records and she immediately liked them. Thank God she doesn’t collect psychedelic music from the ’60s! I know people who’ve had to deal with worse problems. Terry Zwigoff had a girlfriend who listened to what he called ‘old hippie lady music’—Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell. It became a real bone of contention between them and it drove him crazy that the music irritated him so much. She dragged him to a Bob Dylan concert and the audience was so worshipful of Bob Dylan. At one point they all stood up, and they’re clapping in unison, and he was the only one in the audience who refused to stand up.”
Crumb’s own aesthetic was formed at an early age. As a teenager in Delaware, he had a small epiphany at a farmer’s market. “I had a natural bent to collecting: before it was records it was comic books, trading cards, all kinds of things. When I was in my early teens I started yearning to hear older music. I already knew I liked it more than what I was hearing on the radio. One day, out of curiosity, I was in this second-hand store, they had a lot of old books and things, and I started thinking, ‘I wonder if they have any of this old music that I’ve been trying to find?’ Lo and behold, they did and that was a real defining moment for me. My first one was ‘Happy Days and Lonely Nights,’ a Victor 78 by Charlie Fry. And I remember how great it felt to take that record home.”
Locating prize 78s during the mid-’60s was an inexact science. You simply went into the black neighborhoods and knocked on peoples’ doors, hoping that they had stockpiled
some 78s a few decades ago and that they might be willing to part with them. “I didn’t have the resources to make a lot of big trips, but people were doing that. A lot of guys in those days, they would go through the South canvassing for records, going door to door. Richard Nevins [founder of the folk label Shanachie] did that, and John Fahey [the late experimental guitarist] did it. The depression in the ’30s killed a lot of the record business, since the records weren’t selling in great numbers. So there’d be people holding onto them, and there’s always fanatical collectors trying to find those people. It took a lot of detective work—finding someone who’d say, ‘Oh yeah, so-and-so down the street has a lot of records in his barn.’
“You got great records that way, but it was a huge amount of work. And it was dangerous in the South; if you went into the black neighborhoods, the cops would bust you. A white guy knocking on peoples’ doors—they didn’t like that. I started going into the Salvation Army, and then to the black sections of town, where the houses would have old Victrolas in them. They’d have records stashed behind the couch or in the closet. I’d give them ten or twenty-five cents, and usually they’d accept that. There was this one lady, though, she started yelling at me—‘You think I’m an ignorant old colored woman? I know that record is worth more than that! Don’t you go pulling that smart stuff on me, boy!’ And she was right, I would have given her more money, but I didn’t have it. She had a record I really wanted. It took me twenty-five years to find another copy.”
Living in the Bay Area at the height of the psychedelic explosion, Crumb let those records and that movement pass by. Why go after those records when you can find something as exotic as releases on the Flexo label—a short-lived San Francisco outfit that made 78s that actually bent? “Nobody knows what they’re made of, because they kept the formula a secret. It was a small company in the ’20s and ’30s who actually made nonbreakable, flexible records, and they’ve held up pretty well over the years. And there’s some really excellent music on them—San Francisco jazz and dance bands who have only been on Flexo. Over the years I lived out there, I only ever found two or three of them. Terry beat me on that one: he looked in the phone book and found that one of the bandleaders was still alive. And somehow I never thought of using the phone book—that shows that I don’t have that kind of resourceful, hustling mind.”
And that’s enough to prove Crumb’s point: only someone with a slightly twisted mind would, at this very moment, be getting excited at the idea of a 78 that bends. “Any collecting involves a bit of fetishism, it just depends on which one you’ve gotten fixated on at some point in your life. Once that’s in place, very few collectors I know have ever expanded beyond that first fixation. For me, the 78 is a special talisman in itself, it has an aura that’s different from that of a CD or an LP. It’s as close as you can get to the original source of what the music was recorded on—even with the scratching and the surface noise, there is an aura. Because somebody before you originally bought that 78, it was sitting in the shop at some point soon after the music was
recorded. Somebody of that era bought it and listened to it, and that record carries that aura from whoever else had handled and appreciated that object.”
Fetishism does have its rewards. “When I was younger I was more obsessed,” he admits. “But I’ve gotten most of the ones I really yearned for when I was young, my dream records—the ones you could only imagine ever finding. Even now, I’ll pull my copy of ‘What’s That Tastes Like Gravy?’ by the King Davis Jug Band out of my collection and feel amazed that I actually own it.”