R. Crumb’s rebellious, sometimes just plain weird comix became really
popular with the counter-culture. Zap featured an unforgettable image of
this bearded character who looked a little like Father Time……..
This was of course, Mr. Natural..
Who loved to say, go **** yourself, Do it today, Don’t Delay
In January 1967, Crumb moved to California, where he did some comics for a magazine called Yarrowstalks. His work was so well received they asked him to do a whole comic book, and soon the first issue of Zap was ready. The publisher however disappeared with all of the original artwork. Crumb, who had not only saved xeroxes of his work, but was already halfway with the next issue of Zap, found Don Donahue and Charles Plymell willing to publish it. So it is that the material for the second Zap comic was published as Zap #1, after which the older material for the first issue was printed as Zap #0. All of these have become collector’s items.
Cru
mb illustrated both sides of the Cheap Thrills album in the summer of 1968 as a favor to Janis (who he had recently befriended in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood where both Crumb and the band lived) and also because Crumb needed the $600 dollars Columbia records promised to pay him. Of course, by the time they requested him to do it, it was needed immediately, so Crumb was required to pull an all-nighter to finish the job. However, Columbia decided to scrap the original cartoon/caricatures which Crumb drew for the cover, and use what Crumb originally intended as the back of the album for its front cover. They reduced the “Cheap Thrills” masthead and moved it over to make room for the Columbia record logo. Also, Big Brother recorded a song called “Harry” (as a play on words making fun of the then popular Hare Krishna movement) which was to be included on the album, but at the last moment, a decision was made to cut the song from the album. Crumb had originally drawn the East Indian announcing the song “Harry” and its credits, but that was changed to “Art: R. Crumb” and pasted on unevenly.
Later, the original artwork, which rightfully belongs to Crumb, was never returned to him, and was “removed” from Columbia’s archives and sold on Sotheby’s twice since the late 60’s. It’s no wonder Crumb has mixed feelings about this illustration, a commercial job where he not only lost creative control, but the actual artwork itself. Incidentally, it doesn’t speak well of Sotheby’s to sell the artwork for a second time after they had been informed it was stolen artwork the first time they sold it.
Crumb’s artwork has come to personify the sixties in San Francisco, and small wonder when you look at the subject matter and the weirdly whacked out style.. Imaginative doesn’t begin to explain it, its in a class, and world all its own.
