ROBERT CRUMB
R. Crumb is not only a graphic genius. He's also an afficionado of "old music"--blues, jazz, and blue grass--and has been collecting '78s since he was a teenager. His love for the music of the 1920s and '30s is paralleled by his disdain--and sometimes active hatred--of things contemporary: fastfood culture, faddish art, loud electric music, the American ethos (which he forsook for the life of an expatriot in France in the mid 1990s). For Crumb, the "old music's" attraction isn't just because it sounds better than the newer stuff. Its appeal lies also in the fact that it's a craft, a reflection and builder of community, not the latest product from an industry whose bottom line is profit and whose identity changes almost daily.
R. Crumb Draws the Blues pulls together some of the artist's best music-themed work, reflecting both his love of the old stuff and his contempt for the new. Three of the pieces are dramatic biographies of blues greats Charley Patton (1891-1934), Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941), and Kansas City Frank Melrose (1907-1941). Each of the biographies, especially Patton's and Jelly Roll's, are drawn in dark, ominous tones--only appropriate, since all three of their subjects led unsettled, torturous lives (Jelly Roll was convinced he was voodoo-cursed), and all three died young (Melrose was beaten to death).
Crumb's love for the "old music" is expressed in "That's Life," a wonderful story about an unknown black sharecropper who travels to Memphis, cuts a record, is killed in a honky-tonk shortly afterwards, and gets rediscovered by a Crumb-like collector forty-odd years later. Good music lives on. "Where Has It All Gone, All the Beautiful Music of Our Grandparents?" is a piece that Crumb calls his "diatribe on modern music." It's funny, but it's also a poignant lamentation for an age that's gone forever.
Crumb being Crumb, though, no collection of his work would be complete without a few of his deliciously outrageous rants. R. Crumb Draws the Blues doesn't disappoint in this department. "The Old Songs Are the Best" and "Boppin' and Jivin'" are his opportunities to scream in frustration at noise that masquerades as sound. "Cubist Bee-Bop Comics" is a (LSD-inspired?) psychedelic romp that at times waxes furious, but at other times seems utterly celebratory. Who knows how to classify it?
