Episode 598 - Robert Williams
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckineers?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuckabillies?
Marc:What's going on?
Marc:How are you?
Marc:Good to see you.
Marc:Nice to be here.
Marc:Thanks for coming.
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my show, WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:Hope you're enjoying your day so far.
Marc:Hope you're having a nice drive or a nice run or perhaps a nice bath.
Marc:Be careful in the bath.
Marc:If you're listening to me on something that's not a battery-operated device, don't die in the tub while listening to me.
Marc:Before I get into me, I want to say that I have one of the great psychedelic geniuses on the show.
Marc:I don't know if he'd like being called that, but a masterful painter of the realms of the mind.
Marc:Robert Williams, the genius painter, is on the show today.
Marc:I went over to the Barnsdale Art Park where he had basically a retrospective along with some juxtaposed collection.
Marc:And certainly you can look up Robert Williams.
Marc:He's got a lot of amazing books out.
Marc:of his work.
Marc:And, you know, he goes all the way back to Zap Comics and maybe a little before.
Marc:Dude's been around.
Marc:He was down here in L.A.
Marc:with Von Dutch and Big Daddy Roth making hot rods and doing pinstriping.
Marc:And he was up in San Francisco with Art Crum and S. Clay Wilson and Spain and the fellas.
Marc:Doing the panels.
Marc:And now he does big paintings, little paintings, prints of all kinds.
Marc:He's a very aggressive and profound imagination.
Marc:And it was a real honor to talk to the dude.
Marc:Because his paintings blew my fucking mind.
Marc:It's always nice when I can get one of the original mind blowers on here.
Marc:You know, for me, there's only a few.
Marc:There's a small Olympus, Mount Olympus of mind blowers that defined how I see the world.
Marc:Williams came late to me, though I don't think I registered him initially in the Zap comics as being Robert Williams.
Marc:But later on, the paintings were like a complete mind fuck.
Marc:And when I saw them in person, I was excitedly devastated in the best way possible.
Marc:So Robert Williams will be talking to me.
Marc:Also, my buddy Nate Bargetsy, one of the funniest humans I know, has got a special coming out.
Marc:So he stopped by the other day.
Marc:We were at Moon Tower together, and he stopped by his...
Marc:His hour-long Comedy Central special, Full-Time Magic, is on Saturday, May 2nd at midnight.
Marc:It's 11 Central.
Marc:And me, Mark Marin, the Marination Tour is extended.
Marc:We're going to Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Port Chester, New York, Brooklyn, New York, Huntington, New York, Red Bank, New Jersey, Portland, Oregon, and two venues, Boulder, Colorado, Denver, Colorado.
Marc:You can check out all the dates.
Marc:They're up at...
Marc:wtfpod.com slash calendar.
Marc:But I do want to give you a quick heads up for certain people in certain cities where the pre-sale is happening today until 10 p.m.
Marc:That's for the Playhouse Square in Cleveland on June 5th.
Marc:You can use the promo code performer.
Marc:For Minneapolis, the Pantages Theater on June 7th, promo code performer.
Marc:For Huntington, New York at the Paramount Theater on June 27th, the promo code is PULSE.
Marc:Portland, Oregon on July 10th and 11th at the Aladdin Theater and Revolution Hall, promo code MARIN.
Marc:Boulder in Denver, Colorado, July 24th and 25th at the Boulder Theater and the Paramount Theater, promo code MARIN.
Marc:All the venues are officially going to go on sale tomorrow, May 1st.
Marc:So again, go to wtfpod.com slash calendar for all the dates.
Marc:And get involved in those pre-sales.
Marc:Nate Bargetze and I hung out.
Marc:Him, myself, Kurt Metzger, Todd Berry, went to get some barbecue at Moon Tower.
Marc:And old Nate said that he was going to be in town here in Los Angeles for a couple days.
Marc:And I had not realized he moved to Nashville.
Marc:He just...
Marc:Under the radar, moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he grew up.
Marc:I'm going to talk to him about that right now and about his new special.
Marc:As I said, that airs this Sunday, May 2nd, full-time magic at midnight and 11 central on Comedy Central.
Marc:So my buddy Nate, stopping by.
Marc:Nate Bargetsy.
Guest:How long did it take me to get your name right?
Guest:A long time.
Guest:A lot of people still say Bargetsy.
Guest:Because of me?
Marc:Oh, no, you called me Nick.
Marc:So, oh, well, the Nick thing, that wasn't a real thing.
Marc:A lot of people call you Nick after that?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, that was, people, like, looked up Nick Bargetsy.
Guest:I remember I told you, I said on, like, when you could look at something on my website, it was, like, the fourth thing was Nick Bargetsy.
Guest:didn't i correct it you did but uh you said my last name right oh good hey we're just happy to be yeah halfway there halfway yeah something identifiable that they could i think i told you it would be you know what it might be easier for me just to change my name to nick then try to go but was that before i talked to you
Guest:It was right at the beginning.
Guest:I thought you said it on the Nerdist, like when you did.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:Right after I met you.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And we were talking about that, and you thought, like, there it is, my big opportunity to get mentioned on the Nerdist podcast.
Guest:You know, I fucked it up.
Guest:I'm just going to change my name to Nick.
Guest:That would be the easier way.
Guest:That's easier.
Guest:That's less people to tackle than...
Marc:So what the hell happened?
Marc:You were out here in L.A.
Marc:living in... Where were you living?
Marc:Somewhere in... Oh, we were way down.
Guest:Carson.
Guest:Carson?
Guest:Yeah, near Torrance.
Marc:So you're down there in Carson, near Torrance, with your new baby.
Marc:New baby.
Marc:Driving up into the city to do 10-minute spots.
Marc:And now you're gone.
Marc:That was it.
Marc:That was it, yeah.
Guest:What happened with the show, with the Fallon-produced pilot?
Guest:We did it two years in a row and nothing happened.
Guest:You did scripts.
Guest:Scripts, sold two scripts and then wrote them and neither one of them got picked up and so now we're here.
Guest:Is that when you decided, sort of like, I don't need to live here?
Guest:I thought we did it before I moved in December.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I just, I don't know.
Guest:I get like, well, I'm just like, well, I'm just going to do it.
Guest:And I say it was the first thing I've ever done in the, you know, I've been, I've left Nashville in 13 years.
Guest:So like.
Guest:So you moved back to Nashville.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I moved back to Nashville.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:It's the first thing I've done in 13 years that wasn't for me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everything's always been- Oh, this was selfless.
Guest:This was the first selfless thing.
Guest:I mean, now I just leave there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You owed it to your wife and your new child- To give them a chance to- To have a life- Not have to be in the dicey streets of Carson by themselves.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, you're out at the improv.
Guest:I'm out at the improv.
Guest:Drinking.
Guest:Drinking, just be like, life's great, whatever.
Guest:Calling your wife up going, how's everything?
Guest:What's going on?
Guest:Did they catch that guy that shot that guy?
Guest:And then she's like, I don't know.
Guest:We heard a guy get shot in our neighborhood.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay, well you did the right thing and now you're not drinking anymore.
Marc:You're living in Nashville.
Marc:You got a house.
Marc:Got a house.
Marc:Right down the street from your parents.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:See, that was, but I think on some level that was a smart move in a selfish way to have the parents nearby because then you can have some time.
Marc:Take the child.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:We can give her.
Guest:My mom comes over.
Guest:And they're happy to, right?
Guest:Grandparents.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:We have a bunch of, my brother has four kids and my sister has a kid.
Guest:So like all the cousins and stuff.
Guest:And one of my nieces is like nine months older than my daughter.
Guest:So they're like best friends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and so them being around and she's going to all these birthday parties and you know, I mean she's like, you know, instead of just being her and my wife.
Guest:Down in Carson.
Guest:Down in Carson.
Guest:Hold up.
Guest:Hold up and now we're, you know, and I got a, I stay at, I got a room out here that I can come to.
Guest:You do?
Guest:Well my buddy has an extra room downstairs.
Guest:Oh really?
Guest:I noticed you have an extra room.
Marc:Yeah, I mean you can stay in there with the records.
Marc:With the records.
Marc:Yeah, there's a bed up against the wall, you just throw it.
Marc:It's like a Murphy bed?
Marc:It's like a Murphy bed that just covers the window.
Guest:It's not even hooked into it?
Marc:No, it's a mattress.
Marc:It's a promotional thing.
Guest:It's like the first idea for a Murphy bed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like some guy walks in and goes, what if you put that in the wall?
Guest:Go with me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's how Murphy beds store it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So what's Nashville?
Guest:What's the plan, man?
Guest:The plan is, I'm not sure what the plan is.
Guest:I was very nervous about even... I was trying to move and not tell anybody.
Guest:Really?
Guest:That was the idea.
Guest:Because you were embarrassed?
Guest:You were ashamed?
Guest:I wasn't embarrassed.
Guest:I think you still feel that everybody thinks you just quit comedy.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You're out of the game.
Guest:You're out of the game.
Guest:You're done.
Guest:Give up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Ran away.
Guest:You still have that mentality.
Guest:So I just literally did it and didn't tell anybody.
Marc:I think when I talk to you at Moontower, you're sort of still in this justifying period.
Marc:You're like, hey, you know, show business is in Nashville.
Marc:My agent has an office there, though they primarily didn't
Marc:deal with country musicians.
Guest:You didn't give me what I wanted out of it either.
Guest:You want everybody just to be like, yeah, dude, I think that's so smart that you did it.
Guest:And I don't think I got that from you.
Guest:I got like, oh yeah.
Guest:Then I'm just like, oh boy.
Marc:No, I think it's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're a comedian that has a career in comedy.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:You decided that it's a good idea to turn your back on show business.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And move to Nashville and engage that show business.
Guest:Well, they all, every time I'd go to meetings, they all think I live in Nashville anyway.
Guest:Like, I would go, like, just because of my accent or if I say something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, like, they're just assuming I live there.
Marc:Now, what are you going to do, though?
Marc:How are you going to infiltrate?
Marc:What's the plan?
Marc:Are you going to be the next generation of, like... Boom-collar guys?
Marc:Well, I didn't want to say it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No, it's out there.
Guest:I mean, it's, you know.
Guest:It's already out there?
Guest:It's out there.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:It's not out there.
Guest:No one's saying.
Marc:If you just get one of those blue-collar guys to go out with you on tour, are you in contact with any of those fellas?
Guest:Some.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You talked to Foxworthy?
Guest:No, I've never talked to Foxworthy.
Guest:I golfed in Nashville.
Guest:Larry the Cable Guy was golfing in front of us.
Guest:Who?
Guest:Larry the Cable Guy.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Dan?
Guest:yeah yes i told him i said you can tell i go i can tell how long someone's been in comedy is if they refer to you by dan yeah then i know that they've been around for a while i remember him at the comedy store briefly yeah he's a good guy he was the nicest dude in the world yeah and uh real cool and it looked it's funny uh so i'm a big vanderbilt fan which is the school nashville and i did not go there
Guest:And so we took a picture with me and him.
Guest:You and Larry the Cable guy.
Guest:And he is all Nebraska.
Guest:He's a big Nebraska fan.
Guest:And so he's got all Nebraska stuff on, camouflaged, dressed just like you would expect him to be dressed.
Guest:I'm wearing all Vanderbilt stuff.
Guest:So it almost looks like if the South is trying to create a new Larry the Cable guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And their idea is like, we want to use, look, we're going to go, his school instead of Nebraska will be Vanderbilt.
Guest:It will be a smart school.
Guest:And people are like, well, that, you know, I don't know, that could turn people off.
Guest:You're like, here's the thing.
Guest:He did not go there.
Guest:That's the twist.
Guest:That's the hook.
Guest:That's the hook that gets them in to go.
Guest:You think, oh, is this guy a smart guy?
Guest:No, no, no, no, no, no.
Guest:He is far from it.
Guest:And just wears all the Vanderbilt stuff.
Guest:So this special, it's on Comedy Central?
Guest:Yes, this Saturday, May 2nd, which is the night of the Mayweather-Packnell fight.
Marc:So the Comedy Central special is on this Saturday.
Guest:You can buy it May 5th.
Marc:So have you gotten to know your daughter at all?
Guest:We have crossed paths at the house.
Guest:She's how old?
Guest:Two and a half.
Guest:She'll be three in July.
Guest:It went from like the first, at the very beginning, I remember once we were home.
Guest:See, we'd go home for Nashville too, like sometimes for like a month.
Guest:Like if I was going to be on the road, it was just easier to go home and we'd stay at my parents.
Guest:And I remember one time I was packing and she started packing her Minnie Mouse suitcase and was like, oh, I'm going with daddy.
Guest:And that was brutal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:because it was like you know that would hurt but now it's actually brutal for me because she's almost fine with it yeah now i come home for like you know uh i was in new york and then i went home for a day then i flew out to austin and uh here and so i've been gone for like two weeks besides one day and she's just kind of like you know she's she's happy to see me and then just kind of like all right see you you know that's worse yeah so you going on the road this week she says yeah
Guest:Did she say that?
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:She goes, are you featuring or are you headlining?
Guest:I'm like, ah, this weekend headline.
Guest:You know, I'll probably do some guest months.
Guest:But, like, you know, we'll see what happens.
Marc:But, you know, that probably has more to do with the fact that she has more friends around.
Marc:She has more friends.
Marc:And I think they get to a point where they don't really like you or care about you.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:FaceTime.
Marc:FaceTime's big.
Marc:How long does that last, though?
Guest:We're FaceTime for a little bit.
Guest:We're pretty good at, you know, you don't want to keep anybody awkwardly where it's like, okay.
Marc:Where your two-year-old daughter says, okay, Daddy, I'm done.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Good luck with everything.
Guest:I just see her moving her hands like, all right, he just keeps going and going.
Guest:He's to your wife.
Guest:She's like, Daddy, just yapping.
Guest:Oh, nonstop.
Guest:All right, you're on the road.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:i almost like the idea too i wanted to move and like almost see if anybody would know yeah just to be like who would prove a point no one would know because we don't ever see anybody right because we're either you're on the road or you go to your spot and you're done like i'd have to go if i want to go see you i have to go find you we got to be at a festival we have to be a festival yes and you can just go do it oh that's well that's i think it's gonna be good are you gonna i hope it's good
Guest:I had this whole idea I wasn't telling anybody, and then here we are now.
Guest:Making the announcement for the special.
Guest:What's the special called?
Guest:Full-Time Magic.
Guest:Full-Time Magic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, it's based on your dad.
Guest:Now your dad's out there doing the magic.
Guest:He goes on the road.
Guest:Did you grow up with him going on the road?
Guest:Yeah, he went on the road all the time.
Guest:I don't know if I ever put it together.
Guest:I don't think I pay attention to details of things.
Guest:To your parents, because you've got your own life to live.
Guest:Yeah, but I, yeah.
Guest:And I don't like, and now when I think back, it's like, I just would be like, I don't know.
Guest:Like, he just wouldn't be like a baseball game.
Guest:You're like, I don't know.
Guest:Why is he not here?
Guest:You know?
Guest:And it's like, now I'm like, oh, he was like.
Guest:Doing magic somewhere.
Guest:God knows what, yeah, what kind of gig he was having to do.
Guest:Like in the 80s, like just some awful road gig.
Guest:And I'm just like, he should have came to my game.
Guest:I don't know why he didn't come to my game.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He didn't come to your game because he's somewhere going like, is this your card?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He's somewhere doing that.
Guest:He didn't come watch me, I don't know, not make it in baseball.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You didn't make it in baseball because he was out there pulling coins out of people's hair out of their ears.
Guest:My son is fatherless and wayward.
Guest:He wasn't gone.
Guest:He had a regular job.
Guest:He was a teacher, too.
Guest:Oh, that's right.
Guest:Does he do tricks for your kid?
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:They like it, and he does stuff for all our nephews and nieces.
Marc:He'll do parties if they're family?
Guest:yeah yeah people still ask me uh they'll be like hey well you're they want to get my dad to be a clown because he started as a clown yeah and uh they wanted him to be a clown for like their part you know and you have to like tell my guys he's not he doesn't do that anymore you know i mean it's almost like yeah if someone wants you to come hey we come do these are people you grew up with yeah
Guest:now they have kids and being like hey could we hire your dad like yeah yeah he's yeah he would still love like they just picture that he doesn't move up at all it's like if you have someone a friend that will be like you know you're doing you're doing this great you got your own show on tv and still be like hey could you do some time maybe at my wedding and you're like i don't do yeah it's not what i do anymore you know i don't even know you that well yeah yeah but all right i mean how much time do you want me to do and then you do it and then you go
Marc:Well, that's so weird about people that they're so much in their own heads.
Marc:How are they going to know that?
Marc:I mean, they might not even know you're where you're at.
Marc:They'll just see you around town and be like, is your dad still, because we got kids, he's going to have a birthday party.
Guest:Yeah, you know what my biggest, one of my biggest things when you mentioned being rolling stone?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was one of the first things that I felt, and I already did a few late nights and all that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that was the first thing where I felt like people were pretty wild.
Guest:This guy's a guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:yeah no they were just impressed like friends like high school friends were like that was like uh oh yeah yeah that was like a oh wow so the specials an hour an hour that's another one people don't know they're like uh you tell them like i'm doing an hour and they're like oh yeah didn't you already do that you're like no that was a comedy central presents half hour and you're you know it's like this is like much more time than that and harder to get and they're like oh yeah i
Marc:okay they don't know that they oh man they don't i don't know what you have to do you have to be seinfeld before someone will be like okay that's exactly right he's made it that's exactly the truth that is the worst part about what we do is that even my parents it doesn't matter my father be like you know you should maybe call bill maher ask him how he did it
Guest:yeah what are you talking about yeah i'm doing fine it's cool yeah but they but if you don't enter the culture like with like like everyone knows you yeah worry they even if you don't want to know yeah they know but you're pretty far i mean i don't know how like it's crazy i think my mom's one that said that she's like didn't you already do one and then i got really mad at my mom who's so supportive
Guest:She didn't understand.
Guest:Yeah, I was like, are you serious?
Guest:That was a half hour.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was like, this is a full hour.
Guest:You think they just hand these out?
Guest:Do they?
Marc:Yeah, it's pretty easy to get, to be honest.
Marc:All right, so we'll watch the special, and it's good to see you.
Marc:Yes, thanks for- How long are you in town for?
Guest:Till Friday.
Guest:Oh, what are you doing?
Guest:You know, Hollywood stuff.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Meetings.
Guest:I'm doing Matt at midnight.
Guest:You've done that before.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:We did it.
Guest:Me and you did it.
Guest:Oh, that's right.
Guest:It was a big day.
Guest:I won, didn't I?
Guest:Or no, I didn't.
Guest:You and Natasha.
Guest:Did Natasha win?
Guest:I think Natasha.
Guest:I got knocked out.
Guest:Oh, that's right.
Guest:That was sad.
Marc:I felt bad for you.
Guest:I was out of there.
Guest:It was immediately.
Guest:It's at the end that happened.
Guest:Yeah, it's at the end.
Guest:And then y'all stay.
Guest:And then the light goes out on you.
Guest:Yeah, they make it a red light.
Guest:It was sad, man.
Marc:I think a lot of people were upset by it.
Marc:It was a shakeup.
Marc:It looked like it was anti-Southerner.
Guest:Well, a lot of stuff is.
Marc:It's all coming back.
Marc:That's your journey, though, is to bring back
Marc:The pride.
Marc:To get the Civil War started back up.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Well, I don't know if that's a good... It seems like it's already starting around the country.
Marc:I think what you're trying to do is... You can only hand out so many flyers.
Marc:Bridge the gap between us, you know, highbrow, condescending.
Guest:I come in going, I know what y'all are doing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I know what we're doing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Honestly, we're all on the same page.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We're all doing the same thing.
Guest:You just have to listen.
Guest:You just talk differently.
Guest:Yeah, that's all it is.
Guest:Yeah, stop projecting.
Guest:We will go attack Manhattan and L.A.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're the only two different people.
Marc:And then, you know, you just infiltrate with a bunch of you, talking the way you do with your sort of homespun wisdom.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And we'll all come around.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right.
Marc:That's the agenda.
Guest:Yeah, that's going to be my next special.
Marc:All right, Nick.
Marc:Well, it's great talking to you.
Guest:Nick Bargetti, full-time magic.
Marc:Nate Bargetsy, Full-Time Magic.
Marc:All right, buddy.
Marc:Thanks for doing it, buddy.
Marc:Love that guy.
Marc:Watch that special, Full-Time Magic.
Marc:Saturday, May 2nd at midnight, 11 Central.
Marc:I think it airs again right after.
Marc:So, Robert Williams, man.
Marc:I think that I'm sort of hung up on the idea.
Marc:You know, the different identities that we go through, the different personas we try on.
Marc:Maybe not personas, but whatever you can get away with with your attire.
Marc:Whatever that implies.
Marc:The first time and the only time I was in rehab was back in 88, maybe 87.
Marc:And in there, there was a dude named Milo.
Marc:And I don't know if Milo made it.
Marc:I don't know where he's at or whether he's alive, but he came in pretty whacked out of his mind from staying up too long on some substance, doing dope and doing coke and doing speedballs and hearing the voices and keeping guard just in case someone wants to steal your brain, that kind of stuff.
Marc:Quietly sweating in the shed.
Marc:Waiting for some shit to go down because the dispatch was made.
Marc:If you understand what I'm saying.
Marc:But I got close to Milo and he was a hardcore dude.
Marc:And Milo had a goatee before goatees were happening.
Marc:But this was not the standard goatee that goes along with the bro shirt.
Marc:Or the acid wash pants.
Marc:With the elaborate pockets.
Marc:No, this was a goatee that went along with a bike.
Marc:A motorcycle.
Marc:And maybe a little jail time, maybe not.
Marc:But he was a hardcore motherfucker and he smoked Lucky Strikes.
Marc:And when I was in rehab that first time, I was pretty shattered.
Marc:Whatever personality I had had become a bit fragmented.
Marc:A bit wobbly.
Marc:It was fragile to begin with.
Marc:So I remember when I was in rehab, I listened to Milo tell stories.
Marc:And then he had a carton of Luckies.
Marc:And I was smoking those Luckies until they hurt my fucking lungs.
Marc:I'd take his Luckies.
Marc:I'd buy a pack of my own because I wanted to be like him.
Marc:And then I grew out after rehab.
Marc:I grew out the Fu Manchu thing.
Marc:But it was before...
Marc:They were hip or cool.
Marc:This is the late 80s.
Marc:So I was going for the hard look.
Marc:I'd pull my hair back into a longish ponytail.
Marc:And I had my round glasses on that were tinted all the time.
Marc:And I had my jailbird biker goatee.
Marc:And I wore my long trench coat.
Marc:And I was about what?
Marc:How old was I?
Marc:About 25 years old.
Marc:And I think I was wearing the Milo costume for a while because I thought it made me look like I had been places.
Marc:And I had.
Marc:I had.
Marc:I had lost my mind.
Marc:But I'd never been to jail.
Marc:I never rode a bike.
Marc:And I don't think I could kill a man.
Marc:But I think that my beard looked like it could at that time.
Marc:Why did I tell you that story?
Marc:Because there's something about what Robert Williams sort of represents about the 60s, about hot rods, about motorcycles, about cars, about speed, about unleashing your imagination, about that darker part of the 60s that sort of I believe I always aspired to.
Marc:And through the Milo costume, I believed I had been there.
Marc:Eventually, I shaved it and took me about a decade or two to get straight with who I was.
Marc:But I think I'm here now.
Marc:I got it.
Marc:I got to tell you, I was nervous to interview Robert Williams because he was intimidating to me.
Marc:I went to his opening.
Marc:I met him briefly there.
Marc:My buddy Coop, Chris Cooper.
Marc:The poster artist and painter is a big fan, obviously, and very influenced by Robert Williams and his personal friend, and he facilitated an introduction at the opening.
Marc:I met him, and Robert, in my mind, very quickly dismissed me, and I projected a lot onto that.
Marc:I just didn't think I was hard enough or serious enough or the real deal enough for him to even register.
Marc:I gave him...
Marc:I projected that gift on him that he could judge me thoroughly through to my soul that quickly.
Marc:But I was nervous when I met him over at the gallery where he did the show, where his art was hanging.
Marc:And he was with his wife, who who was not in the room.
Marc:We were in the office there.
Marc:So you might hear a phone ringing occasionally.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, I was intimidated and, you know, I really wanted to have a good conversation with him because I do respect his work.
Marc:So here is me trying not to be nervous with Robert Williams.
Marc:I'm a tremendous fan of yours, and I have been for a long time.
Guest:You could do worse.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Two wives ago, the woman that became my first wife worked at Shafrazi.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And I remember knowing that you were there and going to see the things.
Marc:The first time I saw the canvases in person, I had only seen them in books.
Marc:And there was that moment where you see someone's work outside of a book and you're like, holy shit.
Marc:The layers of work that went into those paintings and all your paintings, I couldn't believe it.
Marc:It was mind-blowing to me to see it live.
Marc:Is that an odd thing to hear?
Guest:No, no, it's not because when you see a painting in reality, there's a certain disappointment and also a certain pleasure in seeing it.
Guest:A printed formalizes it.
Guest:When you actually see it, you can actually see hand strokes and suffering and energy and thought into something, you know.
Guest:When you see the painting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That's exactly the whole texture of the thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, like in terms of your like styles of how you painted, it was much more laborious at a different point in time.
Marc:Right.
Marc:In terms of the techniques you use.
Guest:Well, I've never been lucky enough to find an easy way out on these things.
Guest:I've always in my mind think, well, I better find some shortcuts.
Guest:But on the other hand, I think, well, here's a nicer way to do it.
Guest:And that nicer way to do it is always more time consuming.
Marc:And what was the nicest way you found where it was taking a year?
Guest:To get the better effect.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I said, well, this will give a remarkable effect.
Guest:And hell, that's another two or three days doodling around with that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it's kind of a losing game.
Guest:It's not a rational person's occupation.
Right.
Guest:but I mean obviously you have to be somewhat obsessed with it I mean in order to do it I mean it's more than obsession yeah it's more than obsession and it's more than fulfillment it's uh it's like your worth yeah you know it's like when I was young I wanted to be a slick artist and be a big operator yeah
Guest:be a hip dude yeah attracted chicks and everything sure i did an immense amount of studying of uh technical painting tomes and books and whatnot on technique things from back from the 1850s on the modern times and i memorized all these color combinations and what paintings were transparent what paintings weren't transparent and whatnot and uh
Guest:my ego projected me into learning this stuff but then as i got into the realities of selling the stuff and finding even a venue that would dare show the stuff i think it was kind of kind of at odds there but by this time by my time of my late 30s the painting on the skill owned me it was no longer me trying to be a slick egotist yeah you know um the the the
Guest:practice every day and the habits and the mixing the paints owned me and I could do it automatically right right yeah yeah so I was left with you know I got I've got this thing I've developed here and I'm not getting any recognition but on the other hand nobody else seems to be able to do it and
Guest:And I'm not going to do anything else.
Guest:At the same time, I was doing comic books, too.
Guest:I was involved in Zap Comics.
Guest:And my same problem developed there.
Guest:I got into spending too much time in the comic books.
Guest:A good comic book artist would do at least a page a day.
Guest:It was taking me a week a page, you know.
Guest:So I just, there's like something wrong with my mental value of being practical and rational.
Marc:But wasn't it a perfectionism, though, really, right?
Marc:I mean, you had a process.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But I caught on real early on what Salvador Dali said.
Guest:If you're looking for perfection, forget it.
Guest:You'll never find it.
Marc:But is that something you can actually do intellectually?
Marc:I mean, if you're wired to say, well, this isn't quite good enough.
Marc:I mean, you're never going to get around that.
Guest:Well, let me point this out to you.
Guest:If you're a young artist, say you're 10 or 12, and you're just taking art classes at school, and you sit down to a canvas or a drawing, you have an idea.
Guest:There's a chance that when you get through that project, that it's going to be maybe 25% of what you intended.
Guest:And you do project after project, and it'll probably be about 25% of what you intended, unless it's a tic-tac-toe or something, or a stick figure.
Guest:So when you get to be in your late teens, your early 20s, and you start into college, you know, and you...
Guest:you get up to maybe 40, 45%.
Guest:But by this time, you've learned to keep your mouth shut.
Guest:When you get a piece of artwork done, you give the impression that this was what your total intention was.
Guest:You learn to shut your mouth.
Guest:But you're still hitting about 45%.
Guest:Right.
Guest:okay you get you get into your late 20s and your 30s and you sit down to do a piece of artwork you got it in your head well that's that's going to be if you're pretty slick that's going to be about 60 or 65 percent right right now i'm an old man i'm 72 and i can hit about 80 now so i have an idea and i sit down to do it right but i don't tell people that see i tell
Guest:No, it's a 100-pointer.
Guest:Ever lick was intended.
Guest:That's just the nature of genius.
Marc:Sure, absolutely.
Marc:Now, when I first met you, it was interesting because I didn't know if I'd put you off or not because I met you with Coop, who has also done this show and who I'm friends with.
Marc:He's a good friend, too.
Marc:He's a great guy.
Marc:And the first thing I said to you was like, you know, I grew up in Albuquerque.
Marc:And you said, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Guest:you grew up in albuquerque i did and i thought like well this is a surefire way to connect with the dude in a heartbeat and make an impression but you were like oh boy no no that no you you misread that you yeah you misread that it's just uh you're a lot younger than me and i wonder what your life was like in albuquerque compared to mine yeah well what was i was there in the 40s and 50s i can't imagine man so what was there
Marc:Kirkland Air Force Base?
Guest:Well, there were three Air Force bases.
Guest:There were Sandia, Kirkland, and Manzano.
Guest:My mother said it perfectly when I was a little kid.
Guest:She says, watch out for Albuquerque because it's still a frontier town.
Guest:And she couldn't have said it better.
Guest:Because between criminal activity on the street and the brutal police department, you know, you... Still?
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Guest:I was in fights and in jail all the time in Albuquerque.
Marc:How'd you end up there?
Guest:You mean in fights or in jail?
Marc:No, in Albuquerque.
Guest:Well, I was born there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was born there in 43.
Guest:My parents were married and divorced four times.
Guest:My father was from the Deep South, so I was...
Guest:Going back and forth from Alabama, Georgia, Florida, back to Albuquerque.
Guest:So I come up from not only a broken home, but like a terribly torn apart home.
Marc:Over and over again.
Guest:Over and over again.
Guest:With the same characters.
Guest:My father had a sizable amount of money.
Guest:He was fairly wealthy.
Guest:What was his racket?
Guest:My father had the largest drive-in restaurant in the world that serviced 100 cars at one time and had its own theater and its own radio station.
Guest:Where was this?
Guest:Montgomery, Alabama.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And his good friends with Hank Williams and Gene Krupa and a lot of people.
Marc:They came through and hung out with you guys.
Marc:Well, he knew Hank Williams very well.
Marc:And you remember him as a kid?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:But then when I go back to Albuquerque, I'm just totally broke.
Guest:So I went from this one lifestyle to the other.
Guest:And then in Albuquerque, it was a real reality check.
Guest:Fighting continually and getting in trouble.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I've developed a lot of character in me.
Guest:But on the other hand, my father was a military man, and he sent me to a strict military school.
Guest:Two sides.
Guest:I was raised with this inferiority complex that had to face up to Nietzsche.
Guest:The only way I was going to get out of my inferiority complex is start Nietzscheing it, you know.
Guest:I had to stand up to Frederick Nietzsche and grit my teeth and fight these guys on the street and get my ass kicked and whatnot, but it happened time after time.
Marc:When you were in Albuquerque, what high school did you go to?
Marc:I went to Highland High.
Marc:I went to Highland High.
Marc:I graduated from Highland High.
Marc:I'm sorry.
Marc:I didn't.
Marc:I was thrown out.
Marc:Right behind the Highland Theater.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right there.
Guest:Do you remember that bowling alley over by Highland High?
Marc:I don't know if it was there when I was there.
Guest:There was a rumble there with over 300 people, and they were in there.
Guest:I was involved in it.
Guest:Really?
Guest:They were throwing bowling balls.
Guest:Pachucos went in there throwing bowling balls.
Guest:It was knife fights, and people were stabbed.
Marc:So it was the Pachucos, which later became the Cholos.
Guest:Well, we used to call them chooks.
Guest:There was the stomps, which were the cowboys, and then there was the chooks.
Marc:What were you?
Guest:I was kind of a... Well, I ran with both of them, really.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Marc:You could move through all fields.
Guest:Pathetically.
Guest:Pathetically.
Guest:But you must have been a funny guy.
Guest:Well...
Guest:usually it's a sense of humor that i had my antennas out you know i was a young kid that learned real quick you know i'd walk down when i'd walk down the street i'd always look two blocks down yeah learned real quick you know walk down the street look two blocks down because you might want to cross the street right yeah there's no there's three of them yeah yeah right so what was that i don't want to go in i have so many of these vulgar street scene stories that could fill a book let's go on about the art
Marc:I'm completely willing to do that.
Marc:I saw a picture of you, and I don't remember where, maybe it was in the Malicious, that collection, that big book.
Marc:What was it, Malicious Resplendid?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Of you at the Albuquerque State Fair.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And, you know, I was sort of obsessed with the state fair.
Marc:You know, I was obsessed with it.
Guest:I worked there as a concessionaire, and when that fair, when that carnival moved, I went with it.
Guest:And what were you doing?
Guest:Pitch them in, win them out, take home some dishes.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, I played the cigarette game and a number of games.
Marc:I've always been obsessed with, like, after I saw, I had a book called Very Special People, you know, and then I was obsessed with the anomalies, with freaks.
Marc:And I remember going to the state fair to see Ronnie and Donnie.
Guest:See, that's after my time.
Guest:I saw freaks.
Guest:There was freaks in the 10 and 1 show when I was there that I saw back in the early 50s.
Guest:Nico and Ico, the sheep-headed men from Labrador, Johnny Ick.
Marc:Johnny Ick was still around?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you saw those guys.
Marc:Yeah, I talked to them.
Marc:I traveled with them.
Marc:You traveled with Johnny Ick.
Marc:And other characters, too.
Marc:And because I have to believe that that informed your eye somehow.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:The tawdry side of culture has always fascinated me.
Guest:It's always seemed romantic to me.
Guest:It seemed like the kind of thief society that was in Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Guest:It's a very, very dangerous world to function in as the lower classes and the criminal classes.
Guest:And I was always attracted by the romance of petty criminals.
Guest:And later I understood what my problem was.
Guest:It wasn't really that I had these criminal tendencies.
Guest:It was just that I was in a small town like Albuquerque that hadn't developed a full bohemian community.
Marc:It wasn't there.
Guest:It was very small around the University of New Mexico.
Guest:I was always in trouble with the police and whatnot, and then I'd become a chess hustler around the University of New Mexico, and I was just a kid.
Marc:But you were compelled towards that scene, looking for...
Guest:Yeah, I very much involved myself in the beatnik movement in the late 50s you did yeah in New Mexico there wasn't like a true literary beatnik world that we think of the orthodox but there was Urban beatnik world that had created all over the United States from seeing
Guest:sorry movies like, well not sorry movies, but questionable Hollywood interpretations of the beatnik culture.
Guest:One of them was The Beat Generation.
Guest:The other one that I remember standing out really a lot was Bell Book and Candle with Kim Novak.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:So those kind of set the pattern for the United States of America to have a beatnik idea of how to conduct themselves.
Guest:I was very, very, I was 15, 16, very much into that world.
Guest:I hung out at coffee shops and smoked marijuana.
Marc:And were you doing art at that point?
Marc:I was always doing some kind of art.
Marc:What was going on?
Marc:Where did it start?
Marc:Where did you start defining yourself or knowing that that was where you were going?
Guest:Well, before I had a developed memory, my parents would sit me down on a big roll of butcher paper with crayons, you know, and I'd just take off.
Guest:And I did a big red skeleton bone for bone, and it was Red Skeleton the comedian, you know.
Guest:And I was just out of diapers.
Guest:And then there was a pop song called The Devil in My Darling's Eye, and I did a big eye with a devil in it, you know, and I was just a little bitty baby.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:And in, I think, the fifth grade, they selected about six of the gifted kids, six or eight of the gifted students, to do a mural at the end of the hall.
Guest:All these young, talented children would do their efforts.
Guest:And then I'd draw back and look and see a thing here and a thing here and a thing here.
Guest:And I'm the only one that could go up there and do a landscape tying them all together.
Guest:I could only unify.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I really didn't get to do my little thing.
Guest:My thing was unifying.
Guest:And if something was big, I'd put it on a hill close, big, something small, you know, I could have a perspective, understand, but the stage thing.
Guest:So I had that innate ability.
Marc:So when did you, like, when the beatnik thing started happening, did you have some sort of aesthetic that you were gunning for?
Marc:Like you wanted to be part of?
Guest:Well, I...
Guest:real early on was taken with surrealism.
Guest:Really young.
Guest:And I presumed that the beatnik thing, it was part and parcel of that, but I didn't have a real good grasp of the time of what abstract expressionism was.
Marc:Where'd you see surrealism first?
Guest:He was omnipresent.
Guest:It was ubiquitous.
Guest:It's in books and whatever.
Guest:Dolly mostly?
Guest:Yeah, mostly Dolly.
Guest:Then that, of course, you know, Dolly was a Johnny-come-lately and then he was thrown out.
Guest:He was kind of parasited off Surrealism and then got the whole name of Surrealism, you know, and then they kicked him out and still run off with the name of Surrealism to this day, you know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, he lived to make bank, that guy.
Marc:He did.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:He did.
Guest:He was an operator.
Guest:No doubt about it.
Guest:He should have been a wrestling promoter.
Guest:He looked like one in a way.
Guest:He was enormously talented.
Guest:A rich, rich imagination.
Marc:He had a carny sort of disposition.
Guest:You know, I went to a lecture and there was this gal that knew him personally.
Guest:And she said that when you were with him just around the house or something, he talked perfectly normal.
Guest:But when he got around a bunch of people he started affecting that exaggerated accent, right?
Marc:Yeah, why not put on a show?
Marc:Yeah So all right, so you're in Albuquerque.
Marc:Did you ever know like a guy named Gus Blaisdell by any chance?
Marc:No He owned a bookstore later.
Guest:I just don't even I don't even know when he got there Well, I'd left in 63 and I kind of burned all my bridges you left running
Guest:Well, it was a good thing I did get out.
Guest:I probably ended up in Santa Fe Prison.
Guest:A lot of my friends did end up in Santa Fe Prison.
Marc:Do you still have friends in New Mexico?
Guest:Just relatives.
Guest:A few hot rod buddies.
Guest:When I go back to Albuquerque, I see a few hot rod buddies.
Marc:Is that when you first started doing hot rods?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I first started when I was in Alabama in 1955 at 12 years old.
Guest:I got my dad to buy me a 34 Ford Coupe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I was home to the hot rods way early.
Guest:I started reading Hot Rod Magazine about 53 years.
Marc:So that was in your consciousness.
Marc:That was something that drove you, literally.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Because one thing when I started going through stuff today, the intensity, no matter how long it may take you to paint one of your paintings, the intensity and the velocity of the thing coming at you, in all the ways that it comes at you, there's no avoiding it.
Guest:And there's almost a speed to it.
Guest:Well, what I do, I have to kind of disregard the concept that this is going to be a decoration in a house.
Guest:I see my paintings closer to literature than I do to... Well, yeah, the titles are literature.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, if you have a sophisticated home, you have a coffee table with classic books on it to show people how intelligent you are, you'd have like maybe War and Peace or Two Years Before the Mast or Tales of Two Cities and just really interesting literature.
Guest:But as long as it's sitting on the coffee table and the pages are closed, it's okay, because there's stuff in there that would make your hairline recede, that would create diarrhea in children.
Guest:But unfortunately, art has to be tamed and knocked down, because people can just...
Guest:look right at it.
Guest:That's really a sad thing that literature is allowed to totally eclipse graphics.
Guest:Comic book has kind of challenged that.
Guest:Comic book is one of the most important things of the 20th century.
Guest:Fifty years from now, you look back on the 20th century, and you'll see that the cartoon dominated the art world.
Guest:Forever.
Guest:From the beginning.
Guest:It was the most important thing of the 20th century.
Marc:What was the first time I ever saw people having sex?
Guest:I agree with you.
Guest:I've got some examples in this show here, those eight-page Bibles.
Guest:I think it was like 1951.
Guest:I was eight years old, and some kid showed me one of them eight-page Bibles that he stole from his dad.
Guest:I'm looking at that, and ah, that's how that works.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:that's how that works the first time i saw it was a spain picture like it was uh it was in an underground comic collection of two bodies in space with and they're having sex and i was like that's how it worked and then about a few years after that someone showed me a pointographic photograph at a baseball game
Guest:And the fellow was an ex-GI that just was stationed in Japan, and he came back and he had these pictures of these Japanese people in the act of sexual intercourse.
Guest:And that didn't look interesting to me at all.
Guest:That didn't look interesting to me at all, seeing these guys' buttocks on top of a woman.
Guest:That wasn't as good as the eight-page Bible.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Well, when you set out, you left Albuquerque to come here?
Marc:And study art practically?
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And where was the first place you studied?
Guest:I came out here to go to Los Angeles City College because it was only $6.50 a unit.
Guest:So I spent two years at Los Angeles City College and I was nominated for the Dean's List and I did...
Marc:What were you working on specifically, just learning technique?
Guest:Yeah, sculpture and painting.
Guest:And the college newspaper there, the Collegian, approached the art department for a cartoonist, an editorial cartoonist, and nobody could draw.
Guest:Approached the entire student body, nobody could draw.
Guest:So I'll do it.
Guest:Man, what a wonderful opportunity at 20 years old to get in print.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, the first time to get something published, you know.
Guest:What were you drawing?
Mm-hmm.
Guest:Just editorial cartoons, whatever the current subject was.
Guest:And I won an award.
Guest:It was a national contest, and I came in second nationally, you know, of all the junior colleges.
Guest:And after I quit the school, I still had to come over to me to get editorial cartoons done, you know.
Guest:But I wasn't even a student anymore.
Marc:You're still making money doing that.
Guest:It wasn't very much money.
Guest:It was enough money for me to get married on.
Guest:But, you know, I let it build up for a long, long time before I bothered with it.
Marc:So, all right, so after that, where'd you go next to continue this?
Guest:Well, I went out and got a job, and then I took extension courses.
Guest:I married my wife, Suzanne, that I met at... Still married?
Guest:Yeah, still married.
Guest:Great.
Guest:And it was hard getting a real good job.
Guest:I got a job as an art director for Black Belt Karate Magazine.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And then at night, I would take extension courses at Chouinard's.
Guest:And that was a big deal?
Guest:That was a very big deal, history-wise now, because all your major artists in Los Angeles, the older ones, all went to Chouinard.
Guest:Did you jive with that school?
Guest:No.
Guest:why not at all well when I when I came out to California and I was a pretty good draftsman and I was so enthusiastic so enthusiastic ready to get into the arts yeah and I had you know all my influences were comic books and surrealism and b-movie posters and
Guest:hot rod magazines and all this second class influences.
Guest:And so I come out here and lo and behold, it's right in the middle of the abstract expressionist period.
Guest:Drawing was considered absolutely out of the question.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Not even as a groundwork?
Marc:You got to learn this first?
Marc:No one thought that way?
Guest:They had drawing and painting classes, but it was contour drawing of quick studies of a nude model.
Guest:You had to knock that thing out pretty quick.
Guest:You couldn't sit and nurse on this thing and get the shade tones right and whatnot.
Guest:You couldn't work on muscle tone.
Guest:Just quick impressions of a nude model.
Guest:So that's the closest thing they had to academic drawing.
Guest:Now, their philosophy was that representational art was a cheat.
Guest:And it was a phony thing because you're trying to make something look three-dimensional and it's actually two-dimensional.
Guest:And the arts after the Second World War, especially in the 50s and early 60s, was the art of truth and honesty.
Guest:And art should reflect the honesty of the artist doing it and the impressions of the artist doing it.
Guest:And if you paint it, it should look like paint.
Guest:If you chiseled wood, it should show the marks of the chisel.
Guest:If you welded a sculpture, it should show the burnt slag on it.
Guest:Because that's the nature of it, see.
Guest:Of course, completely disregarded it.
Guest:550 years ago oil paint was invented to be tight you know that's the nature of oil paint if you can do it yeah wood can be polished and show the grain that's also the nature of it yeah metal sculptures can be ground down and polished sure and plated but they disregarded that now did you think it was bullshit
Guest:No.
Guest:No, because I was a young student and I realized I had to discipline myself to things that I wasn't used to and I'd had to take this in.
Guest:But I still had this tendency to tighten up.
Guest:I had contemporary friends that were in Otis and Chouinards and UCLA that referred to me as the illustrator.
Guest:That I was going in the wrong direction.
Guest:That I really would not be a painter because my stuff's tight and it spoke of three dimensions.
Guest:I was actually an illustrator.
Guest:That got hung on you back then.
Guest:before well it was a slander right it was a slander now what they don't understand and what they i would have to explain to them if i could get them by the scrub of the neck and drag them through five decades to face me now was not only was there length and depth and width
Guest:there was, what would you call it, there was an element of time.
Guest:So that's the fourth dimension, see.
Guest:Something moving in the picture, that's time.
Guest:And if there's something that's abstractly created in it, that's a violation of physics, which is the fifth dimension, see.
Guest:So not only am I cheating in one direction here, I'm cheating in three more directions with the ability to have the mental capability to search things out.
Guest:yeah yeah any one of your canvases it definitely time travel their story there's uh defying the physics abstraction there there is a situation that exists in art schools and i i really support art schools and i do support abstract expressionism and there is no bad art but if something does exist it should be pointed out that if you had a hundred artists and three of them were technical masters and
Guest:And 97 of them could only pick their nose.
Guest:The art of the time would be picking your nose.
Guest:The three masters would be totally disregarded because they were creating a problem for the 97.
Guest:There's a graphic democracy, an art democracy.
Guest:And I was facing that violation of that democracy when I was young.
Guest:Because if I did real slick stuff as a kid in art school, I was showing off and I was trying to set the standards too high for the other young people that had other inclinations.
Marc:So you were an outsider on both counts.
Marc:You were creatively an outsider but also technically threatening.
Guest:I always end up outside the situation.
Guest:I'm always in violation of the social situation that I function.
Guest:I don't know what that is.
Marc:What?
Marc:It's like it's the great spirit of fuck you.
Marc:That might be that immature contrariness that I have.
Marc:But I don't know if it's immature, but I think that democracy you're talking about only applies to maybe that education, because once you get into the art business, there's certainly no democracy at all.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:But like, okay, so I'm seeing these two experiences when you first get out here and you go through technical and you get your shit together so you're a wizard technically and then you go to this sort of poetic of the time school.
Marc:I imagine this was the first building block of this sort of like, well, I can do anything you can do and I can do it better and I can integrate it and you go fuck yourself.
Guest:Well, let me feign humility here.
Guest:It's not...
Guest:That I am such a great artist and so slick.
Guest:It's just that everyone else is so fucking bad.
Marc:But the intelligence of, you know, what I think is your sense of humor, which I appreciate deeply, is that, you know, you can turn anything on its head and you can now do what you're satirizing.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I have to contradict you here.
Guest:What I do is not primarily humor.
Guest:It goes that one step beyond humor.
Guest:It's abstract thinking.
Guest:It has no punchline.
Guest:It's not made to make you giggle.
Guest:It's made to pull your mind.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I get it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's designed to realize that a situation here that's come from a mind that completely functions a lot more investigatively and off any logical, practical...
Guest:Train tracks.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you have all the intelligence and the skills in place to do it on several different levels within one canvas.
Marc:So you're blowing minds up.
Guest:I appreciate you saying that.
Guest:You're very generous with me.
Marc:So after you get out of the abstract expression mindfuck that you were subject to.
Guest:Then came pop art and conceptualism.
Guest:You say, well, pop art, that's realism.
Guest:Well, yeah, it's realism, but it's art that's been appropriated.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:You cannot step out of pop art and do something that's free thinking.
Guest:It has to be something appropriated.
Guest:It's a reflection of the things around you.
Marc:But the people that define whether that's popular or not is such a small group of people, and it's rooted in two or three intellectuals.
Guest:The whole thing is made up of a failed artist.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:But so where did you go after that?
Marc:How did you get from there to Big Daddy Roth?
Guest:Well, I was a container, after being the art director for Black Belt Magazine, I lost that job, and then I had to go get another job.
Guest:something art related and i ended up desperately taking a job as a container designer for warehouser corporation and that was a a junior executive job where i wore suit and what does that mean a warehouser can warehouser is a one of the biggest container companies in the world they're forestry have giant fires forestry and lumber and and um cardboard so this was like an engineering job almost
Guest:Well, I had to make commercial boxes for products.
Guest:I designed boxes.
Guest:And this was during my psychedelic period, so it didn't take them long to realize that I wasn't an executive stock.
Guest:So you were taking acid in designing boxes?
Guest:So they fired me.
Guest:So then I fumbled around and...
Guest:By sheer divine providence got a job with Ed Roth.
Guest:I'd met him years late years earlier at a car show and then I went to the unemployment agency and they said we we don't have anything for you We have this one thing, but nobody will take the job and the conditions are not right They're a little filthy down there and I said what is this is well it they're looking for an art director down at Ed Big Daddy Ross.
Guest:I said give me the phone and
Marc:Yeah, and you knew him.
Marc:You knew his work and you knew his magazines.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I was a big fan of him.
Guest:I knew him.
Guest:I'd made him at car shows.
Guest:And I was a hot rodder.
Guest:And I went down there and talked to him.
Guest:And he looked at my portfolio.
Guest:And he says, well, if I knew you were alive, I'd have hunted you up.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:So it was right away.
Guest:Yeah, I just got this incredible job with an enormous amount of money.
Guest:And then I could come and go and dress the way I wanted.
Guest:I just had deadlines to fill.
Guest:I was in charge of his advertising.
Marc:Well, what was it like over there?
Marc:I mean, when you were in the hot rod, so you could take a part of the car and put it back together and, you know, chop a car up.
Guest:You did that stuff.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what they were doing over there was like above and beyond, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but I could stand there and talk to them.
Guest:They weren't doing anything I didn't totally comprehend.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:And you guys hit it off?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And your job over there was... Yeah, when he understood that at 12 years old, I had a 34 Ford 5-1 to Coupe, you know, I mean... You were in?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where did he come from?
Guest:His father...
Guest:When he was born, he was living in Beverly Hills.
Guest:His father was Mary Pickford's chauffeur.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And his father was a German that belonged to the German Bund.
Guest:Real right-wing, strict German.
Guest:He hated driving Mary Pickford around because on a couple of occasions, she made him go pick up fertilizer in the limousine.
Marc:Huh.
Guest:So Ed was an American kid from German parents.
Guest:I think he started out as doing winded design for Sears Roebuck and he was a remarkable sign painter and interested in hot rods.
Marc:I wonder if for some reason, I wonder if the Eric von Stroheim character in Sunset Boulevard was based on his dad.
Guest:Well, there's a comparison there.
Guest:I think about that, yeah.
Guest:You do?
Guest:Yeah, I think about that.
Marc:It just struck me immediately.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:Well, that's an impression I wanted to give you, yeah.
Guest:That's the guy.
Guest:You could see him in a chauffeur's uniform with jodipers and black boots and a cap.
Guest:And a chip on his shoulder.
Guest:Yeah, standing as the doorman to the limousine.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Standing there pissed off because he had to go get fertilizer and bring it back in a Rolls Royce or a Duesenberg or something.
Guest:Yeah, that huge car.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So when you were over there, what were your jobs?
Marc:I mean, what was the title job?
Guest:Well, my first responsibility was get out about six ads a month.
Guest:But then besides that, I designed T-shirts and decals, and I helped him work on the cars a little bit.
Guest:And since I was the only one there with a formal art education, I was kind of a front man there.
Guest:When people come in and I was talking about art and careers and stuff, he'd always get me to...
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Go do some PR?
Guest:Yeah, I had the... Human resources?
Guest:I had the vocabulary.
Guest:No one was going to snow me, you know, so... And it was a scene over there, right?
Guest:It was a remarkable scene.
Guest:A remarkable scene.
Guest:A gypsy carnival scene.
Guest:there's people coming in and out all day there'd be movie stars and rock stars and just bikers and police and the fbi and beautiful chicks and it's just it's just like he would go out of town on um touring with a every year make a new car show car and then he would go on the circuit like a carnival and then i would stay there and work with my crew did t-shirts and stuff and
Guest:And when he'd come back, he'd have all these followers come back, you know.
Guest:He picked up over the United States.
Guest:He'd have all these hangar owners.
Guest:Charismatic guy.
Guest:Yeah, and then they'd come in with some good-looking gal, you know, and then three weeks, everybody had worked there and had gonorrhea, you know.
Guest:It was beyond colorful, you know.
Marc:But it was like the Hollywood elite dug it, and they would come down.
Guest:Yeah, and the rock world dug it, and the car world.
Guest:He was in the middle of the car and motorcycle world.
Marc:Now, what did you learn from him in terms of how it influenced how you moved through?
Marc:Because obviously, cartooning was... And he had a very specific style.
Guest:Well, I gained confidence.
Guest:I couldn't be snowed anymore by the art world.
Guest:I had confidence, you know, and I...
Guest:I was the first artist Ed allowed me to sign my name to the works.
Guest:So I started getting a following.
Guest:So I learned to do t-shirts.
Guest:I really learned how to do black and white with not a pen but with a brush like a real cartoonist, a real comic book artist.
Guest:And then I met Stanley Mouse, who's Ed's competitor, a car shirt designer at car shows.
Guest:But Stanley Mouse would give up the car show circuit.
Guest:And he went up to San Francisco and he became one of the founders of the psychedelic poster movement, one of what's called the Big Five.
Marc:Who are they?
Guest:That's Griffin and Mouse?
Guest:Rick Griffin, Mouse, Kelly, Wes Wilson, and Victor Muscoso.
Guest:Those were the Big Five that got into Life Magazine in 66.
Guest:Right.
Guest:that was a big article that was a big article before we get up to san francisco what happened to big daddy roth what ultimately happened to that empire that's that's a whole show in itself that's a couple hours yeah he uh he was the one that championed outlaw motorcycles he was the first professional person there's always been well they used to be called fat bobs before choppers and then they got to be called choppers and they were because of the motorcycle gangs that were they were really despised by society and
Guest:the hot rod world didn't want anything to do with i mean he he got involved with these guys like the angels well of i don't want to go into names here right i don't want any retribution here but he got involved a lot of really brutal bikers and uh he promoted uh he come up with the first outlaw biker magazine you know and he really promoted it and he had a lot of trouble with them and uh
Guest:The IRS and the FBI moved in on him because they thought he was involved with these biker gangs, and they were under the impression that he had some ruling control, and they just enacted what's called the RICO Act, the gangster racketeering act.
Guest:So they thought he was a kingpin.
Guest:Yeah, so they moved in.
Guest:The IRS just went right up his ass.
Guest:And then the FBI was on him all the time.
Guest:And the IRS found out that he was maybe a fumbling in his books, but he was more honest than anybody.
Guest:He was really in a patriot, really loved America, you know.
Guest:So he wouldn't cheat.
Guest:In fact, any dealings I ever had with him or seen any dealings I'd ever seen with anyone, everyone always got the best of him, you know.
Guest:right because he's a fair guy he's a very sweet and honest guy but um anyway so they crushed him yeah they they eventually crushed him and uh i had that job as art director for five years and his wife left him and it broke him and then he he
Guest:Finally got a job at Knott's Berry Farm as a sign painter.
Guest:He was really down on his luck and a low ebb.
Guest:And then, fortunately, nostalgia came and picked him right back up again.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:The Rat Think, the resurgence of Rat Think.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And what about Von Dutch?
Marc:We didn't talk about him at all.
Guest:Well, Von Dutch was very intelligent, enormously talented, very imaginative, but he was extremely right-wing, right-wing to a fault.
Guest:That's a nice way to say a lot of things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was one of my childhood heroes.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I remember seeing him in magazines, 53, 54.
Guest:He started pinstriping as a hot rod affectation, and he brought back flames from the 30s.
Guest:Very imaginative guy.
Guest:I could really relate to him.
Guest:Then I got to know him.
Guest:And then people warned me about him.
Guest:They said, well, you know, watch out for him because he goes crazy.
Guest:And I got to be good friends with him.
Guest:And, you know, we'd stay up until the sun comes up drinking beer and got along real well.
Guest:And then one day he turned on me and threatened to kill me, you know.
Guest:And so they were right.
Guest:Watch out for him.
Guest:He was mentally ill.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He was mentally ill.
Marc:Well, you know, that happens.
Marc:If you live in the world of artists, you're going to meet a few mentally ill people.
Guest:Well, he would go into a biker bar.
Guest:He reacted to people violently, and he'd go into a biker bar full of bikers, and he'd get up on the bar, stand up on the bar, and call them down for their costumes.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So he had a death wish.
Guest:Yeah, you know, because he preceded these guys in the motorcycle world and he saw them all as pretenders, you know.
Guest:And they'd pull him off the bar and beat the hell out of him.
Guest:That's how he lived.
Guest:You know, I was talking to one of the big biker chiefs and I said, have you seen Dutch recently?
Guest:And he says, yeah, I saw him about two weeks ago.
Guest:Someone took a primary chain to him and beat his ass.
Guest:I'm bitching.
Marc:Bitching, man.
Marc:But what did you learn from him?
Marc:Did you learn technique from him?
Guest:Not really.
Guest:He had an admiration for me.
Guest:He really didn't know how to paint.
Guest:He never got past using one shot.
Guest:You can't blend one shot.
Guest:He thought I was pretty slick.
Guest:One shot is an enamel paint for pinstriping.
Guest:The pigments are so dense in them they don't blend.
Guest:You can't blend them.
Guest:He tried and made messes.
Guest:He had an appreciation for my painting skills.
Guest:He said that Dolly, what did he say, that I paint like Dolly tries to paint.
Guest:I was kind of him, but he had some awful ugly things to say about me.
Guest:He said I was the boringest person he ever met in his life.
Guest:He was a chronic alcoholic, and I mean chronic.
Guest:First thing in the morning, he started drinking beer until he went to bed for years and years, and it finally...
Guest:finally got him in the liver.
Guest:It was killing him.
Guest:And then he was getting bitter.
Guest:It wasn't like he wasn't bitter in the first place, but he got like chronically bitter.
Guest:About what?
Guest:About life in general and the races.
Guest:He was just a very negative person.
Guest:But on the other hand, he had this bohemian
Guest:presentation he was good good friends with Lord Buckley at one time and and on you just kind of kind of a contradiction in life you know but when he saw his end was near he wrote this last testimony
Guest:On a piece of paper.
Guest:And it run down the races and just how he's glad to get out of this world and all this.
Guest:So it was a racist manifesto.
Guest:Yeah, it was a racist manifesto.
Guest:And he said that...
Guest:We fought the wrong, we're on the wrong side in the Second World War and whatnot.
Guest:And then he ended the letter by saying Heil Hitler, you know.
Guest:And then the guy that was taking care of him, Jim Brucker, I guess he got that letter to the Hells Angels.
Guest:And then it got Xeroxed.
Guest:And that letter got all over everywhere.
Guest:And then this company comes along and they start selling Von Dutch apparel.
Guest:And I'm thinking, well, my goodness, when, you know, I saw blacks wearing them on television and all that stuff.
Guest:And I thought, man, when is this, that letter going to surface, you know?
Guest:Did it?
Guest:This letter going to surface.
Guest:Never did.
Guest:Ten years it took for that letter to surface, and it was in the L.A.
Guest:Times verbatim.
Guest:And it just killed this big company.
Guest:It just killed this clothing company.
Guest:Did it?
Guest:So they couldn't find a spokesman to defend him.
Yeah.
Guest:They keep coming to me, you know, the L.A.
Guest:Times and television stations and New York Times.
Guest:All these people come back to me, you know.
Guest:Here's a guy who's going to kill me.
Guest:So I had to explain to him, well, he was mentally ill and, you know, he was my childhood hero.
Guest:But, you know, he affected an entire generation and was a wonderful influence for a lot of people.
Guest:But he was quite the bigot and mentally ill, you know.
Guest:So...
Guest:So you put him in context.
Guest:Yeah, I tried.
Guest:I don't know if I did.
Guest:I tried.
Guest:I found myself being associated with him, which I didn't really want to do.
Guest:But no one else would come to his defense.
Guest:People would come to his defense that weren't articulate.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It sounds like you handled it diplomatically and correctly.
Marc:Well, that's a past chapter now.
Marc:So when you left town, so this was after Big Daddy Roth, you go to San Francisco.
Guest:Well, no, I never lived in San Francisco.
Guest:I had property up in Marin County.
Guest:You still got it?
Guest:No, no, I sold a long time ago.
Guest:I had property up there, and I was up there a lot.
Guest:I spent a lot of time up in San Francisco.
Guest:Hanging out?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So, and where'd you meet, like, S. Clay Wilson and Chrome and those cats?
Guest:I love S. Clay Wilson.
Guest:I met these guys through Gilbert Shelton.
Guest:Now, Gilbert Shelton was doing car art back in the 60s through a fellow, a publisher named Pete Millar that did a magazine called Drag Cartoons, and Pete Millar liked Gilbert Shelton's Wonder Warthog, and they did a couple of Wonder Warthog books about hot rods, and so...
Guest:uh i was dealing with the print meant to get some of my paintings published and i'd seen this zap comic and it just really blew me away and i asked for some pages and then they hand this over to gilbert and gilbert talked to crumb and i got a letter from gilbert's inviting me in to get pages and zaps so this is so that's how it worked it was pages you were allotted pages
Guest:Yeah, well, they were very democratic about it.
Guest:I've become one of the seven owners of that.
Guest:Still?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The thing is, I was probably the eighth or tenth underground artist, underground cartoonist, comic book artist in the United States then, see.
Guest:It was later that thousands and thousands of people jumped on.
Marc:Isn't it interesting how intimate the landscape was, media-wise, where...
Guest:Well, we were drawn together because we were all just fuck-offs.
Guest:We used to read EC Comics and carnival art.
Guest:We were a rare breed, a very rare bunch of people, and we just immediately gravitated toward each other because we were just not socially worth much.
Marc:And you were defining a medium whether you knew it or not.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And what was S. Clay Wilson like at that time?
Guest:Very much like his cartoons.
Guest:Very, very much like his cartoons.
Guest:A pirate?
Guest:Yeah, well, yeah.
Guest:He rode bikes.
Marc:Were you riding bikes at that time?
Guest:I went through a period of motorcycle riding in the late 50s and had some bad accidents, and I saw the liability in that.
Guest:I had a number of friends killed and maimed on motorcycles.
Guest:I love motorcycles.
Guest:I just have the good judgment to stay off of them.
Okay.
Marc:And you and Clay, who were you close with in that crew?
Marc:All of them.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:You all just hung out?
Guest:Very close with all of them.
Marc:Was there a community in the early Zap Comics where you and Crumb and Spain and Clay and the other guys, I guess Griffin, who were the seven?
Guest:Victor Muscoso and Gilbert Shelton.
Marc:Did you guys sit in a room and talk about what you wanted to do?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:What was the agenda?
Guest:Well, no.
Guest:There was no agenda for the whole comic.
Guest:You sit in a room and do jams.
Guest:Pass a piece of paper around.
Guest:Get drunk and have ladies around and party up in the hills there and have a lot of fun.
Marc:Did you do jams where you just add to the piece of art going around?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you'd sort of collectively create this thing.
Guest:You got any of those?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Those ended up in the hands of very wealthy collectors.
Guest:Oh, so they're around, though.
Guest:Yeah, Moscoso took care of those, and I think they sold them out to very wealthy collectors.
Guest:Oh, when did we get to see those?
Guest:Are they in books?
Guest:Well, they're in all the Zaps.
Guest:Each Zap had a jam in it.
Marc:So you stayed with Zap the whole time.
Marc:How many issues were there?
Guest:Well, the last one that's in this book here, Zap 16, and then Crum did an extra one, which makes it 17 issues.
Guest:You still in touch with him?
Guest:I talked about a year ago.
Guest:And Clay's not doing great.
Guest:No, he's not doing good.
Guest:Alcoholism caught up with him.
Guest:And, you know, Rick Griffin died in a motorcycle accident in 81, and then Spain died two years ago from cancer.
Marc:People are going.
Guest:Yeah, we're old turds now, you know.
Marc:We're old people.
Marc:Okay, so after the Zapp residency, you've been painting all the way through.
Marc:All the way through.
Guest:Hopelessly.
Guest:In 1970, when Ed went out of business, a multimillionaire car collector...
Guest:Come in and bought all of Ed's cars and bought all the original Roth artwork and then got interested in the artist that did the artwork and saw my paintings.
Guest:And then he bought all my paintings.
Guest:Enormous sum at that time.
Guest:Enormous sum.
Guest:It kept me going for years.
Guest:So I couldn't get a show with that kind of art.
Guest:How many paintings?
Guest:Six or eight.
Guest:And I couldn't get a show and I couldn't get in a gallery.
Guest:Sure couldn't get in an art magazine.
Guest:And I just struggled along and struggled along selling paintings.
Guest:And then the punk rock movement come along and I started doing, I started licensing my paintings to punk rock groups.
Guest:So then I built a whole new underground audience.
Guest:They had the Zap Comic audience and the Roth audience, and then I started getting a little bit of the punk rock audience.
Marc:Who were the guys who were doing that with you?
Guest:You have to remember, the art world didn't have big audiences like this.
Guest:They just had connoisseurs that they hoped to gather.
Guest:I was building up this giant fandom.
Guest:Late 70s?
Guest:Yeah, in the 80s.
Guest:And so once I got in with the punk rock artist, I had a peer group.
Marc:Who were they?
Marc:Gary Panter?
Guest:Gary Panter and Savage Pencil.
Guest:There was a whole slew of them.
Marc:And they all looked up to you, I imagine.
Guest:Yes, because of the zap thing.
Guest:They weren't necessarily tight artists, but I sloppied it up to get in with them.
Guest:So...
Guest:So, through that world, then I could get shows at these real marginal punk rock galleries.
Guest:And then I just haven't sold out shows.
Guest:So that got me to bigger galleries to bigger galleries.
Guest:And finally, I ended up in...
Guest:in the 90s with Tony Schifrazi.
Guest:That's when I saw it.
Guest:It was like the second, third biggest gallery in the world at that time.
Marc:Yeah, it was a great show.
Marc:I sort of coveted the, what do you call it, the sock monkey.
Guest:The invitation.
Guest:The invitation.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, and I loved that thing, and I think that's when I got the first book.
Marc:What we didn't mention was that the album cover for Guns N' Roses, The Appetite of Destruction, which I imagine they took the title of the album from your painting.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that became, like, I think if people listening to this who don't know your work, I'm sure they've already gone to their computers to check it out, but that was a big piece because of how many people got that record.
Guest:Well, that was, yeah, that was...
Guest:There were four paintings done that were called Super Cartoons, and that was one of the four paintings.
Guest:Axl Rose ran across it somewhere and wanted to use it for an album cover.
Guest:And that was good exposure, though, right?
Guest:It was great exposure.
Guest:It was a really...
Guest:I had to defend it, and I explained to them to pick something else when they wanted to cover.
Guest:I said, this is going to be very problematic.
Guest:Culturally.
Guest:I understand.
Guest:I understand because I've been in underground comics, and I know what problems are going to occur.
Marc:And you knew that was going to happen?
Guest:Yeah, I knew exactly.
Guest:I told them exactly what the order was that things were going to happen.
Guest:I said, well, all your first problems, you're not going to be able to get this through the Canadian border.
Guest:The second problem is going to be church groups.
Guest:And the third problem is going to be family.
Guest:For that cover?
Guest:Yeah, for that cover.
Guest:I told them the order of things were going to fall.
Guest:And it all happened?
Guest:And I said, then the feminists are going to get on you and tear your pieces.
Guest:They're all just like I said.
Marc:And you've dealt with that your whole career?
Yeah.
Marc:And your response has basically been, it's my imagination, fuck you.
Guest:Well, when we were doing underground comics, there was a point about 60, about 70, about 1970, that it looked like during the Vietnam War, if the country went more right wing, they were going to start rounding up dissidents.
Guest:People that were contrary to the actions of the government.
Guest:And
Guest:Our names were listed with the FBI.
Guest:We understood that if they start running up distance, they're going to hit Zap Comics.
Guest:Fortunately, the country got liberal there all of a sudden about the Vietnam War, and we just come out of this thing smelling like a rose.
Guest:But on the other hand, all over the United States, about 400 news dealers did go to jail over selling Zap Comics.
Guest:We bear that burden and guilt and responsibility for these poor people who had to go to jail selling our comic books.
Guest:We don't just take that for granted.
Guest:So I was seasoned, already seasoned, to know the responsibilities and the discomforts and situations that these comics created.
Guest:So when I got time to – these guys used this painting on Guns N' Roses.
Guest:I knew exactly what was going to happen.
Guest:The painting was never intended for general public.
Guest:It was intended for a special audience, a small audience.
Guest:It had investigative skills that would enjoy something like that.
Marc:Well, it's interesting to me that even after so many years, the fight during Zap where you guys knew you were provoking and it was necessary at the time to define that territory.
Yeah.
Guest:aesthetically mentally and culturally we had an axe to grind we had an old axe to grind all of us because then when they when they outlawed the really good comic books in the early 50s that uh because it's that dr wertham's seduction of the innocent book that they got rid of all the real good comic books in a senate hearing
Guest:And all of a sudden – Purian interest?
Marc:Was that the argument?
Guest:Well, they said it was causing juvenile delinquency.
Guest:They said there was too much violence in the comics and sexual luridness.
Guest:And this was causing a whole generation of young people.
Marc:And which comics were these?
Marc:The EC or the Fred Gaines?
Guest:EC.
Guest:It was primarily the EC comics.
Guest:They just about killed them except for mad.
Guest:We had that revenge to issue out to the American world.
Guest:It's like you think those comic books are bad.
Guest:You ain't seen nothing yet.
Guest:You ain't seen nothing.
Guest:And you continued that, is that it?
Guest:Well, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I'm a liberal person, a free thinker, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm not necessarily a leftist, but I am extremely liberal, enormously liberal, you know.
Guest:And do you still get flack?
Guest:No, not anymore.
Guest:We have changed the world.
Guest:We were part and parcel responsible for changing the world.
Guest:We changed movies, television.
Guest:That had an enormous effect on the world that people don't realize.
Guest:They just don't understand.
Marc:Well, it sort of started that ball rolling.
Marc:I mean, I was thinking about coming over there today.
Marc:I did a little reading about some of your history, and I was like, well, look at this now.
Marc:It's almost like, you know, we live in a completely pornified state.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And we're surviving.
Marc:And it's good mental health.
Marc:You don't get too deep.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:Yeah, if you limit your masturbation to a reasonable amount of time per week.
Yeah.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:Do you think there is any repercussions?
Marc:Any negative downside to it?
Guest:There's certainly a small percentage, I'm sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, there's people that are just hostile anyway.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Do you feel vindicated?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:When I was doing the punk rock art, I got a big following with tattoo artists.
Guest:Skateboard artists, surf artists.
Guest:Surf world.
Guest:so uh i was getting a lot of write-ups and rock and roll magazines and stuff getting an enormous amount of press you know and stuff you'd never get in the art world the art world's a very limited world yeah boring universe so i was talking to this gal at uh one of these tattoo magazines i says you know you gotta you we gotta do a whole magazine of just this kind of art you know
Guest:so she called you know i what i explained to her was that there were some magazines out in france in the 20s and 30s for the surrealists that were really interesting you know maybe it's time to do something like that now not not like the boring art magazines that are on the stands now you know but some really interesting stuff like uh there used to be a magazine called minotaur and the surrealist revolution and stuff back in the 20s and 30s and
Guest:I told her about that and she called me back two weeks later and says, well, I've got that magazine.
Guest:I said, what do you mean?
Guest:She says, well, I talked to my publisher and we did that magazine.
Guest:So they did it and I was the conduit that fed in the artists for the magazine because I knew all underground artists.
Guest:The name of the magazine was Art Alternatives and it did really, really well.
Guest:I bought that magazine.
Guest:I think I had the first one.
Guest:It did really, really well.
Yeah.
Guest:and then they fired the girl so i guess the publisher was under the impression that we can just get any crazy shit in here and it'll sell you know so anyway it didn't do well at all after that and so uh i was talking to greg escalani and my wife suzanna whatnot about well maybe we should find an underwriter buy that title put it back on the stands yeah and
Guest:so I tried to I went to Timothy Lurie to see if he could get me an audience with Larry Flint and that didn't work out and I tried a couple other connections I couldn't do any good then Greg Escalani reminded me that I'd done two covers for Thrasher and maybe I ought to try to get a hold of Fausto Vatilla up in San Francisco and so called him and told him we would like to start a magazine and
Guest:We want to buy this title, Art Alternatives that went down the drain.
Guest:So we tried to buy that title and they would not sell it.
Guest:So I said, well, I'll come up with a title and I wrote a list of 120 titles.
Guest:So they took about 10 of those titles and took them to a lawyer to see if they were clean, and they picked Juxtapose.
Guest:So Juxtapose came out in the winter of 1994 with 23,000 issues, and it did remarkably well.
Guest:It was in the black immediately.
Guest:It just did great.
Guest:And I was feeding the artist in there and supplying them to artists.
Guest:So then it was quarterly.
Guest:So then the next issue came out.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:It sold.
Guest:This thing was just selling like crazy.
Guest:And not only was it selling really good, but it had one of the largest sell-throughs of a magazine.
Guest:Now, a sell-through is if you print 100 magazines, 35 of them will end up in the hands of people, and 65 will go in recyclables.
Guest:That's the way magazines are.
Guest:Well, juxtapose,
Guest:the distributors immediately realized this thing had like 65 70 percent of sell through it was just unheard of yeah so then the print rate the print runs went way up and after a couple of years it went from quarterly to bi-monthly and then later monthly and that's uh first thing we noticed well the thing outsold art forums
Guest:Sweet.
Guest:And then a little while goes by, a year or two goes by and it outsells art in America.
Guest:Time goes by and it sells art news and we discover, well, this is the top selling art magazine in the world we've got here, you know.
Guest:and so originally no art school would allow it in the class you know now it's in every art school so if i i guess if i have a legacy maybe that's it now that that isn't you know that helped a lot of artists and there's a handful of artists that came out of juxtapose that are now millionaires now i guess i would take that as a legacy but i think my legacy that i would want was what i do in paintings you know it's the the fact that uh
Guest:They said in the 80s that painting was dead.
Guest:Well, painting hadn't even started.
Guest:Painting hadn't even started because it was such a narrow-minded period of time.
Guest:The conceptualists just really tried to get rid of painting completely.
Guest:And so the area of imagination, the playing field for art,
Guest:It's so gigantic.
Guest:No one's really explored it.
Guest:That would be the legacy I'd want to leave is the exploration of what imagination can lead to and how it would compound itself and become exponential.
Guest:In other words, what my generation does, I'd like to see another younger generation come and step on that and make that go one step further into wild abstraction.
Guest:Just compound the poetry.
Guest:Make it lyrically remarkable.
Marc:Well, I'll tell you, you can stand in front of almost any one of your canvases for at least, you could really spend at least two hours trying to work that shit out.
Marc:It's not about making sense, but it's about taking a journey, you know what I'm saying?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I appreciate you saying that.
Guest:It's hard for me to keep a straight face with such a wonderful remark.
Guest:But now I'm right here.
Guest:I'm showing at Barnsdale Park at the Los Angeles Municipal Museum.
Guest:And I came here originally in 1964 to see a Salvador Dali show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I told all my contemporaries, my fellow students, fellow artists, there's a dolly show up there at Barnsdale Park and none of them would go.
Guest:They were not interested.
Guest:It had nothing to do with abstract expressionism.
Guest:It was just that old phony realism, you know.
Guest:So of all the places I've shown, to come back here and have an art show here, it's such an honor and such a fulfillment.
Guest:So if I fall over dead tomorrow, I'll be looking good.
Marc:Thank you, Robert Williams.
Marc:That's a beautiful way to end.
Marc:So that's it.
Marc:That's the show.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:I did the best I could.
Marc:I think we got comfortable.
Marc:I think things started to get comfortable with me and Robert eventually there.
Marc:And I'm just fascinated with his work.
Marc:Go check out his work by all means.
Marc:Respect.
Marc:So what else?
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:The new tour dates will be up there.
Marc:There's some pre-sales I told you about earlier.
Marc:You should be able to get in on that.
Thank you.
Guest:Music Music Music
Guest:Boomer lives!