“Minds Are Made To Be Blown (1966–196757ya)”, 1991 (; backlinks):
…So, it’s early in the year 1966. I’m 22 years old and I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve just broken up with my [first] wife Dana [Morgan]. She went back to Cleveland and I stayed in New York.
My big career as a commercial artist was just one more cardboard cut-out dream forgotten in the dust after many heavenly trips taken on LSD. I feel like I’m back in kindergarten, it’s all new to me… I’ve been stumbling around in a delirium since I took some weird psychedelic drug… the stuff came on like normal acid… the usual trippy sensations, the visual effects, the expanding consciousness into infinity-like WOW—then all the sudden everything went, like, fuzzy-like; the reception went bad—I lost the picture, the sound, everything—it was so WEIRD, but not particularly frightening. For the next couple of months I felt like the guy in Eraserhead… everything was dreamlike and unreal. It was rather pleasant in a certain way except that I was helpless and barely able to cope.
…Marty [Pahls] was a little bewildered by the sickly green psychedelic aura that buzzed and crackled around my head, but he was fascinated by the strange images that began to appear in my sketchbook.
A whole new thing was emerging in my drawings, a sort of harkening back, a calling up for what G. Legman had called the “Horror-Squinky” forces lurking in American comics of the 1940s. I had no control over it, the whole time I was in this fuzzy state of mind; the separation, the barrier betwixt the conscious and the subconscious was broken open somehow. A grotesque kaleidoscope, a tawdry carnival of disassociated images kept sputtering to the surface… especially if I was sitting and staring, which I often did. It was difficult to function in this condition, I was certifiably crazy, I sat staring on the couch at Marty’s apartment, or on long aimless bus rides around Chicago.
These jerky animated cartoons in my mind were not beautiful, poetic or spiritual, they were like an out-of-tune player piano that you couldn’t shut off… pretty disturbing… this strange interlude ended as abruptly as it had begun in the next time I took a powerful dose of LSD in April ’66. My mind suddenly cleared. The fuzziness was gone, the fog lifted. It was a great relief… a weird drug, that was. But what the heck—“minds are made to be blown.”
And what a boon to my art! It was during that fuzzy period that I recorded in my sketchbook all the main characters I would be using in my comics for the next 10 years; Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, Schuman The Human, The Snoid, Eggs Ackley, The Vulture Demoness, Shabno The Shoe-Horn Dog, this one, that one… which is interesting.
It was an once-in-a-lifetime experience, like a religious vision that changes someone’s life, but in my case it was the psychotic manifestation of some grimy part of America’s collective unconscious… studied these funny books closely… I got into them… lurid funny animals that tried to look cute, but weren’t, lived in a callous, savage, world of cold violence and bad jokes, exactly as Fredric Wertham and G. Legman had said. They were very much akin to the nightmare visions spewing up and out of my fevered brain. Marty observed this phenomenon with detached fascination. He encouraged me to continue with this line of exploration.
…Ironically, she [his first wife, Dana] wasn’t all that eager to take me back at first. She was doing just fine without me. She had a little apartment, a little scene going, she even had cute boys mooning around after her. She’d gotten a job at a hospital pharmacy and was passing out methedrine tablets like candy to all her friends. This endeared her to a host of young ne’er-do-wells who were always hanging around.
I moved in with her and we immediately fell back into our old pattern. I went back to work in the “Hi-Brow” department at American Greetings for another stint of 8 months. It was the last time I ever held down a 9-to-5 job… I’ve been lucky. Secure in the marriage situation, Dana sunk back into her role as the fat housewife. She stopped messing with pills. Her little fan club drifted away. We continued to take LSD and popping those high quality meth tabs occasionally. More and more people were taking psychedelic drugs. Even some of the less-conservative artists and writers at the card company experimented with it. The wave of the ’60s was beginning to have its effect on everyone.
…Dana’s mother knew this guy who was the curator for the art museum [?] in Peoria, Illinois. He said he’d give me a show if I’d do a bunch of large pen-and-ink drawings. I quickly turned out 60-some drawings of varying subject matter…He introduced me to a few people. They remained distant, cold. One Margaret Dumont-type Matron in a fur stole made a brave attempt to communicate. “Why do you hate us so much?” she asked with a polite smile on her rosy, Midwestern face. Interesting question—I’ll never forget her… I said nothing, I looked down, chuckling nervously. She was right. I wanted to march her to the wall and squash her smug, rosy face against one of my psychotic drawings. It’s complicated—attraction and repulsion at the same time… the “Boho Dance”, as Tom Wolfe called it.
…She came, of course, and there we were, neurotic bag and baggage, in a nice apartment in the “Haight-Ashbury” smack dab in the middle of the wild and wacky ’60s San Francisco hippy scene at its high noon of acid-induced euphoria! Everybody in San Francisco seemed to believe that the world had been permanently transformed! As soon as all those nasty uptight old farts over 30 died off we’d turn this planet back into a garden of Eden. Nothing to it! Skeptical though I was of some excesses of hippy behavior, I, too, was swept up in the incredible optimism. It was a breath of fresh air in the weary world, no telling when we’ll see the like again…
It’s hard to have a clear memory of events from that period. Everybody was stoned, high all the time. Life was unstructured. “If you can remember the ’60s, you weren’t there”, an old hippy said recently. Misty memories of clusters of people hanging out—always hanging out—smoking dope in living rooms—gurgling water pipes—roach holders—pipes made of stone—pipes made of brass—listening to the latest Beatles or Stones album—these records were very important. Hanging out in the woods smoking dope—on Haight Street—at the beach—most people had no money to speak of, but rents were cheap and necessities came easy—it was considered unenlightened to fuss and fret about a little matter like survival.
It was actually a little nerve wracking… Nobody ever knew what to do next. Oh well, here we are, we’re beautiful, now what? Too much freedom? I dunno…
…Jane was a beautiful, statuesque shiksa from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, rather distant and repressed. She was in indolent creature who laid around all day. I’d come home and see her sprawled on the bed on her stomach reading. Dana was at work. Joel was out somewhere. She always wore tight-fitting pants and these high-heeled black boots, her big, pert butt jutted boldly up into the air. Oh man, It was all I could do to stop myself from going over there and leaping on top of that nubile, angel-faced thing! But she was out of my reach, she might as well have been a thousand miles away. “Free love” seemed to be happening everywhere except our house. Boo-hoo…
…One of these guys, Alan, once looked at me seriously and asked, “Crumb, don’t you like girls?” I laughed nervously. “Sure I like girls”, I answered meekly. “Then why do you stay with that fat woman when there’s thousands of beautiful girls out here?” It’s true… there were. It was unfathomable to him that any red-blooded male wouldn’t be out there taking full advantage of a very unique opportunity. Easy for him to talk, with his bamboo flute and Christ-like appearance. He could have all the hippy-chicks his heart desired. Every day was filled with new beautiful experiences for Alan, Joel and Jane.
…My comic thing flowered in this fertile environment. I figured it out somehow—the way to put the stoned experience into a series of cartoon panels. I began to submit LSD-inspired strips to the underground papers… not for pay… never gave it a thought… but they loved them.
…I completed two 24-page issues of Zap Comix in two months (I worked faster and more spontaneously in those days—hey, I wish I could still do, comic fans! You know, you get older, things get more complicated—it can’t be helped).