In 1986, another in a long string little bands from the strip asked Williams for cover art. They wanted to use his 1979 painting “Appetite for Destruction.”
“I told them what would happen,” says Williams.
There were protests. A media frenzy. Chain stores refused to carry Guns N’ Roses. And, after the artwork was moved inside the sleeve, the album went on to sell twenty-eight million copies.
Unsurprisingly, it is this image—a slavering outer-world beast swooping down on a mechanical rapist as he torments a semi-naked woman—that is most often cited by Williams’ progeny in the realm of lowbrow art.
Everyone saw it. And a lot of women hated it—probably the same women who hated Guns N’ Roses.
But, Williams, who seems to weave criticism like an indispensable but painful hairshirt, says he has no regrets on this point.
“Look, I was very supportive of the women’s movement,” says Williams, “but the feminist movement went nuts, it just fucking went nuts… You remember, in the teens and ‘20s, it was the feminist movement that outlawed alcohol! And they were doing the same thing in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, just latching on to everything. It almost completely got rid of nudes in the art world—which is 90 percent feminist to begin with. It was like a frenzy, a fucking frenzy. I was getting death threats.”
This is a wonderful time to be in the arts. But I am not going to be the Pied Piper, leading kids down a dark, brutal road.”
On the other side of the spectrum, Williams had gained some pretty formidable female allies. No Wave performance artist Lydia Lunch became a stalwart, outspoken defender. Blondie, who posed for “Debbie Harry’s Fears” based her harrowing encounter with Ted Bundy, would go on to champion Williams.
And then there were the punks.
“Well, I don’t know about art, but I know what I like”—The Cramps (1983)
“I’m a generation older but these people prided themselves on gratuitous sex and violence, and free speech,” says Williams, who credits Suzanne for introducing him to the scene. “They were just wide open.”
It was actually Southern California punk rock that first provided a venue for Williams’ paintings, in afterhours pop-up “galleries” where kids could drink when the clubs shut down. The work was fast and loose and came to be known as Williams’ Zombie Mystery Paintings.
“They sold like crazy!” says Williams. They also got Williams’ work noticed by magazines.
“Mostly rock ‘n roll magazines, tattoo magazines, some car magazines,” says Williams, “But I was some body… for the first time in the painting world, I had a foothold name.”
Of course, Williams wanted more. Not just for himself, but for every good artist that had been dismissed by teachers and theorists. He wanted real estate for the “feral art”—to
use Williams’ own term—which was growing in the wilds, sharpening its claws on the white walls of hallowed institutions.
In certain circles, Williams was already famous.
In 1965, not long after leaving Chouinard—and getting fired from a straight job—Williams found himself at the unemployment office.
“As an artist, you might get placed at a production house, making painting for motels and hotels,” says Williams. “That was where a lot of people who studied abstract expressionism wound up.”
A social worker cautiously offered Williams an interview for art director at Roth Studios, but with a warning.
“She said, ‘Everyone we’ve sent out there has turned it down,’” chuckles Williams.
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was a famed hot-rod builder, a key figure in Southern California’s Kustom Kulture scene, and the creator the psychotic Rat Fink icon which already adorned t-shirts across the country. Williams and Roth had met at a car show in Albuquerque five years earlier.
“I was really the right guy for the job,” says Williams.
Given free-reign to pour his own vision into illustrations, ads, and t-shirt design, Williams’ name quickly became synonymous with Kustom Kulture. And he was making decent money for the first time.
“Here I was, trying to get away from hotrods,” says Williams, “only to get pulled right back in at the highest level.”
Roth Studios in Maywood was a nexus for freaks—bikers, surfers, musicians, artists, gearheads, hippies, dropouts, and the occasional FBI agent.
Suzanne worked on Choppers, the magazine Roth started when mainstream publications refused to run pictures of his bikes, and was never shy about sliding under a car. The couple still lived in Hollywood, the center of the party.
“We were true bohemians, you know,” says Williams. “Psychedelic cavaliers. No affectation. Nothing fake about it.”
Somewhere between unicycling around Hollywood, enjoying the rock ‘n roll scene, dropping LSD, and working at one of the coolest places on the globe, Williams continued to paint.
It was during this heady period that a musician pal gave Williams a copy of Zap Comix No. 2 featuring Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, and R. Crumb.
Williams knew some of the artists from the psychedelic poster movement, which intertwined with the hot rod scene. Like them, he was proud of the deep influence comic books exerted on his art—especially the early gore-soaked days of EC Comics, and Mad Magazine, which was one of their few titles to survive the Senate Subcommittee Hearing on Juvenile Delinquency in ‘54.
But nothing had prepared Williams for Zap.
“It just blew my mind! I mean, my brains were all over the fucking ceiling!” says Williams with palpable excitement that even nearly
half a century cannot dampen. “The work in there—there was just no considering social values in that comic.”
In 1968, Williams joined the mad grandees at Zap, ground zero for the mushrooming underground comix movement, and became an underground legend for a second time.
Zap Comix No. 4, already targeted for obscenity charges, hit the streets. Booksellers were arrested up and down the West Coast. A sting operation was carried out in New York. Vietnam was raging. Williams was listed as a draft dodger. To make things worst, Time Magazine dubbed “Big Daddy” Roth—Williams’ steady, longtime employer—the “supply sergeant for the Hells Angels.” The FBI and the IRS took notice.
By the age of twenty-seven, Williams was a full-fledged art outlaw.
In 1993, the Laguna Art Museum launched Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Robert Williams & Others, a seminal, record-breaking show brought together by surfer and fervent lowbrow patron Greg Escalante.
Something important was percolating, and Williams was eager to revive his idea for an art magazine created, for and by his peers, in the spirit of the Surrealist movement’s Minotaure and La Révolution Surréaliste. His first attempt, the far-sighted but short-lived Art?Alternatives, was published in New York by Harvey Shapiro in 1992. For the first time lowbrow art had a forum—the premier issue explored tattoo art, the history of underground comix, and featured the work of Williams, S. Clay Wilson, and Spain—but, with an editorial staff based on the East Coast, the situation was untenable.
“They were just too far from the real action,” says Williams.
After trying to interest Larry Flynt in the project, and picking the brain of Timothy Leary, Williams went to Escalante for ideas. Escalante’s suggestion: High Speed Productions, the San Francisco-based company which published Thrasher, a popular skateboard magazine that had often featured Williams’ art. Williams and Suzanne flew up and he gave the pitch: A magazine devoid of pretentious theorizing, distracting layouts, and drawn-out critical analysis, it should be driven by the art itself—which would be a mad combination of subversive sensibilities and fine-art craftsmanship.
Williams drew up a list of names and, in 1994, Juxtapoz was born. The premier issue featured “Big Daddy” Roth, Kustom Kulture’s Von Dutch, Garbage Pail Kids’ John Pound, and Zap Comix No. 13. Williams did the cover.
“It was ordained from the beginning to be an underground outlaw publication,” Williams explains.