THE BLACK VERNACULAR. Clarklittle on Instagram. How Iconic Album Cover Illustrator Robert Crumb Brought Comics to Music. By Maria Popova What Janis Joplin has to do with rediscovering yesteryear’s forgotten masters. Alex Steinweiss may be the father of the modern album cover, but Robert Crumb is its favorite weird uncle. Though best-known as a pioneer of the underground comix movement, the subversive artist had long been fascinated with the music of the 1920s and 1930s — jazz, big band, swing, blues, cajun — so when, in 1968, Janis Joplin asked him to design the cover for her album Cheap Thrills, it was the beginning of R.
Crumb’s prolific second career illustrating hundreds of covers for artists emerging and legendary. In fact, Crumb’s covers for yesteryear’s forgotten masters were so influential in and of themselves that they spurred the rediscovery of many of these old records in the 1960s and 1970s. R. In this narrated short, Crumb, who eventually learned to play the uke, banjo, and mandolin himself, talks about the convergence of his two passions: Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. R. Crumb: The Complete Record Cover Collection. Aurum Light Blog. Mcbess. Andrew Thomas Huang. Ralph Steadman.