Original subtitles

[ Background Noise ]

>> I've gotten to where I'm starting to use purple.

I was going try to conquer the use of purple.

Purple is a very difficult color.

It can be very dramatic, but if it's used incorrectly,

it makes the painting look weak.

So you've got to know how to use purple.

Purple is really a touchy one.

[ Music ]

There used to be a color of brown at one time,

turn of the century called "Mummy Brown."

Have you heard a mummy brown?

>> Yeah.

>> You know, it's made up of ground up mummies.

[ Background Noise ]

Isn't this thrilling?

[ Background Noise ]

This is what my days have been comprised

of before you were born.

[ Background Noise ]

>> Yeah.

>> Let's see, it's a 2, 2010.

OK, you've been --

>> Great. Thank you.

>> My pleasure.

Thank you very much for coming.

Thanks for coming all the way out here.

I appreciate it, Fred.

>> Okay. No problem.

I'd be here.

>> Yeah. How are you doing, Josephine?

Look at that kid, bigger every minute.

>> You've got a line out the driveway, people get --

>> Really?

>> Yeah.

>> That's what I fuckin' want to hear.

>> Yeah.

[ Laughter ]

I didn't talk to my father in like 15 years,

or something, you know.

He says, "Well, you turned out pretty good."

I told him, "Well, you know, I didn't turn

out to be a criminal or anything."

He says, "Well no, but if you'd have been somebody

like John Dillinger, you know, I'd still been proud of you."

And I said, "Dad, in my field I am John Dillinger.

"

[ Music ]

>> I would like to be like a big rock star and I'd like to be

like real prestigious like Salvador Dali, you know,

and just -- I could act any silly way I wanted.

That isn't rational to the way I have to make a living.

If I put on those kind of airs, then I'd be such an ass,

no one would take my work serious

that I busted my ass to do.

[ Music ]

I used to be a truck driver.

You know, I used to be a short order cook, you know,

a forklift operator, I herded cattle.

You know, I've been in jail a bunch of times.

You know, I am that person.

[ Music ]

We're going to -- we're going to come out.

>> We're going to turn around --

>> We're going to go --

>> Go inside and come out.

>> We'll come out to the door.

>> And come up here.

>> We're going to stand right here

and we'll wait till you wave, okay?

>> What? For what?

>> We're rolling now.

>> Okay. Okay.

>> Drive around and come on back.

[ Music ]

>> Hello. I'm Robert Williams.

This is my wife, Suzanne.

>> Hi.

>> What? Do you?

>> Hi.

>> Hi. I'm Robert Williams.

This is my wife, Suzanne.

And this is our lovely American tract home.

>> I'm waiting for him to speak first.

Should I say "hi" first or not?

I can't figure out what to do here.

>> You say nothing until I say, introduce you

and then you say "hi".

>> Well then walk with me.

I don't want to stand here --

>> Yeah.

>> Okay.

>> -- and like have nothing to say.

>> Howdy. I'm Robert Williams.

This is my wife, Suzanne.

>> Hi. I'm Suzanne Williams.

This is my husband, Robert.

This is our beautiful tract house.

>> Yeah, that I'm allowed to live in.

>> The American dream.

Oh fuck you, you know --

>> The success that me and Suzanne have had is

because we haven't got in trouble.

Getting divorced and borrowing too much money

and having bankruptcy, and you know,

and all these things will drag you down, you know.

My business, a painting, off the wall paintings is one

of the least ways of success.

I mean, I'm really sticking my neck out

but I don't stick my neck out in anything else, you know.

Hello, I'm Robert Williams.

This is my wife, Suzanne.

>> Hello.

>> And this is our lovely American tract home.

>> Cool.

>> Did I get American in --

>> No. That was perfect.

>> Okay.

>> Robert was really an historian, you know,

that was one of the neat things about being around him.

We'd talk about different things and he'd teach me a lot

of things that I didn't even know about.

[ Music ]

>> That's the Piltdown Man.

>> Did you ever take anthropology

or paleoanthropology?

>> No.

>> Do you know anything about cave men, Neanderthal man?

You got a college education, right?

You don't know anything about cave man, Cro-Magnon man

or Australopithecines.

Do you know anything about those?

No?

>> Not really.

>> I was afraid of that.

In the 19th century, late 1800s, Europe was abuzz

over the finds of prehistoric man.

First and most important fossils to be recognized are

of course the Neanderthal man in Neander Valley in Germany.

And then later the French found the Cro-Magnon man.

So England not to be outdone, had to come up with something.

So, ironically, an old individual found the fossils

of a human skull and Piltdown, England.

The fossils that they had indicated

that they had what could be considered a missing link,

the most intelligent of all the prehistoric man fossils.

Immediately the authorities in England jumped on the bandwagon

and substantiated the proof of this find.

But in 1953, carbon dating proved the skull in reality

to be a complete hoax.

But in that span of time from 1912 and 1953,

a lot of supposition and bullshit was made

about the Piltdown Man.

And what I've done is I portrayed this ideal Piltdown

Man as chroniclers would have liked who have presented him.

I've got in the central panel the Piltdown Man throwing a

mammoth because he was superhuman.

He had not only intelligence but enormous strength.

Up here, I've got a nice portrait of the Piltdown Man

and it says up here, "O Piltdown buzz, the man that never was."

Over here, I've displayed

in cartoon paneling, some satires on him.

Here we have a little skunk

in a devil costume indicating this whole thing stinks

with a little bucket of fish saying "Something's fishy".

Up here, we've got a projected ideal

of how intelligent the Piltdown Man was.

In other words, he could actually conduct himself

properly in a social surrounding.

Okay, down here, we're portraying the Piltdown Man

as he actually fit into human scheme of philosophy.

In other words, if you look at the panoply

of all our fantasy characters, he fits in there perfectly.

>> Is it really important like for you

to educate your audience --

>> No.

>> -- in the context or --

>> No. It would be nice to generate enough

of a pictorial interest that people

who would investigate what this is all about.

>> So in a way, you're

like teaching people whatever you can.

>> But I'm not trying to teach people.

I'm trying to find people

who already know to blow their minds.

[ Music ]

My mother always wanted a boy

and she says the reason she wanted a boy was

because she always wanted a cowboy,

wanted a son to be a cowboy.

And right out of the shoot man, I couldn't stand cowboys.

I couldn't stand them.

Later on, you know, when I had to work cattle,

and I worked my granddad's ranch and I had

to actually spend the whole day with riding a horse chasing cows

around and running them 15 miles down the road

to the railroad head and stuff, it was like hard work and I --

like I really hated horses.

I had to get up early in the morning

and go chase those horses down and put a saddle on them.

Horses have no compassion and horses just don't like people.

You know, horses don't make good pets.

I guess you can get horses and you can condition them to act

like they're sweet, but a horse, from the get-go,

although you've broken it in, just doesn't care for you.

And it only even -- tell you that it does.

Don't let young girls that love horses tell you how horses love

back, because they fucking don't.

It's like loving a cat and the only thing that keeps that cat

from not eating you is its size, you know, you're -- you're --

you're sweetest cat in the world, you know,

if it was big enough, would just immediately eat you.

Whoa. My fascination as a child was not to be a cowboy,

but to be a crusader, you know,

I saw the 1936 Cecil B. DeMille movie of the crusader

and it just flipped me out.

As a child, I wanted to be a crusader, you know,

I wanted to wear armour and ride a horse, you know.

That was my calling.

[ Music ]

My mother was an Indiana Yankee in contrast

to my father being a Georgia Cracker.

We had a large cattle ranch

and we would always keep the meat lockers full

of the best beef.

You know, my life was fairly secure, but I had to fit

in to a certain Christian parameter.

The thing I reacted against was the constraint

and the conformity that my Christian upbringing imposed

on me.

That was not my cup of tea, I --

I always liked to use foul language and drink

and raise hell and -- and I did it to an access

of what would be acceptable in that group.

I had a little too much character to conform to that

and I would be offensive to those people.

'Cause I tried it -- I tried to conform when I was young,

I did but I just realized that when I got older,

I had to express myself other than just being quiet.

Now when I -- my parents got divorced, it was a --

it was an epiphany up the ass, an epiphany up the ass.

[ Music ]

Going from being well-to-do in a rich

or upper middle class family down to living with my mother

on the streets of Albuquerque, and living very desperately,

gave me a -- a very good vista of what life's all about.

My father taught me to be a gentleman.

How to conduct myself around sophisticated people.

From my second life as a street rebel,

I really developed a sense of streetwise

that I never had in Alabama.

When I was young, my mother left me in the care of the landlady,

a Lieutenant in the Air Force and she had a girl friend.

For, a year or so I was in the care of this lesbian couple.

They were the kind of a core of a whole liberal scene

that was involved around the Air Force base.

I'd already had enough male influence from my dad who was

like chronically macho, you know, a really balls

to the wall type human being.

It was good that I didn't have my dad around too

because this is when I was like flaming and crying.

I'm coming out with this personality,

it was like completely diametrically opposed

to his conservative values.

[ Music ]

I decided to go to art school in 1963 to Los Angeles.

I really like Southern California, I'm not here

by accident, you know, I moved here on purpose.

I love to be around people with capability of having abstract,

but protracted imaginations.

You know, and you can -- the only people you could find

like that in Albuquerque or the deep south

or somewhere are people who were like right

on the edge of being criminals.

[ Music ]

It was Los Angeles that started the hot rides.

It was the West Coast that started the image

of outlaw bikers and Hollister.

It was the West Coast in San Francisco

that started the psychedelic poster movement.

It was San Francisco

that started the underground comic book movement.

It was the movie industry here

and the pornography industry here

that generated a certain attitude.

Skateboarding started out here, tattooing was very popular

out here first and that started with Don Ed Hardy.

The West Coast was holding all the cards and no one knew why.

You go back East, you go back to New England and New York

and you're stuck in a world that seems

like it's still being held on by Europe.

[ Music ]

>> In the late teens and all through the 20s,

before the Depression, the auto racing world went to extremes

in building enormous high banked race tracks.

There were about 30 of these tracks built all

over the United States.

One of the early ones was built in 1920 right in the middle

of what is now Beverly Hills, California.

This track was located right where Wilshire

and Santa Monica Boulevard meet right now.

Some of the finest drivers in cars in the world raced

on these board tracks.

It was a very expensive affair and the crowds

that attended were 60 to 70 thousand people.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1920,

they were having a major race there

and there was a horrible accident

that killed three drivers.

One of the drivers was Gaston Chevrolet,

the brother of Louis Chevrolet.

My purpose of this painting was to appeal to young people

that this exciting world did exist right

under their noses here in California and all

across the United States.

There were two forms of cars.

This is the Frontenac with a flower pedal nose

and that is a Duesenberg.

Now over here I show three dead drivers coming up out

of their graves, tearing these cars apart as a symbol of doom,

a gorilla-shaped monster that's done in abstract cartoon style

and both its hands and legs are twisting race cars causing the

death of Lyall Jolls, Eddie O'Donnell and Gaston Chevrolet.

And then I've got a poignant vignette here, a little tableau.

We've got a flag man knocking three chessmen off a chess board

indicating their death.

Then we've got a green race driver in the form

of a devil holding a trophy.

And in his right arm, he's holding a --

a nude young woman that represents lady luck.

Green was considered the color that was bad luck

and after this wreck, almost nationwide,

green race cars did not appear in auto racing

for more than 50 years.

I'm very proud of my interpretative work.

But I want that validated with the fact that I know every nut

and bolt on these antique cars.

I want to give the impression that I am responsible

for every brush stroke on this canvas and I know what I'm doing

to justify the fact that if I get over here and I get breezy

and I get emotional, I've got command of the whole situation.

>> Everything about what you do is like complete romance.

>> Well, yeah, you know, I love the paintings and the stretch --

do my own stretching, and they're done with tacks.

And there's like all these things

that people just don't do anymore, you know.

It'll just kill me to see staples, look at the back

of the canvas and see fucking staples, you know,

and some idiot's going clonk, clonk, clonk, clonk, clonk.

That would just, that would break my heart.

[ Music ]

I'll be saving my hand for -- canvas flowers.

[ Music ]

>> Two here, two there, two here, two there.

Flows up to the corners they are about three inches apart

and when that's done, I'll go all way around it,

filling in the spaces.

[ Music ]

>> If I'd been accepted right out of art school,

I've been pulled right down in the mire,

never got anywhere, you know.

We always had to like fight off of the side,

create my own audience and then figuring out --

>> Even now you have your own audience, you're still fighting.

>> I do have a very small art following,

but my little following does understand exactly what the

hell's happening and they understand how I evolved

and what affects -- influences --

brought about the material that I do.

When I came into art, cartoons were not considered art

but the cartoon is really the point

of where you can do the most exaggeration and, you know,

really test and strain your imagination.

>> Cartoon is a very peculiar

and very unique thing in American culture.

You know, one thing that defined America at the turn the century

and to this day, were the funnies.

The so-called funnies invented a certain way of telling a story

which didn't really exist in European tradition.

It was a new way of telling a story.

>> When you look at my artwork, what you're looking

at is you're looking at about 40 or 50 years of going back

through EC Comic books, Exact comics and Hot Rod Magazine.

You've gone clear back to Pulp Magazine illustrators using

that energy that's been denied for all this period of time

and has been lost often abstract art.

>> In Robert's language, there are a cast of characters.

You don't have that in most artists' works.

His work is very rich with a thousand and one sceneries

and places and a thousand and one different,

bizarre and perverse events.

In a way, his work is a lot closer

to the world of a magician.

There's a bit of magic that's taking place.

But maybe more like a story telling writer.

[ Music ]

>> My name is Artie Shaw and I used to lead a band.

[ Music ]

>> People are comfortable with the familiar.

So if you get up on the stage and you act differently

than what they expect you to, it's outrageous, everyone.

In my business a big thing happened

when Charlie Parker came along.

He changed the face of jazz.

The seminal figure had been Louis Armstrong.

And Charlie came along and changed that.

What happened as a result was --

a spate of Charlie Parker clones, that isn't good.

I think the important thing to recognize about a musician,

performer, and this applies to art as well, is if you look

at an art gallery and you know anything about painting

and across the wall, 50 feet away, there's a Modigliani,

there's a Gauguin, there's Cezanne and there's a Monet.

You can see who they are, if you know,

you know without going near the canvas, who painted that.

I would recognize that Robert William's painting almost

anywhere and that's pretty good right there.

He's got his own thumb print, so to speak.

>> The important thing is to come

up with an idea that's never come up before.

It -- I don't want even a bad idea,

that's never been come up with before.

>> No reasonable man could do anything like say Watson

and Crick with the DNA.

A reasonable man could not do what Einstein did.

You have to be unreasonable.

You have to say, "I don't agree with that.

Everybody in the world says that true.

I don't think so."

And you go out and break all the rules.

But you do know the rules, you'll learn them.

Once you know them, you know what to do about it.

[ Music ]

Robert paints paintings that are sometimes deliberately offensive

painters are artists that are busily trying to explain

to themselves what it's all about,

what the world is all about.

Robert's work speaks for itself.

They -- there's a picture of somebody doing something.

You know what it is and a lot of people can't stand it

because it looks like something.

He mirrors the present-day culture of America.

He mirrors it pretty accurately, and he paints a lot of things

that are not particularly pleasant,

but the whole world is not so pleasant.

>> I'm not accepted as a blue chip artist.

And there's every indication I probably never will be.

>> Bob is intent upon success.

And I've been trying to point out to him he's got success.

He's very well known.

He paints.

He's got a good marriage.

He's got a good life.

What more can you want?

But he's got that American thinking, he's an American boy

and he's grown up in America and we're told that you have

to have success with dollar signs instead of ecstasy.

He's brought in to that inferiority myth

that the wise acre is thrust upon you.

The critics will make people like Jackson Pollock.

I would daresay that almost 99 and four tenths percent,

like Ivory Soap, of the owners

of Jackson Pollocks can't tell you what they bought it for.

Except that it's a Jackson Pollock

and it's worth a lot of money.

I don't think that has anything to do with the art.

Most people who are collectors don't care about art.

They care about owning something nobody else can have 'cause it

cost too much.

I got out of the music business 'cause the audience would not

support me anymore in the things I was trying to do.

I finally found myself choosing

between do what they want or do what you want.

Any artist with any halfway reasonable meaning has got

to arrive at the place where he does exactly what he wants to do

and whether the people will like it or not, should be irrelevant.

Somebody wants to find the success as a 90 percent loser.

That's pretty good.

10 percent winner in our day was -- that's a lot of winning.

[ Music ]

>> I got into Hot Rod because after the Second World War was

over, you couldn't buy a car.

All the cars had been melted down and made tanks

for them to go to Africa.

They made like 5,000 tanks to get around a lot

of the African desert.

All our Model As and all our Model Ts went into those tanks.

Whenever I talk a look at those tanks, I say, well there must be

like 20 Model Ts in there, you know.

There was no cars after the war.

And we had to go to the junkyards and dig

out an engine here, a fender here

and just weld together what we could do and everybody did that.

>> These are classic Hot Rods.

Both are 32 Fords.

This is a 32 Ford Roadster.

This is a 32 Ford Coupe.

These are what's referred to as Deuces,

part of my little America Dream.

>> A Hot Rod is really an abstract thing

when you think about it.

It's far out thing.

You're taking this old, dead car, that's really an antiquity

that should either be left alone or thrown away,

and you're completely gutting it

and you're putting a big power plant.

So this thing is fast if not much faster than anything else

on the street and it's dangerous.

>> Radiator used to blow

up because it had these powerful engines

where only a little 4-cylinder should be.

They had big V8's now.

I spent a lot of time in high school

in the garage putting these big engines into these little cars

and welding everything up and making it work.

The nice thing about Hot Rods is you can customize the Hot Rod

to yourself like I'm a pretty big guy,

so I need a lot of seating room.

So I'd always make the seats real big with a lot of leg room.

I can make that car fit my little particular world

and paint it the color I like.

That's what Hot Rodding is.

You do it to which you like.

>> Well here's my two cars.

A 1934 two door sedan Hot Rod, kind of a Ford.

It's got Chevy engine.

The other car is a 1957 Thunderbird

which has basically been my everyday car

since 1969 when I got it.

[ Music ]

>> I'd done rather well at City College

and I'd attracted a few little lady friends and stuff

but no one that could carry an abstract off

and Suzanne was a remarkable find, no doubt about that.

She'd be walking along in these tight blue jeans

with a big T-Square, you know and people are fighting for her.

>> Really, what did you have to do to win her?

>> She had a following of gentleman.

Well it didn't go smoothly.

The situation didn't go smoothly.

>> Well can you describe it?

>> No, it's not your business.

[ Music ]

Suzanne is very well-educated and she is a person

of tremendous interest.

She's well read in astronomy, history,

anthropology, paleontology.

Suzanne is a remarkable person.

Suzanne is always leading me.

You know, she finds things on television.

She finds interesting things in life.

She points things out to me, you know.

Get into abstract conversation with Suzanne sometime.

You'll discover you'll be way over your head

when you start getting off on some weird shit with her 'cause,

you know, she's a little thinker, you know.

You're not going to get too dirty for her.

You're not going to get too far out.

You're not going to get too mathematical, you know.

I'm fortunate to be in her company.

[ Music ]

>> I think it was some bizarre inevitability that Bob

and I would end up together.

We have these two things in common

that generally don't go together.

We were both studying art already before we met.

And we were both into Hot Rods already before we met.

And at that point in time,

those two things definitely did not go together.

>> Is Sandy here?

>> Yeah.

>> Well you don't have to have Sandy back here do you?

>> Well you have to come outside.

I bought you a present.

>> Really?

>> Yeah. It's a surprise.

>> What is it?

>> Come see.

I bet you can guess.

>> I have no idea.

Oh, I know what exactly what the fuck it is.

Oh my God.

Oh shit, look at this thing.

>> Now we can go riding together, huh?

>> Oh baby, oh.

>> I hope you like it.

>> Whatever --

>> It was put together when Sandy built it.

>> Really?

>> Yeah.

>> Is it functional?

>> Oh yeah, it works great.

>> What'd this thing cost?

>> That's none of your business.

>> Can I ride it right now?

>> Yeah, sure.

>> Get your -- ride yours Suzanne.

>> Open the garage.

>> All right, look at that, huh?

My own sting ray, huh?

>> It feels good.

[ Music ]

[ Background Noise ]

>> Is it working?

>> Did you survive it?

>> Yeah.

>> Did you survive it?

>> Everything but my pride.

>> Ahh.

[ Music ]

>> Knowing what's in the future, I have no plans,

let's put it that way.

I have no plans beyond driving my Hot Rod as long as I can.

And painting as long as I can and trying

to help Bob be the success he wants to be.

[ Music ]

>> So I was working on coming up with some ideas on one

of these large paintings,

and I come up with the theme of delusion.

I wanted to do something with someone in history

that really suffered from delusion.

I went through a whole number of people, famous,

very famous people but then I popped

in my mind here is King Farouk.

When I was young my mother bought scandal magazines

that were one digit socially below movie magazines.

One character that kept coming back as a star

in these scandal magazines was the King of Egypt, King Farouk.

[ Music ]

We went to the library and got everything I could find

on King Farouk.

And it was just as amazing as I remembered, more amazing.

In reality, the painting is a comic book story.

In one panel, you got King Farouk's face.

You've got a central vignette of a situation

and another situation here,

a stylized suggestion of an attitude here.

Some kind of prosperous presentation

of his going-ons here.

And then right here is the symbolic surrealist image

of delusion itself.

Here, okay, you notice some writing on here.

While I'm doing the sketches,

I am verbally describing the painting, working the title

in with the -- with the paintings.

Coming around in a cloud

of smoke is King Farouk in a red Cadillac.

So I've got all the Cadillacs from '49 to '53.

And here they have the same body stamps.

There's no one picture in here with that position.

I don't just take this picture and blow it

up with a lithograph, call it my painting.

I get a set of dividers

and I measure things off proportionally

so I know what's what.

You know, this is called being a technical draftsman --

what used to be part of art.

This is what allows me to do airplanes and cars and machinery

and architecture and anything else.

The different angles rather than just like many artists do

with what they could steal, you know,

and make their entire fucking world their clipart.

[ Music ]

>> All right.

So, you got a couple of good sentences in that.

And let's say again.

>> My.

[ Laughter ]

>> "My" is a nice say to say "fuck".

I like all these real soft expletives like "gee".

And I find myself in my old age now saying "gosh", "golly".

>> Gee whiz.

Why are you saying that?

>> Why am I saying that?

>> I'm afraid because I'm getting old.

Unfortunately I've been attracted to shit like that.

But I don't -- I'll outgrow it.

[ Music ]

Becoming an artist was too much for me to deal with.

It was too much for me to deal with.

I had no peer group.

There's no jobs for an artist

that did what I did other than an illustrator.

Things didn't look good.

Out of desperation, I took this white collar job

as an executive aspirant for a warehousing corporation.

And I had to appear there in the morning with a suit and tie

and deal with people that I wasn't suited to deal with.

I worked there in the day and the night, would drag ass

and got up and try to get to work

with a straight look on my face.

And it was like obviously not my kind of work, you know.

So after six months they fired me from there and had to go back

down to the unemployment agency, face all this again.

And then when I got a job for Roth my world just opened up,

you know I just blossomed like a mortar shell, you know.

>> I thought you were going to say a water lily.

>> You did huh?

A water lily.

[ Music ]

>> Ed Roth had a phenomenal mind.

I don't think people today realize how brilliant the

guy was.

He was so far ahead of his time and he knew what people wanted.

>> I was looking for somebody full time 'cause I was doing all

my stuff freelance to people.

And I needed somebody there to direct them.

>> This very sensitive trained artist would go down.

They looked at property although it was filthy with car parts

and bikers and one thing or another

and they would just turn their nose up at it.

Boy, it was just made for me.

Think up your perfect job.

Well I work for a very big guy and I want it

for this amount of money.

That's not going to happen.

So it happened.

>> He was really a bedraggled-looking person.

He looked like he was out of the Skid Row.

And his car was a disaster.

>> That car had a knack for people running into it.

>> 'Cause the whole thing was dented in, one big dent.

>> One time, I'm sitting there in a stop sign with Suzanne

and we're watching this lady come swing around, you know,

I'm "oh no, she's going to run into us" she just ran right

into the front of the car.

Bam, we're looking at each other's eyes.

>> When he came in and showed me this beautiful picture,

that he said he drew, I said in my own mind I said, "Now,

hey this guy could never have drawn anything

like that because, you know, he was really not the type

of person that would paint a picture that gorgeous".

So I told him, I said "You go home and you draw me a picture

of a '54 Plymouth doing a wheelie with a Rat Fink in it

and so you bring it back tomorrow".

Because I knew nobody could draw that quick

and I thought well I'm rid of this guy.

I don't have to put up with that kind of nonsense, so he did.

He went home and he drew that.

And the next day he came back it was just another

gorgeous picture.

>> When I took the job with Roth in '65, Ed Newton preceded me.

He's the one that designed all of Roth's characters

when you Rat Fink and stuff that's the guy that designed it.

I replaced him 'cause this guy went out on his own

and I got the next job.

That's how I got to be art director.

>> When Robert first started working there I couldn't really

figure out how I was going to deal with the person

that had long hair 'cause Hot Rodders,

they never had long hair.

They used to comb their hair in what they call a duck butt.

It was always shaved in the back.

And I had to deal with it.

It was a big mental thing for me.

Then when he started drawing his ads, the concept of these ads,

I would have to come along and say "Look,

we can't do this gray area stuff".

>> Peterson Publishing sent a list of don'ts.

I had a list of don'ts.

No open wounds, no bodily fluids, no warts, no reference

to mother, no reference to God, on and on and on.

I was stuck with this whole big thing.

The last year I worked at Roth's, I did no drawing at all

because the magazine said we won't accept any ads

with this guy's illustrations in them.

There's a thing about ugly and distastefulness.

It's really an anesthetic in itself

and it's always got to be played.

I try to play the ugliest colors in the deck.

Pink against dark green, purple against orange.

Things that hurt.

When you look around, you go "oh, oh".

And then I would just play that card 'cause here you --

man that feeling, that cold feeling you get

like someone slipping an ice cube up your ass.

[ Music ]

>> When I was working for Roth, I met Stanley Mouse.

Stanley Mouse was a competitor at Roth's.

He painted T-shirts at car shows, too.

But later on, Mouse went to San Francisco

and became a full-fledged hippie bohemian, smoking dope

and getting on the cover of Ramparts Magazine

and being quite the liberal.

Well I hit it off real well with Stanley Mouse,

and this was right when Mouse was starting doing psychedelic

rock posters.

>> A lot of people don't

like the word psychedelic 'cause it reminds them of lava lamps

or something that they did or didn't like about the '60s.

It's actually a pretty good label for the art form.

>> Psychedelic drug taking

in the early '60s wasn't like drug taking now.

And it wasn't like drug taking before.

I remember when LSD came out.

People started getting LSD.

That was like a wonderful adventure.

That was an exciting expedition.

You know, the word "trip" was not by accident.

You know the word "trip" had a validity.

You were going somewhere that nobody had ever been.

This thing about the Psychedelic art movement

out of the '60s was it ran color and shape

and intensity all the way to the top of the register.

Pinks against purples and chartreuses against blues

and what not, you know.

That had never been done before.

It gave license to doing things ridiculous.

It was justified because it was done by people taking drugs

and they're irrational and from

that evolved the underground economy.

These underground California worlds were

virtually inseparable.

They were so akin just like the people that do artwork

on the bottom of the skateboards and the people

that do wall graffiti.

They're just so akin it's unbelievable.

[ Music ]

>> There's a large facet of society of human beings

that have no capacity for anything

like oblique or abstract thought.

And there's a good reason for this and it's

because anything anomalous means you have a problem.

When you're talking with someone and the person starts talking

in tongues or talking incoherently, you're talking

with someone with a problem.

We live in a society of people that fear anomaly.

Developing the abstract mind is something that's just really

starting new.

[ Music ]

>> You hear with your anus.

Your pelvis turns the thing and your feet turns the thing.

Your hands don't do anything but keep you balanced.

[ Music ]

I started when I was about 14 and I used to be good at it.

>> When Bob and I got together he knew how ride the unicycle.

I took that as a challenge.

I had to learn.

>> I'm only going to bloody myself once here, you know,

so you better be at the grandstand.

[ Music ]

>> Here comes Suzanne.

Look a here.

Look at this girl ride.

[ Music ]

>> We used to live in Hollywood and we'd take LSD and get

on unicycles and just ride the streets on unicycles.

When Suzanne rides, she sprains her arm

and a cop car pulls up to her.

We were like on acid.

People don't know you're on acid.

You know, you can't just walk up to the police and ask directions

and you're flaming, man, you know?

I ride over to the side of the door of the driver, the cop.

Walk up to the cop car with a unicycle on my hand,

I said "Now officer don't tell me it's against the law

to ride unicycles here on Bryant Street", you know.

And the cop's put back, you know, he says "Oh no, no,

we just saw her waving her arms

and thought she was being assaulted".

We laughed about that for a minute

and I told the cop I'll show you a few tricks.

And then I did a couple of tricks for them

and they drove off and we were just raving on acid

because a little LSD wasn't outlawed until later.

It was frowned on by society

and it was obvious it was going to be outlawed.

But it hadn't been outlawed yet.

And you're on new territory that your generation was the first

to walk in so it was a real thrill.

[ Music ]

>> Did you get that on camera?

[ Music ]

>> 1968, a musician with The Holy Modal Rounders named Peter

Stampfel showed me a Zap Comic.

And this was Zap Number 2.

And this ignited me.

[ Music ]

>> My first appearance in Zap was in Zap 4 in 1969.

There were seven artists in Zap so we set kind of our own style.

Me and Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin

and S. Clay Wilson were visual artists.

Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez and I guess Crumb

to a certain extent took a great deal

of pride in story structure.

There was a psychedelic drug psychosis

that we really enjoyed exercising.

All of us had our fine arts backgrounds to a certain extent.

This mixed with the comic book world

that we knew was plant food for us.

>> Look at these things now,

you don't think anything about them, see?

'Cause they're out of context.

They're just nothing now.

They're out of context.

But when that stuff hit, it's just like in 1953

when that first Mad Comic come out man, I also was a little kid

and I about shit my pants.

I -- whoa!

You know, it was just unbelievably far out.

The word Mad was not a joke.

It bordered on a mental illness.

It played on psychosis.

I realized here's some people in New York

that did these comic books, man,

their mind is just way out there.

I want to be like that.

I had that same feeling when I saw

that first Zap Comic, man this is flipped.

These people have no consideration or care

about the social mores.

Now that is so bitching

that they would dare do something that's published

and printed, that's circulated.

It's so flipped out, it's so disrespectful

to the fucking society we're in, you know.

And it's such a beautiful, wonderful virtue.

[ Music ]

In 1969, I needed an early 30s style cartoon character

who would have all the characteristics

of a traditional, already established Max Flasher

or Walt Disney character.

But the thing with Coochie Cootie was instead

of a child's character, he was an adult cartoon character.

He dealt in a world of sex and violence and jealousy and greed.

And he had all the shortcomings that most human beings have,

bordering right on being a felon.

A prisoner made this in solitary confinement.

>> Was it a friend of yours or was it --

>> I never met the guy in my life and it was

like a letter and stuff.

>> Do you have the letter?

>> Well sure.

Dear Mr. Williams, how are you?

Fine I hope.

My name is such and such.

I am currently serving time in a Texas prison.

I have been a fan, and admirer of you and your artwork

for 30 years and I make paper sculptures here in the cell.

I am sending you one I did based on your drawings

and paintings of Coochie Cootie.

I made the frame with copper wire

and used pulp from newspapers.

I hope you enjoy it.

P.S. Here is a good luck devil's head you can hang

on your rear view mirror of your Hot Rod or something.

Two sculptures enclosed and then it gives the prison number.

>> That's a sweet letter.

>> It's a nice letter huh?

>> Can I see that skull?

The devil head?

>> The devil head, see.

[ Pause ]

[ Music ]

>> This is Pleiku 250 miles north of Saigon.

The air base that was ripped by Vietnamese communist guerillas.

>> And you have understand about underground comics.

They were born in a very tense and restless period

of time during the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War was the very critical changing point

for America.

To understand the Vietnam War,

you had to understand the United States

in the '50s and early '60s.

It was very constipated, constrained society we live in.

It had definite rights and wrong.

There was a lot of bigotry and society was very,

very inhibiting to people with imagination.

When the Vietnam War comes, this brewing underground world

of drugs and whatnot that had been suppressed immediately

raised to the top in the form of a bohemia.

About 1967 or '68 for the first time in the history of humanity,

there was more young people than old people.

Now you take that for granted now.

But then, it was one big changing point.

So I am a member of the first youth movement.

It was my generation that realized, "hey we have power.

And we're going to use that power to stop that goddamn war".

Almost all of the youth culture in one way

or another did something in the direction

of showing their resentment

to the U.S. Government after the late '60s.

[ Music ]

>> There was in my mind a serious cosmological model.

And I saw and I still to a certain extent presume

that the physical nature of the universe was like a Mobious band

and the inside is the outside.

There's not like an end to the universe 'cause it's,

inside is the outside.

[ Music ]

I did a painting called "Riding a Dead Horse

in a Dream within a Dream.

I not only entered the fourth dimension of time

but I entered the fifth dimension of split dimensions.

Fifth dimension, you can get in and suggest situations

that can't be categorized like two situations simultaneously

that can't be in the same place.

This very vaguely describes five dimensions.

So you've got a receding one to back here.

This is suggesting a situation and it transcends over here.

So this is like a real elementary suggestion

of five dimensions.

You get off under that foggy area of things going

through things and whatnot

and you lose your audience pretty quickly.

[ Music ]

You think you know what I mean

like I think I know I know what I said, right?

[ Music ]

Always, when I worked for Roth, I was always focused

on becoming a noted painter and being able to make a living

as a fine arts trainer doing what I did.

>> That was the day job which was wonderful.

But he'd come home at night and he'd paint all the time.

>> I never quit being a painter.

But that's when I realized you just could not get paintings

in print or in front of anybody.

There was just no gallery or any form of venue

that would deal with these paintings.

There was no publications that would deal with these things.

I was absolutely out in the cold.

>> The Hot Rod world was very generic boys' world

like the average joe world.

It had a crazy streak in it of art.

And that was fostered by Von Dutch.

>> At the time, I knew who Von Dutch was and he was kind

of the guru or the phantom figure.

He was such a rebellious character

that most people were even afraid of him.

>> Ed Roth styled himself after Von Dutch.

I had studied fine arts.

Roth hired artists.

They explored all facets of the non accepted arts

like sign painting, flame painting and girly drawings.

>> I actually had met Ed Roth back in the '50s

at the Hot Rod shows and when I opened the museum,

the car museum which was Movie World Cars of the Stars,

I hired him to be the art director.

I put this little nucleus of a collection together

that revolved around their world

which was mainly Hot Rod's and custom cars.

[ Music ]

Ed Roth was actually the guy that played out my museum

and one day I said "Ed,

who would you think is the best artist living right now?"

He said "Oh without a doubt it's Robert Williams".

And I said "God, I'd love to meet the guy, you know".

The painting that really caused me to meet him was this --

I always called the Eyeball Painting.

I think it's called something Retinal Delights.

[ Music ]

The Eyeball Painting just blew my mind when I first saw it.

To me, it's still one

of the phenomenal pieces of art out there.

[ Music ]

>> When it comes to that movement what you call it?

Lowbrow Art, I guess that's what they call it.

He's the guy.

He is the captain of that whole movement.

Without him all these other artists would not even be doing

that kind of art.

>> He's actually opened the door

to a new art form being accepted into the mainstream.

And I think it's huge now.

>> What he's done with his painting is open up avenues

in kind of weirdness and possibilities of expression

to a lot of other people to give them courage

to develop their own work and take it from there.

>> He opened the portal for like probably hundreds of people

to have a successful career in the arts.

>> Without exaggeration I'm basically an artist

because of Robert Williams.

He liked my paintings and put one of them

on the cover of Juxtapoz.

And that's what launched my whole fine art career.

He's done that for a lot of artists.

>> I don't think people really realized how much effect he had

on the culture of the United States.

>> I got to know him over the years

and he got to know Leonardo too.

Leonardo actually is named after Robert.

Originally Leonardo's stage name Lenny Williams.

You know we picked that out just

because it was Robert's last name.

Robert would always say "Oh, I'm his hippie godfather that's

who I am" and stuff like that.

>> You can't put a little blue sometimes,

a little Prussian blue or aquamarine blue in my black.

It makes it blacker than black.

It makes it a real coal, dark black.

I had always realized,

to do real tight well done interesting paintings,

it's going to take more than a normal sacrifice.

If I could live three or four lifetimes

and I had a real tough pain threshold

and I could really concentrate, I would do nothing

but super cartoons with a one hair brush

and a magnifying glass 'cause that's like beautiful jewelry.

It's like creating diamonds.

There is a psychopathic characteristic

in doing detail work.

It's been long referred to as being anal retentive.

But in psychiatry, it comes to --

there's actually no such a thing as being an anal retentive.

The term anal retentive has an opposite side if you refer

to somebody like me as an anal retentive,

there is this other side called an anal repulsive.

In other words, someone that paints is real loose instead

of tight and they continually express shitting their pants

by doing a brisk, breezy paint job.

You live in a time in history

that if diamonds were just discovered,

no one would see the beauty in them.

Diamonds had to be discovered 4 or 500 years ago for people

to see beauty in them, okay?

It was later that they discovered diamonds were

like real hard and could be used industrially.

Diamonds that are found today, they would be utilized strictly

for their industrial value, not for beauty, see?

Beauty is a thing that's come from another period of time.

We appreciate diamonds and flawless diamonds now

from something from the past.

That would not happen today.

People don't see a little beautiful thing, okay?

That's out of our culture now.

It's just like people don't go up to a painting and look

at the little beautiful intricacies anymore.

That's kind of a passé thing.

It is a reflection of my emotional involvement too

because if you see an old illuminated manuscript,

and you see that the armor seems to be right,

that means this pathetic little scribe, this little artist

that sat there and did it must have indulged himself

in some kind of appreciation for the armor, you know,

so it's just like me painting that grill in that Cadillac.

I'd have to have some personal appreciation for that Cadillac.

I mean I want that goddamn Cadillac to read Cadillac.

I had a hell of a time with the grill on it.

I pulled it into shape.

I might have had one of those compulsive mood fits

of not getting anything just technically right.

That's why people copy photographs, you know,

it gets rid of those fits.

I work on a thing and I'll get the drawing just right.

And I'll come back the next day and I look at the drawing

and it's like the hand's all fucked up and the face is

at an angle and the geometry in the eyes are way off.

And it's like "What the fuck was wrong

with the guy that did this?

What was you thinking yesterday, you know?

" There's a certain amount of enjoyment.

We'll get enjoyment.

Well, I like sitting in front of the television

and drinking root beer is what I like to do, you know,

but that's not getting the work done.

It's a compulsion.

It's exercising that compulsion.

[ Music ]

>> I did a number of very fast,

brief paintings I called Zombie Mystery paintings

that deals primarily with gratuitous sex and violence

because it had energy.

It visually antagonized you.

Women didn't take to that.

[ Music ]

I found that I had great success showing at underground galleries

like La Luz de Jesus and Zero One

and Psychedelic Solution and what not.

I was greatly rewarded with a following almost instantly

and I generated quite an audience and a group of buyers.

[ Music ]

>> I paint women that are easy read beauties.

I can't stand big tits but I put big tits

on them 'cause that's easy read.

It would take persons with a much more refined taste

in investigative powers

to understand the little small breast, see?

But if I got the big fucking butter bags,

I mean the stories written right there.

On the other hand, the ass is like, you know,

a little more fundamental.

It's like very, very primitive if you go to the back of her

and you have to have like a way of what is the back of her

and the back of her is the big part.

You know, the big smiley part that looks friendly.

[ Music ]

The very first art ever created was naked women.

You know, you look at the little Venus's and shit, you know,

there are nothing but ass and tits.

Some of them were lucky if they have heads.

If you look at the Venus of Willendorf and you turn

that thing right, it's got an asshole.

It has no head but it's got an asshole, you know,

it's like we're saying something here.

There's some detail talk in this thing, you know,

there is no face on the Venus of Willendorf.

And the Venus of Willendorf is

like a Playboy magazine, you know.

That's a Playboy magazine 15,000 years ago.

[ Music ]

You look at it on an astral level, the beautiful expanse

of Orion Nebula and all these things, you can't even start

to comprehend how immense, and how dynamic

and how beautiful those are.

And you know, you can be looking at a telescope with a one eye,

man, and a girl goes by with a nice ass

and the man the Orion Nebula is nowhere you, know,

just curls up like a pork skin, you know.

But then you say well, an ass that's too perfect is

like not good either, it's to style, just like the guy

that likes the big titties, you know.

Like the big titties are like for an idiot, you know.

It's like the perfect ass is like kind of like an idiot,

like a little bit of cellulite you know that really looks good.

[ Music ]

The more trauma that I got,

the more my sexual material was catching criticism

and the feminists started really getting on me.

>> It exploits women, I'm sorry,

the titles don't make it any more amusing."

>> I endured about a decade there of being a punching bag

for a lot of people who wanted to point out what not to do.

>> I'm sure down the line when you have guys doing paintings

of real heavy duty graphic sexual shit

and putting it in galleries.

He's going to have to be considered a sexist.

>> I even hate the word sexist.

Humanity is sexist.

There's women and there's men and they're different sexes.

We have to get along with each other.

>> I don't consider Williams a misogynist at all.

He loves women.

He makes them strong, fearsome, and beautiful.

>> He is not a sexist person at all, not at all,

not in the finest sense of the word.

>> Women on enchiladas and who are obviously supposedly

to be portrayed as Latino, it's really obnoxious.

>> The girls on food is a combination of your libido

and your necessity to stay alive.

I don't want to go into that too much

because then it would expose me as like really a pervert.

>> I guess that's sexist, right?

Anybody who's too horny and you know, puts it in their work.

>> I think it's really offensive.

>> The most interesting and beautiful thing that exists

in human culture is a woman and that's what I'm attracted too,

so you know, I'm guilty.

>> I was talking to that director Herzog, you know him?

Warner Herzog?

He says he hates Cinema Reverto [assumed spelling].

Huh? It's okay.

[ Music ]

>> As a young man in my mid teens, I had the opportunity

to do a small stint in a traveling carnival.

I realized how everything was just designed as a facade

to get people's money and rather than being resentful,

I started developing an appreciation for this

and saw a certain aesthetic in the fact

that they would test the limits of what people could tolerate.

If you see it on the outside, you see this gypsy romance,

you know, but in reality, it's like very desperate people,

a lot of them on the drugs, a lot of them just went goof ball

that would do anything for money.

[ Music ]

There's a certain comic arrogance in my pain.

And a lot of people don't like me because of that.

But I think I picked that up in the -- from the carnival art.

It's like the carnival art challenges you

like just how stupid are you, you know?

[ Music ]

>> Welcome back to the Week In Rock.

Hi, I'm John Norris with the news.

And the group's 1987 debut album is still stirring

up controversy.

>> People look at it as sexist or anything, I mean, I guess --

I can see what they're saying.

>> -- sensationalistic work has attracted many fans --

Guns of Roses, but it's his paining on the inner sleeve

of their Appetite for Destruction

that caused the recent controversy in California.

A feminist group branded it a glorification of rape.

>> Glorification of rape.

[ Music ]

>> It wasn't good enough, right,

when we took it off the front cover and put it on the inside.

You know, that's, that blows.

They can't do anything about it.

[ Music ]

>> When these people originally approached me, they were unheard

of and I would consider them to be just another punk rock band

that comes to my door wanting art work.

>> It was a post card we found in a -- in a store in Melrose,

I think Axl turned me on to it.

>> I love the picture but I kind of submitted it as a joke that's

so outrageous and I was like, you mean, you want to use this?

Oh, this is great so then we just went for it.

>> They even used the name, the painting was

"Appetite for Destruction".

>> I love the art work and the talent that was involved in it

and I think that that since it was such an outrageous picture

that like the skill and the talent involved in making it,

it gets -- gets overlooked.

>> I gave him my best wishes but I warned him that this is going

to get them in a lot of trouble and it got them

in exactly the amount of trouble I thought it was going

to get them into.

>> A lot of people don't have anything else to do, you know,

so they get into censorship or whatever.

>> This was when Tipper Gore was still around.

And -- not that she's not anymore, but during her heyday.

>> The family organizations started raising hell

in school organizations and in churches and whatnot.

>> That was when at least for me personally, I first grew

up to the whole media affair.

When I first had to sort of sit there and go "really?"

You know, and my bottle of Jack Daniels and the whole thing

and I was going, "You think what about us?

Yeah, we're such a nice bunch of guys you know.

"

>> I don't really know what to think about censorship but it's

like we seemed to be like, you know,

knocking down the doors every time they censor us,

we get past it so we just don't give up.

>> What we did was we said "You know what?

Fine, fuck it", and we took the cross thing that we had

on the inside sleeve put that on the cover

and put the real painting on the inside.

>> This thing sold 14 million records and a third

of those records, this was the cover and the other two-thirds,

this was on a sleeve inside.

And I let them have it for nothing, see.

Almost nothing, and that was one of my lesser business endeavors

but it did get me quite a bit of publicity.

>> A lot more people I think were turned

on to Robert's artwork than were before

and I'm really glad to be a part of that.

>> If you don't like us, don't listen to us.

If you don't like him, don't look at his art, simple.

>> Such a waste of time.

People have spent so much time like dwelling on that.

>> Appetite for Destruction --

is that peoples' moms were buying it.

Okay. So it's no longer that much

of a controversial issue anymore.

It's like it's accepted.

And so we just turned around and put it back on the cover,

and just didn't say anything

and we never heard word one about it since.

[ Music ]

>> When I came up with Juxtapoz Magazine,

I wanted that "Here is an art magazine that's flipped".

I think I did to a certain extent.

If you would look at Juxtapoz and you compare it to Artnews

or Artforum, you'll realize there's a whole different

psychosis there.

The important thing to an artist is to get publicity

and the best publicity is write-ups in magazines.

You have to remember, it's that write-up on Jackson Pollock

in LIFE Magazine that made him.

That one big write-up in LIFE Magazine made Jackson Pollock

so you can see the importance of getting publicity in write-ups.

>> At the time, you got to remember what existed, you know,

there was Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, ARTnews,

Art issues, that's kind of weird because you go

to the magazine rack and you look

through all the different --

the same month, they'd review all the same shows.

It was all like one big magazine disguised

as 20 different magazines.

>> When we first started doing Juxtapoz,

I went to all the underground artists that I knew.

And I went to Crumb and S. Clay Wilson and Victor Moscoso

and Spain Rodriguez and I'd say, "Well I'm coming

out with an art magazine that deals

with underground painting and underground art".

And I got agreements from all these artists

that they would help.

>> He really was trying to bring other artists along with him

because he didn't really want to be the only one.

He wanted it to be an art movement.

>> Almost every person has a hunger for some kind of art

like when someone's making crafts

or they're drawing pictures or there's a certain

like human nature things.

So everyone has his art urge

and it's just how does it gets stifled in every person.

It starts in kindergarten

with the teacher saying, "That's awful".

And then you really get stifled in college

because all those people are trained

to tell you whatever you're doing is wrong.

So then when they find a magazine

that champions all the wrong art,

they're going to subscribe to that.

They're going to buy, they're going to get addicted to that.

>> I started a magazine called Coagula,

meaning it was a big middle finger to the art world.

I came straight at them

and critiqued the entire culture of the art world.

I trashed the big names.

When Juxtapoz came out; it was a totally different animal.

It was actually saying the art itself, the end product,

not the people, not the culture, are the problem.

We want to take over the art world.

>> If you look at, say Artforum, like the pictures,

it would be small and the writing would be big

and it'd be all about the writing and then

if you would read the articles, they'd be heavily footnoted

and they would quote all these philosophers, so it was really

about the art historian proving to you how smart that they were.

If you have a PhD in art criticism,

you can't understand Artforum but, you know, between that

and someone that likes art, you know,

there should be a step to that.

>> The secret to Juxtapoz was the art needed very little

rationalizations to be accepted as art.

The art world had thrived for 40 years

on the more rationalizations that the art needed,

the higher up the food chain in the art world it went.

Juxtapoz completely inverted that.

And now, it's been about 15 years and it's almost

like we can now see how deep the crater was

of what it destroyed in the art world.

>> Since the minute it hit the stands, it took off,

it did really good until it finally did become the number

one selling, for sure, above and beyond any other art magazine

of all the other art magazines.

[ Music ]

>> Rather than view just a bland portrait of Debbie Harry,

I was interested in some kind of psychosis

that gives the picture some substance.

What I've got here exhibits a lot of neurosis.

So I don't want you to think that Ms. Harry is like a,

you know, an involved lunatic or something like that.

This is like just particular neurosis that I had to extract

from her after a long conversation.

Up here, we have a cartoon characterization

of Debbie Harry.

And she has a phobia of being bound up and trapped under --

in a triangular shape.

This has been an emotional situation that bothered her

in dreams in one thing or another.

>> The sexual thing was the Ted Bundy experience.

>> She told me in the early '70s, she was coming home

from night clubbing at 3 or 4 in the morning

by herself walking the streets of New York,

and a little white car pulled up to her and offered her a ride.

And she flagged this character on.

>> This guy kept coming back and offering me a ride.

And I said, "No."

When he came back the third time, and I said, "Okay."

And I got in the car and the interior

of the car had been totally stripped,

it was just like a frame of a car.

And I was sitting in this frame of a car but the windows rolled

up with a guy that smelled really bad

and I couldn't get out.

>> She looked to the side of the window there and noticed

that it hadn't been rolled up all the way

and she reached through the window.

>> Squeezed my arm out that little crack in the window

and I opened the door from the outside.

>> Popped the door open as the car is going around a corner,

tumbled out on the street.

>> And was sort of hanging from the door like this.

And he spun around and I flew out into the road

in the middle of Houston Street.

>> And later she learns that she was a virtual prisoner

to Theodore Bundy, the serial murderer.

>> I don't have these dreams anymore.

>> Since he started the paintings.

>> Yeah. And now, I have also stopped aging.

Yeah.

>> I don't pull out no stops or anything

but on this particular painting,

I had Ms. Harry's dignity to think about.

>> I did have her keister showning here.

>> I really wouldn't have minded being portrayed sitting

on a taco with no clothes on.

But Robert is a gentleman.

[ Music ]

>> You bought that painting, why?

>> 'Cause it was cheap, dirt cheap.

>> I think I just bought this painting.

I still owe them money.

The reason I bought this painting is

because it was the last one and didn't get

to pick any of the others.

>> What part of this painting do you like the best?

>> The guy's dick, you can barely see his little green

penis hanging down.

>> I like the fact that you painted me in the shell here,

you notice the whiskers.

I don't know if you can see in detail.

>> You can see there's a little bit

of fluvium here extruding from the corona.

>> This is Oscar Wilde by the way,

and you can see the fairies getting shot here

which is a nice image of the fairy getting the bullet hole.

Coochie Cootie is dead on the floor right here

and he's kind of cute.

>> The individual that's purchased a painting is I'm

afraid bought the painting for the wrong reason.

He's seeing things in the paintings

that -- it wasn't emphasized.

>> Some people, you know, they'll go like this

on a painting and they'll sell it for a half million dollars.

But Robert is a craftsman, you see.

>> There is articles in here that suggest vulgarity

but these aren't the things that we concentrate on.

And I think Mr. Haynes has jumped

to conclusions in this purchase.

>> I asked you, I said, "What time do you get

up in the morning to paint?"

And you said.

>> About 4:15, 4:30.

>> He gets up at 4:30 in the morning to start painting.

Now this is an inspiration to me.

Ever since he told me that, now I get up at about nine

in the morning and I start writing.

[ Music ]

>> I'm doing this article for Juxtapoz Magazine.

And I really have to summarize Robert.

All of us, we want to think "Yeah, I'm the greatest".

You want somebody to say "Yeah,

you're just as good Michelangelo".

Well that's what I intend to say.

I want to look at the Sistine Chapel in some

of the Robert Williams' paintings as having more

in common than not having things in common.

>> I was working on a set of four sculptures.

I'm doing a set of four sculptures, Eloquence Redefined

because it sure as hell have to redefine eloquence

to tolerate these, okay?

There's four of them and they just selected two.

The first one here is an ecology statement.

We have this brute creature here with a blowtorch heating

up the world referencing global warming.

He's blind so he can feign innocence.

He's got this brute strength like mankind, all his energy

but it's going in the wrong direction.

[ Music ]

And in the second one here is Corker [assumed spelling].

The name of this one is A Diamond in a Goat's Ass.

And what this refers to is something that's overdone,

a lyrical, poetic euphemism for pretension.

[ Music ]

I am the sculptor but I work with a crew

that does the sanding

and faceting things together and whatnot.

[ Music ]

>> Do you see yourself as a blue-collared worker?

>> Yes. A journeyman, there's an apprentice,

a journeyman and a master.

I'm a journeyman.

>> You're still a journeyman?

>> I can do the work.

That's a journeyman.

>> How long 'till you're a master?

>> Well that's supposition for someone else to say.

[ Music ]

This should be ready for Halloween

at Tony Shafrazi's Halloween night opening.

Right in the middle of the Art World New York,

these things are coming about.

A Diamond in a Goat's Ass, you know.

Yeah.

[ Music ]

>> What are they going to say about you 50 years from now

when they look back maybe they'll call it

"The Juxtapoz Moment".

Maybe they'll call it "The School of Robert Williams".

What are they going to say?

>> That you honor me by saying "What are they going to say?"

I appreciate it.

They're probably not going to say a fucking thing.

There's younger artists that have leapfrogged me

but they're going to be saying about these guys

and then more intelligent people are going

to investigate the movement.

They function in the real life "Hey,

it looks like there's a real intelligent fucking guy

who did this really great work".

That's what I'm hoping for.

[ Music ]

When you start getting into real detailed art work,

it starts getting obsessional.

Work this area out and this area has to be worked out.

The resolution on the thing starts developing before you.

And the thing about being an artist is you're always

like in a chess game ten steps ahead of what you're doing.

You want to try a little while?

The onlooker doesn't realize this, you know, they're looking

at what you've done there.

What you're doing is your way ahead of it.

You're drawn out in this obsession of this visual image.

You're not in the picture.

You're around the picture.

The picture is actually you.

I don't want to feign the insane genius artists

like Van Gogh or anything.

But there's like an emotional tie

into this stuff that's pretty radical to define,

you know, it's a need.

It's like a real need.

You have to come to grips with yourself and you have to come

to grips with what other people think and you have to come

into grips with what you can actually fucking do, you see?

What you want to do and what you actually can do, you know,

are sometimes a broad distance.

Should I wake up every morning so fucking jealous?

That's the only way I get up.

It's not caffeine.

It's jealousy that gets me up every fucking morning.

>> Which part of the studio do you enjoy the most?

>> The finish.

>> The last?

>> The day I sign it.

The day the son of a bitch is out of my hair.

[ Music ]

I've always done the paintings.

You know I always thought well since I'm nobody,

doing the paintings and I'll probably never be nobody,

I'm left with the total freedom

and do something really bitching.

[ Music ]

>> Tonight is the opening of the Whitney Biennial in New York

and Robert has finally been included.

He's now in the canon of contemporary art.

The Whitney Biennial is the ultimate arbiter

of which artist is in and the artists

who don't get in are out.

And yet he's going to be an outsider

and not attend the Whitney Biennial opening

because his opening is here in Cal State Northridge.

[ Music ]

>> The great artists reflect their time in hindsight.

The trendy artists, yeah, they get the headlines.

The museums buy their art.

30 years later that stuff is in the attic

if it hasn't been deaccessioned.

When they close the book

on the 20th century the great painters are going to have

to compete with the lines of Picasso, the color of Matisse

and the plots of Robert Williams.

[ Music ]

>> You know I have a daughter who's 14,

somehow like all these kids, they like the Jonas Brothers

in their school and these girls are going crazy for it.

And so somehow she thought that music kind of sucks.

And so she like figured out, I'm not sure how, but if she's going

to listen to music she likes it's going to be the Beatles.

Then I'm like sort of the Beatles like now

as an adult, you know.

I go, "Man, the Beatles are a lot like Robert Williams".

They were young.

They had a new message.

It was edgy and it was really good.

Our whole music world was completely changed

by the Beatles more than anyone else.

And that sort of gets discounted I think in history just

as Robert Williams gets discounted.

Everyone takes for granted the --

all these other artists are so great.

[ Music ]

>> But just the Beatles of the logo.

[ Music ]

>> He was the breakthrough guy.

All the art before Williams was one thing.

But all the work after Williams starting right

with him, that was all better.

[ Music ]

>> Robert, are you happy?

>> I am happy.

I am happy.

[ Music ]

>> Hot Rod Bob, Geronemus Bob as they call silently Betty Bob,

Is that the Bob, Robert William.

>> Oh he worked at a carnival.

He's a geek I think in the carnival.

Got rocks like this --

ladies and gentlemen -- got squawky voice.

Got the little hands going down like that kind

of chicken breasted guy with a hurt neck, that Robert Williams?

I don't know him.

[ Music ]

>> You know people are running me down from my red socks.

Red socks are very hard to find.

Usually I have to find women's high heel socks.

Nothing accents blue suede shoes like red socks.

[ Music ]

>> My name is Spain Rodriguez I'm an old friend

of Robert Williams.

Therefore it's very -- what I have to report about,

Mr. Williams is very sad --

Robert Williams is a practitioner Salvador Dali's

secret masturbatory techniques which are so debasing,

so degrading when these are exposed to the world,

all those Hollywood friends

that he has will just be utterly repelled and shocked

and they will see what a squalid reprobate he really is.

[ Music ]

>> People collect anything.

I don't know if this relates but some guy in LA

that collects vacuum cleaners and --

>> Yeah, there was a lot of people

that collect vacuum cleaners.

[ Music ]

>> When you go to a small town down South or a city

down South you're going to probably go to church

to meet people that are going to church.

That's where you -- my dad told me one time that's

where you get the pussy is the church, so, you know,

that's where the women are.

[ Music ]

>> What are exactly -- I mean?

--

>> I think he said that it represents the rape of mankind

by technology and the media.

>> Oh, sure.

>> Okay.

>> That's deep

[ Music ]

>> I can't lose this painting.

I've lost a lot over the years.

I just have a told people, you know.

>> What do you do with the ones you lose?

>> Just shut my mouth and people don't know it.

[ Music ]

>> I'd don't want to say it on the camera.

Sit here and tell you my political entry

from staying here.

You're out of your mind!

You shouldn't have told you in the first place.

[ Music ]

>> Suzanne is a good gal, she's the best,

there's nothing like her.

She's extremely intelligent, talented,

tolerant, progressive woman.

I'm her minion.

[ Music ]

Gee, it's incredible how deeply involved you are in my world.

>> You don't understand that like all these people

that like your work wanted

to know all these weird things that --

>> How many people do you think are out there?

>> We don't know.

>> That's right, you don't.

[ Music ]

>> I love Robert.

He's really good.

[ Music ]

>> End of story.

[ Music ]