Harvey Pekar tells it as he sees it

Harvey Pekar has been writing for nationally distributed publications since the age of 19. Pekar wrote for a number of jazz magazines including “The Jazz Review” and “Downbeat” throughout the 1960s until he became fed up with the low financial returns of writing serious music criticism. In 1976, inspired by some of the work from the 1960s undeground comix and by the undeveloped potential of the comics field, Pekar began writing his own comic book, “American Splendor”, where he developed a unique style of autobiography and realism to depict his life and what he observed in it.

Pekar has worked with numerous important comics illustrators over the years including, Frank Stack, Spain Rodriguez, Joe Sacco, Chester Brown, but some of his best and most representative work has been with his one-time neighbor and well-regarded artist, Robert Crumb. What Pekar appreciates in seemingly common or ordinary dialogue is reflected in Crumb’s sincerity and care in illustrating what many people would consider mundane, such as bent window blinds or worn out T-shirts. They both have a great talent for showing things as they really see them.

Pekar continues to work on a number of projects, including polemic essays on literature and politics for several publications and a resumption of his critical writing on music. One of his most recent projects has been an attempt with Good Machine Inc. to make an “American Splendor” movie, set be directed by critically acclaimed filmmakers Bob Pulcini and Shari Burman with a script written by Pekar.

Pekar currently works as a file clerk at the Veterans Adminstration Hospital in Cleveland Ohio, a position he has held since 1966. This interview took place there.

Arashdeep Sangha: In some of your more recent comics you have talked about wanting to retire from your job here at the hospital. You have also mentioned that your income from comics has leveled off. If you retire, do you want to continue to write comics?

Harvey Pekar: Yeah, if I retire it only means I’ll retire from working here. I still want to write comics and all the other things that I write. I consider comics to be the main thing thing I do, though.

AS: Do you like the collaborative aspect of working in comics? Do you ever feel that a lack of total control on the work limits how expressive you can be? For example, some of your comics have an essay-style and I know you have also written essays for newspapers. Are there pieces where you feel that it should be written as a comic or that it should be written as prose?

HP: I do like collaborating with these guys. If I was a technically competent illustrator, I’d probably illustrate my own work, but I am not. But a playwright doesn’t usually act in a play.

If you work with somebody for a while, you pretty much know what you are going to get. Sometimes its not going to be as good you hoped it would be but you got put up with it. I’d love to be working with Robert Crumb, but he’s over in France, he’s got his own thing going. It’s not possible. But I will say that a couple of guys I’m working with are tremendous, Joe Sacco, Frank Stack.

With regard to your question, would I rather write essays, there are some instances like that when I write about music. I write jazz criticism that goes over the heads of a lot of editors. I don’t feel it’s that difficult, but for people who are musically illiterate, they don’t like it that much. They want more impressionistic kind of writing and no real technical terminology.

I was writing for the Village Voice one time, doing jazz criticism, and this guy who was the music editor was a big fan of mine – of my comic book. He didn’t really know that much about music. You know, these guys are the music editor one day, the arts editor the next day. They don’t really have a strong background in anything really. They get out of college and they’re an English major or something.

Anyway, I sent this guy an essay and he asked me if I would do it in the context of a comic book story. Well, if you do that, you get less words. A lot of the space is going to be taken up with pictures. So I went along with the guy, but I wrote really text-heavy pieces, so actually it’s not that much of a difference. There are times though, I just assume write what I want to write and let it go at that.

But if a guy is offering halfway decent money, I’ll do it. And it helps out the illustrators. For this one publication, this guy I work with gets $350 for a tabloid-sized illustration. It’s good money by our standards. I get something like $150. It’s either we do it that way or it doesn’t get done at all. So, all right, I do it.

AS: In the articles and comics you have done about musicians and authors, they are often about people who have been overlooked or marginalized by the press and the public. What do you think of the whole situation of these artists work being under appreciated?

HP: I imagine there are outstanding artists in every field that get overlooked, and I certainly run across them myself. It’s scary. You think about how certain guys with great ability-they’re not just talented, they’re achievers, they have realized their ability. They just don’t have a broad enough audience. Usually these people are experimenters, and, as far as I’m concerned, innovators are the greatest artists.

There’s this one musician I’ve written about in the past, a guy named Joe Maneri, he is up there in Boston with you guys. Partly because he didn’t know how to go about marketing himself, he was about to go completely undiscovered. The only thing that helped him was that his son started making it as a musician in Boston and he dragged Joe out to play with him after Joe had pretty much given up on it. Yeah, it’s real scary. You add to that there are a lot of extraordinary artists who don’t go to New York and that’s a big strike against them right there.

And then if you talk about actors and actresses. Man, you look at all these people in these sitcoms and in these dumb movies that don’t require a lot of ability. You ask yourself, “Why did that person make it and somebody else didn’t?”

There are all these terrific actors and artists in local situations that never rise. Maybe they aren’t real good looking or maybe they aren’t big pushers or something like that. Nobody ever hears of them. It just doesn’t work.

AS: Do you feel that its negligence of the press? For example, in a lot music criticism today there is a real lack of discussion of the actual music. That is a real disadvantage to talented musicians.

HP: Well, that is usually writing on pop music, and in pop music, I don’t think they ever really discussed the music. The first time I think that they tried to write analytically in pop music was this magazine called, “Crawdaddy.” There have been some other attempts but the people that did that stuff, by and large, didn’t know much about music from a technical standpoint.

There are exceptions, but pretty much, they just didn’t have the ability to write about music as an end in itself It was a social phenomenon. Or else these guys wanted to write poetic prose and describe the music that way, impressionistically. And you wouldn’t have music editors who would tell you that it is not saying anything about the music. It’s just bullshit.

AS: Yeah, it is bullshit. And it’s not that its even half impressionistic and half analytical, its all impressionistic.

HP: Exactly. But that’s pretty much the way it’s always been.

AS: How do you think this situation came about in music? Do you think it is a failure in music education or music journalism? The subject matter isn’t well discussed in most media.

HP: That’s a question I’ve been thinking about a really long time. I think it’s probably a combination of factors. I ask myself, “Why is it that people don’t like avant-garde art or stuff that is more challenging?”

In the area of pop music, you can have great art that is popular music. I think the ’60s rock’n’roll and the big band era are examples of that. But most of the time the pop stuff is insipid. A lot of it anyway. I think part of it has to do with education, but I don’t really know that if you educated people better it would make a significant difference.

I would like to see, for example, when they do music appreciation classes in schools, I would really appreciate it if they would bring the thing all the way up to the present instead of quitting seventy-five years before the present. When I was in school, they sort of quit it in the late nineteenth century and I think that is really bad.

And it’s not only schools that do that. There is this fairly celebrated documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, and he is doing a 20-hour series on jazz for PBS. Jazz has got a history that is about a hundred years old and he only has one show that deals with the last with forty years of jazz. This is really unfortunate.

On the other hand, if somebody comes home and they listen to some easy to take music, nothing challenging, what are you going to do? Are you going to get up there and start screaming at them that they aren’t listening to post twelve-tone classical music or something like that. They just want to relax and go to bed.

Maybe an innovator, after his music has been around a while, people get a chance to catch-up to it, and his innovations start trickling down into film scores and stuff like that. But that takes so much time, the guy is probably dead and gone by then.

AS: It seems to me like the lack of acceptance for innovation is sort of why your work hasn’t gotten that wide of recognition. I think our own innovations in comics go over the heads of lot people, like your realistic style, people seem to be thrown by it a little at first. What do you think of the attention your comics are getting now?

HP: If my comics get attention at this point it is going to be because I’ve done something in another field. Lets say, and this is a long shot, a movie gets made of mine, and it’s fairly popular, then it will focus attention on my comics. Short of that, I don’t know.

What’s got to happen is that the general public has got to become aware that you can do great work in comics just like you can in any other art form. But when they have this notion, and when writers and illustrators have this notion that comics are just a limited form by looking at the superhero comics, they all think why should I bother with that.

Just the idea that you can do great work in comics doesn’t occur to a lot of people. That is why they have been sort of ghettoized. The field has sort of been left to these juvenile intellects. Some of them really resent what I am doing in comics. To them, if its not a superhero type comic it’s not really a comic. It’s ridiculous.

AS: Are you angry with how many people have sort of resigned themselves to not looking more into art work for themselves, not challenging themselves? Or with the commercial aspect that most businesses don’t really want to put out challenging work?

HP: I’m not happy with it. I sort of reconciled myself to it. I can’t change things by myself but I can do what I can. If you ever hear any of these editorials I do on the radio, I often attack listeners in general because they always think I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about the guy standing next to them.

I actually won a first place award for my radio commentaries, best essay of the year from this board of directors or something. I’m not big on prizes. I think prizes like the Oscars and stuff like that is just a bunch of bullshit. Even what happened with me, even though I think I do pretty good work in that area, is a freak because what won it was that I read “The Harvey Pekar Name Story.”

They wanted me to read one of my comic book stories and I thought fine, I’m really happy with the story. But I never would have thought to do that as a radio piece. The original didn’t win any awards.

Its almost like a make-up call, like in the basketball when the ref throws the call against one team and then calls it against the other when its real close because he can’t admit he was wrong in the first place. Its weird, I got an award for this and not for that. It’s strange.