A Fine Line, Part 3: Underground Artists

I’m sitting at my early 1900s wooden desk in my basement listengin to KZAP, an original sixties FM radio station that’s still going here in Sacramento, looking up at a poster made – and signed – by Dave Mann. It’s one of his rare non-‘biker’ paintings, showing an early rider on a pre-sixteen motorcycle crossing an old wooden bridge in a forest. It was given to me by an old friend, a motorcycle rider – and an exceptional artist in his own right – called Bob Wise. He does a lot of motorcycle and old car art.

My good friend Chuck Wesholski – owner and operator of the original Kick Start Motorcycle Parts and provider of a lot of my reference material – wanted me to write this piece on the late ’50s to early ’70s ‘underground’ artists as they relate to motorcycles.  Perhaps you’ve not heard all these names or read their back stories. The most outrageous of this group was probably S. Clay Wilson, though Robert Williams came a close second. He was born in 1941 and moved to San Francisco in ’68.  A lot of his ‘Checkered Demon’ biker characters happened to be influenced by people he knew in Kansas, although he hung out with many of the drinkers at Dick’s Bar, “At the Beach”, a favorite haunt of the Frisco Hells Angels, Gypsy jokers, and Satans’s Slaves in the late sixties.

A year or two down the road he teamed up with R. Crumb, Robert Williams, Rick Griffin, Gilbert Shelton, and a couple of other artists to create the infamous Zap Comix.  His Checkered Demon, the Hog Riding Fool, the Gypsy Bandits and other classic works are laced through and through with outlaw motorcycle related story lines and characters.  S. Clay suffered a major head injury in 2008, and died in 2021, after years living in a diminished capacity. He still gets his mail at Dick’s Bar.  R. Crumb said of him, ‘He blew the doors off of the church!”

You may have read about Robert L Williams in my piece about Ed Roth [A Fine Line, Part 2].  Williams was hired by Ed to produce the magazine ads that sold his biker-related products and Weirdo shirts.  Born in 1943, Robert was riding Indian Chief and Scouts by the time he was 14.  He was, by his own admission, a delinquent youth and though he still loves motorcycles, a series of nasty accidents early on convinced him that he’d be killed if he kept riding.

Williams showed his artistic talent very early on; after his time as an art director with Roth, he moved to San Francisco in 1970 and joined the other artists on Zap Comix.  It wasn’t until the fourth issue that they were charged with obscenity.  Zap was a reflection of the San Fransisco culture in the late ’60s with drugs, free love, hippies, resistance to the Viet Nam war…you get the picture.  It ran hard up against the morals and virtues of the fifties, like a bug against a windshield.

Robert is still quite active today, some of his art has had an abstract bent and a lot of it has been labelled ‘feral Art’ or ‘Lowbrow’.  In the 1980s he even joined the Punk Rock movement.

Rick Griffin was born in Palos Verdes in 1944 and spent his youth surfing in the South Bay area; Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Manhattan Beach. He created his iconic ‘Murphy’ for Surfer magazine in the early sixties.  In 1966 he moved north to San Francisco where and when the revolution was being televised.  There he joined Stanley ‘Mouse’ Miller who had been a heavy influence on Rick’s artistic endeavors.  Along with alton Kelly they created some of the best psychedelic rock posters for bands playing at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore West theaters. Stanley Mouse, as he liked to be called, was one of the first to mass market ‘weirdo’ characters on shirts, staring around 1958. A couple of years before Ed Roth.

Rick joined Zap Comix about 1970s; soon after that he became a born again Christian and his art took on a whole different slant.  In 1991 while riding his Harley-Davidson just west of Petaluma and north of San Francisco a van cut him off and he passed away at the young age of 47.  A huge talent lost.

If you haven’t heard of any of these artists – or Zap comix – I wouldn’t be surprised.  Not your generation.  I do strongly suggest you search them out though.  The work may surprise you; but you had to be there to fully realize what an impact they all had on the changing culture of the late sixties and early seventies – and on my generation.

[Editor’s addition:  There was another -slightly less underground – comic artist in 1960s San Francisco with a motorcycle connection: Dan O’Neill.  His comic strip Odd Bodkins ran in the San Francisco Chronicle from 1964-70, although they cancelled it a few times during that stretch for its political content and obvious drug references.  Odd Bodkins featured two main characters, Hugh and Fred Bird, and their intelligent motorcycle ‘Norton’, based on O’Neill’s Norton Atlas.  Norton conversed with the characters via snorts, and could be fed ‘magic cookies’ to take them on rides out of Earth’s orbit.  As a youngster, I read the Chronicle daily, especially the comic pages, and Odd Bodkins was a surreal counterpoint to the more abjectly political Doonesbury, and the gay soap opera Tales of the City.  Newspapers used to be cool.

Odd Bodkins comic strips can be found in scarce copies of The Collective Unconscious of Odd Bodkins, a book I’ve treasured for decades, as hey, it features a talking Norton. You can’t get that kind of publicity today.  Dan O’Neill was part of a second comic artist collective, a rival to the Zap Comix group in San Francisco, called the Air Pirates.  Zap Comix featured far more sex than the Air Pirates (sadly, it was my own perverse sexual education – R. Crumb strips could be Pornhub plots), while the Pirates were more politically oriented, and O’Neill gained notoriety for leading a copyright battle against Disney for the Pirates’ use of Mickey, Pluto, and other characters as part of a ‘Mouse Liberation Front’ in their parody strips, mostly proving that Disney, like all capitalist behemoths, has no sense of humor.

In 1974, long before Art Speigelman won a Pulitzer Prize for his Maus graphic novels (1992), O’Neill drew up Penny Ante Republican, a pioneering work of comic journalism.  PAR recounted his experiences visiting Wounded Knee SD and his time with the American Indian Movement (AIM), and in Northern Ireland with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), finding commonality in the struggles of minorities fighting colonial oppression under difficult circumstances.  This work was recognized as significant, and acknowledged by the International Congress of Cartoonists and Animators. – pd’o]