"The Velvet Underground of Writers" -> Robert Anton Wilson

Interview with Tales of Illuminatus! Creator Bobby Campbell

The third issue of the Tales of Illuminatus! comic series is crowdfunding now.

The comic is based on the works of Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) and Robert Shea. I have covered RAW’s influence on games and music in a previous newsletter:

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Happy Maybe Day - Robert Anton Wilson Music & TTRPG Connections

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Here are some details from the Tales of Illuminatus! project description:

Bobby Campbell and Todd Purse's ongoing comic book adaptation of the cult classic Illuminatus! trilogy takes something of a detour in issue #3, delving into Robert Anton Wilson's prequel material from his Historical Illuminatus Chronicles and his fan favorite Masks of the Illuminati novel.

I conducted an interview over email with creator Bobby Campbell. We both studied with RAW at the Maybe Logic Academy, and Bobby provides observations and insights that I think will be valuable to musicians, game designers, writers, and other creators. Enjoy our conversation!

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Matt: There have been many musicians, writers, and visual artists who have been inspired by the works of Robert Anton Wilson. What do you think it is about his writing and ideas that has been so influential to folks who are creatively wired?

Great question! I like describing Robert Anton Wilson as the Velvet Underground of writers, due to his outsized impact on pop culture, relative to his modest level of traditional mainstream success. It does very much seem like everyone who reads Robert Anton Wilson starts some sort of creative endeavor.

I think there’s probably some degree of artistic self-selection within RAW’s audience, because his books have this zen koan quality that requires imaginative speculation and interpretation. (As E. E. Cummings said to crazy Uncle Ezra, “I know what you’re up to you goddamn sadist, you’re trying to make people think!”) If you’re not interested in riffing along with his books you’re probably not going to get very far with them. This creates a kind of creative quality over quantity effect within his readership.

And then there’s the info-density, this embarrassment of memetic richness in his work, where he’s burning through a ridiculous volume of ideas on page after page, which would keep most authors busy for years and years, but he just keeps flowing in new directions. His books are an absolute smorgasbord of conceptual delights, which seems to invite further elaboration, if not outright appropriation!

So if you’re Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, for example, of course you feel comfortable taking the Justified Ancients of Mummu from Illuminatus! and forming a very successful band around their mythos, because it’s barely even a drop extracted from a sea of novelty, who would even care or notice? As indeed RAW absolutely did not! When John Higgs asked RAW what he thought about The JAMs/The KLF, who had hit records using his ideas, he had never even heard of them.

And then there’s also his close associations with Discordianism and its copyleft ethos, or grassroots collaborative groups like the Church of the Subgenius, all of which encourages the laissez faire spread of this guerrilla ontology.

Finally, there’s the context within which many people find themselves discovering RAW, which typically tends to be at some sort of crisis or transformation point. Those that make it through the cosmic intensity of a Dark Night of the Soul/Chapel Perilous experience usually come out the other end with quite a story to tell, and if RAW’s ideas helped safely deliver them through that underworld journey, it makes sense that his influence would shine through in the telling.

Matt: Your Tales of Illuminatus! comic series has featured in-universe musical productions. Can you talk about how those fit in with the project and how you collaborated with the musicians on them?

Most certainly! I think it originally started just as a practical problem solving exercise, because within the original trilogy there are several significant storylines, and recurring motifs, involving songs, bands, and the music industry, all of which converge in the climax of the narrative at the Walpurgisnacht rock festival.

The main villains of the book are a crypto-nazi rock band called the American Medical Association, who are part of the Illuminati controlled corporate record business, which is opposed by an indie rock label, run by John Dillinger, called Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc.

So really the idea of incorporating musical productions into the project emerged pretty organically from the text itself, but took on a life of its own as the implementations got worked out...

In the opening trip of Illuminatus! the song “Rock Around the Clock” features very prominently, almost too prominently not to re-contextualize for younger audiences. The first step of which was to get a new version of the song recorded. Fortunately, one of my best friends since high school is dynamite Dan Robinson of The Headies and Danny and the Darlings, the hardest working man in punk rock, who crafted a perfect RAW rendition of our de facto theme song, but then this created a story problem...

In Illuminatus! “Rock Around the Clock” is performed by Robert Pearson’s band. (In the novel they’re called Clark Kent and His Supermen, but in the comic it’s Kal-El Hajj and His Supermen.) I needed to keep Robert Pearson’s band in the story, but also wanted to keep the Danny and the Darlings version of the song relevant to the plot, and that’s where the concept of the cassette tape came from.

I’ve always loved the mythology around Raekwon’s “Purple Tape,” the early cassette demo release of “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx,” which spread like wildfire in the mid 90’s. So the idea was that Danny and the Darlings would have a similar hit mixtape, circulating through the underground music scene, including their gritty rendition of “Rock Around the Clock,” which would also explain why a hip band would be playing a song from the 50s in the mid 70s.

Dan then took it upon himself to create the full Jukebox Musical mixtape, taking slightly more b side rock staples and crafting a wild spiritual journey through the early history of Rock and Roll. (Never mind the metafictional implications of the cassette tape existing both in real life and the Illuminatus story universe!)

The cherry on top of this plot is that this would also coincide with the emergence of blank cassette tapes as a new form of physical media, which the record industry was terrified of, that whole “home recording is killing the music industry” business, which is exactly what Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus wants! So the proliferation of blank tapes becomes a pointed attack from Dillinger’s LBJP against the Illuminati controlled music industry.

(From what I hear, on the streets of Illuminatus, another disruptive Danny and the Darlings cassette has started to spread, a punk rock opera called “Goddamned Wonderful.”)

And then on the Illuminati Records Ltd. (IRL) side of things, in the original trilogy there is this massive line-up of bands, I think 201 in total, listed as performing at the Walpurgisnacht Rock Festival, and I’ve had a long-standing dream of making them real, at least in some sense. Back in like 2009 I made a couple dozen album covers based on those bands, which sat dormant until early 2023 when the great DJ Steve Fly and I were talking about it, just as the comic was starting up, and he had an idea about bringing them to life, using both traditional and artificial music production tools.

(In the comic IRL goes by Ingolstadt Records Ltd., and are the record label for the American Medical Association, but are planning to openly operate as Illuminati Records Ltd. after their long awaited triumph at the Woodstock Europa rock festival.)

I’ve worked collaboratively with Steve for 20+ years on all sorts of weird art shenanigans, and we both studied with RAW himself at the Maybe Logic Academy, so I was delighted for him to use his unique expertise to bring this apocryphal catalog of music to life. I was, and remain, a bit squeamish about the usage of generative tools, but in terms of artistic purity Fly is as pristine as it gets, so we rolled the dice, and ended up with a convincing top 40 playlist from the universe next door.

Narratively, the idea became that these tracks were literally produced by the corporate music machine, (Eagle-eyed readers will discover the machinations of GWB-666, the total information awareness system from RAW’s Schrödinger’s Cat behind it all!) and so the IRL vs. LBJP showdown becomes a John Henry story, where man made music takes on the machine, building towards inevitable human triumph.

Though in the intervening years the problems surrounding AI have become such a hot mess that it’s certainly not worth pursuing further production, so with our antagonist already established, DJ Steve Fly has switched teams and is now hard at work on a fully human LBJP release - without spoiling too much, it does indeed involve the wild and wonderful legacy of his longtime friend and collaborator, the legendary John Sinclair! Who is also now a character in the story :)))

Matt: The campaign for issue #3 includes an option for a cassette tape. What does physical media mean to you in this day and age?

I’m old enough to remember when the internet represented a leveling of the playing field in terms of indie art distribution. There was this small window of opportunity where you could use the web to bypass traditional gatekeepers, and make your art available directly to an audience in a competitive way.

However, in the current era of algorithmically curated walled gardens and overwhelming creative superfluity, that situation has reversed somewhat, and these days it seems like there’s better opportunities to connect in physical spaces.

Heck, at least when you publish physical editions of your work it graduates from the pejorative classification of “content” to, at worst, an object, if not a product, and hopefully, eventually, a successfully circulating artwork.

Physical media has become much easier to produce and the quality has improved pretty dramatically. Back when I first started making comics the minimum order for a print run was 1,000 copies, and they looked like shit, which for a fledgling small press operation was prohibitively expensive and cumbersome disadvantage. (Boxes and boxes of unsold issues of Fun Time Comix still haunt various garages!)

There remain serious issues with rising production and shipping costs, but at least those affect big and small publishers alike, and I think it’s currently very possible to create competitive alternative culture.

Part of the idea with the cassette tape is keeping all our options open, remaining agile, because it’s very likely that we’ve discarded more advanced communicative technology in favor of things that are merely newer.

For example: Nick Herbert, one of the “hippies that saved physics,” author of the awesome Quantum Reality, and good friend of RAW, told me that the best customers for his books are libraries. There are thousands and thousands of libraries in the United States alone. It’s probably the most advanced and sophisticated media distribution model imaginable! And it doesn’t even need to be invented, just utilized.

Ultimately, I think a hybrid approach is what will work best. When working with niche subject matter, such as Discordianism, you still need the internet because the audience is so distributed. I don’t know that there are 1,000 people in my tri-state area that are into this kinda stuff, but without physical media your work ends up as content grist for the social media mill.

So I think the middle both/and path is ideal for a project like this.

Matt: Do you listen to music when creating your art? If so, any faves?

For sure! Though I tend to split time equally between podcasts/audio books, tv/sports, music, and silence, depending on what part of the process I’m in.

Music is best for sketching/initially composing pages and then again for adding on final touches.

All the high energy emotional work.

I tend to accumulate a playlist of songs that I listen to obsessively, and then wipe it all away and start fresh. Right now in my playlist is MF Doom, Belle and Sebastian, The Coup, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Ramones, Doechii, Prodigy of Mob Deep, Billy Bragg, Otis Redding, Dolly Parton, Bouncing Souls, Hot Water Music, Danny and the Darlings, The Headies, Man Without Plan, Marina and the Diamonds, Plow United, The Crash, Kreayshawn, They Might Be Giants, Wu Tang Clan, and Power of IV.

Though since classical music plays such a huge part of the current issue I’ve also been listening to a bunch of Mozart and Beethoven. Really enjoying Glenn Gould’s renditions especially.

Matt: Music plays a role in RAW’s original Illuminatus! trilogy, for example with the list of bands playing the Walpurgisnacht rock festival. Any chance you will be creating in-world music-related artifacts for future issues, such as festival posters or t-shirts?

That’s the dream! I definitely have the Woodstock Europa festival poster in mind, at least to be featured in the comic, if not offered as a print. I’ve been slightly hesitant to get too into merch just yet, because of various logistical issues, but we are indeed offering our first ever poster during our current Kickstarter campaign, so if that goes well we can build on that and start offering more traditional swag.

I feel a bit queasy about print on demand merch. I don’t like the idea of selling a $25 shirt, from which I make like $3, and then it washes out after the first time you wear it. It’s a rip off for everyone but the print company.

It’s just about figuring out high quality production, with a decent price per unit, that can be reliably shipped from both the US & UK/EU.

TBH, traditionally, shirts sell way better than comics, so if we want to keep this lasagna flying it’d be a good idea to get it figured out :)))

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Pledge your support at the Tales of Illuminatus! campaign page. It includes options to order the complete series to date so you can get caught up if you missed the first two issues.