A life in the underground

Rip Off Press publisher Moriaty helped define the '60s

Enlarge This Image Bob Simmons From left, Fred Todd, Gilbert Shelton, Jack Jackson (with his girlfriend, Beatrice 'Babbi' Bonini) and Dave Moriaty were at the front of the underground comics movement in the late '60s in San Francisco. Enlarge This Image The Rip Off Review of Western Culture was one of the magazines Moriaty published with his fellow Austin transplants. Enlarge This Image Fred Todd The Rip Off Press crew, here in front of one of the buildings where they set up shop, printed material that was often jaw-dropping. 'We parodied everybody, especially cops and the drug culture,' says co-founder Dave Moriaty. Enlarge This Image Bob Simmons 'My idea was if we're going to talk (nonsense) about forming a counterculture, we needed a printing press,' Moriaty says. Enlarge This Image Laura Skelding After he returned to Austin, Moriaty worked at the Austin Sun. The paper helped advance the career of Stevie Ray Vaughan and others.

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Published: 6:52 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 6, 2011

Dave Moriaty grew up in Port Arthur, a friend of Janis Joplin, who was a few years younger. After graduating from the University of Texas, he moved to San Francisco and became co-founder and publisher of Rip Off Press, which was critical in kicking off the underground comics (or "comix," as they're called) movement, helping make stars of R. Crumb and many others and essentially helping to start what's commonly known as "the '60s."

Improbably, Moriaty is now 70 and at a considerable remove from the movement he and his partners helped summon. Although he might have been a hippie and his hair has gone white, he still carries himself with the discipline of a Marine. He has a house he built himself — is still building, more precisely — on the north shore of the river in East Austin across from the beach at Roy G. Guerrero Park. It's been a work in progress since, oh, 1979.

He has a 1914 Knabe grand piano that Spike Jones once played and boxes of comics and other publications that draw collectors from all over the country. And that's just a piece of a long and eventful life.

He studied aerospace engineering and journalism at UT, reported for the Beaumont Enterprise, was drafted into the Marines, wrote repair manuals for ballistic missiles ("That wasn't exactly the antiwar work I wanted"), helped run the Austin Sun — a precursor to the Austin Chronicle — taught electronic publishing at Austin Community College for 15 years, worked as a mobile mechanic, married and had a daughter, tended bar at the Soap Creek Saloon and printed posters for shows at the Armadillo World Headquarters.

His story is that of a former Marine turned key counterculture figure, a man who — with the relatively uncomplicated idea of buying a printing press — helped give a social revolution its voice.

Here's what happened: In the early '60s, what would become the core of Rip Off was hanging around Austin. Moriaty was studying at UT, and Gilbert Shelton was editing the Texas Ranger, UT's humor magazine. Fred Todd was going back and forth between UT and Texas Western in El Paso and, according to a history of underground comics, attended Ranger parties. Jack Jackson from Kingsville came to town and started hanging around the Ranger bunch.

In 1964, Jackson (or "Jaxson") published arguably the first underground comic, "God Nose Adult Comix," printing it in the basement of the Texas Capitol, thanks in part to his job at the comptroller's office. (A copy of "God Nose" No. 1, assembled and stapled by hand, sold for a little more than $6,500 in 2007.) Jackson and Moriaty for a time were roommates. There were nights hanging out at Kenneth Threadgill's gas station-turned-beer joint on North Lamar Boulevard, where Joplin would perform and eventually become a weekly feature.

After Moriaty graduated, he and Jackson bummed around Europe, financed in part by "God Nose," swearing never to return, but of course they did. And like Joplin, Boz Scaggs and Steve Miller, Austinites Chet Helms and Jackson made their way from Texas to San Francisco, where they promoted concerts and dances and printed posters under the name Family Dog.

Moriaty, meanwhile, got drafted and spent most of his time stateside attached to an engineering company. He says he made sergeant in two years and narrowly avoided being sent to Vietnam. (He also largely failed to grasp how famous his Port Arthur friend and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, had gotten while he was serving, boosted by a set at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 that got the band a deal with Columbia Records.) By the time he was discharged he was, like a lot of his generation, "fighting mad" at what was coming to be seen as an increasingly senseless war. And by 1969, Moriaty had headed west to join his friends.

It was the year of Woodstock, the Manson Family murders and the moon landing, and the pioneering migration from Texas to the Bay Area had led to Rip Off Press, founded by four Texas hippies: Moriaty, Jackson, Shelton and Fred Todd. And with the comix scene just starting to take off, the work had shifted away from posters to raunchy and irreverent books sold in record stores, head shops, wherever hippies hung out.

"Everyone was dropping out and joining the counterculture," Moriaty says. "We were not going to participate because the country was out of control. We were going to start an alternative economy. Everybody dropped out with full knowledge that this was going to be fatal to our careers. My idea was if we're going to talk (nonsense) about forming a counterculture, we needed a printing press. The establishment was censoring us."

So they'd gone to a printer's exchange and bought an old press — which they didn't really know how to run — for $1,000 on credit, "which was a rip-off," Moriaty says. "This was bootstrap capitalism. We started with $35 apiece."

Eventually, artists such as Bill Griffith, Jay Kinney and Art Spiegelman would all live within blocks of each other in San Francisco's Mission District, and there was a unifying if not universal ethic: celebrate drugs and free love, condemn the establishment, push the boundaries.

"Their titles were some of the best," said Patrick Rosenkranz, author of "Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution." "Shelton was a supreme humorist. Crumb and Shelton have sold more comics than anybody else. Shelton's comics are in print in 40 languages. The fact they did all those books about women's liberation, sexual fetishes, 'Hydrogen Bomb Funnies,' those had the biggest impact.

"People had never seen comics that raw or uncensored, and it made people realize you can do that. And it led to things like 'Saturday Night Live,' pornographic videos, a loosening of cultural censorship all over. They were closer to outlaws than to social reformers," Rosenkranz said. "They didn't feel compelled to follow good taste or censorship rules, the standards the straight press was holding to. They felt free to doctor photos, tell lies, spread anarchy, all that."

Well worth remembering: As Rosenkranz notes in his book, this was a time when people could be jailed for printing strong profanity in a book. These guys weren't just doing that — they were graphically showing sex, in addition to printing the profane word for it.

Says Moriaty: "We were radicalized, in a way, by Mad magazine. We were conditioned to suspect and disrespect everything that was proper."

Rip Off worked out of — and occasionally squatted in — several spaces, notably a former opera house in a run-down neighborhood where, according to Rosenkranz, there were other freak entrepreneurs, including a filmmaker who shot a soft-core film in the opera house, and people living in a false ceiling between the third floor and the roof.

"It was a counterculture center of activity that was really underground," Rosenkranz said. "No one knew anything about this operation. You had to know somebody to know what was going on. And there were hookers and pimps outside that would harass people."

The standard book on underground artists is that they were inspired by the previous generation that had toiled for EC Comics, but the new guys — they were overwhelmingly men — went places the older ones didn't. Even some of the titles Rip Off published can't be printed in a family newspaper, and the sex was frequently depraved enough to be called repellent at best, dangerous at worst. The idea was to celebrate and elevate the lowbrow — and it worked.

When told that you couldn't get away with printing some of that stuff today, Moriaty shoots back: "You couldn't get away with it then, either. We parodied everybody, especially cops and the drug culture. We were making fun of the movements that couldn't see past the ends of their noses."

They saw what they were doing, in fact, as propaganda, an agent of change.

But in Moriaty's telling, it was far from fun and games. Distribution was a problem, as was cash flow. In 1971 Playboy published a story on the comix phenomenon and "it was like a bomb went off," with press runs going from 20,000 to 250,000. There was a fire at the opera house. Moriaty says he once worked 180 days straight.

"He was the Marine at Rip Off," said Threadgill's owner Eddie Wilson, who opened the Armadillo in 1970. "His shoulders were thrown back a little more than the other guys."

And despite the fact that he's seen in vintage photos wearing a shirt that says "Cocaine," in that swirly, Coca-Cola-esque font, don't get the wrong idea: "We were all too poor to afford cocaine," Moriaty says.

Artists also were receiving royalties irregularly, although after Hollywood optioned Shelton's "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" — which started in Austin — after Moriaty had come back to Texas, at least he had room to breathe. (The movie was never made. Shelton also did the cover art for the Grateful Dead's "Shakedown Street.") There was a newsprint shortage in 1972. In the mid-'70s, law enforcement was cracking down on sales of drug paraphernalia, and there went a big chunk of the publications' distribution network.

By May 1973, Moriaty was back in Austin with all of $15 in his pocket. Partly it was business differences, partly a matter of quality of life.

"Everyone I knew back here was living in a complete house with a yard for $60 a month," Moriaty says. "In San Francisco you had to work your (butt) off to rent a flat for four people in a slum."

(Rip Off, meanwhile, soldiered on. In 1976 it began publishing Larry Gonick's "Cartoon History of the Universe." It exists today as a website to sell reprints such as "Freak Brothers" No. 1 and Woodstock tickets.)

With a recession on, the bartending gig became a necessity, and the legendary Soap Creek was home to Greezy Wheels, Uranium Savages and cheap tequila shots. The following year, Jeff Nightbyrd and Michael Eakin started the Austin Sun. By the time they approached Moriaty "because they thought I was rich," he was "appalled" to learn there was essentially no bookkeeping at the biweekly.

"They were totally broke," Moriaty said. "We discovered they'd never billed anybody for ads."

On the editorial side, the paper followed the alternative-media template of mixing politics and pop culture. It helped advance the early careers of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Marcia Ball and others, and also warned of "MoPac, the monster that ate Austin."

"Some stories," Moriaty says of the latter, "never go away."

Moriaty, pretty much the only person on staff with much of a head for numbers, wanted to make a business of the Sun, but once it went weekly it turned out advertisers couldn't afford to buy ads every week. In later years he worked as a mobile mechanic (slogan: "We'll make your buggy boogie at your bungalow"), taught at ACC and remains what he calls a "small-time landlord."

Moriaty supplemented his income by occasionally smuggling trucks into Mexico, and on one trip he brought back a case of hepatitis that left him laid up and away from the Sun for many weeks. When he finally returned, a woman he'd never seen before asked, "Who the hell are you?"

"Who the hell are you?" Moriaty shot back.

And that's how he met the woman who would be his wife, Sara Clark, who later played a prominent role in getting the land dedicated for what would become Guerrero Park, which he can see from his raised back deck. Sara Clark Moriaty, an author and scholar who headed up manuscripts and archives at the then-named Center for American History at UT, died in 2001, as have a fair number of Rip Off employees and hangers-on. (Taking care of Sara during her illness slowed progress on the house.) Jackson, who later went on to become a serious historian of Texas and the West, died in 2006. Shelton lives in France. Todd keeps Rip Off going in a small way, although Moriaty hears he might be thinking about liquidating his stock and shutting down.

Moriaty has a girlfriend of six years, Carlene Brady, who also worked at the Sun and calls him "quite the Renaissance man, although he would probably be grumpy and say, 'No, I'm not.'\u2009"

And he's still here, in his work-in-progress house with a view, with his boxes of memories of a revolution a pack of Texas hippies helped start, a revolution the ripples of which we're still feeling today.

"These guys are my cultural heroes," Rosenkranz says. "They don't make them like that anymore."