Your Muse Is Not Yourself

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times the son of legendary pop artist Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth mentioned how he's continuing to keep his father's legacy alive. Roth was the creator of the iconic Sixties character Rat Fink coupled with a distinct model kits of caricatured custom cars and hot rods driven by grotesque, bug eyed, huge mouthed, drooling monsters. His creatures were very popular and were a huge part in the Sixties car culture in Southern California, no less than to boys.
In the Times article Roth's son explains how his father blamed the arrival from the Beatles for his eventual decline because the youth of America then turned their attention from cars to guitars. I believe this illustrates a standard problem with artists which is that they confuse their muse with this giving them their appeal.
Roth loved cars and they were his inspiration. Except for Rat Fink which served as his personal logo character, nearly all of his monsters came designed with a cartoon version of a popular custom hot rod design. The designs, Revheads employed for T shirts, plastic model kits along with other toys and clothing, were supposed to appeal to car lovers while using monster drivers simply Roth's identifying twist. But to somebody who is not a gearhead, like myself, the monsters were the main attraction not the cars.
If Roth had embraced the modification through the British Invasion and created his monsters combined with guitars rather than custom cars he might happen to be able to transcend the custom car fad and continued at least for a couple of more years. Ironically, nowadays there are Roth designs for guitars and guitar straps. A similar popular pop artist, the late Rick Griffin, the creator of Murph The Surf for Surfer Magazine who represented Southern California surfing culture the way Rat Fink represented Southern California custom car culture, became a psychedelic poster artist when rock replaced both cars and surfing inside late Sixties and also got to become part of two large pop art movements.
It is oftentimes very hard to understand the forest to the trees and many artists can't realize that exactly what the fans like relating to jobs are different things for which they actually do the work firstly. Rock fans love the Rolling Stones' song Satisfaction largely because the fuzz tone guitar riff helped set the style for heavy lead guitar licks yet Keith Richards meant a guitar riff to simulate a horn section and hears the song much less proto Heavy Metal but as R & B. Sometimes a painter needs to stand back and look at her or his process your eyes from the fans. Then the path through the forest becomes far more clear.