Q&A: Matt Groening Is Bart Simpson’s Real Dad
When Matt Groening shuffles into his Santa Monica, California, office at 10:30 on a Monday morning, he’s weighted down by a large cardboard box full of 45s. “Show and tell!” he hollers, brushing a tuft of his salt-and-pepper mop away from his face as his two office mates gather around. “They were twenty cents each, so I bought 350 of ’em.” Groening’s work space is cluttered with crap: Several years’ worth of magazines overflow in one spot, piles of items marked “To be autographed by Matt” in another. Looking more closely — at the Homer Groening sign hanging over a storage closet, for instance — one remembers what got the forty-eight-year-old cartoonist this office in the first place. This year, Groening’s animated series The Simpsons enters its fourteenth season and celebrates its 300th episode. Consistently one of the top-rated shows on the Fox network, The Simpsons is shown in more than sixty countries, and the franchise — syndication, toys, books, calendars, Pop-Tarts — is valued at approximately $1 billion.
Since The Simpsons debuted in 1987, the show has featured more than sixty guest musicians, from Robert Goulet to Britney Spears to three Beatles. This season’s premiere, called “How I Spent My Strummer Vacation,” takes patriarch Homer to rock & roll fantasy camp, where his teachers include Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Tom Petty, Lenny Kravitz, Elvis Costello and Brian Setzer. You won’t find music by any of those artists in the record room at Groening’s office: “I sold all the rock & roll stuff,” he says. The thousands of CDs, audiotapes and vinyl LPs that line the walls are organized alphabetically by place of origin. “Africa, Bahamas, Bali, Bali, Bali,” he says, running his finger along the spines of the discs and noting that the Bali section expanded exponentially during his recent trip there. “Brazil, Bulgaria. I took home all the Colombian cumbia music. Cuba, France, Ghana, Greece, Guinea…”
Born in Portland, Oregon, Groening began his career as a cartoonist in 1980, when his Life in Hell strip — still appearing weekly in 250 newspapers — began running in the Los Angeles Reader. The Simpsons — Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie — was born seven years later, after Life in Hell caught the eye of television producer James L. Brooks, who recruited Groening to draw animated shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show. Though Groening leaves the writing to the writers and the animating to the animators, he still makes certain that The Simpsons stays true to its original spirit: “It has to be a celebration.” He’s considering doing a Simpsons movie, and he has another season of his animated sci-fi series Futurama to shepherd. In what little free time the divorced father of two has left, he’s got a rock & roll project to work on: He’s choosing bands to perform at next summer’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Los Angeles. For the indie-rock event (curated in previous years by Sonic Youth and Belle and Sebastian), he’s already laid down at least one mandate: “Anyone who wears a costume is in. Except Michael Jackson.”
You used to be a rock critic, didn’t you?
Yeah. Right after college, I moved to Los Angeles and wrote about rock & roll for the Los Angeles Reader, which is no longer around. I also worked at a record store called Licorice Pizza and at the Whiskey a Go Go. It was during the heyday of punk, and that was when I started Life in Hell as a little Xeroxed zine. I put it with the punk magazines, and I was quite honored — the punks actually shoplifted my comic book. At the Whiskey, I got to wait on Elvis Costello, and Patti Smith played in the parking lot of the record store. And all the rock stars of the day came into the store to buy their coke vials, because, in addition to selling records, we sold drug paraphernalia. They would say, “Five hundred amber vials please,” and I’d say, “What’re you gonna do with all of these?”
Was there a bulk discount?
No. I had to count them out, because they had the caps separate from the bottles. It was really funny to take your time when somebody was coked up. Kids would come in and buy bongs and then come back and go, “It’s defective, man” — after they’d used it. People were so stoned they would call up Licorice Pizza and order licorice pizza.
Q&A: Matt Groening Is Bart Simpson’s Real Dad, Page 1 of 2