FIXATIONS : Sculpting to Scale : Bob Roubian, fishmonger, environmentalist and freewheeling philosopher, makes likenesses of his heroes--human and marine.
Bob Roubian likes to do sculptures of fish and people. He’ll do just about any fish, though he’s far more particular about the people, choosing to knock out wood or stone likenesses of his personal heroes. Hence, the wood-paneled den in the warehouse near his legendary Crab Cooker restaurant houses a thoughtful Mahatma Gandhi near a surprise-mouthed grouper. There’s flailing octopuses and a fuming Winston Churchill, a Chinook salmon eyeing Baruch Spinoza and Clarence Darrow. It’s sort of like Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds” program, except half the guests have fins.
Roubian’s most recent carving, kept at a separate location, is a bas-relief carved in Honduras mahogany titled “The Fish Lover,” depicting a nude woman hugging a totuave, a huge croaker fish. “It’s a beautiful fish,” Roubian says. “Most everything I do now is about fish.
“I’m in a different world when I’m sculpting,” he claims, perhaps belaboring the obvious. “When I’m working, I get in a trance, and the chips are flying as big as golf balls. I’m not even paying attention to them. All I’m seeing is a nose and an eye there in the stone. I get fatigued and I sweat, and the peacefulness it brings me saw me through some rough times.”
Compact and effusive, Roubian likes to pad his age by a couple of decades, saying he’s 85. “I tell people they can stay young like me if they just eat more fish,” he said, laughing. He’s most at ease on the beach, but his warehouse den must run a close second. In it he’s surrounded by his art, his piano, and the culture he loves, ranging from Slim Gaillard records to shelves of the world’s great books. The acoustic-paneled ceiling is marked with rusty stains, showing where the water drops in when it rains.
Whether acting as fishmonger, artist, environmentalist--a cap he dons on his 1983 record “Who Hears the Fishes When They Cry”--or freewheeling philosopher, Roubian has a barely repressed enthusiasm. He said: “Even when I worked mopping floors at the Santa Anita racetrack, I would be doing figure eights with a 24-pound mop. It’s so good just to take pride in whatever you’re doing, even if it’s cleaning the bathroom floor. That’s where it is for me, to give everything I’ve got to what I’m doing: I don’t want to look at the outside; I want to peel it, then I want to get into the core of whatever I do.”
His father was quite a craftsman, he said, hand-carving the walnut propellers of World War I biplanes. Roubian himself worked as a carpenter but found the pounding his hands took was ruining his piano playing. So in the early ‘50s he opened a small fish market on the Balboa Peninsula. “I found I could work with fish 14 or 15 hours a day and my hands would still be limber and soft,” he said. (Maybe Madge should start soaking hands in ceviche instead of Palmolive.)
In 1955, Roubian wrote and sang “The Popcorn Song” with Los Angeles bandleader Cliffie Stone. The novelty tune about two unexcitable popcorn kernels became a No. 14 hit, was banned in Boston and introduced the phrase “too pooped to pop” into the American vernacular. (More recently, the song was featured in the Billy Crystal film “Memories of Me.”) Tired of waking up in “foreign cities like Las Vegas and Reno,” he quit the road and poured all his music profits into his fish business.
“The music world already had its greats, so I decided I’d be the fish business equivalent of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter or Johnny Mercer,” Roubian said.
At a time when people were used to getting their fish fried, Roubian introduced the now-trendy practice of charbroiling it. That’s the result, he said, of his Armenian and Sicilian parentage, and of the Depression. “We’d have to cook over a fire, because the gas would be turned off, and the electricity and water,” he said. “So it was, ‘Light the fire, Robert, we’re going to do shish kebab.’ Times were tough, and I remember a lot of nights with the kerosene lamps and the candles and the shish kebab in the back yard.”
Since the mid-’60s, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Crab Cooker has been the line that’s usually outside it. Roubian has a “first come, first served” policy--not bent even for his own mother--that was put to the test in the early ‘70s when President Nixon wanted to eat there.
“When the Western White House called, I had to tell them we don’t take reservations. That was very difficult for me to do, because I wanted the glory of feeding the President’s family here--this was before Watergate. The President’s people kept calling back, saying, ‘You don’t understand! What kind of person are you?’ I thought I was being very democratic and expected the Oval Office should understand that better than anyone.”
Roubian’s decision made the national news, and he claims to have gotten two 5-foot stacks of letters equally praising or condemning his decision.
The restaurant door Nixon never entered was hand-carved by Roubian, showing two fiddler crabs battling on one side and a naked diver and octopus having at it on the other. One thing setting it apart form most of his art is that it can actually be seen by someone. Most of his art--some of it involving hundreds of hours of work--is kept out of the public view.
“At some points in your life you want so much to be noticed--’Lookit, I’m Robert Roubian. Here’s my name on this thing.’ Then when you really get into what you’re doing and feel good about it, you don’t give a . . . if anybody sees it. You don’t care if you put it in the closet and burn it. It’s doing it that matters. I hardly ever invite anybody over here to see this stuff, maybe just a good fish peddler or someone I admire like an ACLU worker or Cousteau Society, Greenpeace or Sierra Club member.”
He feels that doing his art has exerted an influence on how he deals with the world.
“It makes me less of an animal. I don’t just study the appearance of a Gandhi or Darrow, but their thoughts and soul,” he said. “There have been times when the IRS or local bureaucrats have worked such lousy deals on me--nearly closing the Crab Cooker down--that I start seeing swastikas. So the Sicilian comes out in me and I want to get the lupara , the short-barreled Sicilian shotgun, and just go ‘bup-bup-bup-bup.’ Then I think ‘stop,’ look up at the sky and say to myself, ‘Self, what would Jesus do?’ And a big smile comes over my face, because I can’t see Jesus or any of these great minds getting upset over this garbage. If you’re going to use role models, why not use the best?”
His current hero-in-progress is a bust of Albert Einstein, being executed in a 500-pound block of Carrara marble. He started work on it three years ago but has been stalled since then, daunted by the weight of the subject and the beauty of the stone.
“I have it roughed out, but I’m afraid I’m not up to the challenge. So I’m doing more studies on Einstein. I’m drawing him, at different times of his life, oblique, face on, profiles, everything else. Then when I can really draw him backwards, I’ve got some logs I’ve just fleeced, lopped the bark off, and I’ll do Einstein in wood over and over again until I feel real confident going back to the marble. I think marble is so celestial, gracious, honorable and immortal. I felt Einstein should be that.”
Once he’s applied his energy to that mass of Carrara, Roubian has enough projects in mind to busy him until he really is 85. He’s thinking of doing Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Keats, Carslile, Robert Frost and an encyclopedic host of others. “And don’t forget the fish,” Roubian enthused. “They’re my jewels, and there’s oceans and oceans of them.”