What's With the Crab?

Isn’t it standard for every pedal company to have a mythos? It’s a bit embarrassing how the same pedal can be cloned by five different companies and guitarists will tell you that they all sound different, because one came with a poem about the sun imploding and another was purported to be a tribute to the “old gods”. Real deep stuff. So here’s the answer. The crab means nothing.

Quite literally. It means nothing. It’s a celebration of meaninglessness. It’s a nod to the absurd. It’s Sisyphus pushing his crab up the mountain, only to have it scuttle back down again.

Alright, it’s not as quite random as that. Here’s the full story: At around the time when we were deciding on a name for the company, we were looking through the book Gödel, Escher, Bach for inspiration and had the classic “the book fell on the floor and opened to a page with a crab on it” moment. We laughed at the idea (because crabs are innately funny) but ultimately dismissed it. But the crab would not be ignored. Perhaps we were getting Bäder Meinhof’d a bit, but we started seeing examples of mathematicians using crabs in their illustrations everywhere. And in every case, it was as funny as it was bewildering. Check out the GIF in this Wikipedia article….just…why a crab? It’s so good.

As though we needed any further convincing, the next day I got a call from my wife. “...you didn’t do the dishes. AGAIN. What is wrong with you? God, you make me so SICK. You’re an absolute CANCER on this earth, you know that, right?” I was stunned. “I…I’m a w-what?” “I SAID YOU’RE A CANCER ON THIS WORLD AND IF THE DISHES AREN’T DONE BY THE TIME I —” click. I hung up the phone, shaking with excitement. Cancer…CANCER! The latin word for crab! It was too much to be a coincidence. I put a beach towel over the dirty dishes so my wife wouldn’t notice they weren’t clean and rushed to my office. Within minutes, I had the first crab logo sketched, and the rest was history.

There you have it. A little profundity, a little serendipity. Now you’re inside on the joke. I’m sure some other crustacean would have made for a more marketable mascot….but we’re about as interested in making boring logos as we are in making boring pedals. Let’s get weird.