Episode 8 transcript

Note: this transcript is AI-generated, and as such, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.

Chad (00:01.998)
Hello and welcome back to the Aural Mess podcast. My guest this week is artist Joan LeMay. Hi Joan. I'm great. Thank you so much for coming on. It's a real pleasure to have you.

Joan LeMay (00:08.888)
Hey, how you doing?

Joan LeMay (00:13.88)
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Chad (00:17.454)
My pleasure. I don't think you need an introduction to most of my listeners and viewers because you did the amazing illustration work for the Quantum Criminals book about Steely Dan.

Joan LeMay (00:28.856)
that I did with my book partner, writer Alex Pappademas, who's just a super duper genius. So I'm very lucky to have been able to get to work with him.

Chad (00:46.126)
Yeah, and we're lucky that the book was able to come out. I mean, how did that whole thing originate? You know, if you can just tell everybody just the quick story about, you know, how the book came about and how you got involved in the project. I think that we'd love to hear it.

Joan LeMay (00:59.288)
Yeah, sure. So during the pandemic, I started making a fanzine because that's part of my, I was a punk rock kid. I used to make fanzines when I was a teenager and I'd gotten back into the practice of it, I believe in 2019, 2020. And so, and I wanted a project and I thought,

you know, what is what is something that I can paint a lot of that I won't get sick of? And I thought every character in Steely Dan's entire oeuvre and all the session players and all that, everything. So I started making this fanzine called Danzine and I made a giant spreadsheet that had the list of of everybody and it was hundreds. And I got as far as making the cover.

And I posted that on Instagram and pretty simultaneously, my dear friend, the director, producer, writer, editor, author, extraordinaire, Jessica Hopper, saw it and Alex, writer, editor, extraordinaire, saw it too. And they had previously been talking. She's an acquiring editor at University of Texas Press.

So she asked Alex, prior to this, what kind of book do you want to do? Because she obviously wanted to publish something from him, because who wouldn't? And he thought on it, and he thought, what would I not ever get sick of talking about? And his answer was Steely Dan. So they'd been working, there had already been a sort of a proposal of like, yeah, I want to do something.

but there wasn't a solidified idea of exactly what shape the book was going to take or what exactly it was going to be. So they both saw my thing and Alex and I had known each other a little bit for God whatever 20 some odd years because I was a music publicist for over 17 years and he used to work at Spin and a bunch of other places. So I would call him up on the telephone when publicists used to do that.

Joan LeMay (03:20.504)
which now would be just sheer terror, but we would just cold call people. And we're like, you want to write about this? And they're like, no, I'm like, okay. And so we all knew each other. Anyway, Jessica texted me and said, Joni, that's not a fancy and that's a book. And I was like, really? And so put my structure and idea together with what Alex was working on and.

We Voltron'd together the team that we are today. That's the origin story.

Chad (03:56.654)
love that. And it's funny that you mentioned that you were a punk kid. I was also a punk kid, although in hindsight, I was maybe a little more of a poser than I thought I was. But it's just funny how, you know, we grow up and the sort of dichotomy of being a punk kid to then liking Steely Dan, like talk to me about that. How did that taste develop? And, you know, I think the I'd love to dig into your time doing music PR a little bit later. But, you know, how did you get from A to B, I guess, is the question.

Joan LeMay (04:22.904)
I, depending on if Steely Dan is A, which it should be, I was always at A before B came along. My parents didn't have that many records growing up. There were about this many. And for the podcast listeners, I just made like a four or five inch long length with my fingers to indicate the width. And in that stack was the whole Steely Dan catalog. So I grew up...

I mean, it's my first musical memory is listening to Camp By a Thrill. I just always, Daily Dan was always my favorite band. I don't know the extent to which I, you know, because memory, I'm an unreliable narrator and memory is fluid. So I don't really remember the extent to which I proclaimed or didn't proclaim that at certain times during my teenage days, but I pretty much always, I...

feel like I always did. And I think, you know, in the early, I mean all of the nineties, but the early to mid nineties too, there was a whole, you know, it was okay, I think culturally, if we're talking about like the micro, micro, micro culture of my...

high school in Katy, Texas, where I grew up, all of the weird kids were together, and the weird kids lumped together were the metal kids, the punk kids, the new wave kids, the whatever. So it wasn't, you know, I wasn't, even though I got involved in like the hardcore scene and nobody from where I was sitting was a...

I was really lucky to be in facets of a scene that didn't contain too horribly much. You need to answer these five questions about this band or else you're an illegitimate listener. Which for me to say that as a woman too is fucking big because you always get tested.

Chad (06:39.086)
Alright.

Chad (06:43.79)
Yeah.

Joan LeMay (06:46.592)
Um, which is. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But yeah, so I was always, I was always a Steely Dan person, um, and got into punk rock just like anybody else. You have a terrible childhood. You're angry, you're upset, you're whatever. I mean, that's not how everybody gets into it, hopefully. But, uh, but.

Chad (06:46.894)
Right, name three songs, right? Like it's the whole meme. I mean, it's ridiculous.

Joan LeMay (07:15.864)
For me, I was like, ah, I'm gonna run backwards in the pit at a fear show, see what happens. That was how I rolled. Yeah.

Chad (07:27.63)
Sure. So you basically grew up with this preconceived notion of Steely Dan songs, because one of my next questions, and it's a good segue, I think, is, you know, image is subjective, right? And it's one of the things that we talked about, you know, via email leading up to this recording. And that was sort of how, you know, visual art intersects with music, but more specifically, especially in the case of quantum criminals, you know,

I'm not going to lie, I was very resistant to looking at the book. I wanted to read it. I wanted to see it. But, you know, having listened to Steely Dan for 40 odd years, I have this image in my head of all these characters, right? And of course, you know, there's the realism, there's Donald and Walter and all the studio guys, and they look a certain way. And, you know, you can you can do portraits, and that's great. But when you're talking about a character that doesn't really exist, I was sort of like, wow, you know, this is how I think.

Joan LeMay (08:19.416)
Mm -hmm.

Chad (08:24.438)
Jive McGill looks, this is how I think Josie looks. I'm not sure I really wanna see it on paper in somebody else's eye, right? So how did you, you know, have you, did some of the characters always appear in your mind and then you were just able to get them down on canvas? Or, you know, how did you shape some of these portraits in the book?

Joan LeMay (08:44.312)
I did it in sort of a mishmash of ways because I had images in my mind just like you, just like a bunch of people, which one of the things...

I digress around, but one of the things that I wish I had done during the kind of core run of the book that I didn't do was I planned on doing some sort of Instagram thing where I was like, what do you think they look like? Because everybody thinks they look like something different. And that's fascinating and great. This is just my take. It's like just one of them. But I, I, I, you know, had a, had a rough idea, but the kind of idea, the same sort of, sort of degree of visualization that you have when you have dream people in your dream that you,

sort of see the essence of them but maybe not the face but you kind of would know the face if you saw it in a lineup. So I had a folder on my computer called the Dan Casting Gallery that was all found photos, photos of friends, and all kinds of things from old magazines and sewing catalogs and whatever and I would go through and be like Snake Mary, okay that's her.

You know, and sometimes just like a lot of art making, you don't know exactly a thousand percent why, except your gut says yes. So, you know, it was also a tremendous wormhole to be in and a tremendous...

a big, a big, big project. So, so a lot of the time I would go and go and go and paint and paint and paint. And then the next day go upstairs to where my studio at the time was and and look at what I'd done and go, oh, all right, you know, and not really remember. And I'm in that space now because Alex and I are working on our follow up to Quantum Criminals, which is a book about the Grateful Dead called Friends of the Devil for random and I'm

Chad (10:44.014)
Yes.

Joan LeMay (10:48.472)
Yeah, I'm in it. I'm in it now. Big time. The waking up and seeing what you did thing.

Chad (10:57.454)
That's pretty cool and it's gotta be gratifying to sort of look back and be like, okay, I nailed that one or this one sort of came out of left field, but it kind of works. And I mean, after I finally got over my art crisis and bought the book, I just love it. And I love everything that you did. Get it, still with the N reference there.

Joan LeMay (11:14.008)
Thanks. Yes. Appreciate that.

Chad (11:17.65)
unintentional, but yeah, like in my mind, for example, Josie to me, I saw the Warriors as a kid. I was probably way too young to have seen the Warriors when I saw it. But to me, Josie was always Deborah van Valkenburg, right? Like she just, that's who it was. Yeah. And I didn't have a specific person in mind for some of the other characters, but you know, it's all subjective, but it's so much fun. And you know, what I love about the book is that,

Joan LeMay (11:31.176)
Love it! Oh, that's great! That's great!

Chad (11:45.93)
Alex's words sort of weave through the pictures and it tells a great story. So this whole danisance, I hope it doesn't slow down. I think it's still pretty much full steam ahead right now.

Joan LeMay (11:55.704)
Yeah, hope so.

Chad (12:00.206)
So what else besides Dealey Dannen? I know you're working on a Grateful Dead book, which I'm not a huge Dead fan, but I'm definitely excited for any other project that you two do together. So I'll definitely have to pick up a copy when it comes out. But besides that, what other music are you into in general? And I guess, you know, anything in Hot Rotation lately, anything that you've just discovered?

Joan LeMay (12:20.056)
Yeah, I am, and I know that I'll have a lot to talk about whenever we get around to the dead book press cycle, but I also was not a dead person, like at all.

and I'd had them on my list. We all have our lists of, you know, I've never really gone there. And I know at some point I want to go there and deep dive and try and get inside and figure out what is my relationship to this thing. And that is my time now with the dead. But I've been this way for a very...

long time but I'm more caricature characterishly this way at this point in time than any other point in time in my life. I'm the jazz I'm a jazz woman and so I listen all day long these days to like Wayne Shorter and Brubeck and Mingus and da da da da da lots and lots of Bill Evans lately. I've been listening to the

there's a the the first uh low bourgeois uh a uh and i i don't know if i pronounce his name right or not probably not hard to know uh but he's a brazilian um composer and uh and songwriter dude made a record in 1972 um that is flawless and blows my mind and it's like

bossa nova via the Beatles magical mystery tour and it's so I tend I think I think at a certain point maybe towards the end of when I was a music publicist in terms of discovery I started really heavily looking backwards more than forwards and I think that I you know I've always looked in both directions.

Chad (14:08.142)
Wow.

Joan LeMay (14:33.72)
present and what is just now nascent and what is, you know, in the ocean of stuff that has been. But I think towards the end of being in the music business, I had such tremendous fatigue, is not even a strong enough word, listening to things for work and considering.

new clients and trying to stay on top of things. So I knew what the landscape was. It was forever of that. And I got to a point where I knew I was burned out. So for pleasure, I would be like, let's listen to Beethoven. Let's listen to whatever. And just total fucking opposite direction. It's Mark Smith's birthday today. So I've been listening to the fall today. Yeah.

Chad (15:24.382)
Yeah.

Chad (15:29.422)
Oh wow.

Joan LeMay (15:31.96)
So I'm kind of all over the place as the answer, but my, I'm deep, I'm deep jazz right now. And I can't talk shop either. I'm like, I because it's, I can name things, but I can't like, there's so incredibly much to learn. And that's part of what I love about.

Chad (15:42.894)
Love it.

Joan LeMay (16:01.848)
trying to do the follow the liner notes thing.

Chad (16:07.822)
Yeah, I love that too. That is a big part of music discovery for me. I tend to get obsessed with things. I mean, you know, hence the whole Steely Dan thing that I've been into for, you know, all my life, but specifically the last few years. But any band or any new genre or anything that I'm sort of listening to, I need to know more, right? Like it's great to just listen to it and appreciate it for what it is. But if I like something enough, I'm going to go seek out, you know, videos and interviews and...

liner notes and you know whatever else I can sort of get my hands on to understand where the artist is coming from and where the music sort of coming out of and you know I just immerse myself you know.

Joan LeMay (16:42.922)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, I'm enjoying doing that again because I think for the vast majority of my adult life, I did not do that when it came to things that I wasn't working on. And so also as a result of that, there's so many records that I deeply love that I can't tell you anything about because I didn't go deep.

because I was needing to go wide professionally. And I'm hoping to correct that, because sometimes I feel like a dummy. But I'm like, yeah, I can sit every note of that record is burned into my brain, but I can't tell you everybody who played on it. I don't remember what year it came out. And I love knowing those, having context and having...

Just knowing more about what you love is always a joy.

Chad (17:47.694)
Yeah, oh, absolutely. And I find myself the same way. Like there are albums and songs and things that are burned into my brain, but I still find myself like revisiting things and going backwards to learn more because I didn't at the time, whether it was because I was just young or, you know, for whatever reason. Are you familiar with Lloyd Cole? Okay.

Joan LeMay (18:02.584)
Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's great.

Chad (18:08.302)
Yeah, so just a great example. So Lloyd has been solo since I think like 1990 or 1991. And you know, he's he's kept this music career going, which has been great. But a couple of years ago, he started a Patreon. And his Patreon project was to share, I guess he kept meticulous notebooks with song ideas and, you know, chord charts and

He had a bunch of old pictures and receipts for things and you know, like he had like a receipt for a guitar that he bought in like 1983, you know what I mean? Stuff like that. And he's like scanning all this stuff and you know, posting them a little bit at a time onto his Patreon page. So it was like this rare opportunity to really see and kind of get under the covers with an artist because you know, he talked about somehow some of these songs ended up being developed and you know, you can see early versions of lyrics and you know, things scribbled out.

and rewritten and it's really kind of cool and I really wish more artists would do that you know especially some of the ones that are you know a little further along in their careers but it's been fascinating.

Joan LeMay (19:13.496)
Yeah, oh that's great. I'm gonna I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to join the patreon

Chad (19:19.534)
It's worth it. And I just started revisiting. I've been sort of preaching the gospel of Lloyd Cole and the commotions to people because I had this whole conversation on Twitter around like Steely Dan and, you know, sort of adjacent bands. And I find that a lot of people that are into Steely Dan are also into Lloyd Cole and the commotions, Fountains of Wayne, Prefab Sprout. A lot of Grateful Dead crossover, interestingly, too.

Joan LeMay (19:40.632)
Mm -hmm.

So much. So much.

Chad (19:45.038)
Yeah, which is weird because I feel almost like the Dan is like the antithesis of a jam band.

Joan LeMay (19:51.348)
Yeah, yes, yet not necessarily. It's that the way that the streams cross is fascinating to me, both in terms of culture, in terms of fandom, in terms of, I think one of the things that's true now.

Chad (19:59.054)
Yeah.

Joan LeMay (20:17.464)
is both bands have had a massive online renaissance with quote unquote the kids, you know, Gen, Gen, not Gen X, that's me, Gen Y, Gen Z, the whatever, whoever, the kids who, now I sound like I'm a million years old, that's great, who, yeah, it's fine, who,

Chad (20:38.286)
I'm older than you, it's okay.

Joan LeMay (20:43.192)
who've been super, super getting into the Grateful Dead and in a time where, you know, talk about there being absolutely no judgment or boundaries or bias around, you know, listening only to one flavor of thing. I think, yeah, it's kind of fascinating.

Chad (21:09.324)
I love that. It's very fascinating. Kids aren't gatekeeping stuff anymore, you know, and it's...

It's funny because, you I mentioned the whole punk days and I never committed to any specific type of music. Like you said, like he sort of just, you know, took it all in, um, and high school and stuff, but it was the same with me because I, I love too many different things to sort of pigeonhole myself. Right. So while I wanted to be a hardcore punk and I was a skateboarder and I was into all that kind of stuff, I listened to hip hop. I listened to Steely Dan as a kid. Like I listened to Led Zeppelin. Like I was all over the map. I mean, my cousin and I had the.

this sort of shared love for music. And we'd be in his bedroom playing like ACDC and Black Sabbath. And then we'd get bored of that and put Run DMC on, right? Or Eric B and Rakim and listen to that for like three hours. So it was like, and for the longest time, I meet still so many people of our generation. And, you know, I guess some of the boomers, if you want to call them that, that are so rooted in one type of music, right? And that they just have this style or this, you know, a few bands that they like and that's it. But these kids are just all over the place. And I think it's because availability, right? We didn't have

Joan LeMay (21:57.642)
Mm -hmm.

Chad (22:16.798)
Spotify, we didn't have YouTube, we didn't have TikTok, you know, for better or for worse.

Joan LeMay (22:22.616)
Yeah, I think availability and also just what it is to be young and be trying to define yourself culturally. And I think when, when.

writ large culture was more bifurcated and chopped up into tiny, tiny regional bits. It was more incumbent upon kids to say, no, I'm flock of seagulls only. And that is how, this is what I want adjacency to is this aesthetic, this, you know, deal. Because also when you're young, you're flailing.

desperately to figure out what your place is in the world, who you are, what your whole deal is. And the landscape around that is a trillion degrees different now.

Chad (23:21.931)
I don't think I still figured that out at 52. So.

Joan LeMay (23:24.632)
I mean, that's the cosmic trick is you never figure it out. They're the cosmic joke rather. Yeah, you're not supposed to. The only constant is change.

Chad (23:32.427)
True.

Chad (23:36.14)
That's it. Yeah. And if you don't accept change, then you're just going to get left behind. Right. And who wants to do that?

Yeah. So we keep talking like referring to punk and one of the things that we sort of said we might talk about is this whole idea of like DIY art and flyers. And in my mind, when you said that it was really it triggered memories of like punk shows, right? Because they were, I think, the some of the most widely spread and revered things that were out there. You had this era of the 60s with flyers for concerts and festivals, and they had all these, you know, trippy psychedelic artwork.

type stuff, but then the punks came along and just started cutting and pasting and ripping things and drawing stuff by hand and doing lots of lettering. I sort of went down a rabbit hole after we traded those emails and found just tons of old flyers online, which were really cool. And it sort of brought back memories, like Dead Kennedys and Sex Pistols and Black Flag and...

descendants and all those bands. So what was your experience with Flyers? And you said that you were into zines and used to do zines. Tell me a bit about that.

Joan LeMay (24:47.192)
Yeah, I had a zine that was called Out of Order that I don't remember how many...

issues I put out, but I want to say like 20 or something like that. And they had like 100 to 200 press runs. I distributed them through Profan existence and MRR mail order, and then did a lot of prison library exchange programs and would go to, you know, Street Fest and I bring them with me to shows and consigned them.

Houston record stores like Sound Exchange and Soundwaves and places that would have a zine rack. And I also made flyers. I put on shows and I promoted shows.

and you know had a bunch of friends always in bands and whenever someone would let me make a flyer I was thrilled to do so like super thrilled just like now if I ever get to do album art or book covers for somebody else or I and I haven't done a show poster in

God knows how long, a really, really long time. I'm gonna make one soon, because I started playing music again and my...

Joan LeMay (26:10.546)
band has a show in the summer that's our first show. And we may or may not tell people about it because your first show is always sketch. But one of the first things that I thought as soon as my bandmate, who's one of my bandmates,

Her name is also Joan and we call her Joan one and I'm Joan too. As soon as Joan one told me about the show book, the first thing I said was I'm going to do the flyer. But yeah, I collected flyers. I have in a plastic tub, in a closet in this apartment, a folder or two or three folders that are just full of.

flyers from from Houston and Austin.

tons and tons. It was something that I always wanted. I plastered my walls. Like, you know, you can kind of see... I won't move the thing, but my apartment is completely... and I'm just putting this together now... it's completely wall -to -wall, gallery walled with art. And when I was a teenager, my bedroom was completely plastered with flyers and things from magazines.

I would make basically a giant collage out of my walls and there's something about being surrounded by visual representation of what you love that was comforting and reassuring and it's the same thing with all of the art that's on my walls now, a lot of which...

Chad (27:51.552)
Yeah.

Joan LeMay (28:04.024)
made by people I love or by artists I really respect or people I love who are also artists that I really respect. Yeah.

Chad (28:14.252)
That's really cool. My childhood bedroom was the same. It was like a sort of melange of things that I loved. My parents encouraged me to do it, so I would just literally slap up posters and pictures and drawings and whatever I felt like doing, and nothing ever really came down. This all sort of kept growing. So it was great.

Joan LeMay (28:31.608)
Yeah. That is great. That is great. Yeah. The whole universe of artists' relationship with making flyers, like artists who...

already were or grew to become people who were in the quote unquote, you know, fine arts world or art world. All of that is fascinating. Like, Pettibon is a great example, you know, making Black Flag's logo and doing the cover of Goo and, you know, so much other stuff like Minutemen and Mike Watt and off.

Chad (29:01.162)
Yeah.

Joan LeMay (29:15.03)
artwork and and you know and he's a he's a capital A you know.

iconic big deal artist and it goes back way predating punk rock stuff too. Thinking about the ballet, Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham collaborated with Rauschenberg, with Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Osamu Noguchi on

ballet costumes, Alex Katz, who did costumes for Merce Cunningham and sets also. And then today, like Marcel Zama, who's one of my very favorite artists working today. He's done a bunch of record covers and he also has made costumes for the New York City Ballet. So kind of continuing on in that tradition. And it's...

Chad (30:17.94)
Oh wow.

Joan LeMay (30:21.656)
it's all, you know.

Nothing, I think no artistic expression exists in a vacuum, right? Like even, even when you go to a museum and you look at a painting on the wall, there's a plaque. So there are words. And if you're lucky, there's a paragraph that somebody at the museum hopefully wrote well about.

the piece you're seeing, contextualizing it. So there is prose and the piece. And whenever you're going to the bookstore to see what you want to read, how do you decide what book you're going to pick up? It's what your eye goes to first. It's the cover design. And...

you know, unless you have a book already in mind that three friends have been like, oh, you need to buy this or whatever. If you're just browsing, it's your eye goes there first or with food, you know, you eat with your eyes. It's everything, you know, everything is everything. All of our senses work, you know, simultaneously. And it's, yeah.

Chad (31:48.332)
Yeah.

I really, I love how the different arts intersect, right? So in my day job, I actually work for a dance company and it's satisfying because I actually do technology work, but just being around that creative process. And like you said, it intersects with art, the costume design, the visuals, the stage lighting, everything that it takes to put on a ballet is just, you know, to see it all come together, it's super.

Joan LeMay (31:49.784)
It's.

Chad (32:19.502)
rewarding. And yeah, sort of tying this back to Pettibon and Black Flag, you know, I know how I'm going to make this leap, but as a kid walking into a record store, right, and you know, back when it was records and you know, we had full size album covers to look at and you know, people design those largely on purpose. I mean, Steely Dan didn't but well, it just slapped some shit together and see what sticks right. But I mean, I think, you know, other artists did.

Joan LeMay (32:40.406)
That's a good time.

Chad (32:48.3)
Um, so as a teenager looking for something subversive and you know, Ooh, my mom's going to hate this, right? Like black flag, the family man album. I had that on vinyl because I went to the record store and bought it solely based on the strength of the cover. I don't think I'd even heard black flag before I bought it. My cousin told me about it. Um, I don't think he played it for me. I don't think he owned a copy. I think somebody had it that he knew. Um, so I went and bought it and brought it home. And it was like this half spoken word, half sort of free form punk instrumental record. And, you know, again,

blew my mind, but really only bought it because the album cover was so cool and it's the guy about to shoot himself in the head after killing his family, which is sad and tragic, but just the idea that you're attracted to something, it speaks to you right from that rack or wherever you're looking.

Joan LeMay (33:26.168)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joan LeMay (33:36.544)
Yep, absolutely.

And, you know, that Black Flag logo, just the iconography of it is the thing that launched a thousand other band logos from there on out. And it's like, you know, how many kids wearing a Crass back patch really, really, really fucking love Crass versus were like, this looks so cool. And I feel like a tough mother

fucker wearing this. Or the Misfits font. Or, you know, what? Absolutely, yeah. You know? Dead Kennedys. Another classic. I still have my shirt from whatever it is, 93, I guess I got it, which is late, but still I have it.

Chad (34:10.028)
Oh yeah.

Chad (34:17.26)
Yes. Anarchy symbols. Yeah. Oh God. Yeah.

Chad (34:36.78)
You have it Nice still still one of my favorite bands and I just started, you know revisiting some of their back catalogue again I mean just and it's funny how prescient jello be offer really was talking about, you know politics and you know, I can go off on that tangent, but I won't But so, you know other I guess visuals. What are some of your other favorite album covers or posters, you know, they're famous

Joan LeMay (34:36.92)
with the holes in it.

Joan LeMay (34:55.96)
Yeah.

Chad (35:06.252)
festival and concert posters. I love the one, just for example, I guess, you know, when Led Zeppelin was sort of at their peak, everybody did.

art for them that had zeppelins and blimps and things like that, right, which was the obvious choice. And some of those were really well done and really cool. But then this one artist, I had to refer to his name, Randy Tooten, decided that he was sick of seeing blimps and all of Led Zeppelin's advertising. So he made a poster with an avocado with googly eyes and put Led Zeppelin across the top. Like, how fucking great is that?

Joan LeMay (35:30.072)
Mm -hmm.

Joan LeMay (35:38.552)
Yep, yeah. Yeah, and then that became a big deal. And it's funny, because it's like a Mr. Potato Head. And there's nothing, you know, you don't match that up, but it's like a kid's record or something, as a poster, but so funny, like super, super funny. I'm trying to think of...

Chad (35:49.868)
Thanks for watching!

Joan LeMay (36:09.144)
I'm trying to think of album covers specifically that come to mind that are my very, very favorite. Shoot, I should have thought about this beforehand.

Chad (36:26.444)
Have you seen the hypnosis documentary? Maybe that'll jog. Amazing. Yeah.

Joan LeMay (36:30.188)
Yes, that is phenomenal. That is phenomenal. That was beyond killer. And when all of that barfs out, when they do the fast, the rapid cycle album covers, and you're like, yes, yes, yes, yes, and also yes, the band, yes, that's another wonderful band, font icon.

logo. Those Yes record covers are great. The Yes album cover is great. There's a band from

I believe the record came out in 76, 77, a band called Sand. It had a quarter -flash bassist Rich Gooch playing on the record. But anyway, the cover is just a sandwich in sand. And forever, and still to this day, I like to go through...

dollar bends, which are fewer and far between further between now, but cheap bends, dollar bends and pick up records just based on the cover and and take a take a chance. And and that record went on to heavy rotation and still sort of remains so to this day and is just a great, great, dumb.

I really like album artwork that is funny. I'm a fan. Speaking of, there's an Instagram account that just makes Instagram worth it called Terribly Awesome Covers. I don't know if you've seen this, but it's...

Chad (38:11.308)
Yeah, me too.

Chad (38:27.404)
Oh, no I haven't.

Joan LeMay (38:31.4)
It started out being terribly awesome cover songs, but it is now it's mostly it's like the whole universe of outsider music. But sometimes he'll just put up album covers that are ridiculous and campy and funny and things that look like they're, you know, public access. And it's it's a treasure trove of.

of the triumph of the human spirit. It's really, really, really wonderful. And there are jams, like just so many, it's led me down so many wormholes. Listen.

Chad (39:10.348)
Oh, that's great. I'm going to have to go subscribe to that. Yeah. Some of those sixties album covers, you know, like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, like just, I don't know what the hell they were thinking, you know, I'm trying to think of some funny ones too. I do love a good, funny album cover. I feel like it was a Public Image Limited. Was it their first album where it was just called album? And you know,

Joan LeMay (39:12.792)
down.

Joan LeMay (39:19.256)
Sure.

Joan LeMay (39:34.488)
Yes.

Chad (39:38.58)
I don't know. And going back to the whole hypnosis thing, it's kind of funny because some of the bands would get these sort of rapid fire ideas. I can't think of the guy's name who was the real eccentric one that was just like, you know, this is my concept and if you don't like it, fuck you, go someplace else. Right. So and I love that he did that. And so many bands were like, OK, we'll go with it. Right. Why not? What the hell? What do we have to lose?

Joan LeMay (39:54.776)
Yeah. Yeah.

Joan LeMay (40:02.424)
Yeah. Also at a time when money was flowing like water. So was like, where it was like, okay, we're flying to the Sahara to shoot this. We're not just going 20 minutes away to Joshua Tree. No, no, we're flying to the Sahara with like a crew of a hundred people or whatever. Yeah, that was phenomenal.

Chad (40:07.308)
Oh god yeah.

Joan LeMay (40:26.166)
I just thought of two album covers. The most recent Spoon record, which was designed by an artist named Edel Rodriguez, who's phenomenal. I love. And also Sub Pop. If you look across the last like 20 plus years, one of the main designers at Sub Pop is a guy named Jeff Kleinsmith, who's also a phenomenal poster designer. And he...

he is just a master at balance, balancing form and color. And he's great. And it's also, I think, relatively uncommon now for people to, and maybe I'm wrong, I could be wrong about this, but I think it's more uncommon for labels to actually have in-house designers now.

So it's, I think it's kind of great that Subpop's maintained that.

Chad (41:30.858)
Sub Pop was always like their own animal and another maybe great transition. So tell me about your days at Sub Pop if you don't mind, like any stories come to mind or any bands that you helped to break that people might know of.

Joan LeMay (41:33.942)
Thank you.

Joan LeMay (41:44.024)
I didn't help to break anything. I only signed one...

Chad (41:46.988)
Ah, okay.

Joan LeMay (41:52.928)
wasn't a band either. I had I brought a bunch of bands to try and get them signed and no dice but I signed Patton Oswalt the comedian for his album Lollipops and Werewolves which was fantastic. I was I was a publicist during here I guess here's the story the Shins record

Chad (42:02.188)
Oh well.

Joan LeMay (42:16.818)
that came out concurrently with Garden State, the movie where there's the moment where, why am I forgetting her name? This is what's really annoying about ADHD sometimes, it's like, what's that you're talking about and you can't pull the name out of your ass.

Chad (42:35.116)
filter.

Chad (42:40.908)
Natalie Portman.

Joan LeMay (42:41.816)
Thank you, where she puts the headphones on Zach Braff and she's like, song will change your life. And the entire staff, all 27 of us had walked down to the Cineplex to watch this thing. And we were just losing our shit laughing because a thing called that didn't, that was kind of at the, not quite at the beginning, but maybe kind of at the peak of.

Chad (42:45.388)
Right, right.

Chad (43:00.716)
Right.

Joan LeMay (43:10.616)
when the OC was happening, when indie bands were getting big sync deals, and the president of subpop, Jonathan Poneman, said if this record goes gold, I'm flying the whole staff to New Zealand. And we knew as soon as we saw that moment in that movie that we were all going to New Zealand, and we did. So that was happening during my time. Postal Services Give Up was happening during my time.

Chad (43:27.276)
Oh well.

Joan LeMay (43:40.024)
There were so many great records that I had the full honor of getting to call and bother writers about. And...

Those were a couple, there's a band called CSS who are about to come back to the States and do a tour who I love dearly and am dear friends with Louisa Matsushita, who's the lead singer and she goes by Love Fox. She's also a otherworldly phenomenal visual artist and painter and she's been.

kind of pivoting towards that the last handful of years. And it's been so cool to see her do these like big dick gallery shows in Sao Paulo. She's Brazilian. The band is Brazilian. And so I can't wait to see them again.

But yeah, it was, I was lucky to be there when I was there. It was a special workplace. And there was definitely a lot of, there was a lot of humor happening all the time. We made a bunch of videos that were incredibly goofy. And you know, it was, yeah, it was.

I was very, very lucky to get to have that job. I was a publicist there.

Chad (45:21.291)
And then you went out on your own right after sub pop. Is that how you got into your own music PR firm?

Joan LeMay (45:26.648)
I think you froze. Oh wait, you're back.

Chad (45:31.081)
Uh oh. Okay, are you back? Great, yeah. I just said after Sub Pop you went out on your own and did music PR, right? So what happened there?

Joan LeMay (45:43.512)
Yeah, so after, uh, towards the end of my run at Subpop, my dear friend Dave Lewis, who had worked with the aforementioned Jessica Hopper and I at her publicity firm Hyper PR, which became Hopper PR. Dave Lewis had started a company called Riot Act.

and he offered me a partnership in the company. And so I left Sub Pop to partner with him at Riot Act. And not too long after I came on, he was offered a job in music business academia and he went on to do that and he just gave me the company. So I had it and...

And at the time, the company was just myself and Dave. And then I brought on the wonderful Sheila Kenny, who was with Tag Team PR, and she had a comedy roster, and I had music roster and a little bit of comedy. And then she formed her own thing, and I brought on Nathan Walker, who became...

my like right -hand dude and partner in the business and at its height there were eight of us all together and I ran it more like a collective. It was really important to me that every publicist developed their own roster because there are a few things that were more of a bummer in that job.

than if you were working a record that you didn't really connect with. Because writers can tell, because I was also a writer. I wrote for Rolling Stone, I wrote for Spin, I wrote for Venus, I wrote, you I had my fanzine. My first, the whole reason that I wanted to become a music publicist was like, I had a long game in mind that...

Joan LeMay (47:59.704)
I would get to know all the writers and editors I needed to know, and then I would stop being a publicist and be a writer full -time. That didn't happen. I wrote full -time for like six months or something, and I absolutely couldn't pay the bills even then. And it's all but impossible now. But anyway, so yeah, Riot Act was me at its height, eight other people. I got to a place where...

I realized that I was burned out and the company was going to be fine without me. And just as it was given, just as the company was given to me, I gave it to Nathan and he continues to run it handily to this day. And he's phenomenal and Red Axe always had a tremendous amount of integrity. Nobody there works anything they don't want to be working.

it's just done out of true, true love for the music and wanting to get people to hear it who will actually connect with it. And, you know, Nathan's been doing this a really long time and he knows who to pair with what record. And that is that's what your actual...

currency is as a publicist is actually knowing and being like, hey, I know you are going to like this, not just farting out everybody. Here's this. What do you hear? These five records. What do you want? You know, it's you. You want to be a curatorial voice, not just like a convenience store.

So yeah, but I was a publicist for a very, very long time. Very, very long time.

Chad (50:01.545)
Wow, that's amazing. I mean, especially just how you were able to maintain that integrity. And, you like you said, it continues to this day. I hate corporate rock. I always have, but I think it's just a necessary evil.

Joan LeMay (50:09.848)
Thank you.

Joan LeMay (50:15.768)
Yeah, sure. I missed the first part of what you said because you froze.

Chad (50:20.905)
Oh, bummer. So I was just saying, it's amazing how you were able to maintain that integrity, you know, through your tenure and then, you know, handing it off and it seems to continue because, you know, corporate rock, although it's a necessary evil, you know, it kind of sucks. It's all about money and, you know, money's nice, but it should really be about the artist, right? And it usually isn't.

Joan LeMay (50:22.168)
Oh, it's.

Joan LeMay (50:42.794)
Yeah, I mean, it's it's all it's all So complicated it's all so complicated it really really is and but at the end of the day for sure We're talking about major labels of retires sure sure as hell for talking about streaming for talking about distribution models throughout time and space that's solely about money the the problem is that the distribution model now is

Chad (50:49.767)
Yeah.

Joan LeMay (51:11.992)
and has been horrifically, horrifically broken for so, so long. And I don't know, I mean, obviously I don't know what the way out of it is because if I knew people who know much more than I do who are actually still in that universe would know. But here's another thing that I know what I want to say and I can't remember.

name of the organization. There's a, I think it's United Music Workers Alliance.

Anyway, there are a couple of organizations that do a lot of great advocacy and advocacy work and educational work trying to get policies on the table to change the way that things are or at least halt the progression of them.

down to down to touring and what what touring is now versus what it used to be. The the tyranny of merch cuts, which is the most I can't possibly be more angry about that. Seeing what it's done to so many people in my life. It's it's just it's vampiric, horrific. You know, late stage.

Chad (52:25.513)
Yeah.

Chad (52:29.961)
Mm -hmm.

Joan LeMay (52:45.716)
capitalist bullshit. And yeah.

Chad (52:48.745)
Oh yeah.

I've read a bit about that and a couple of indie bands that I liked were talking about that and I had no idea but you know it's terrible and definitely needs to change. So Joe and anything else that you wanted to talk about or cover because you know I just feel like I should open the floor.

Joan LeMay (53:12.216)
Oh, yeah, I don't know. I'm selling paintings. That's something. Speaking of capitalism, like baby capitalism, because I'm a working artist, I am going through my archive of work.

Chad (53:19.434)
Oh.

Joan LeMay (53:40.472)
because while I'm spending my time working on this book, I don't have a ton of time to produce new work right now that I can sell to make money for life. So I'm going and I'm realizing, oh, okay, I've got actually hundreds of pieces of drawings and paintings and things that I've never shown, I've never put up for sale.

So I started this month and I will for the rest of the year be putting up a batch of anywhere between, you know, 15 and 25 new pieces on my site and telling Instagram and my newsletter people about it and seeing if anybody wants these things. Which I hope they do because I think there's a lot of stuff that I still stand by that I...

It's in my bedroom. What am I? I want it to go to somebody who will connect with it and put it on their wall. So that is a thing that's going on with me. I did another book cover for a book that's coming out that I'm very excited about. And I do not know if I am allowed to say what it is.

So I shouldn't do that yet, but that's occurring. And those are the main things that I have going on right now.

Chad (55:19.531)
And when does the Grateful Dead book come out? Is there a release date yet or are we still just infancy?

Joan LeMay (55:22.872)
There's not because we're still cooking it. Alex and I are both losing our minds. Tunneling deep, every once in a while, Alex will send me a, he'll text me a photo of his newest library book stack of deep dive research stuff. And I painted him into the book. He is painted as Casey Jones.

Chad (55:50.796)
Oh cool.

Joan LeMay (55:51.864)
And I texted that to him the other day and he was like, I'm nothing if not a man who should not be driving a train. I was like, no, that's it. So yeah, there's no release date. We know when the due date is and we know that it is approaching us like a train. But after that, it takes time for these things not just to be put together and edited, but then to go when they go into production.

especially for a four color hardcover art book, it has to be printed overseas. And then the whole process for that is just nuts and it can take, and usually does take around a year for turnaround time. After you've got everything designed and it's good to go, it takes a long time to actually get everything printed and then distributed and blah, blah, blah. So.

Chad (56:49.546)
Yeah. Well, we'll definitely have to keep an eye out for it. And I'm sure there'll be more info. Yeah. Great. Yeah, I'm glad. So part in question. And then we'll say our goodbyes. What's the most unlikely song you're obsessed with? I know you've already told me that you're into so many different styles of music and things, but if there is this one sort of off the wall song that I would never think that you'd be into if I knew you, what would it be?

Joan LeMay (56:52.536)
Yeah, we will let everything out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joan LeMay (57:20.448)
Let's see, oh, you just, you froze again. You said, I know you're into lots of unlikely and then, okay, yes.

Chad (57:22.826)
hahahaha

Chad (57:29.246)
Let's try that. Can you hear me now? All right, great. So this is the question was, I know that you've mentioned that you're into so many different kinds of music. So this might be a loaded question. But if there was just one song that is an unlikely song that, you know, if I knew your musical taste and you said, oh, I'm in love with the song, I'd be like, really? What song would that be?

Joan LeMay (57:54.262)
Hmm. That's a really, really, really good question. And I don't, I don't know. I don't have, I don't know if I have a definitive answer for that because in my mind, everything makes sense together somehow.

For the last three days, I have unrelentingly had Robyn's Dancing On My Own stuck in my head because my upstairs neighbors were having a birthday party until like three in the morning or whatever. And it was, but it was great because I'm, I'm, I was, I, I'm up until three, four, like most of the time working. And, and it was, it felt like having company.

You know, it was like, it was like, you know, I could hear everybody talking and, and, and having a good time and dancing. And I was like, yeah. And, and it's been stuck in my head since. So kind of maybe that, uh, I would say, I mean, that's it. That's it. That's an all time jam. So you can't, there's no nothing. You can't say anything bad about Robyn but that's maybe slightly incongruous with, um, you know, jazz. I don't know. Maybe it's not.

Chad (59:01.292)
for sure.

Hahaha.

Chad (59:12.555)
Yeah, no, it makes sense. I know that's a great answer. Well, great. Joan, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you coming on. Absolutely my pleasure. And hopefully we'll talk soon.

Joan LeMay (59:22.232)
Thanks for having me.

Joan LeMay (59:27.864)
Sounds like a plan. Thanks a bunch. Thanks.

Chad (59:29.385)
All right. Thanks again. Bye.