Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay, "Quantum Criminals": Exploring Steely Dan Characters and Artistic Collaboration

In this episode of "Unlocking Your World of Creativity," host Mark Stinson delves into the fascinating world of storytelling, art, music, and character development with author Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay, the creative duo behind the book "Quantum Criminals: Ramblers Wild Gamblers. Another Soul Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan." The book explores the rich tapestry of characters found within the songs of the legendary band Steely Dan.

The conversation begins with Alex discussing the genesis of the book and how Joan's idea to base it around characters transformed the project. Their collaboration, guided by a massive spreadsheet of 160 characters created by Joan, allowed them to explore the extensive catalog of Steely Dan's characters and bring them to life in a unique way. Alex highlights how the character-based approach enhanced the writing process, adding depth and humanity to their portrayal of the band's history.

Joan discusses her artistic process and how her lifelong fandom of Steely Dan influenced her visual interpretations of the characters. With a penchant for high chroma and psychedelic aesthetics, her vibrant paintings captured the essence of the colorful and sometimes enigmatic characters. The collaborative nature of the project brought a new dynamic to both Alex and Joan's creative processes, providing support, encouragement, and a fresh perspective.

The interview also delves into the research behind the characters and the extensive exploration undertaken by Alex. While the band members, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, didn't provide much information about the characters, Alex's research led him down intriguing rabbit holes, uncovering fascinating connections and stories. He shares examples such as the inspiration behind "Kid Charlemagne" and the story of Sayoko Yamaguchi, the model featured on the cover of Steely Dan's album "Asia."

Throughout the conversation, the evolution of Steely Dan's characters over time is explored, with Alex noting that the reunion albums allowed for a clearer understanding of the individual songwriting contributions of Fagen and Becker. The duo's sensibility shifts and a touch of sentimentality emerges in their later work, which can be heard in songs like "Shame About Me."

Highlight Quotes:

·      "I think that was what was exciting about it because I, this started out, I was going to write a Steely Dan book before Joan came into the picture. But the idea to base it around characters was an idea that Joan had." - Alex Pappademas

·      "Joan made a giant spreadsheet. At the beginning of this process that had 160 characters on it, which is like a Robert Altman level of character." - Alex Pappademas

·      "I prior to diving into this I've always painted in a very high chroma way. All of these are gush paintings that are 18 by 24 or nine by 12. And I I've always. I've always painted slightly psychedelic in, in terms of pallet. So it it was an easy, it was an easy application of that natural tendency here, for sure." - Joan LeMay

·      "So I when this project started to I had thought about I, I'd start, I had started. Making a fanzine called Danze, where I was going to depict every single named character in the entire Steely Dan universe." - Joan LeMay

·      "I think for years, Several friends and I who are Steely Dan fans have been like, oh, they're such a major dude. As a, as, just as a colloquial way to refer to somebody referring to the song, but to refer to somebody who is a solid friend, who's somebody you're gonna call if you're in trouble." - Joan LeMay

Overall, this podcast episode explores the captivating journey of Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay as they delve into the world of Steely Dan's characters, combining storytelling, art, and music to create a unique and visually stunning book, "Quantum Criminals." Listeners are taken on a deep dive into the creative process, research, collaboration, and the evolution of Steely Dan's characters over time.

Alex Pappademas is the author of Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant—The Movies & Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon and the writer and host of the acclaimed podcast The Big Hit Show. His work has also appeared in GQ, the New York Times, and Grantland. https://www.instagram.com/pappademas/

Joan LeMay is an artist based in London and New York City (although the paintings for this book were created in Portland). Her work appears in multiple publications and books and has been shown in museums, galleries, and public spaces internationally. https://www.instagram.com/joanlemay/

From University of Texas Press

auto generated transcript

Characters and the character development. And we're talking with author Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay about their new book, quantum Criminals. Alex and Joan, welcome to the show. Thanks. Thanks for having us. It's gonna be such a fun conversation. A I love these kind of rock biography review kind of books, but Steely Dan is right up on top of my favorite bands.

Wu. But boy, the contents of these characters goes deep.

Alex Pappademas, author: Yeah, I think that was what was exciting about it because I, this started out, I was going to write a Steely Dan book before Joan came into the picture. But the idea to base it around characters was an idea that Joan had.

At the beginning of this process that had 160 characters on it, which is like a Robert Altman level of character. Yes. That we kinda told. It's too it's, it was really, what a great metaphor. Yeah. Too many people moving around in that picture. Yeah. But yeah, once we, so that was not my idea.

It was Joan's idea, but it made everything come together in a way that I don't think it would have. I might not be, th this book might not be done. At this point, two or three years after its inception, if that had not happened because it was just such a great organizing principle and it was such a really it was became such a fun way to think about the process of writing about this band's whole long history and all of this, all of the whole catalog and the, the whole magill, which is very big.

Yes. So I, it became just yeah, it made a lot more sense.

Joan LeMay, illustrator: Thanks. Yeah. I prior to diving into this I've always painted in a very high chroma way. All of these are gush paintings that are 18 by 24 or nine by 12. And I I've always. I've always painted slightly psychedelic in, in terms of pallet. So it it was an easy, it was an easy application of that natural tendency here, for sure.

Yes.

Mark Stinson, host: And the collaboration piece, this is almost like the songwriting, there's, the Witch came first. The music or the melody or the words, witch came first, the Fagan or the Becker. What did your collaboration feel like as this whole thing was unfolding? Yeah,

Alex Pappademas, author: Oh yeah.

So maybe we're not gonna do Charlie freak on this one, or, I had this idea that to talk about, hip hop samples of Steely Dan and. For that I was, it's for that one. It was like, oh, so what if Rudy from Black Cow is MF Dune, who's a rapper, who's sampled prominently sampled black cow and, just, we just talked around, how to do that.

And then I think, as I started to, Joan was done. With a lot of this work before I was, so as I started, I got the chance to see what it was gonna look like as it was happening because my piece of it was still unfinished because I'm a slow writer and e even though this was, we did this one kind of fast, but it still took longer for me to finish.

A, a dignity or the, just, there's a sense of the way that these pe, these people looking directly in the camera and thinking about, trying, fleeting with you, with their eyes or something like that. And I think that really just, it spurred me to think more about the humanity of these characters as I was writing about them.

And so I think there's that's, sort of part of the, the mind melt that a occurs here, but. Yeah I loved doing it this way because writing books is really lonely and depressing, and you're stuck in a room with your feelings of inadequacy and wondering if this is gonna be any good.

And so it was, it was really amazing to, to be able to, to both, to see how this was gonna come to life and have that faith in how it was gonna come to life and to know that, but also just, just to have somebody to. Talk to it's look at this room that I'm in.

Were you trying to like, translate that into the art or bring your own interpretation of the characters?

Joan LeMay, illustrator: So I when this project started to I had thought about I, I'd start, I had started. Making a fanzine called Danze, where I was going to depict every single named character in the entire Steely Dan universe.

And I was doing that independently. And Alex had been working on a book the idea of what a book might look like with Jessica Hopper of University of Texas Press, who is a mutual friend of ours. And she put our projects together. So I had I've been a lifelong Steely Dan fan. They're, they've always been my answer to what's your favorite band?

And it, it the figuring out how to Articulate. That had a lot to do with me and Alex's conversations. And a again, just to Alex's point, it being just so good to have somebody to talk to when you're undertaking a large thing and there's something like 120 paintings in this book.

And it's it makes you approach things differently and spurs you on when you're like, ah, look at this, ah, read this.

Mark Stinson, host: He gives you a little encouragement there. And some of these characters, clearly names like Josie and Peg stand out, but I guess as I was looking through the list, I guess I never would've thought of the major dude as a character I knew, obviously the song and what it's about, but I didn't pull out the persona like you have.

But also the major dude is fallible, also the major dude maybe deals pot maybe. There, there's, there are a lot of ways the major dude can be, and I realized after I painted the major dude that he looks a lot like Mark Maron, which I didn't mean to have happen, but it happened and now I can't unsee it.

And now neither can anybody else, cuz I keep talking about it. But. Yeah, I it, to me, the major dude is both an archetype and refers to individuals and that is one possibility in the in the universe for who he might

Mark Stinson, host: be. Yes. And Alex Amia beyond just the creativity of it, there has to be research and rigor into, what did the writers of the song mean this character to be?

Alex Pappademas, author: characters? Oh man there is a, there was a whole lot of rabbit holes to go down, even though Donald and Walter do, did not give us all that much information about who these characters are.

In a lot of cases you would just pull one little thread and then you would find all of these other things. And so I found myself reading a lot about, they've acknowledged, for example, that. The Kid Charlamagne is based on Oley Stanley, who's the sort of famous acid chemist who is a kind of a intimate of the Mary Pranksters and Ken Kei and then the Grateful Dead.

And so that led me to rereading Tom Wolf's electric Kool-Aid acid test for the first time since college. And, that's, that was such a pleasure to go back to, cuz I, I didn't remember how good that was, even though I'm a big Tom Wolf fan. And then, Going into Leys history and kind of what ended up happening to him.

He winds up a, sort of a. Depressing ending. He's he was actually very worried about climate change very early, like in the eighties. He was terrified of a great flood, he was sort, ahead of that. So I, yeah, that one, but all of these talking about Sayoko, Yama, Gucci, who's the cover of of Asia, the cover model from Asia, and like finding out which something I never knew.

I was like, I wonder who that is. And then it turns out like she really is somebody and has like an amazing story in the history of of in international fashion. It's the first Jaap, the first Japanese model to walk the Paris runways in the like for, I think is Miyaki, maybe in the, the late seventies, early eighties and like all that stuff.

As it tr ended up being, because I guess I, I wasn't sure, I imagined these being a lot shorter than they ended up.

Mark Stinson, host: And somehow it turns a substantial history. Yes. And thinking about that history, Alex, from the standpoint of the The timeline, from Jack and I think about Cousin Dupree is relatively recent as far as Steely Dan albums go, but did you find the characters changing over time or did the, tone or the angle that Donald and Walter took did they morph at all over that timeline in your view?

Have the chance to before that, if you listen, you can really, if you listen to the nightly, if you listen to come Curad like you and then, and to Walter's 11 tracks of whack, it suddenly becomes a lot clearer. Who was bringing what to the table in the Steely Dan amalgam more so than I think it was prior to that.

You, so you get that, but I think you can also hear them. You can hear them getting older and you can hear them, their sensibility shifting and maybe getting a little more, there's a tiny bit of sentimentality creeps into it. And I think, I think about the narrator of shame about me.

Which is the song like Joan Painted Franny from nyu, who's the, the girl who comes back into the narrator's life after all these years. And they talk about, it's their group of friends and whatever. What happened to this guy and all these guys got rich and did this or whatever.

As much as that's a made up story, obviously it's a fictional narrative. It does mirror what happened, with Walter where he he got into some trouble over the years. There were some addiction issues and conquered that and then, restarted his life and career and by the time he was back with the Dan, things had shifted and.

So I think, it does reflect, even though they were still writing songs like Cousin Dupree, which is from told from the perspective of a guy who wants to make it with his cousin which is still, it's still still creepy after all these years. There's something different going on in with their relationship to those characters to be sure.

That age gap is only like 10, 11 years. Something like that. Yeah.

Mark Stinson, host: Yeah. You tend to forget that cuz it does seem whiter. Yeah,

Alex Pappademas, author: Cuz they covered so much ground in such a short time, it's not really, that's basically just the seventies. But like they're, and we think of them as being old because I think they always presented themselves they acted like they were dirty old men when they were 24.

It's like they just, and which is a way to never seem like you're aging, cuz you just grow into the thing that you've always presented to be.

Joan LeMay, illustrator: Absolutely. And an obsession with the past and an obsession with the future, but never presence in the presence.

Mark Stinson, host: That's right. Yeah. And Jones, from a visual standpoint, many of these character, there were as you mentioned in the book, no, M t v at the beginning many of these characters are being visualized for the very first time.

You really have to conjure up your own image of this. How was that informed for you?

And I had pictures of friends and I took a lot of pictures of myself for just body image reference stuff. I. Have had generalized ideas of these characters in my head for a really long time. But for finishing, putting them together and for, for looking for inspiration in the instances where I hadn't, I hadn't visualized pixel previously, for instance.

So they're the phases of people I know throughout as well. And it, every day I sat down to paint and ended up with these cats on the page and it was delightful and fun for me also because, In the process of painting, I tend to make choices intuitively a lot of the time.

I don't do much ever in the way of sketching things out, although I'm told that I should. I certainly didn't for this. Thanks

Mark Stinson, host: for the advice

Joan LeMay, illustrator: folks. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of the time, things would just materialize and And get painted. Yes.

You need to, get your creative rhythm. And Joan you've touched ever so briefly on your, painting your graphic development style. Do you have that kind of rhythm or habit that you find that you need to keep the work moving? For me,

Joan LeMay, illustrator: One, one thing that I really like to keep in mind that I, God, I'm trying to think of what book I read this in.

Oh, it's gonna bother me. I'll think about it and I'll send you what sounds good. This comes out of, and you can put in show notes or whatever. Yeah. But I was reading about the idea of Parade of human beings. We're all sponges and we have to be really cognizant of the fact that we need time to soak things up and then when we're full, we must be rung out or else.

For me, what my daily habit is and what things look like varies wildly to depend my in my life at the time and what my environment is and all that kind of good stuff. If I'm left completely to my druthers, if I have no nobody. Nothing, no other, any forces at all pulling me to do anything other than work.

And that worked. So I think what's important in terms of I. Tips for people listening. Wanting to hear about people's creative habits. You really have to find what works for you and you have to be you have to have a lot of grace with yourself when what works for you no longer works for you.

And know that you are the only authority on what works for you and know that you need to. Change it until it does work for you or else you're gonna cheat help out of your own work.

Mark Stinson, host: Wow, great advice. The sponge image is a strong one, isn't it? Where it's like, whenever it's full you gotta get it out.

Yeah, you gotta

Joan LeMay, illustrator: get it out or you'll go bananas. Yes.

Mark Stinson, host: Folks, my guess is Joan LeMay and Alex Papa Dimus, they are the author and illustrators of quantum criminals. It's just out this month from University of Texas Press. Thinking about the now release of the book, it's a whole nother phase, isn't it?

Alex Pappademas, author: It's been pretty awesome. It's been pretty cool. I've yet to actually see it in a bookstore, and I'm really looking forward to that.

When that happens it's not, I've not run into it on a shelf, but, I'm excited. I'm ready to scan for this bright yellow

Mark Stinson, host: everywhere that I get. That's right. And we were talking about the media blitz or the media. Parades and all the telling about the book.

How do you find that part of, now this process where you're reflecting, you're talking about the craftsmanship how are you finding that, Joan, maybe if I start with you,

With some other little things in between. And I've always been on the on the side of supporting artists, musicians and I've been a freelance writer. I've played in bands. I've done all kinds of stuff. But having a thing that you worked on with somebody else out in the world is.

Such a great feeling, and it's not really one that I've had the privilege and honor to have before. Outside of you have a, you have illustrations published, you have a. I've had a ton of gallery shows and art shows and weirdo spaces for the last, whatever it is, 20 years and having shows is really satisfying.

Mark Stinson, host: What do you think, Alex? Holding a mirror up to the work now? I,

Alex Pappademas, author: Yeah, it is interesting cuz I also have, for different reasons, I've spent way more time in your seat asking the artist about their creative choices and why they did it and how that maybe try, and trying to get it something about them through that.

That's what I've, that's the bulk of pretty much all the writing that I've done, in, in my career, which is 20 years now too and it's. Interesting and weird to be on the other side of it. It's really, it's super positive because everybody's really excited about this book and you get to talk to people that love Steely Dan, and that's, and are just stoked that this exists.

But yeah that's been really fun. But it's also, it's it's fun to have the, to have people tell you what your book is about. I really do enjoy that. And that's been really, that's been really gratifying because people have. They're the, what they find interesting about it.

Cuz also when you work on something for this long, you lose any perspective about what's good in it and what's what, and you're like, any of this good. It's like you, sir, I have that problem. Like things really do start to feel like dead work. The longer I'm working on them.

So there's a chapter about dildos in history and literature in literary history. And the previous, the most famous literary dildos. And as I was writing that eventually I was like, is this even is this the worst chapter of the book? Is this the I didn't

Joan LeMay, illustrator: even know. It's my favorite chapter.

It's my favorite chapter. It's genius. It's a

Mark Stinson, host: lot of people's never gets old does it, Joan? Just keep going. That's a lot of

Alex Pappademas, author: people's favorite chapter. It's crazy. But yeah, it's it's and but that's the, that's the thing. It's like you get to almost open the present. With them at the same time because they're experiencing this thing and they're like, oh my God, I had no, I like, I've it's so you get to, that sense of discovery I think is really nice and it's not Yeah.

So I, I think that's been the funnest part of it of being on the other side of the interview thing is that, that all of these, all the enthusiasm that, that people have had for it so far, we have not been interviewed by anybody who's not a Steely Dan fan.

Mark Stinson, host: the ranks of everything with that great musical taste. Yes. Yeah.

But not just the boomers. I think you also have caught on to this new, appreciation, a new generation of steely Dan fans. Huh? This cult following that has built a little bit wider

Alex Pappademas, author: now. Yeah, it feels, it's, feels like this was a cult thing when we started. In some ways, at least among, people it, I read about this in the book, but there was a point where, to me I'm 45, turning 46, like I am the tail end of Gen X, like right before it becomes, the millennial but I don't identify that way.

And even when we started this project on the book it seemed oh, this is gonna be pretty niche in some ways, but I feel like over the, in the time that we worked on it, things built and now it really feels like you can, you can drop a Steely Dan meme on Twitter and everybody's gonna get it in a way that, maybe they wouldn't have before.

There's some kind of, a weird thing has happened with that, which is obviously good. From our perspective. Yes. And I have some, there's some speculating I do in the book about how this came about. And I don't know that it's any one reason necessarily. I think there's societal factors and factors having to do with the way people consume music now versus even a few years ago, even, maybe 10 years ago.

It's it's so radically different and I think the idea of the cannon has been blown open by streaming and by the, yes the way people experience

Joan LeMay, illustrator: I I, Alex and I hope to work together on some stuff again in the future. I. When you're a painter or when you're a writer or when you're a potter or when you're, there are so many different creative disciplines where at the end of the day, it's you versus you and the actual making of the thing, even when it's in a collaborative framework.

And we all had our own little corners and our own little spaces, but I had certainly never. Painted around any other human beings before, and I was really trepidatious going into that experience. Because I'm easily distracted. I, if I'm interrupted I, it takes me a while to get back into it.

Mark Stinson, host: Yeah. Ultimately it is you and the work, isn't it?

Joan LeMay, illustrator: I love that always. Yes. The battle of boxing

Mark Stinson, host: all the time. What a terrific conversation, guys. I really appreciate you coming on the show and Alex and Joan, I think like anytime when you finally meet the people behind the work, now I hear the voice differently now.

I'll see the illustrations differently, so I really appreciate the personal connection.

Alex Pappademas, author: Oh, we appreciate you having us, mark. This has been awesome. Absolutely.

Mark Stinson, host: And continued. Good luck with the book. It's just release folks this month from University of Texas Press. It's Quantum Criminals, the Ramblers Wild Gamblers, and other Soul Survivors from the songs of Steely Dan.

So until next time, I'm Mark Stinson and we're unlocking your world of creativity. We'll see you soon.