From The Archive: Interview with Venessa Briscoe Hay and Michael Lachowski
Pylon
This interview was transcribed from the Nov. 6 2020 episode of The Go-Go Radio Magic Show which originally aired on CJLO 1690AM.
GGRMS: I thought we should start sort of at the beginning. I've always held this romantic notion of what Athens, Georgia was like in ‘79 and ‘80 and those early years of the scene. Can you maybe paint a picture for me briefly what it was like in that college town as young people, young creative people?
Micheal Lachowski: Yeah, I can. I had been already in Athens,for about four and a half, five years before we started this band going to college. I did graduate sometime after Highline got back together in around 1979. And I moved over to Athens from the Atlanta suburbs and I thought I thought that the place was, a really small sort of Georgia town. It wasn't a rural city by any means. I mean, it's one of the oldest, it's the oldest land grant university in the United States. So the college has been there since 1785. But the town itself just seemed so, you know, kind of likelate 1940s or something to me. It was really kind of, it took some getting used to. I was really just a campus focused person for the first couple years that I was in college probably, well not entirely, then it I took pretty hard to the in-town living situation and being downtown and our scene got going.
So our scene was kind of in the, like when you look at the B-52s and how the two women in the band had those elaborate kind of beehive hairdos. I mean, that wasn't a completely outlandish thing. They just went to the kind of hairdressers that made those hairdos for the ladies that worked at the ANA bakery. It was fairly common sight, you know. So our scene, our little like punk inspired and art inspired and DIY kind of scene was happening in the midst of an environment, a society that didn't really understand us and also just didn't really pay any attention, didn't really care, you know. I mean, there'd be the occasional times, like one time Vanessa and I have a friend, Maureen, and Maureen and my friend Neil and I, it just stayed up all night long. It had been some kind of a big party. Maureen was wearing some elaborate party dress, you know, one of those, you know, like something really big. And we went into Helen's Restaurant to eat breakfast, a restaurant where we went there so often they all knew us. No, we went to a different restaurant. I'll take that back to Strickland's Restaurant. And yeah, we'd been up all night and looked pretty much like that. And those people would kind of maybe glare at us, but that was about it. You know, we just, we're a little separated from the kind of town that it was at the time. And it's much different town and has been for quite a while since.
GGRMS:You and Randy started jamming or getting creative with with music. And then you brought on Vanessa as well. Where were you, what were you drawing from musically for the beginnings of Pylon? You had mentioned the B-52s and we know that they triggered attention to the scene, but they were very much drawing, like you had mentioned, visually from older aesthetics. You guys seem to land from outer space or something.
Micheal Lachowski:Well, I mean, we had our influences, we had a lot of influences at the art school from faculty and from our peers. And then there was a pretty hearty party scene that we were a part of, and we'd hear a lot of music at parties. We bought a lot of music too, you know, a lot for our budget, I guess you'd say. We spent a lot of time listening to music. So we were inspired by things that we were hearing from England and New York. And like this week, I was listening to Pere Ubu and I was really remembering, you know, like there's a couple examples of non New York City and non-English bands. Of course, there were some German bands like Kraftwerk and DAF. But we had somewhat different influences than the B 52s. You know, we weren't interested really in camp or some of the other stuff that might have might have informed some of their approaches and outfits and and and lyrics and stuff like that. I think we were trying to be a little bit more like, you know, the stuff that we were hearing, like New York and then influenced by Vanessa and Curtis and the factory I worked at, DuPont. I had an Eraser Head poster hanging in the studio. I mean, there's kind of soundtrack, the kind of movie that Eraser Head was. Bands like Tthe Normal singing about being in a car crash. I mean, a bunch of this stuff was just sort of combined influences. But I think it'd be a mistake to overlook l movements and art and stuff that we were exposed to… As well as all four of us being art students, the minimalist art of the era, some conceptual art of the era and video art, that kind of thing.
GGRMS: When Vanessa was asked to join the band or auditioned or if you were friends prior, but can you just talk a little bit, Vanessa, about what you were drawing from? Like what experiences or what you were moving through at the time? You were quite ahead of your time, as a vocalist.
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: Well, I did audition, although I was also friends with Michael and Randy from Art School. Michael and I had been in a class that was an independent art class, art study class with a professor named Robert Croker. And it was his last year at UGA, that particular year, 1977 to '78. And he decided to throw it all in with us. At the school at that time, there was a direct pipeline almost between Athens and New York, not only because of the B-52s, but because Jimmy Carter had become president. New York artists had donated a bunch of art to the Georgia Museum of Art. And we had friends who were always back and forth. So we knew that there was a much bigger scene outside of Athens than what we were saying, you know, basically the party scene at the time. And prior to that, there had been a scene in Athens that was more focused on what they call “Americana” now. There was a lot of covers and whatnot and even before that, there was Capricorn Records in Macon GA, which was a too far south, which had the southern rock scene. And we were totally not interested in any of that at the time. When these songs that we were hearing at the local record store, Chapter 3 Records, it was like it was new music, It is what they called it at the time…anyway, I came in and they invited me to audition. I guess they'd auditioned a couple of guys before that who hadn't worked out and they had taken a record called Teach Your Parakeet to Talk or something. And they were going to use things like that, like found tapes and records and things for vocals because they hadn't really found anyone who would work out. They had two guys come in that kind of had a pre-conceived notion. And I think one of them, they said later on, had brought in a guitar and, you know, he wanted to bring in songs or whatever. But they weren't interested in that. It was an art project. So they invited me to come in. I was in the art school like they were. And we were on the same wavelength. So I came in and there's lyrics already typed up. And they started playing. They played it once and then I was like, well, I'm going to try to make this fit. And when they wrote the lyrics, they were, I guess, conceptual. They were kind of industrial. There were a lot of things about safety and whatnot. And I was like, I don't think they really thought about how these words would fit into the music because they didn't. So I had to somehow make a way to make them fit. So I would elongate words or shorten them or chop them or whatever. And I didn't really think about anybody else when I was singing, to be honest, I was just trying to find my place in the, you know, it was like a machine that they had. And I had to find my place inside the team that they were creating. And sometimes I might echo the lines somebody else was doing or sometimes I would find, you know, like an art, there's negative and positive space. I'm trying to find that negative space to leave some space in there. So it all fits. So I mean, I listened to a lot of music. I was a music fan. I had no intentions on becoming a vocalist. So I don't know. That thing where you said about being an alien who's dropped down in the middle of the town or whatever, I felt like that my entire life. I've never really felt that in sync with people or things that were around me always, always found my own way, so to speak, what made me happy or comfortable. So I was lucky enough that they invited me on board. And you know, here I am just many years later talking about it. I can't believe it.
GGRMS: Musically also, I mean, I've yet to hear the complete Razz Tape that's in the box set, which from what I gather, is sort of a document of your very first session. Is that correct?
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: Well, it was, Chris Rasmussen worked at that local record store that you know, we were discussing earlier, Chapter 3 Records. And he had kind of a state of the art home recording device at the time. He had a Nakamichi tape deck. And I don't know that it was like a big focus of ours to make this as a document. Maybe he did just for fun, but he was serious about recording. So he came and recorded us at practice, you know, in our practice space using three microphones. Michael and Randy were sharing one mic between the guitar and the bass. Then he put one mic over the drums. And then I got the third mic and they put me out in the hall because it was so loud in the room where they were. We couldn't see each other. So, you know, they would just say, well, I guess let's go, and let's start playing. And then I would come in and it's not perfect, but it is in a way because of its imperfection. It's maybe a perfect image of how we were at that moment before we ever set foot in a real studio. It's real raw and immediate and has a lot of energy. Sometimes I hear what I'm doing and I cringe a little bit because, you know, there was no, like, retake or do ever. It's just all at once. So I think it's a very good picture of how we were live at the time.
GGRMS: Michael, can you talk a little bit about song construction at that point? Whether it's the first single or the first album, just how you guys assembled these songs together?
Micheal Lachowski: Yeah, Randy and I started out playing through our stereos or something like that at the apartment we lived in. And then we moved our equipment down or we got some amps and we started rehearsing in my art studio. I sublet the art studio from Curtis who became our drummer. And he lived upstairs on the third floor loft. Randy and I didn't know what we were really doing. So the best approach, or what worked out is that, was we would just kind of noodle around until one of us came up with some kind of a sequence, like a riff. And then the other one would find something that would kind of fit with it using some of the same notes or whatever. And, you know, occasionally we'd play sort of in lockstep on certain songs, but usually not. It's more of a, like, call and response or like one of the instruments is maybe more melody and the other one is more rhythm or vice versa. And, but we would just play them and, play and play.If I'd kind of come up with a bass riff or something, I'd just play it like, for 10 minutes, while Randy tried to find his way through it and come up with something.
When we would be playing like that at the practice studio, Curtis was listening to it from being upstairs. He said in a recent interview, I think that he used to smoke more pot back then and he would just like get these little riffs like memorized. And they were also driving him crazy because it was not really ever going anywhere. He had a little bit of drumming experience. I mean, in that he was in , a garage band, a high school band or whatever. Randy had some drums too. We'd brought those to the studio and Curtis had seen them. They were out in the hallway. We didn't know him real well. I mean, I knew him well enough to have rented the studio. I remember seeing him at some parties. He was an art student too. So he came down downstairs one day and he just asked us, he was like, Hey, you know, I've been listening to you guys, you know, for weeks. And you need to put some structure to this stuff. Can I bring these drums in here and start trying to help you guys like find some, you know, solid ground? That's how the instrumental part of it came together.
Once we had a drummer and Curtis claims he only has like one drumming pattern or whatever. But I don't care. I mean, I think whatever he does is awesome. I just love listening to his.. I was listening to Cool today off of the Razz Tape and was just like, Wow! That wasn't one of our early songs really, but it was the first song that we released as a single. We'd finally go work out the A and the B part of the song. And then we'd maybe, you know, come up at least with the C part, which I don't know what that would be, but like a break or a bridge or something. And pretty much that was it for most of our songs. I mean, I think occasionally there would be a D part, some kind of interruption or something.There was a little bit of variety to who started the song. Sometimes it would be just the bass or just the drums and guitar at the same time and a number of different ways of concluding the songs. We kind of found our way just making it up our own way.
“We were clearly just aware of the fact that Vanessa would be a change. A fourth element, add something completely different and new and just as equal in importance and, and interest is what the other three of us were doing. That became kind of like our, our credo for how to work with each other..”
When we auditioned the other singers, it just didn't feel right. It didn't feel like this fourth person, and this is unfair to judge somebody in a, 40 minute audition. But it just didn't, it just didn't seem to click. And so when Vanessa came in, I mean, Vanessa was saying like, I don't even think they could hear me singing very well, like through, through whatever PA type thing we had. Curtis's drum volume is just something that everybody else had to turn up to compete with. We were clearly just aware of the fact that Vanessa would be a change. A fourth element, add something completely different and new and just as equal in importance and, and interest is what the other three of us were doing. That became kind of like our, our credo for how to work with each other, the band live… ideally that would have been exactly what we would have done in studio. It didn't always turn out that way. And, and same for who got the credit for writing the song, for writing the lyrics, you know, it was all, all four of us were equally represented all the time in our music and, and hopefully in the other aspects of the band, like making decisions and such. So yeah, Vanessa was probably the best thing that happened to Pylon because what we had up until then was interesting, but it, you know, needed that, it needed that extra presence… It wouldn't have worked with “How To Teach A Bird To Talk” records and weather radio recordings and stuff.
GGRMS: I want to touch upon what Michael was saying about the fact that musically and creatively, as far as credit went, it was the whole group, it was like a democracy. I know that was a philosophy that R.E.M. also applied and, live by and I discovered you guys through R.E.M.’s Dead Letter Office, like I'm sure many suburban kids did when that album came out. But when I finally got a chance to see clips of the Athens, Georgia, Inside Out movie, which was my first time seeing you prior to YouTube and, you know, access to seeing anything one on a computer. I noticed that live, I feel like they kind of picked from your movements or you were definitely a touchstone for those bands. I'm curious about your first show in 1979 when you played to a crowd of college kids. What was the reaction? What was the reaction of the non-musicians, the party kids?
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: They just stood there and stared at us at first. They really did. There was just, you know, it was several shows before there was any reaction at all. They were, I don't think they knew what to make of us. Like, what is this? You know, although I have a dear friend who was in another band, Dana Downs, who was in Tone Tones, and she said, you know, just from the first show that she knew that it was special, you know, it was just like a big machine or something. I think it's how she put it. But we were so totally unlike the B-52s and other bands that were popping up in Atlanta that were sort of more straightforward pop or even before that, like, you know, I'm thinking of The Brains in that case and maybe Swimming Pool Cues and before that there was a band, very punk called The Fans that were, it was just totally different from what we were doing. But then the B-52s happened to come and catch us. I can't remember if it was the third or the fifth show, house party. We were playing out in the country and up until this point we really hadn't gotten a whole lot of reaction from people. It's almost like they could make up their minds or maybe we were really awful. I don't know. But anyway, the B-52s came in saw us. They had been on the road and they just immediately started dancing and went bananas. And all of a sudden it's like they were the catalysts. People realized, oh, we can dance to this too. So after that point, you know, it kind of took off. They threw a friend of theirs, Robert Malner, who was the door guy at the Mug Club in New York and knew everybody. They helped us get a show in New York at a really big club called Hurrah. Michael can talk about that. But, you know, really, we played some house shows in Athens and then in August of the same year, we played our first out of town shows, which were Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. And we played there before we played Atlanta.
“the B-52s came in saw us. They had been on the road and they just immediately started dancing and went bananas. all of a sudden it's like they were the catalysts. People realized, oh, we can dance to this too. So after that point, you know, it kind of took off.”
GGRMS: So the show that you were referencing, that was with Gang of Four? Is that right?
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: Yeah, that's exactly right. We were offered various people to open for in New York. And I don't know, you know, thinking back about it, we should have been grateful to be offered anything at such a big club. But we were like, no, we're not interested in that band. No, no. And then they said, Gang of Four. And we were like, yeah, yeah, we really like them. We had that red single that they put out, I guess, in '78 that had damaged goods on it. And we were super interested in opening for them. So on the basis of getting that booking in New York, a friend of ours, Vic Varney, he ended up being in The Method Actors, but was on time. He called around and got us a show in Philadelphia opening for him. He said, hey, they're opening for him in New York, which like to get him to open for them in Philadelphia. And then he got us a show in Boston at the Rat with some other bands.
GGRMS:It's been well documented that as the shows got bigger, and you guys got carried on with like bigger acts, it was sort of the start of the end.But at this point, when you're getting offered that show at the Gang of Four, and it was slowly moving away from maybe the art project that you had originally seen it as… was that difficult?
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: It was a lot of fun. Oh yeah, it was a lot of fun. Michael, you want to go?
Micheal Lachowski: Yeah, I mean, my memory is that we didn't, I'd have to look at our list. We have a list of pretty much every show and dates.We didn't really open for very many people. We were sort of a little hesitant to do that. We would have rather played a smaller club for our crowd rather than a big venue playing for somebody else's crowd. And so like a lot of the times that we opened for people, it was either because we were like extraordinarily eager to do it. We were somehow given an offer to open up for PIL and you know, just a trip, I would have tripped over myself trying to get to that show and that and have that opportunity. Really good friends like the B-52s had introduced us to The Talking Heads. Both of those bands asked us to open for them in Atlanta. And way back early on, The B-52s even had us come in and fill in at the last minute when The Plastics couldn't make it through customs for the Central Park Dr. Pepper concert that was enormous.So we didn't really open for people a whole lot. The Gang of Four stuff when those opportunities came back when they were on tour and we got to go and play like consecutive shows with them… that was super fun.
We played a lot and we mostly just headlined our own shows.That was what we were meant for. I mean, Pylon would go play in Atlanta at the 688 Club. It isn't sizable enough club, but we'd have to play two nights in a row and it was just like beautiful nights. I just remember looking forward to those. I just knew it was going to work. I knew we were going to put on a good show. I knew that we'd enjoy ourselves because we'd have so many people there and such a great reception. I remember feeling that way about playing almost all the cities and crowds, that we had kind of gotten used to that like playing at Maxwell's or playing out in San Francisco or Boston and DC… almost anywhere in New York City. It was just delightful and super fun.The story about us kind of collapsing because we had to open up for U2 ... I mean, that was just another, kind of catalyst that set us off into making a decision to wrap things up. It was a little bit of a, it was a total fluke. I mean, we had a booking agent who just didn't follow our expectations about how he wasn't supposed to, laterally go out and book us for something. He thought it was a great idea and we didn't. We were just at odds with the sort of conventional wisdom of the industry. The more that kept getting brought to our attention, we already knew we didn't really belong in the industry. We called ourselves at one point, tourists in the rock and roll industry, because we're always taking pictures at the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls and stuff. In a way, showing up in a town and opening up the weekly paper and then funding our name in there or finding an article or ad, you know, it's like a wonderful way to be a tourist. You're just traveling around the country going from city to city, but you have an actual purpose. You're sort of like, you've been invited by the city to come visit, you know, and stand on stage and entertain like 200 people that live there. So yeah, great times. It was really almost all fun. And we had very few actual problems or crises or, you know, I don't, I don't ever remember it being a drag. It's just that kind of wrapped up for a few different reasons,near the end.
GGRMS: Now, after you wrapped it up, as history would show, it wouldn't go away. People would still discover you and the temptation to start it up or revisit or reissue would come back. Can you just maybe explain was there a moment when you realized, oh, this thing is going to go go on and on and on as far as reaching people, the legacy, I suppose?
Micheal Lachowski: I'll let Vanessa answer that . Curtis will sound like a 14 year old guy, just being super excited and just flabbergasted that people still care about Pylon like now. He says that. He says that now, just like he did like eight years or 10 years ago, when we got back together and played in New York and stuff before Randy passed away in 2009. And I'm with him. I mean, I just think it's like perpetually surprising that it keeps generating. But Vanessa has, you know, spent more time around our fans, in person and communicating with them online and stuff. The continuity and the resurrection of interest from prior fans is more understood by Vanessa combined with the younger people that she's learned are, you know, still coming to the music for the first time and also responding.
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: So yeah, I'm very grateful for the continued attention. I'd say, it's, several things that happened. You mentioned both of these before, the fact that R.E.M. recorded a single with one of our songs. They were one of the biggest bands in the world. I mean, that is such a huge compliment. And then the movie Athens, Georgia Inside/Out.. we got back together, recorded another record, we broke up formally for a longer period of time, and then got back together for fun. Even though we had offers to play shows in New York, and then San Francisco and Los Angeles at thePart-Time Punks Festival.Then when Randy passed away, you know, that was the end of Pylon. Randy and I also had a recording project called Super Cluster, which was for music that was coming into my head, that was not Pylon type material. It was, just a totally different kind of music. It was acoustic and electric together. A lot more people, as many as nine or 11 at one point. Then that kind of petered away. One of my band mates from that project, Jason Nesmith, was in charge of putting together the music for a local festival here called Art Rocks Athens. And he invited me to come and sing anything I wanted. And because the festival was supposed to show the connection between art and music and Athens between 1975 and 85, I gave it some thought and said, I want to do some Pylon music. You know, he was just kind of flabbergasted. I said, you're going to have to help me put a band together, because, you know, I don't have a band right now. Curtis was gone or whatever working. Michael didn't seem that much into it at the time, so we played and… I did get Michael up to play bass..We had a drummer for one song who had been our sound person, and that was called the Pylon reenactment society, which was a joke, We'd had maybe 15 years there that we'd been broken up. We called ourselves the Pylon historical reenactment society as kind of a joke because we had to relearn the material like we were a cover band. So I shortened it. That went really well. People just went bananas. Well, the next year they did the festival again. But this time it had more of a focus on photography and film. And they said, you can come back. You'll have more time. And so Jason helped me put a band together. And I beefed it up a little. I added a pianist named Damon Denton, because I wanted to do some songs from Chomp. Some of those had keyboard parts on there, you know, really easy keyboard parts. And, Kay Stanton, on bass, who'd been with me in Supercluste, and Jason on guitar, who'd been with me in Supercluster.Then we found a great drummer, Joe Rowe, he played with The Glands.
We played half an hour and that went over really, really well. We got offered to open for Dressy Bessy, for four dates in North Carolina, Atlanta and Athens. After that, we just continue to get offers. At these concerts, I would see, for instance, in Nashville, half the audience had black X's on their hands. And I was like, why did they have X's? Oh, they're underage, which meant they were all under 18. That was half the audience. And they were just going bananas. And so I saw that everywhere we went, Seattle, New York, DC, Florida, California, Detroit, at these various festivals, we were invited to play clubs. I'd see an audience that was very young and I would also see younger musicians,who loved Pylon. And then I would see people that were about my age, or a little younger, you know, like in the 40s to 60s realm. And it was just amazing, you know, that we had such a a broad range of people. I had no idea we had that many younger fans that had gotten into Pylon. The last year we played at Primavera. And actually one of the bands that we played with was Chandra. And they have a lot of Canadian musicians in that particular band. And they were very excited to be playing with us. I just love them. We had plans this spring, we were going to go on a tour of the Southeast with Chandra… I just finished booking it and then COVID hit. So sometime in the future, maybe we can get together and do that. But you know, it's just, it's just been amazing.
GGRMS: So in 2007, when James Murphy and DFA Records re-released Chomp and Gyrate, obviously it was sort of like a moment where a younger generation was about to discover your music. But now with Box, it's a much more extensive package. How involved were you guys in the process of assembling it? And I'm wondering if there was any revelations you might have had about your catalogue or the legacy of Pylon that maybe had never hit you prior to this?
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: Well, found a lot of songs I've totally forgotten about. You know, for instance, on the Razz tape, but you know, Jason Neismith, who's my good friend from PRS and Supercluster, he's also an audio engineer. He went to Berkeley School of Music. That's what he does. He works at a studio here in town. Hesaid to me, like maybe two and a half, three years ago, if you ever want to put out this material, if you ever want to reissue, please consider me.That had been in. the back of my mind since 2010 or so. When I noticed that our vinyl product was very expensive and hard to find, people were always writing me, "Where do we get it?" So about two years ago, Jason and I started assembling all the mix tapes we could find with some help from Henry Ovens. They started ferreting out and going on leads, like detective work to find out what happened to live show tapes because, you know, there's some people that were always recording us live. And in the process of that, I heard stuff that had been lost. I thought it'd been totally lost… and performances that I was just like, "Wow, I forgot about that." Or, "Wow, that's pretty good. I mean, the audio quality, I don't know, but that performance, wow, that's great." At first, when we were making the proposal, we had some help from Bill Levenson, who was kind of a box set guru. He put out Crossroads, for instance, and VU and whatnot.He's a friend of Jason's and Jason had done some mastering for him. He came in to give us some advice, you know, of how to approach labels with this box set idea. At first, I envisioned that it was going to be like Gyrate and Chomp. And then there would be two albums of like extra type recorded music that would be, more rarities and also all of our singles. Our first single, "Cool Dub" is not on Gyrate, you know, that's like some art student type decision we made. They already have that single. We were going to have this be all new music on this record. So we were going to put our singles and, you know, I had, amassed quite a bit of stuff to decide from. And we had an idea of putting maybe three, maybe four songs from this Razz tape, which had surfaced because Jason was friends with Chris Rasmussen. They played music trivia together. And Chris had told him about it. And I've forgotten about this taping, to be honest. Randy knew about it though, because he never really talked about it with me. But there's one song from it on the DFA compilation that you're talking about called "Functionality." So we have this together. We settled on the label. We were signed in with New West Records. Brody Brock, who's the executive producer of the box set, he heard these songs from Razz Tape, he was intrigued and wanted to hear the whole thing. When he heard it, he said, "We just need to have this be one free standing album." And so that kind of scrapped some of the other stuff. But in retrospect, it's a very good decision because it paints a really clear picture of what these four art students were up to in their studio. And also how we sounded live at the time. We really were, we were pretty raw, but we were also pretty together. So I'm real happy with it.
GGRMS: And Michael, you were a graphic designer. Are you still our graphic designer?
Micheal Lachowski: Yeah, it turns out I have done a ton of graphic design. I never wanted to, like when I was in art school, I was studying photography. Photography in the 70s was just barely given any kind of true legitimacy as a minor form. I pretty much taught myself everything about photography that I really needed to know technically. I get to the University of Georgia and enroll in the art program. My teacher, unfortunately for me, he called it photographic design. Like he treated photography as a design outlet. And so the curriculum for that major was involved basically crossing over from fine art over to a different building to go to the graphic design department and study with a bunch of people that want to be graphic designers and take like three graphic design classes. I hated that. Although I made friends over there, it was a different, it was a totally different crowd, though. I mean, they look different, dress different, and they definitely listen to different music. They would listen to FM radio all day in the studios and at night… by choice. And it was like pop music or something, or rock or something. I don't know what it was, but I couldn't, I wasn't into that. The irony of, and so me wanting to be in to fine art, it meant that I just kind of went through the motions when it came to my photography degree.
I put most of my passion and energy into the other stuff, like the independent study class that Vanessa and I got to know each other in. Doing drawings and doing gorilla like installations with sprinklers and stuff like that in the yard. So when it came time when we were in a band and, now we need to design a record cover or a poster. It turned out that I, I knew how to, I knew I had to take a class called Art for Reproduction, just to learn how to do the mechanicals for reproduction in that era, which involved Zip-a-Tone, Half-Tone Screens and stuff like that. I ended up working on our graphics. I didn't exclusively control what art we used, we used Randy’s art …a photo by a guy in Utah that took the picture of the dinosaur on Chomp and things like that. But yeah, I've always been involved in our look and that carried over to this project. Some of the ideas were certainly from Brody, like having the idea to hire somebody to write a history of the band that threads throughout that book. It was his idea to go big on the book, to go 200 pages with a hardbound cover. That provided a huge canvas that we've never had before for images. And I really enjoy the fact that there's so many images from our time, like the band in black and white, a lot of black and white photos that kind of sort of helped me remember that that used to be the norm for photography, or at least was a lot more prevalent because of how things were reproduced and just how expensive color would have been. The book is filled with ephemera of our stuff, our things and objects, posters, process, graphic design process. I love it. I worked with Henry Owings, who had worked on a box set for New West Records and did a all the design, but did a book for that one too, for the band, The Glands from Athens. So he was up and ready to roll like he he took care of all the nitty gritty and worked real well with me on that on that sort of the design direction and some of the content. I worked on a good bit of the some design elements in it. So I really like it. I'm real excited about the package. I mean, the combination of four albums and this nice slip case and this big giant book.
GGRMS: It looks beautiful. I think it does keep the aesthetic with the imagery, your sort of minimalist philosophy that you know, you could trace back to the very origins of the band…. just for the record, if you guys ever put out a t-shirt that says Feasable Rock, I would buy one.
Micheal Lachowski: Oh yeah. That's a great idea.
GGRMS: As far as when you first started, I had read that your approach was a “zero fuss sense of practicality”. And then of course, you coin the term feasible rock.
Micheal Lachowski: I don't really know how that ended up being our deal. It's sort of the way we function. We didn't, get too excited.We didn't view ourselves as being like for going big. We didn't have a self image of us as potential rock stars that wanted to become rock stars, There was a bit of this imposter syndrome or whatever where we knew we didn't really fit in because we were art students and we didn't know anything about how to be musicians. Randy would change my strings on my bass until he died, because he would rather have it done right. I may not have to ask him every step of the way, like, am I doing this right? So we definitely had like differentiation of duties, the four of us. And that's why we worked together well as a band. Touring for us, I think just felt effortless. I mean, we made enough money that we could stay in hotels instead of sleeping on people's floors. And we ate like three meals a day, roughly with the rest of the band and our roadie, like almost every single time. We didn't go our own way. We were always together, just like sitting down to every meal together and such. So yeah, it was great.
GGRMS: I can't thank you enough. This is amazing. It was a really, a real treat. And my teenage self would not believe that I would be talking to you right now. So I really do appreciate it. Is there anything else that you feel you want to add that hasn't been said?
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: I would say if anyone is visiting the Athens, Georgia area, there is an exhibit of the ephemera, some of which is in the book, but we have a lot more that we donated to the special collections at the University of Georgia. It's the Brown Media Center. And it's also, that's where the Peabody Awards come from. It's from UGA. A lot of people don't realize that. So that exhibit is up until May next year. If you happen to be in the southeast, it might be worth your while to come over if you're visiting Athens to drop by. You will have to wear masks, social distancing and all that type of thing.
GGRMS: I had the opportunity of interviewing Zeke Sayer from The Humms, who runs Gypsy Farm Records out in Livonia, Georgia. And I believe Vanessa, you were there possibly at one point with the guys that made Athens, GA Inside/Out. I think there was a possibility of a part two and they were recording some sort of footage with you there?
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: Yes, that's exactly right.
GGRMS: Yeah, we've struck up a friendship of sorts since then. And I've proposed an idea to him that maybe post COVID, I'm looking at getting some grant money to try to bring some Montreal bands over to Athens. And maybe the possibility of having some Athens bands come back to Montreal and play some shows here, like an exchange of some sort. So if I do find my way to Athens, I will definitely check out the exhibit.
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: And then you can also go down and look at the Pylon plaque that's in the sidewalk now as of a few months ago. You’r talking about your teenage self like, being blown away to be able to talk to somebody from Pylon. I mean, I'm blown away that the town, would put a damn plaque, you know, it's gorgeous. It's one of the first 10 of the inaugural establishment of an Athens music Walk of Fame. And so it's not, it's not the final 10, they're going to add to it. But we made the first cut, which is quite an honor. It's an honor no matter when or how many they put in there. It's just fantastic. So that's, that's spread around an eight block area downtown with like 10 different bands being honored. Yeah, including Vic Chesnut, who had a big Montreal connection with Constellation records.
GGRMS: I saw him on his last tour.
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay: I did too. He played in Athens not too long before he died in November. I think there were members of Godspeed, You Black Emperor and some others there along, just a lot of incredible musicians. That's one of the top five concerts I've ever seen. It was just amazing. Yeah, it was definitely one of the most powerful or emotional concert experiences I think I ever had. It was just gut-wrenching, unbelievable. The plaque for him is right as you're like trying to get, into the 40 Watt Club. So you know, you almost have to step on it or over it to go in..
GGRMS: Thank you very much guys.
Vanessa Briscoe-Hay:Thank you, Ian.
Micheal Lachowski: Thank you. Really fun.