Lemon Drops
An inventive new glossy that’s big on ambition serves up a taste of edgy, pop culture–infused art.
- The cover of Lemon's debut issue.
In the bar at the 290-year-old Colonial Inn in Concord, Kevin Grady and Colin Metcalf lampoon a certain overplayed TV ad, the one where a guy gets dumped and talks to a candy bar. “Completely mad,” Metcalf says—and just the sort of banality that shamed the ad creatives into launching something a little less, well, lame. Conceived, produced, and printed over just eight months (“My personal life is in shambles,” jokes Grady), their Concord-made magazine Lemon pays Warholian homage to pop culture’s darker sides, and caters to no one, least of all advertisers. That it came to be in a town so preppy its main street is literally lined with lacrosse sticks seems as wonderfully unlikely as the magazine itself.
A floor beneath the inn’s “haunted” Room 24—where parts of Lemon’s “supernatural”-themed debut were shot—Metcalf issues a warning about print’s endangered state. In order to survive, he says, “magazines need to be more legit.” To the battlefield Lemon brings a high-concept, high-gloss experience-in-print. Q&As take the form of comic strips, product pages hype Polish movie posters, and lemon-scented inserts make good on the magazine’s editorial mission (and its name)—to give readers an entirely sensory way to take in pop culture. “Some people don’t know what they’re looking at,” admits Grady, flipping to one of the debut’s three full-page psychedelic “op art” swirls. “But that’s part of how we draw them in.” So far, it’s working: Curious readers snapped up Lemon’s February premiere. Newsstand orders doubled for this summer’s second issue—themed “espionage” and shot largely at the Omni Parker House—prompting Borders to select it for featured display in its stores.
And that’s okay, because even Grady and Metcalf realize a magazine can’t survive without some corporate backing (the new issue features $44,000 worth of ads, but the brands—which include Puma, Paul Frank, and Volkswagen—are all Lemon-approved, and the ads themselves Lemon-designed). “There is this idea that if you do something that’s successful, you’re selling out,” Metcalf says. The Lemon guys want to do what they love and make money, too—nothing mad about that.
A floor beneath the inn’s “haunted” Room 24—where parts of Lemon’s “supernatural”-themed debut were shot—Metcalf issues a warning about print’s endangered state. In order to survive, he says, “magazines need to be more legit.” To the battlefield Lemon brings a high-concept, high-gloss experience-in-print. Q&As take the form of comic strips, product pages hype Polish movie posters, and lemon-scented inserts make good on the magazine’s editorial mission (and its name)—to give readers an entirely sensory way to take in pop culture. “Some people don’t know what they’re looking at,” admits Grady, flipping to one of the debut’s three full-page psychedelic “op art” swirls. “But that’s part of how we draw them in.” So far, it’s working: Curious readers snapped up Lemon’s February premiere. Newsstand orders doubled for this summer’s second issue—themed “espionage” and shot largely at the Omni Parker House—prompting Borders to select it for featured display in its stores.
And that’s okay, because even Grady and Metcalf realize a magazine can’t survive without some corporate backing (the new issue features $44,000 worth of ads, but the brands—which include Puma, Paul Frank, and Volkswagen—are all Lemon-approved, and the ads themselves Lemon-designed). “There is this idea that if you do something that’s successful, you’re selling out,” Metcalf says. The Lemon guys want to do what they love and make money, too—nothing mad about that.
Originally published in Boston magazine, July 2006
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