* * *

  —

  Music consumed the better part of Peter Buck’s attention in college. He pledged the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and sometimes played with some of the other members in the frat house, and could also be seen strumming in his dorm room or outside on the grass. He did most of his playing on his own—he knew a lot of Monkees songs, a friend remembers—and almost always stuck to strumming the chords, which led some of the others to assume he wasn’t good enough to attempt a lead guitar part. It didn’t seem to bother him or diminish his interest in playing, particularly when a song got under his skin and he could sit with his guitar and stereo and play with what he heard, following along until he got to a sticky spot, when he’d pick up the needle and move it back, constantly picking up and dropping the needle, listening again. Repeating the process over and over until he’d figured out exactly how the song went.

  * * *

  —

  Sometime in the spring term of his sophomore year, he had enough. Thinking of the beatniks, Jack Kerouac, and, perhaps, the music-above-all subculture surrounding the Grateful Dead, whose music he still adored, Peter packed a bag, picked up his guitar, and hitchhiked to California, settling in San Luis Obispo, a small town near the Central California coast. Getting a room in a house full of hippies, he found a job washing dishes and spent a few months living the dropout life. The freedom agreed with him, but then his new roommates began to get on his nerves. All that weed smoking and the jam-band shit they played grated against his sensibilities, and when they reacted badly to his import copy of the Sex Pistols’ single “God Save the Queen,” he figured it was time to hit the road again. Back in Atlanta in the fall of 1977, Peter resumed classes at Emory, but he cushioned the blow by taking a job as a clerk at Doo Dah Records, a shop he’d frequented near Emory. He realized quickly that being on the other side of the counter, counseling kids who thought they wanted Judas Priest that they’d actually be more into the Ramones, felt like a calling.

  * * *

  —

  Going to concerts had come to mean nearly as much to him as the records that had defined his childhood and adolescence. Peter saw his first show in 1971, when he caught Leon Russell and his band at Atlanta’s Municipal Auditorium.[1] From that point onward, the sound of live music invigorated him so much, he’d see nearly anything that came to town. Southern rock, mainstream rock, folk, jazz, anything. He found something to love about nearly all of it. But the real revelation had come when he saw the New York Dolls opening for Mott the Hoople in 1973 at the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium.

  An early precursor to both punk and glam rock, the all-male Dolls wore androgynous clothes and caked their faces with women’s makeup while playing blistering rock songs about drugs, sex, and the variety of weird characters they encountered on the trashiest streets of New York City. Onstage they were a train wreck: stoned, stumbling, rarely in sync, perpetually on the verge of exploding into ruin. And for Peter, gaping from the center of the restive crowd, it was thrilling. The power of the performance coming not from professionalism or musicality, but from the complete absence of those things. What it proved, beyond an eyeshadow of a doubt, was that every word of their songs—“Pills,” “Trash,” “Personality Crisis,” on and on—had been absolutely fucking real. The Dolls were just as fucked up as the people they sang about. “They weren’t stars,” Peter said later. “They staggered around and missed chords. But the magic was there.”[2]

  The shambolic but incandescent opening set the New York Dolls played that night, Peter reflected later, gave him a shove in an entirely new direction. He bought the band’s just-released first album, then a few months later got a subscription to The Village Voice, the same New York newspaper that would soon be filling Michael Stipe’s imagination with the new artier, harder-edged artists.

  * * *

  —

  Real, gob-stained British punk rock came to Atlanta on January 5, 1978, when the Sex Pistols came to play the Great Southeast Music Hall, a five-hundred-capacity club located in, of all places, a shopping mall. It was the controversial British band’s first American show, the start of a hotly anticipated tour that would also prove to be the final act of the group’s brief, explosive career. Excited by the prospect of not just seeing the world’s most notorious punk band but also being among the first Americans to have the privilege, Peter reserved a pair of tickets. He got to the venue just before the show was set to begin, only to be told that the management had underestimated the number of reporters, photographers, and other media folk who needed to get inside and had been forced to give Peter’s tickets to one of the professionals. Peter’s angry protestations didn’t have much of an impact, but when the friend he’d brought with him, a fellow he recalled as both large and rambunctious, bowled over the doorman and dashed inside, Peter saw his opportunity and followed close on his heels.

  He made it inside just as the Pistols came onstage. “Unhh, my name’s John an’ this is the Sex Pistols,” declared lead singer Johnny Rotten, by way of introduction. After a moment they launched into “God Save the Queen,” a song nearly unrivaled in their catalog for both outrage and, surprisingly enough, catchiness, with Rotten’s snarls—God save the queen / This fascist regime!—coming over Steve Jones’s crunchy but tuneful guitar.

  Peter kept in motion, one eye on the stage, the other on the pair of bouncers who had tailed him into the club, determined to chase down the gate-crashers and drag them back out again. After everything he’d read about the Pistols, how wild they were, how dangerous, what Peter saw onstage seemed like just another rock ’n’ roll show. Johnny Rotten was an electric front man and knew how to rile up the crowd. “Forget about starin’ at us, just fuckin’ dance,” he said after the opening song. “We’re all ugly an’ we know it.” But so what? Peter had read how the band’s manager, the morally neutral provocateur Malcolm McLaren, had hatched the Sex Pistols as an idea before finding the performers to animate his concept. “The angry Monkees,”[3] Peter called them later.[4] Which didn’t bother him, exactly—Peter loved the Monkees—but by the time the bouncers caught up with him, dragging him out of the club and hurling him indelicately onto the pavement, he felt less disappointed about missing the rest of the show.

  * * *

  —

  Peter made it through the fall quarter at Emory, then dropped out again to devote himself to the record store. His parents weren’t happy about his abandoning school, seemingly forever, but when his bosses at Doo Dah’s offered him a bigger job with their record distribution business, he took it, thinking that being on the path to some kind of career would at least make him seem like a young man with a direction in life. Thus began Peter’s short career as a rack jobber—the guy who lugs boxes of records from the warehouse to the record stores, collects the unsold albums, and then hauls them back to the warehouse.

  If Peter imagined that working anywhere in the record business would be as much fun as what he had already been doing, he soon realized he’d been mistaken. Rather than spending his days listening to music and talking about records, now he was living behind the wheel of Doo Dah’s delivery wagon, crawling through traffic on the freeways, getting lost on the city streets, and dealing with crabby employees in small-town department stores that kept just a few racks for that moment’s biggest hits. Worse, he had nothing for entertainment except what he could find on the radio dial. What he began to realize, after not very long, was that he hated it. After a particularly stultifying day on the road, he resigned his position in typical Buckian fashion, by pulling the company car into its space in the warehouse parking lot, leaving the keys inside, locking the door, and walking away, never to return.

  Peter had long since gotten to know the clerks at the nearby record stores, and when the owner of the Wax ’n’ Facts shop, a recent University of Georgia graduate named Danny Beard, asked if he’d help reserve a room on the Emory campus for a band from Athens to perform in, Peter was happy to help. Beard knew the band—the B-52’s—from his UGA days, and though they had played only a few parties and one or two public engagements, they already had booked a few shows in New York and wanted to get a little more experience before taking their shot in Gotham. Peter helped reserve the Coke Room, in the Alumni Memorial University Center, a function room with space for a midsize party, and programmed the pre-show music with favorites from the Jam and Gene Vincent. The Bs showed up in all their eccentric finery, the wigs and bargain-basement instruments, trailing a flock of UGA students and other friends from Athens, and with the doors flung open and word of a party afoot, the place filled up with collegiate revelers who greeted the band with cheers, then danced happily to their joyously eccentric songs.

  The crowd from Athens melded easily with the Emory students. Peter stood out, due in part to his being a sort of host for the event. He was also taller than most everyone and radiated…something…that drew the eye and stuck in the memory. “He looked like he always does,” recalls Mark Cline, the UGA art student who would eventually cofound Love Tractor. “A leather jacket, jeans, T-shirt, Converse, his hair below his ears. And that’s how we met. We started talking to him, and he knew his rock ’n’ roll, though he hadn’t been in a band yet. I came with Sam Seawright, and I told him, ‘Hey, he really knows his shit!’ Next thing I knew, Peter was in Athens. And he fit with everybody else.”[5]

  * * *

  —

  After Peter quit his job with Doo Dah’s distribution outfit, he went down the street to Wuxtry Records, another cornucopia of new and used records, music magazines, music books, posters, T-shirts, everything that mattered, and asked co-owner Mark Methe if he had any openings. They had met before: Methe knew exactly who Peter was, knew what he was, which is to say, one of them. A record store guy. He didn’t have any openings at this store, but had Peter ever been to Athens, where UGA is? Because they had two stores there and he could definitely use him, if he didn’t mind moving. Peter didn’t mind at all and took the job. When could he start? His brother, Ken, was already in Athens, so he’d have somewhere to crash till he found his own place. He packed his records and books into boxes, lugged them into his car, tossed in his guitar and amp, jumped into the driver’s seat, and off he went. Ninety minutes later he was in downtown Athens, where his future awaited.

  12

  A Certain Amount of Chaos

  Michael Stipe dances feverishly at the microphone, arms all over the place, hair flopping wildly, spitting out his lyrics like urgent messages: Baby, I, I, I—don’t wanna hang around with yewwwww / Baby, I, I, I—got better things to dewwww…Mike Mills is also in constant motion just to Stipe’s right, fingering his bass, bobbing his shoulders, then bopping back toward the drums to catch the eye of Bill Berry, who flails his arms to keep the beat. Meanwhile, Peter Buck performs the rituals of the rock guitarist, ducking here, sliding there, pausing during the song’s middle section to focus on the arpeggiated chords. The song’s “Baby I,” one of the new originals they’ve been cranking out, and when it ends Bill rolls thunder on his floor tom to launch into an overdrive version of “Route 66” and the music erupts again. It ends slightly more than two minutes later, and they pause long enough for Michael to shout that the next song is for Cindy, and then they’re off into “Scheherazade,” another new original. You say you make her feel all right / She says she wants you, but not tonight…This is followed by another new original, also played at breakneck speed, and then another and another.

  * * *

  —

  It’s the late spring of 1980, only weeks since the church party in April, but suddenly this new band, only recently dubbed R.E.M., is the talk of the town. It happened that quickly. R.E.M.’s first headlining show at Tyrone’s, on May 13, 1980, drew a bigger crowd to the club than they had played to a week earlier opening for the Brains. An even larger audience came to see both bands play a UGA student event at the Memorial Hall Ballroom on campus (the show was relocated from the school’s Legion Field due to rain) on May 15, and R.E.M. returned to Tyrone’s on the 21st to do another headlining set, to an even more packed club. When they played their first show at the 40 Watt, the do-it-yourself venue Curtis Crowe had launched above a sandwich shop downtown (which had since moved to a larger location a few doors down College Avenue), on May 30, they filled the place.

  When R.E.M. headlined the Mad Hatter, a larger, more mainstream nightclub close to campus in downtown Athens, on June 3, the place filled up with people nobody had ever seen at an Athens art-rock band show. Jocks, preppies, guys in T-shirts branded with the Greek characters from fraternity row. All of them dancing and cheering and pumping their fists in the air like they were at an REO Speedwagon concert. The shows began to draw throngs, not just inside the clubs but on the street outside, too. A whole scene: some people waiting to get in, others hoping to catch some music through an open window, others just seeing the crowd, wondering what was going on. The excitement about the new band was palpable and, to some members of the scene, infuriating. When Pylon’s Randy Bewley and Michael Lachowski got to the 40 Watt show at the end of May and saw how jammed it was, they stood on the street, sputtering to the photographer Terry Allen. The last time their band had played the 40 Watt, it wasn’t anything like this! Why are all these people going to see R.E.M. and not us? “Pylon would get fifty people and R.E.M. would get two hundred–plus,” Allen recalls. “You couldn’t even fit inside. We were standing on the street hearing it echoing.”[1]

  * * *

  —

  Word of the hot new band began to echo beyond Athens. Three days after the Mad Hatter show, they ventured to Atlanta to make their big-city debut at the Warehouse, at the bottom of a bill supporting a band called the Space Heaters. Back in Athens the next day, the band went to the WUOG radio studios for a four-way on-air interview, then performed again that night at an outdoor show in nearby High Shoals, Georgia, opening for the southern boogie band Stillwater. They took most of June off, reuniting for a set at the Mad Hatter on the 30th, then launching into an ambitious July with a show at Atlanta’s Agora Ballroom, another 40 Watt appearance back home, then three more shows in Atlanta, starting with a lightly attended set at Hedgens Tavern, in the Buckhead neighborhood, then a pair of dates opening for the British political punk band Gang of Four at the 688 Club, a recently opened venue focused on punk and new wave bands. Given a capacity of about five hundred, it was a relatively small place, a tube-shaped room with bleachers on the side and an open floor where fans could crowd the stage, dance, and, if the mood took them, smash into one another in a southern approximation of slam dancing.

  The club’s core audience divided into three distinct tribes: an art-music crowd, a neo-rockabilly contingent, and a smaller number of hardcore fans. All shared the same animus toward mainstream rock and the local bands that played that sort of shit, so R.E.M.’s pair of opening sets raised eyebrows all around the room. Wasn’t that just a Monkees song, for fuck’s sake? But then again, the band drew from an intriguingly diverse, and cool, array of sources—not just the Monkees but also the Velvet Underground, Johnny Rivers, and Johnny Kidd & the Pirates. And there was a spirit to their renditions, a wild, joyous energy that separated them from all the other bands in Athens, in Atlanta, and everywhere else they went.

  Maybe it began with the rhythm section, the tight-but-flexible connection between Bill’s drums and Mike’s bass, the way they clicked together so naturally. And they played fast, ripping through the tunes at a high velocity that somehow didn’t blur their precision: the drums and bass in lockstep, the guitar chords and notes in place, Michael belting his vocal across the top with a kind of rockabilly inflection, all hiccups and gulps, that made him seem electrified, and all the more spellbinding.

  And as Mark Williams, the club’s newly hired disc jockey, noticed, it didn’t take long for the Athens band to start attracting an audience that went beyond the 688’s usual punky crowd. By the time R.E.M. got back to the club for a pair of headlining shows at the end of the summer, Williams saw a wide array of new faces, not just the UGA gang who came down from Athens but also clean-cut collegiate types from Atlanta and mainstream rock fans who’d heard about the group from friends who had either been at an earlier show or seen them somewhere else. Pylon, the Side Effects, and Love Tractor had also done well at the club, but, Williams recalls, R.E.M. was on another level. “Their ascension was pretty rapid compared to other bands,” he says.[2]

  * * *

  —

  Bertis Downs IV, the law student who came to the Koffee Klub show in mid-April, had been drawn largely by his friendships with Bill Berry, whom he’d gotten to know when they were both on the UGA concert production committee, and Peter Buck, with whom he’d traded fanboy talk about Neil Young albums over the Wuxtry shop counter. Having two friends in a band was enough to draw Downs to the show late on a slow Saturday night, but what he heard in the forty-five minutes before the Athens police shut the place down excited him more than any live music he’d ever seen anyone play. Downs became a fixture at the shows around Athens, and once he’d gotten to know the other band members, he became comfortable enough to tell them how much promise he thought they had. You guys could be bigger than the Beatles, he said, with only a moderate amount of overstatement. Downs also had an offer. Though he was only a second-year law student and hadn’t studied entertainment law in a formal way, he knew the basics of contracts and business law. He didn’t have any ambitions to get into the music business, but if they ever had questions about a contract or other business arrangement someone wanted them to sign, he’d be happy to look it over, for free.