Or maybe they didn’t have to do that much thinking. “It was astounding to them,” recalls the temporary road manager Peter Jesperson. “They were so excited.”[7] Not that they talked about it in public. In fact, Peter Buck made a point of saying the opposite. “It was boring,” he scoffed to the Los Angeles Times a year later. “As close to having a day job as I’ve come in rock ’n’ roll.”[8]

  True enough, the band’s twenty-minute set at Shea Stadium came in the midst of a rainstorm, at the bottom of a bill that also included Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. But they nonetheless rose to the occasion and gained a respectful, even enthusiastic, hearing, according to Jesperson. Ian Copeland agreed, telling British writer Johnny Black that he was astonished to realize that the kids he’d befriended when one of them was a teenage office boy at Paragon Booking in Macon were playing Shea Stadium and getting across to such a mammoth crowd. “When they played ‘Radio Free Europe,’ the whole crowd went fucking berserk,” he said. “That was the moment I finally realized, ‘Shit! This isn’t just my buddies out there. This band is going to make me rich! And I’m going to make them rich!’ ”[9]

  19

  A Collective Fist

  This is how it happens. You set out with your friends on a road trip. Climb into the car, crank up the tunes, stop-start your way through the lights to the highway, and then hit the on-ramp and off you go. Trees and clouds, trucks and cars, crack the window and feel the warm southern wind in your hair. You’re young and on the move, you’re going somewhere, anything could happen.

  * * *

  —

  At the start of 1983 it seemed like a flood tide had gushed into town, sending all of Athens’s bands, the clubs, the artists, the scenesters and random passersby, bobbing gaily on its current. In January they drifted into the slick pages of People magazine, of all places. That bit of absurdity began a few months earlier when the magazine’s editors, from the heights of the Time-Life Building in midtown Manhattan, sat down to ponder the current state of rock ’n’ roll. In search of a happening scene, they turned their ears south and noticed the racket coming from the B-52’s’ hometown. Suddenly it seemed like half the bands playing in New York were skinny college kids from that little town nobody had even heard of last year. Pylon, R.E.M., Love Tractor, Oh-OK, Art in the Dark, the Squalls, the Side Effects…all of them rumbling up I-95 like a Confederate army of quirky new wavers. So the assigning wires were composed, bureaus notified, correspondents and photographers dispatched.

  Two reporters showed up in town, notebooks unfurled, to hear all about the bands and the clubs, the spirit of art and fun and how little anyone cared to have hits or money or anything like that. “No one has an eye on vast success,” Jimmy Ellison, late of the Side Effects and now of Group 3, was quoted as saying. A little recognition was never a bad thing, though, so when the photographer called for musicians to gather at the Revolutionary War monument for Elijah Clarke, right there in the middle of Broad Street, near campus, more than three dozen showed up, many toting instruments, as requested. They posed yearbook style, sitting, squatting, and standing in rows.

  To look at them now is to see a lot of nice young people exhibiting good manners. They are neatly if casually dressed, in jeans, shirtsleeves, and sweatshirts. Many wield guitars, basses, an accordion, a clarinet, a banjo, something that might be a didgeridoo. They are young, serious, quizzical, maybe a touch smirky. Did anyone notice, or care, that they were, to a person, all white? Some faces are familiar, but the ones you’d recognize immediately are missing—off on tour, thousands of miles from Athens already. There’s no caption information and now the image has gone a bit blurry. You might not even see the guy in the third row, a little to the right, in the black silk top hat. Look closely and you’ll also notice the slight tilt of his head, and how long and graceful his fingers are. And also that his entire face is shielded by a cartoonish wolf mask. What was that song again? Here’s a house to put wolves out the door…Perched at the center of everything and also hidden from view. Jeremy Ayers, as he lived and breathed.

  * * *

  —

  The same week the People issue came out, in mid-January, R.E.M. played a pair of their increasingly rare hometown shows at the I&I Club, in downtown Athens. The place was packed with friends, neighbors, folks the farther-and-farther-flung musicians hadn’t seen in months. A few songs in, Michael took a moment to read through some announcements—coming shows from friends’ bands, including Boat Of, which featured his friend Carol Levy. And speaking of Carol, it was her birthday, and she was right there dancing in front of the stage, so how about wishing her a happy birthday! She and Michael had met, along with so many of the others, in art classes, but she had also lived in Reed Hall alongside Mike, Bill, Kathleen O’Brien, and all the rest.

  Levy was relatively petite, but she cast a long shadow around Athens. Her photographs drew attention, and so did her strikingly androgynous style, and the music she made in her avant-garde trio. Levy had a natural way of making connections, of putting people together, of following her star no matter where it led or what anyone might have thought or said about it. She had shortish dark hair and full lips, and dark eyes that flashed with intelligence, wit, and, when she smiled, the best kind of mischief. Michael led the crowd in a chorus of “Happy Birthday,” and the voices rang out. Levy laughed and waved back across the footlights.

  * * *

  —

  They met somewhere, probably an art department party or event, and were drawn together. Michael and Jeremy. Ayers was a dozen years older, but gentle, prankish, and very alive to the moment, every moment. He was thin, sandy-haired, and strikingly beautiful. “He was a spectacular-looking person…very ethereal, and he always had a poetic sense about him,” says Jim Herbert, the painter/filmmaker/art professor.[1] Ayers didn’t take classes at the university, but his dad was a well-known religion professor, and he started hanging out around the art department as a teenager in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s Ayers moved to New York, visited Andy Warhol’s Factory headquarters, and caught the eye of the artist, who saw the striking young Georgian as Silva Thin, a superstar creation whose face was alabaster smooth and white, his lips ruby red, his brow darkened and arching, his eyes soft but affectless. Ayers orbited through Warhol’s gay art celebrity galaxy until disaster struck: a pool party he attended was attacked by vicious malefactors armed with baseball bats. Physically and emotionally battered, Ayers returned to Athens and gentler climes.

  He was sweet and soft-spoken, a fount of art and music whose greatest medium was other people. Befriending them, inspiring them, connecting them to their future partners in art, music, and life. In late 1976 he invited Ricky and Cindy Wilson, Keith Strickland, Fred Schneider, and Kate Pierson to make some music, helped them set up, and then put his coat on to leave. No, he explained, he wasn’t in the band…They were the band. That was the B-52’s. Ayers wrote the lyrics to “52 Girls,” on the band’s first album, and contributed ideas and inspiration to an array of other Athens artists and musicians.

  Michael grew close to Ayers and soon began to evolve. The singer’s clothes grew more spacious, and he took to wearing them in layers. His hair got longer and often fell over his face, a curtain behind which he’d withdraw when he felt nervous. He’d always wrestled with shyness, but there were layers of meaning in his diffidence. After experiencing how magnetic Ayers’s stillness could be, Michael learned to say fewer words and to limit his movements, particularly onstage. To be the absent center while standing in full view. The front man nobody could touch or stop looking at. Born with a sexual orientation that did not conform to the lines drawn by a homophobic society, Michael discovered that taking shelter behind his hair allowed him to exist in the spotlight without disclosing or disguising his essential self. It also allowed him to make an aesthetic virtue out of necessity. His mystery was evocative and, at the same time, blank—a space where the listener could project her own story.

  * * *

  —

  Jeremy Ayers eventually formed a band to join. Limbo District was an avant-garde outfit. They wore antique clothes and made a clattering racket that sent casual observers rushing for the door. But, like Ayers, the other musicians were spellbindingly beautiful, and in 1983 they starred in and provided the soundtrack for one of Jim Herbert’s art films, a ten-minute collage of photos and stop-start action he called Carnival. The band members, in various states of Victorian dress and undress, disport next to a pond. In some shots they are made up like clowns. A horse appears, is mounted, then vanishes. The music clanks and spins, the vocal is gibberish, or in another language, and tuneless. Colors fade out, then in. The men are shirtless, muscular abdomens rippling. A woman wades into the water, first in a diaphanous sheet, then nude. Someone hoists an accordion, pulls at its bellows. A keyboard appears, a flute. Naked bodies, whirling music, rattles, bangs, and a thumping bass. Hey heeee, yah, yah, yah: that might be the lyrics at one point.

  * * *

  —

  On April 12, R.E.M. opened for the English Beat at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, and on April 13 the tour moved to upstate New York and the University of Rochester. A different city and a new venue every night. More faces, more music, more parties, beer, bowls of potato chips, pretzels, pills, and back into the van. Chilly dawns, spaced-out days, the van’s reek of gasoline, fast-food containers and dirty socks. Crowds, lights, music, and cheers, then back into the van, the familiar fetid waft, and dozing again to the hum of the wheels, the flashing lines on the highway, the next city, the next venue, the next crowd. The glow coming from the far side of the horizon, pulling them onward and onward and onward.

  * * *

  —

  Now everything was happening, and not just for R.E.M. On April 14 the band was on the highway in western New York, heading to Buffalo to join the English Beat at Buffalo State College. Down in Athens, Carol Levy, Mig Little, Rodger Lyle Brown, David Helmey, and Larry Marcus jumped into Little’s Toyota Corolla to drive to Atlanta for the Southeast premiere of Smithereens, the first film directed by Susan Seidelman. Her second effort, Desperately Seeking Susan, would be a smash hit in 1985, catapulting both Rosanna Arquette and Madonna to global stardom. Smithereens was a similar story, about a bourgeois New Jersey woman drawn to the punk demimonde in New York. The punk band the Feelies provided the soundtrack, and Richard Hell, the former bassist for the Voidoids, plays a musician named Eric. Hell was slated to appear at the showing and answer questions when it was over. Richard Hell! In the flesh! It was a glorious night, and when the film and Richard Hell talk were over, the Athens kids stopped for coffee, then piled back into the car in the highest spirits, gunning it up the dark highway on the way home to Athens.

  * * *

  —

  This is how it happens. You’re on the road with your friends, music is playing. Maybe it’s a new record, maybe it’s an old favorite. Maybe it’s something your friends made. So many Athens bands were making records in 1983. Love Tractor was about to release its second album, Pylon had a new one, R.E.M. got all that buzz with their EP and now their first full-length album was just out. Larry Marcus’s band Little Tigers had a single out, and there were others coming soon. Little’s band, the Squalls, were putting things together. Maybe they were listening to one of those records in the car, maybe it was cranked up, maybe they were singing along.

  The woman driving the car behind them was thirsty. She had a water bottle, but it was on the back seat, or maybe on the floor, and she couldn’t reach it. Not at first, so she reached back farther, really stretching out, not knowing that she was putting more pressure on the gas pedal, speeding closer to the car ahead of her. She was focused on her hand, on the elusive water bottle, on reaching just an inch farther so she could corral the thing and, finally, cool her tongue. What happened next happened in an instant. The thirsty woman’s car jolted forward, colliding with the rear of the car full of Athens kids. This sent it spinning, then flipping, over and over and over, at least five times. What was it like inside their car? A dream about a Ferris wheel, lights flashing in the darkness, then a nightmare. Secret stigma, reaping wheel, don’t get caught, don’t get caught.

  * * *

  —

  The lights, the music, the cheering, the road, more lights, more noise, horrible noise, then silence. The lights, the sirens, the crying, the moaning. The silence.

  This was how it happened.

  Carol Levy.

  Larry Marcus.

  * * *

  —

  Five months later, R.E.M. got back from their summer tour, including the supersize shows with the Police. Now it was September. They had a couple of weeks of rest, then got back into action in Athens with a show in the abandoned Stitchcraft Inc. factory, a cavernous building just across Oconee Street from the site of their first-ever show just forty-two months earlier. Splayed between their past and future, they opened with a jokey take of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” and salted the originals with a generous handful of rock ’n’ roll covers, including a few they’d first performed in the church that night in April 1980: “Secret Agent Man,” “Route 66,” “Wild Thing.” Michael led the crowd in “Happy Birthday” for a few friends who had September birthdays. It was an upbeat show, the band as happy and excited to see their friends in the crowd as the hometown crowd was to see them. They also debuted a few new songs, including one that opened the second set, a slow, sad tune with mournful if typically elliptical words.

  When the party lulls, if we fall by the side.

  Michael’s voice hanging in the air, Mike’s harmony dancing around him, Bill’s drums ticking like a clock, Peter’s guitar chiming gently, quizzically.

  I still like you, can you remember?

  This was how it sounded. Heartbroken, confused, loving. Mostly heartbroken.

  Will you be remembered? Will she be remembered?

  * * *

  —

  One night that October the telephone rang in Melanie Herrold’s mom’s house in Collinsville, Illinois. Michael’s bestie from high school, his fellow singer and partner in weirdness, in Rocky Horror, in rock ’n’ roll daydreaming. They hadn’t spoken in more than a year, maybe two years, but Melanie was home and recognized his voice immediately.

  I’m gonna be on David Letterman!

  “I was like, ‘What?! You fucker!’ ”

  He told her everything then, about his band, about the club shows, the van, the records, the insane experience of playing Shea, all of it. She tuned in the next night, Herrold and her mom in their little suburban living room, and there he was. Hair long and hanging in his eyes, face lowered, standing almost motionless at the microphone as he belted out “Radio Free Europe,” the other musicians bopping and moving around him. When Letterman stepped over to chat, Michael vanished from view, stepping back to sit on the drum riser. The host chatted with the guitarist and the bassist, then set up the band’s second song. Michael returned to the microphone, the musicians kicked in, and he was singing again.

  Herrold’s mom was beside herself: I can’t believe it! That boy babysat your nephew! Herrold was still chasing the dream too, singing in bands in St. Louis, in Los Angeles, then again in St. Louis. Nothing had taken, but she wasn’t done yet. Mike Stipe, meanwhile, was singing for millions of people on national TV.

  “I thought, He’s done it! That bastard’s done it!”[2]

  Mike’s voice, coming to her through the speaker of her mom’s TV. Amazing.

  I’m sorry…I’m sorry…

  He didn’t need to apologize to her. She was happy for him.

  * * *

  —

  Tom Smith felt differently.

  He was another art student–and–musician, one of Carol Levy’s bandmates in Boat Of. The band had broken up in the wake of her death, and though Michael had been close to the entire group, Smith saw what he was doing with R.E.M. and felt disgusted. He couldn’t abide the commerciality, couldn’t even tolerate Pylon making a record for Danny Beard’s little DB Records label. “He was incensed that we had sold out,” drummer Curtis Crowe recalls. “We’d made a record, and so that was a sellout. But we didn’t get anything for that record, and I was like, Huh, I thought there’d be more money in selling out!”[3] Pylon could have made more money. They could have opened for U2 in 1981 and played to thousands of people in big clubs and theaters all across America. Or they could have toured more heavily on their own, doing it like R.E.M. had done, working night after night to build a fan base in city after city after city. They could have gone on television, they could have pursued a major-label deal, or even a deal with a major indie like I.R.S. Records. They could have gone to the meetings, been taken to the dinners, shaken the hands, laughed at the jokes, and done what it takes to get there. They could have, they could have, they could have. Instead they took stock of themselves in mid-1983, of the work they’d done, the reviews they’d received, what lay ahead, and decided, Oh, screw it. Remember what Michael Lachowski and Randy Bewley said when they started? That this band wasn’t really a band as much as an art project about a band? Now it was time for the project to end. They set a final show for the Mad Hatter on December 1, had a great night, put down their instruments, and that was that.