Rehearsals with his other band kept on going too. The now four-piece band worked up a set of mostly punk and new wave covers with a few offbeat choices from more mainstream acts they liked. Dubbing themselves the Bad Habits, one of the names Michael had suggested for the Jotz, they posed for a photo comically demonstrating common vices—Haynes gnawing on his fingernails, bassist Buddy Weber puffing on a cigarette, Warchol clutching a beer, and Mike grinning mischievously with a finger jammed up his nose.

  To get some pre-summer exposure, Mike signed them up to play a pair of songs at Collinsville High’s year-end assembly for the class of 1978. The setup had them at one end of the gym, with another band on the far side, the bands trading off songs while their classmates hung out, signed one another’s yearbooks, said their goodbyes. The prospect of departing high school singing rock ’n’ roll in front of his own band felt almost irresistible to Mike, but when Melanie Herrold asked if she could handle the vocals for “Eighteen,” he was happy to share his moment. They launched with the Alice Cooper. Herrold spat out the song with gritty resolve, then stepped aside as the other band launched into their song. Mike took his place at the microphone, waiting for the other band to finish their song, and could only keep standing there as they segued immediately into a second song, and then a third, and kept right on going until a teacher pulled the plug and declared the music segment of the assembly finished. Herrold came up to Mike looking horrified. She’d taken his chance for the big kiss-off! But he laughed it off. Fuck high school, right? Let’s get out of here.

  * * *

  —

  Just when things started to come together for Mike in Collinsville, it happened again. Having hit the end of his current term of enlistment, and now at retirement age, Lieutenant Colonel Stipe decided to end his career with the Army. No longer tied to a military base, he and Marianne decided to go back to where they had started, in rural Georgia. Lynda, who was still in high school, and Cyndi, who had graduated, would move with them to Athens, a small town about seventy miles east of Atlanta. They figured Mike would want to go with them too, since he’d just graduated from high school and Athens was the home of the University of Georgia. He could live at home and attend classes during the day. The timing was perfect. They would move in the summer, once the Collinsville school year ended. Except Mike didn’t want to go. When he got the news, he went to Melanie Herrold’s house looking gloomy.

  “He was petrified to go to Athens,” Herrold says. “He didn’t want to live in the South. He didn’t want to get a southern accent.”[4] As sleepy as Collinsville was, he told his friend Michael Edson, at least it was next to St. Louis, a city with theaters, nightclubs, an actual cultural life.

  So Mike wouldn’t go. Instead he registered at Southern Illinois University, a commuter school in Edwardsville, about twenty minutes north of Collinsville. That was fine, John and Marianne said, as long as he found, and paid for, a place to live. Mike found a room in a house close to school rented by the members of the Laughing Heels, a punk band he’d met.

  Mike’s last few months in Collinsville were full of music, independence, and a slowly dawning understanding that it couldn’t last. His classes were interesting enough, and the Bad Habits landed a few bookings here and there, mostly short sets at parties and a high school dance or two. But Joe Haynes was a more than solid guitarist, Jimmy Warchol and Buddy Weber had found a nice groove in the rhythm section, and Mike loved to hear his voice coming through the speakers.

  The Bad Habits landed their first real show at the J.B. Annex nightclub, a small down-market venue in Columbia, Illinois, near the foot of the Jefferson Barracks Bridge, on August 21. They played a few other shows that fall and gained enough momentum to land a big break: an opening slot for Rockpile, the British new wave supergroup featuring Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe. It was a Monday night show at Mississippi Nights, a thousand-capacity nightclub near the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis. Haynes had pulled every string he could grasp to get his band onto the bill, and they did their best, opening with a hard-edged cover of the Boomtown Rats’ “Lookin’ After No. 1,” and ran through energetic covers of the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul,” the Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought the Law,” the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and “Shakin’ All Over.” Mike, dressed sharp in snug Levi’s 501s, a striped button-down shirt, and a blue knit tie, really ripped into that last one, singing the a cappella recitation of the song’s title so that it sounded like Shakin’…awwwwwlllll…overrrrr, his voice hanging for a long moment before the band kicked back in. “Mike was a good singer,” Warchol recalls. “A lot of it was about his attitude and determination.”[5] And about something else that was less definable but just as important. Jim Roehm, who saw the show, recalls that the young singer drew so much attention from two female fans that the men they were with decided to follow the band out to where they were loading up their gear after the show and teach him a lesson. Another friend or two stepped between them to protect the musicians and a fight started. By the time it was over, one friend of Roehm’s had been stabbed with a broken beer bottle and had to be rushed to a nearby emergency room. Mike and his bandmates escaped safely, but it was the last show they’d ever play.

  * * *

  —

  When his family left for Georgia, Mike knew he only had enough money to pay for two months of rent. He barely earned any money from the band, and the part-time job he’d found in a restaurant didn’t come close to covering his expenses. When he couldn’t afford his end of the rent at the band house, he packed his things and went back to Collinsville, where he moved in with his high school friend Michael Edson and his family. But he couldn’t stay with them forever, and as the fall term of 1978 came to an end, Mike realized he had no choice but to head south. To his parents and sisters, to the University of Georgia, to whatever waited for him in tiny little Athens, Georgia. He got there in time for Christmas, and after a few days of exploring he reported to Edson that it was just as bad as he’d feared. “I don’t want to live in this fuckin town,” he wrote to his friend. “It’s a hippie cow town. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.”[6]

  4

  An Oasis for Artists and Misfits

  Mike Stipe moved into his parents’ house just outside Athens and came to the University of Georgia like he’d always come to new schools in new towns: eyes open, mouth shut, noticing everything. There was a lot to keep him busy. Registering for classes, finding his way around the campus and then around the business district to its northwest, a blocks-long grid of shops, theaters, restaurants, and bars, most catering to the interests and budgets of students: T-shirts, all-day breakfasts, happy hours with fifty-cent drafts, textbooks, sandwiches and chips, blazers and khaki pants. More than a few storefronts were empty, dark windows testifying to the magnetic pull of the nearby suburban malls, which had been drawing businesses away from the center of town since the mid-’70s. But the telephone poles bristled with life: flyers for parties and bands, two-for-one drink nights, new wave night at Tyrone’s.

  He signed up for classes in the university’s art department, projecting a major in photo design. It was one of the more pre-professional courses of study in the department, preparing students for careers in advertising and graphic design. But, as his parents reminded him, it was important to find a focus. They didn’t mind if he studied art, but having a practical application for his passion was the smart thing to do. He took the other intro-level art classes too, the basics of drawing, color, and photography. Slowly his resistance to his new home (I hate it, I hate it, I hate it) began to ebb. Inspired by his changed circumstances, feeling nothing like the high schooler he’d been in Collinsville, the new student presented himself with a revised name. No longer Mike, he’d now be Michael Stipe.

  Tucked into a ramshackle building away from the main campus, the art department existed on a different plane from the rest of the University of Georgia. While most of the school was defined by the usual big southern university institutions, the football team, the fraternities and sororities, and the teaching of solid mainstream values, the art department tilted toward subversion. The shift in the art school’s sensibility started in the 1960s, when longtime chairman Lamar Dodd, an accomplished naturalist painter who had joined the department in 1937, launched a staffing initiative. In pursuit of practicing artists with degrees from impressive schools, Dodd wound up hiring a legion of well-trained but bohemian artists. Jim Herbert, a painter and video artist, made experimental films that featured nude models, many of whom were his students, a move that would have been pilloried today. Judith McWillie’s ideals were informed by vernacular art. Robert Croker took a radical approach to teaching drawing and painting, compelling students to finish a drawing in as little as five seconds. Or else he’d have them work on an elaborate piece for two hours, only to instruct them to toss it on the floor; then he’d put on some music and tell them to dance on the much labored-upon work until it was in tatters. “Some of the kids would be like, What do you mean?!, like really freaking out,” says former student Mark Cline. “But he was teaching us to think differently, that the act of creating was more important than the work itself. They wanted to shock us out of normalcy.”[1]

  For a certain kind of southern kid, the ones who didn’t like sports and had no interest in studying agriculture or law or business, finding the University of Georgia’s art school was like discovering a utopia. Sam Seawright, a preacher’s kid who grew up in northern Georgia, recalls visiting his older brother John on campus one weekend, going from a screening of Jim Herbert’s art films to an outdoor lecture by Truman Capote and then to parties full of young people exactly like him: small-town kids just learning that they weren’t the only weird people around, and that their dreams and ambitions weren’t so outlandish after all. “If you were different in your tiny town in Georgia, you’d fantasize about going to school in Athens,” Seawright says. “It was an oasis for misfits and artists. If you didn’t toe the line in Elberton, Georgia, or wherever, Dalton or Bainbridge, you’d come to Athens and find like-minded people. There was support; people lifted each other up and made everybody feel important and worthwhile. And there were just beautiful souls here.”[2]

  * * *

  —

  Now Michael dressed like a college student. Tennis shoes, shredded jeans, a T-shirt beneath a hooded sweatshirt. In classes he seemed to shrink into his hoodie, a silent presence shrouded in chestnut curls and layers of cotton. Other students tried to connect with him and had better luck when they were away from the crowd. In the hallway, somewhere on campus, in a restaurant. He had a way of drawing attention, even when he didn’t say a word. Armistead Wellford, a painting student who sat near Michael in a color theory class, noticed that his quiet classmate didn’t transport his art supplies in a satchel or one of the multicompartment carriers the other students had. Michael toted a child’s lunch box from the Munsters TV sitcom. “I was taken with him immediately,” Wellford says. “I knew he was cool.”[3] At one point Michael dyed his hair green and cut it into eccentric shapes, curls piled high one week, then razored off the next, the sides out of balance. It was impossible to ignore, and so was he.

  Judith McWillie, who taught the color theory class where Wellford encountered him, came from Memphis, and when Michael’s hair took on a tight-in-back, floppy-in-the-front shape that reminded her of Jerry Lee Lewis, she took note. After he found Athens’s vintage stores, Michael’s look evolved in other ways. He started coming to class in fuchsia velvet pants and mismatched patterned shirts, and the loudness of his wardrobe and its contrast with his quiet demeanor gave him a kind of quirky gravitas among his fellow students. When McWillie told her students to make hyperrealistic paintings of something that’s impossible to paint, she noticed that Michael’s initial frustration with the assignment led him to create an image that bridged realism and abstraction in a strikingly unique way. “He got the gist and applied it in a different way.”[4]

  Painting professor Scott Belville saw the same thing in his entry-level class and was so struck by how Michael combined elements of a landscape and a still life on one canvas, he kept it to show other students who could benefit from seeing something so unusual. Later in the term Belville pulled Michael aside to ask about his plans for his future. Michael told him he wanted to major in photo design, and the professor, a talented painter in his own right, urged him to think about focusing his energies in another direction. “I told him, ‘You may want to think about painting. I think you’ve got something here.’ ”[5]

  Beneath the roof of the art department’s little building, boundaries and limitations faded. The list of guest lecturers and resident artists included the likes of Elaine de Kooning, Alice Neel, and Philip Guston. “You could walk down the hall and take a class with Willem de Kooning’s wife,” Cline recalls. “And Alice Neel. I mean, fuck! Philip Guston walked in one day, a year before he died, and there he’d be, teaching painting and blowing people’s minds. Taking us out of ourselves. So when it comes to the overriding aesthetic, that’s what was really important: get out of yourself, get away from these structures of how it was supposed to be.”[6]

  Andy Nasisse, a ceramics professor who specialized in vernacular folk art, brought in Howard Finster, the folk artist, musician, and preacher, who made rustic, almost childlike paintings and sculptures. Finster was a real southern eccentric, a charismatic visionary whose work featured religious symbols, saints, space aliens, and Elvis Presley. Finster’s spirit of inclusivity—from the subjects he chose to incorporate into his paintings to his openhearted approach to the students—reflected the spirit the department’s teachers tried to impart to their students. “You saw people like him, you knew you could just do it,” says Curtis Crowe, who studied painting. “You don’t need credentials or training, just enthusiasm and getting up and doing it. We were like, We can do it too! Anyone can!”[7] Sitting in a chair not far from Crowe, Michael came to Finster’s presentation with an air of skepticism, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed and brow knit together. But after an hour of the artist’s stories, songs, and tales of the visions that had led him to take up art as an expression of the Holy Spirit, the young student was leaning forward, eyes alight. “He was knocked out and went up to visit Finster” in his Paradise Garden home/studio/exhibition grounds, professor Art Rosenbaum recalled to me in 2021.[8]

  Finster wrote songs to accompany his art, and strummed a banjo as he told stories about his life and art. It all came bathed in the same light that flooded his dreams and visions. Finster was extraordinary, but he wasn’t alone: the weave of art and music was everywhere. Rosenbaum was as celebrated for his folk music archivalism as he was for his painting, and he used musicians as models, having his students paint them while they played. Robert Croker blasted the Ramones and the Velvet Underground in class while his students painted and had them bring their drawing pads to a nightclub to make sketches while bands performed and people danced. Students who could play brought their instruments to school, found collaborators, moved into empty rooms and staircases to see what kind of sound they could make. To Judith McWillie, it all went together. “You had to play music in order to be heard. Art takes a long time, and it’s silent and needs a place to hang. That segued into performance art, where it all merged. And the vernacular vision came out because, Fuck that, I want to explode. I need to do this!”[9]

  McWillie also recognized the connection between vernacular art, which emphasized feeling and expression over craft, and the visceral punch of punk rock. The students liked to listen to music and chat while they were painting in class, and when McWillie drifted past to look in on their work, she’d drift into their conversations. When an Eric Clapton song came on one day, she edged into a conversation Michael was having with another student. While Clapton blazed away on the radio, he posed the question to her: Was virtuosity really the mark of a great rock guitarist? McWillie shrugged. “I said, ‘If you can’t play it on a $50 guitar from Sears, it ain’t rock ’n’ roll.’ ”[10]

  Something about art schools makes kids want to rock. For just as the art college at Leeds Polytechnic was serving as a spawning ground for British post-punk bands, the University of Georgia’s art school would soon become a hub in America’s independent music scene.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Melanie Herrold came for a visit, in the midst of a road trip to see family in Alabama, Michael greeted his old friend happily and showed her everything he had found in his new home: the art department building, the cafés and bars where the art students hung out, and a multilevel record store Michael was so excited to show Melanie that he missed a step near the front and took a tumble, landing with a thud near the counter. The guy sitting there, tall and dark haired, cradling an unplugged Fender Telecaster guitar, looked up and smiled. You okay? Michael hopped up, smiled, grabbed Melanie’s arm, and whispered into her ear. That’s Richard, he’s kind of an expert. His name wasn’t Richard, but Michael would figure that out soon enough.