5

  Dance This Mess Around

  A few years before the members of R.E.M. came to town, another Athens band got its start at a party. It was Valentine’s Day 1977, at a rental house on Milledge Avenue, across the street from the Taco Stand, maybe a mile from the edge of campus. The tenants were art students, and the crowd that showed up, predominantly university types, bohemians, a few hip townies and curious neighbors, dressed for the moment. Some women in sky-high wigs, others in spangles, still others in denim coveralls. There were men in dresses, their faces bedecked with mascara and rouge, and women with mustaches painted over their upper lips. It was chilly outside, and the air inside the house was thick: with smoke, alcohol, chatter. And also, though you wouldn’t have guessed it at the time, the first stirrings of the 1980s.

  You could argue that February 1977 was as ’70s as it ever got. Former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter smiling and quoting Dylan in the White House; the radio equal parts easy listening (Mary MacGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers”), freon-cooled L.A. rock (the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town”), and sleek dance music (the Jacksons’ “Enjoy Yourself”); the evening TV a shiny mix of featherweight nostalgia (Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley), fresh-scrubbed sexbots (Three’s Company, Charlie’s Angels), and techno-futuristic action (The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman). The culture just like the hair: fluffy, shiny, lighter than air.

  But some people were starting to have other ideas, including five musicians in Athens who had just decided to call themselves the B-52’s. As they gathered around their instruments, which included a tape player, a thrift store electric guitar, bongos, but no bass, it was clear that this was a different kind of group. And it wasn’t just the odd instruments. The two women, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, wore enormous white bouffant wigs that made them look like poodles in sunglasses. Keith Strickland, who played the bongos, also wore a wig, an eye-popping shade of purple that matched his dress. The guitarist, Cindy’s brother Ricky, looked nearly clean-cut. But it was Fred Schneider, standing at the other microphone in a sleek white jacket over a T-shirt, who started the show, making Morse code–like beeps with a child’s walkie-talkie to launch “Planet Claire.” This was the first of the six songs they had written, all featuring lean guitar riffs, cheesy two-finger organ, Schneider’s unhinged auctioneer vocals, and otherworldly peals from the women, who harmonized, chanted, and made unsettling ululations that landed somewhere between Yoko Ono and angry cats. The tunes were simple but danceable, and the strangeness of it all—Boys in bikinis! Schneider brayed in “Rock Lobster,” girls in surfboards / Everybody’s rockin’!—electrified the crowd, making them dance so hard the floor started to bounce like a trampoline.

  * * *

  —

  It came together in the most unlikely way. The bizarro wigs, the gender-bender clothes, the infectiously silly songs, and the musical limitations they leapfrogged in the most inventive ways. They had never played in public before, but somehow the B-52’s—a name they took from the ’50s beehive hairdos they sported—arrived fully formed. They played another party or two around Athens in the next few months, road-tripped up to New York City at the end of 1977 to check out the clubs, and scored a slot opening a Monday night show at the Max’s Kansas City nightclub. They did well enough, got invited back, and scraped together a couple of other gigs opening shows at CBGB. This band of quirky, largely gay young southerners, with their wigs, walkie-talkies, dime-store instruments, and silly songs about lobsters, killer bees, and girls from outer space, hit the city like a warm southern breeze. Lou Reed came to one show. Members of Patti Smith’s band came too, and soon the critics followed—The New York Times’ John Rockwell, The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau—and their write-ups glowed. By mid-1978 the freaky Georgians were back in New York as headliners, playing multiple nights at Max’s and CBGB, along with stand-alone shows at the Mudd Club and Hurrah. Danny Beard, who owned record stores in Atlanta and Athens, started his own record company, DB Records, to release a single of “Rock Lobster,” backed by another original, “52 Girls.” The record quickly sold out in New York (Beard pressed only a few thousand) and triggered a small bidding war between major labels. By the spring of 1979 they’d agreed to a deal with the Burbank-based Warner Bros. Records, which released their album that fall. A fizzy tonic amid the ponderous company of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, the Eagles’ The Long Run, and Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door, the self-titled The B-52’s sold more than a million copies, launching the band and their wildly inventive and uniquely queer perspective into the upper reaches of the pop music stratosphere.

  Could it really be that easy? Apparently so. It had taken less than three years for the B-52’s to go from musical neophytes to critically beloved, platinum-selling pop stars. All it had taken was an original idea—combine high camp with the rudimentary riffs of punk rock, make it funny and danceable—and the guts to step up onstage and start playing. And now they weren’t just successful; they were acclaimed as innovators. Artists.

  This had not gone unnoticed at the University of Georgia art school.

  Randy Bewley and Michael Lachowski first got the idea just as the B-52’s were shuttling between Athens and New York, not just drawing crowds to the clubs but winning raves in the rock media. Both were art students and music fans, both drawn to the artier punk and new wave bands—Cabaret Voltaire, Suicide, the Ramones. The minimalism of punk, and the success of the B-52’s, whom they’d both seen perform at parties in town, was instructive, and inspiring. Neither owned nor played an instrument. In the spirit of the moment, it didn’t seem to matter. Bewley decided to take on the guitar. Lachowski, noting that the bass had two fewer strings, opted for what struck him as the easier instrument. Bewley purchased both, along with amplifiers, at a nearby pawnshop and the pair set to work. It helped to view the instruments as raw tools, Lachowski explains. “You could make a sound on them with or without any training, so that’s how we approached it.”[1] Another art student, Curtis Crowe, lived upstairs from Bewley’s apartment and, after listening to the duo, offered to pitch in on drums. They were happy to have Crowe join, and as Bewley and Lachowski improved their songs, a sound began to take shape. In search of a singer, they went to Vanessa Briscoe, another art school classmate. She had no experience, but of course that was exactly what they were after.

  The foursome wasn’t supposed to be a band per se. They weren’t really musicians, even if they’d learned their instruments well enough. The entire point of the enterprise was to experience what it felt like to go onstage, become good enough to land a club show in New York, and get written up in New York Rocker. Once they’d achieved that, they’d be done. They weren’t a rock band as much as an art installation about a rock band.

  They called themselves Pylon, after the orange traffic cones, and in the winter of 1979 they played their first show in a space above Chapter 3 Records. Next they played a show in the studio Crowe and his friend Bill Tabor had rented above a sandwich shop and named after its sole source of light: a forty-watt bulb hanging down from the ceiling. They got the same reaction both nights. “People mostly just stood there looking at us,” Briscoe (now Briscoe Hay) recalls.[2] Then some friends asked them to play a party in a house just outside town.

  The members of the B-52’s were hanging out there, and when Pylon started playing, the other Athens band stormed the dance floor. After the music was finished, the Bs showered the new band with praise and told them they had to get themselves to New York—they knew people, they could help. True to their word, Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson handed Pylon’s demo tape to the manager at Hurrah’s nightclub. Soon Lachowski got a call from the club’s booker: Did Pylon want to open a show for Gang of Four? Dates in Boston and Philadelphia materialized, thanks to their booking in New York. The Philadelphia show was rough going. The audience didn’t connect with the repetitious, circular groove of their songs. But when they got to New York, and the packed-in house awaiting Gang of Four at Hurrah, Pylon connected. “They had a very distinctive sound,” says the writer and critic Anthony DeCurtis, who saw Pylon soon after that first New York show. “They were very consciously an art band. And Michael Lachowski would look at his watch onstage, to make you conscious that he wasn’t living to be onstage.” That they came from Athens mattered, too. “New Yorkers, in their ridiculous way, had adopted the B-52’s, and everyone fell in love with Athens,” DeCurtis says. “So the media came to them easily.”[3]

  Indeed, the write-up of the Gang of Four show that appeared in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine a few weeks later played up Pylon and their place of origin as prime attractions. The B-52’s, it read, were “a tough act to follow—but Pylon is also a credit to their community.”[4]

  And the community of Athens music was about to erupt.

  6

  Let’s Make a Band

  For Michael Stipe, the Wuxtry record store was a revelation. Outside of the art school it was his favorite place in Athens, like a dream he’d had back in Collinsville, made real just a few blocks from school. Music played constantly, most of it stuff he either knew or wanted to know about. The walls bristled with posters of the bands he’d been reading about in The Village Voice and Creem. And the clerk he usually found behind the counter, the guitar-strumming guy he’d told Melanie was named Richard but was actually named Peter, was like a rock magazine come to life. He seemed to know about every band that ever existed, especially the obscure ones. And if he didn’t have their records on the shelves, he knew where to find them. Sometimes they’d already be in his own collection, and he was always happy to bring them in so Michael could borrow whatever he wanted to hear.

  When he was in high school it had all seemed so distant. Michael could read about the new music in the Voice, he could gape at the pictures of the Ramones, the Damned, and Iggy Pop in Creem, but the records themselves…the essential sound…had largely been unavailable to him. That started to change in the spring of his senior year, when he fell in with the Rocky Horror crowd, met Joe Haynes and the other Bad Habits, and moved to the Laughing Heels’ band house in Edwardsville. But the music, and the sort of people who got it, who understood what made that edgy, abrasive sound so exciting, and why it was so important for music to transgress mainstream society’s demands, was only now coming into focus. In Athens, Georgia, of all places.

  Echoes of the Bad Habits, and especially that electrifying night in front of the Mississippi Nights crowd, stayed in Michael’s mind. He kept his eye on the classified ads and the bulletin boards around campus, and when he saw a listing from a cover band looking for a singer, he auditioned and won the job. Musically, it was a step backward: the band, known as Gangster, played popular songs by exactly the sort of mainstream rock bands he and Joe Haynes had vowed to avoid when they were establishing the Bad Habits just a few months earlier. But singing mediocre rock ’n’ roll songs with an uninspired cover band was a lot better than not singing at all, so Michael joined in happily, buying himself a vintage suit to fit in with the group’s 1930s gangster stage look. To complete the stage image, and protect his own, he took a stage name—Michael Valentine, as in the notorious gangland Valentine’s Day Massacre—and when the band performed, he did most of his singing with the brim of his fedora pulled low over his eyes.

  A reliable cover band now equipped with a strong singer, Gangster did well in the cover-hungry bars around Athens. For Michael the group’s success was a mixed blessing. He enjoyed the singing, and he even made a little money for his trouble, but his art classes were pulling him in another direction. The tension was immediately apparent to Terry Allen when he happened upon Gangster at the Last Resort bar, on West Clayton Street in downtown Athens. Allen, a young photographer with an ear for pop music, came in for a drink near closing time one night and was captivated by what he heard from the bandstand. Most of the cover bands he’d seen tilted heavily toward southern rock—Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers Band, the hit redneck sound. But Gangster played older, cooler stuff. Songs by the Animals, the Doors…not the usual playlist for a bar band in Georgia in 1979. Allen carried his beer closer and focused on the singer, whose sonorous, textured voice kept demanding his attention, no matter how intently he tried to disappear, facing the drums and keeping the brim of his hat so low it was nearly impossible to see his face. When they finished, Allen went up to greet him. “I told him I liked it and he said, ‘Oh my God, that was so embarrassing. I hate this band.’ ” Allen knew the scene, there were certainly other bands he could look into. Michael nodded. “That’s what I gotta do,” he said. “Do you know anyone who plays guitar?”[1]

  Actually, Michael had already met one.

  * * *

  —

  Peter Buck had settled in Athens just a few months before Michael, moving from Atlanta to take a job at the smaller of Wuxtry’s two Athens outlets, a combination records-and-comics shop near campus on Baxter Street. Peter was tall and broad-shouldered, with shiny brown hair that fell across his forehead and over his ears. He wore jeans and button-up shirts and scuffed sneakers, as appropriate for record store work as for slouching in the back of a high school classroom. He could seem taciturn when you first met him, peering down silently from behind those dark bangs. But his eyes were sharp, and as Michael discovered, once Peter spied a compatriot, he could talk at length. Michael first drew his attention when he started asking for the sort of punk and new wave records that Peter liked. Television, the New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers. Some of the really obscure stuff, too: Suicide, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. When Michael started buying records Peter had stocked for his own enjoyment, the clerk started a conversation. They mostly stuck to bands and records at first, but in those days being drawn to those records signified a lot of things that had nothing to do with music.

  Once they got to talking, they realized how much they had in common. Peter had also come from the suburbs and been introduced to New York punk rock by The Village Voice—he was a few years older than Michael but had also subscribed when he was a high schooler. He’d been entranced by the same articles about Patti Smith in 1975, bought Horses soon after its release, and been transported by how the artist’s poetry played against the visceral wallop of the music. That juxtaposition, the outer limits of both literature and music, was where Peter’s consciousness lived. He read constantly, and widely, and almost always kept a book within reach in case he got bored. When he wasn’t reading, or even when he was, he’d play his guitar, another near-constant presence in his life. Often when Michael came into Wuxtry he’d find Peter behind the counter, leaning back on the stool idly strumming along to whatever was playing on the shop speakers, or working out something else entirely. His prized possession at the time was his Fender Telecaster, an electric he played without an amplifier when he was at work. This drew Michael’s attention.

  He had questions. You’re probably in a band, right? Peter shrugged. Nope, no band. He’d thought about joining a band, but as much as he liked playing on his own, it seemed like a bad idea. Guys in bands are usually assholes, he said. And I don’t want to become an asshole. This made Michael laugh. He was in a band…not a very good band, but that wasn’t because the other guys were assholes. They just wanted to play dumb songs for dumb people. And even that could be fun, he had to admit, because playing music is fun, even when the songs kinda suck. Peter shrugged. Well, maybe. They could try writing some songs first. They could hang out, listen to some records, have a few beers, see where it took them. That sounded like fun to both of them. And something began.

  They started getting together. Peter would play his acoustic guitar, come up with a song Michael also knew, and they’d give it a go. Peter was an interesting player. He didn’t whip off lead parts between the verses, or attempt any solos, even for fun. He stuck to the chords, keeping the rhythm going, giving Michael something to sing to. They liked playing together and did it regularly, sometimes spinning off into ideas for songs of their own. Peter playing some changes, Michael humming a scrap of melody, maybe scatting some words over the top. When they ran out of gas they talked about the kind of songs they wanted to write. First they laid out everything they hated about most rock ’n’ roll songs. The clichéd lyrics, the predictable chord patterns. Why did everything have to sound alike? They thought it would be fun to subvert all the expectations, taking standard lyrical tropes and twisting the familiar words in new and unlikely ways until they said something completely different and totally unexpected.

  If Peter had resisted the impulse to join a band, playing with Michael had changed his mind. More than a few of his regular customers at Wuxtry were students who either were in bands or said they wanted to be in one, and he began feeling out some of them, figuring out what music they liked, what they’d be like to play with. Paul Butchart played drums and was talking about getting a band going, and Peter floated it by him. “He said he had a friend who could really sing,” Butchart recalls. “They had a few songs they’d written, and we should get together and see what we can do.”[2] Butchart was certainly game, and then Peter brought it up to Butchart’s friend Kit Swartz, who was just as eager to start a band. Swartz hadn’t started playing any instruments yet, but in the wake of the B-52’s and Pylon, that hardly seemed to matter. Peter had a perfect place for them to play: he’d just moved into a disused church someone had converted into apartments, and most of the sanctuary was empty, a perfect place to rehearse. So it was agreed. They just needed to find a time they could all meet. Somehow they never could. But a lot of young people around Athens were up for joining bands then, and soon Peter met another drummer, a fun-focused pre-law student at the university who had a friend he said was a killer bass player. They had gone to high school in Macon and played in a couple of bands there. It had been a while since they’d played, but they’d come to Athens together and brought their instruments, just in case.