7

  Don’t Rock ’n’ Roll, No!

  They met at a house party, in one of the crumbling old bungalows students rented around the kudzu-hung corner of Barber Street and Nantahala Avenue, maybe a mile away from campus. There were beers, music playing, the usual chatter. Bill Berry would have recognized Peter Buck from behind the counter at Wuxtry, assuming he’d been there. Which seems like a safe assumption, given his friends and his interests, and his lack of interest in his classes. Bill was dark-haired, heavy-browed, and mordantly funny. They talked about bands, of course, and if Peter’s knowledge of the British punk scene was hard to beat, Bill knew who managed them, when and where they had toured in America, and in some cases how well they had drawn. He’d spent a few months working in a concert booking agency in Macon, and the one guy he’d gotten to know there had come from England with a lot of connections. He’d turned Bill on to all these bands, including the one his brother was in. You know the Police? Sure, of course. “Roxanne.” Everybody knew the Police. Well, their drummer was this guy’s brother.

  Bill played drums, too. He’d been in a couple of bands in high school. Nothing that great, but they had fun for a while—played a bunch of parties, even made a little money here and there. Then the singer had gone to college, the next version of the band hadn’t worked out, and Bill put his drums away. His best friend had played bass in the group and was just as dispirited. Still, neither of them had been ready to go to college just yet, so they got an apartment together in Macon and tried to find jobs. Bill was the one who scored, finding the booking agency job. It seemed like a good way to stay close to music, even if he wasn’t playing.

  It was fun for a year or so but running errands and driving rock stars around Macon got old after a while, and he and his buddy, who got stuck working at Sears, decided to go to college. The University of Georgia seemed as good a place as any, and Bill thought he might try to become a lawyer and get into the music business that way. He hadn’t really focused on his studies just yet. The temptations of dormitory life and the opportunity to have fun around the clock had proven a bit of a distraction, ha-ha, but he did get a spot on the school’s concert committee and he was learning some useful stuff there.

  Did he ever think about joining another band? Bill shrugged, that dry chuckle. Well. Actually, he’d brought his drums to school, just in case someone wanted to jam or whatever, and wound up playing with this weird outfit…you’ve heard of the Wuoggerz? That was a total goof, a bunch of DJs from the campus radio station WUOG-FM had gotten drunk and decided to form a band. They pronounced it Wugg-ers, and one or two of them could actually play. They had a decent guitar player who could sing, a bassist and a keyboard player, a few people who played percussion, a guy who strummed a big plastic fish—sometimes he played percussion on a bong—and a bunch of girls who sang backup. Bill didn’t work at the station, but he had a few friends who did, and they knew he played the drums, so when they asked him to sit in on a bunch of cover songs and one or two of their originals, he figured it would be fun. They didn’t play much, they barely ever rehearsed, and the truly ridiculous thing was that they’d actually played some real shows—opening for the Brains on campus and then for the Police at the Georgia Theatre downtown.

  That last one was particularly absurd, playing on a real stage with a real band from England. But the Wuoggerz were just silly enough, and had enough friends in the audience, to go over with the Athens crowd. He didn’t mention this part, but they’d done so well opening for the Police that drummer Stewart Copeland, whose brother Ian had worked with Bill at the booking agency in Macon, asked them to come with the Police to play the rest of the shows on their swing through the Southeast, starting just a few days from then. Unfortunately, the timing couldn’t have been worse: the show in Athens had been on Tuesday, May 1; finals week started three days later, the same day the Police wanted the Wuoggerz to open the show at the Fat Cats club, in Hollywood, Florida. Johnny Pride, the Wuoggerz’s guitarist, shrugged it off like this: “We couldn’t be rock stars because we had to take algebra tests.” Oh, well. Easy come, easy go.[1]

  Still, being in a band again, even a silly one, had reminded Bill Berry of how much fun it was to play rock ’n’ roll. It even made him think about starting a real band. Maybe they’d just play parties, but wouldn’t that be fun? He’d thought about a name. The Corvettes, maybe the Corvairs. One of those dangerous sports cars from the ’60s. Man, that could be fun. Peter was nodding. Well, I know this guy who sings. He’s good and we’ve been writing some songs…Maybe we should get together. Bill nodded. He had that friend who played the bass; he’d definitely be up for something, too.

  * * *

  —

  They all had a friend in common. Kathleen O’Brien had lived in Reed Hall, the big, loud dormitory where Bill spent his freshman year drinking and partying and staying up far too late to wake up in time for his classes the next morning. O’Brien moved off campus in the fall of 1979, winding up in one of these crackpot apartments built into St. Mary’s, the small, crumbling old Episcopal church at the bottom of Oconee Street, near the Oconee River.

  O’Brien had heard about the church through Dan Wall, the co-owner of the Wuxtry Records stores, who had been living there but was recruiting new tenants so he could move out. Ken Buck, the older brother of his employee Peter Buck, came in first. Peter joined his brother a month or two later, and O’Brien moved in somewhere around then, too. She heard Peter practicing his guitar in his room and remembered that Bill played the drums. Those two would get along, she figured, and having Bill around the church wouldn’t be bad, either. He was a sweet guy with a cockeyed sense of fun, and that epic unibrow that somehow made him strikingly handsome. She had sensed some sparkles between them in the midst of the Reed Hall chaos and, as she put it, “I basically did whatever I could to throw us in the same situation.”[2] So Kathleen pulled Peter and Bill together at the party, and she was there when Peter introduced his singer friend Michael Stipe to Bill, and also at Tyrone’s O.C. nightclub a few nights later when Bill waved over his bass-playing friend from Macon. Michael saw him coming and had an immediate, overwhelming reaction: “I said, ‘No fucking way,’ ” he recalled to journalist Rodger Lyle Brown.[3]

  Mike Mills had the slim build and sweet face of a teenager and, when Bill called him over to greet his new friends, the watery smile and cloddish feet of a stumbling drunk. Michael looked him over silently, icily. The bell-bottom pants. The short, dorky hair. The nimrod glasses. He slurred a hello, belched alcohol, laughed at a joke nobody else heard, and nearly toppled over with the effort. Bill smiled, shook his head, and waved him off. He’d met Mills in high school and hated him at first too; he’d figured him for a pencil-neck show-off back then. An A student, a do-gooder, a dork. But Mike could really play the bass. Then they’d wound up at the same jam session, and that changed everything. Also he turned out to be a cool guy. So Bill felt confident reassuring Michael and Peter about his extremely drunk friend. He’ll sober up, then you’ll like him. Peter nodded, Michael sighed and shrugged. Sure, fine. Let’s get together and see what happens.

  * * *

  —

  Michael was ready for something to happen. It was early 1980 and he’d been in Athens for more than a year. He’d been meeting people, impressing them with his creativity, his quirkiness, the way his artistry seemed to move in every direction at once. He drew, he painted, he made photographs, he found images he liked, cut them out, and made collages he hand-colored and compiled into four-by-four-inch pages, which he copied on a color Xerox machine and stapled into a ’zine he called Momo and handed to friends around campus. He struck his teachers as a talented artist, and they took him seriously, seeing a future waiting for him in photography, in design, in painting, in whatever their own discipline happened to be. Michael appreciated the encouragement but had another idea. Scott Belville, the painting professor who had urged Michael to pursue his talents in that direction, would see him step away from his canvas in class, go to his locker at the side of the room, take out a notebook, and start scribbling. He was not sketching or drawing something. “He’d be writing lyrics,” Belville says.[4]

  The professor knew Michael had to follow his muse wherever it pulled him. But he also felt obligated to caution him: music careers rarely last more than five years.[5] And he had the talent to paint for the rest of his life. Michael took it on, and his dedication to his classes never seemed to waver. But the praise he was earning, and the confidence it gave him, only fired his musical ambitions. “He’d say, ‘I want to be a singer, a great rock singer,’ ” recalls Mark Cline, another art student who also felt the allure of making music. “He was single-mindedly focused on that.”[6]

  Michael was still a member of the band Gangster, but he couldn’t reconcile his artistic ambitions with the evenings he spent singing lumpen rock ’n’ roll with them. At first it had seemed satisfying to project himself into Michael Valentine, the rock-singing gangster, shielding his own identity in an alter ego who wasn’t really Michael Stipe. Not entirely, anyway. But this Michael Valentine character wasn’t like one of David Bowie’s alter egos; he wasn’t alien like Ziggy Stardust or tragically stylish like the Thin White Duke. And he certainly didn’t push the boundaries of gender or sexuality like the galaxy of superstars surrounding Andy Warhol. If music was going to be his art, then everything about his music had to be artful. And nobody else in Gangster was interested in that. But Peter Buck was. And if these other guys could play too, that began to feel like a band he could believe in. He resigned his position with Gangster and never spoke of them again.

  * * *

  —

  St. Mary’s Church became the center of band operations. Michael moved into Peter’s room for a bit. Then, floated by the money he’d earned working as a busboy at the Steak and Ale restaurant downtown, he took over one of the other church apartments that winter. It was a strange but convivial place to live. St. Mary’s Episcopal Church had been built in the early 1870s by the owner of a nearby textile factory for the laborers to worship in, but it lost its flock when the business closed around the end of the century. Soon after that it had been deconsecrated and repurposed. The Red Cross took over the building in 1946, then handed it off to the city, which used it as a historical museum until the mid-1960s, when bits of the walls and ceiling started falling off. The former church sat empty until 1968, when a young real estate investor named Marion Cartwright bought the place with an eye toward transforming it into residential space for students. Working quickly and on the cheap, he hired some builders to construct a kind of modular, five-bedroom apartment within the church structure, filling in the entryway and the front of the sanctuary. A quartet of law students became the first tenants of the mahogany-veneered, shag-carpeted rooms in 1968, and generations of post- and undergraduates followed over the next eleven years. By the time Peter joined Dan Wall and his brother in the church, he found, in his words, “a rotten, dumpy little shithole”[7] that only impoverished students could tolerate entering, let alone living in.

  Still, the church came with a great asset for residents who wanted to play music. The crawl space in the back of Kathleen O’Brien’s closet led to what remained of the sanctuary: a vaulted stone-and-wood chamber whose ceiling rose to the bottom of the steeple. The pews had vanished, but the altar remained, making a perfect stage upon which the musicians could set up. You just wanted to make sure you didn’t step off the far side, where rain dripping from a gash on one side of the steeple had eaten away the floor. It was murky in there, the air thick with the smell of rotten wood and crumbled stone. When Berry and Mills came over with their gear, they set up on the altar, running extension cords from the apartments to power the gear and the battered lamps and clip lights they used to throw some shadowy light around the room.

  They started like all bands do, figuring out which songs they all knew, settling on a key, and then diving in. From the go, the parts seemed to click together. Easy songs at first, three or four chords, basic structure. The Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again,” the Monkees’ “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone.” Peter, the least experienced of the musicians, stuck to simple parts, alternating staccato stabs with chords he’d let ring. Mike helped establish the basic groove with his bass, and let his fingers leap into the upper frets for runs that played against the song’s central melody. Bill kept the rhythm taut, with an occasional snare shot to emphasize an upbeat. Michael’s vocals played out across the top, and as the smiles between Bill and Mike seemed to indicate, Peter’s assertion that the guy could really sing had been correct. He had range and power, and a kind of vocal texture that could go from velvety to gravelly in the space of a single line. He also had a catalog of hiccups, yelps, and asides that were part Elvis Presley, part Buddy Holly, and, the way he did them, all art-rock weirdness. One song after another. Johnny Rivers’s “Secret Agent Man” (recently revived by a Devo cover), the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK.” Their faces glowed against the dim yellow light, a little sweat mixed with a growing excitement. Peter and Michael introduced one or two of their originals. The others listened for a moment, found their way in, and then, immediately, the songs had more depth, more drive. They felt real.

  Now they got together to play regularly. Two or three times a week, at least, working through those first songs, adding others as they came up. Mike worked out harmonies, some with Bill pitching in in a lower voice, sometimes just the bassist’s smooth tenor finding a countermelody to weave in with Michael’s lead. How about a Buddy Holly song? Do you guys like Television? The guys started piecing together new originals, starting with someone’s riff, hooking it to another guy’s chord progression, which might pivot into another set of changes, while Michael sang along, trying out melodies and words, phrases that seemed to go together. I’ve been walking alone now for a long, long time / Don’t wanna hang out with the friends who just aren’t mine…Spiky thoughts matched with hurtling rhythms and herky-jerky chords. Youth, confusion, frustration, crash bang boom. I can’t see, I’m so young! Then back to the Monkees or the Velvet Underground or—turn it up!—the Sex Pistols. The sound came right through the two-by-four beams, insulation, and drywall that separated the sanctuary from the apartments, so O’Brien and the others could hear every thud and note. When the band really got going, the other housemates and their friends would duck in through the crawl space, handing through their beers and bongs, and start dancing. A spontaneous party with a live band! Rehearsals with a cheering section!

  O’Brien began to think about having a real party. Her birthday was coming on April 5, and since that would be a Saturday and they had access to such an incredible party space, she figured she’d do it up big. Throw herself a big party with a couple of kegs, all of her friends, maybe a couple of bands. She and Bill had paired off by then—having him around the church so regularly had worked out just like she hoped it would—so it made sense for the new band to debut on her big night. They were reluctant at first. C’mon, man, no way. We’ve only been doing this for a few weeks, we’re not even close to ready…blah-blah-blah. But O’Brien was charming, supportive, and also willful. When she wanted something, it was nearly impossible to say no. She kept asking. They kept saying no, at first. Then maybe. Okay, we’ll think about it.

  Meanwhile, Kit Swartz and Paul Butchart had figured out their band, with Butchart on the drums, Swartz picking up the guitar, and Jimmy Ellison, the soon-to-be-ex-husband of Pylon singer Valerie Briscoe, taking up the bass in a three-man combo they called the Side Effects. That they had declared themselves a band and come up with a name before two-thirds of the members had become conversant with their instruments was not a problem. It was, in many ways, the point. Because formal knowledge meant following rules, and rules were limiting. Rules stanched creativity. Rules made you more like everyone else. And the whole point of art, at least the way it was taught, practiced, and admired in Athens, was to be only like yourself. To describe the world the way you saw it, felt it, and tasted it. Like the B-52’s could only be the B-52’s. Like Pylon could only play Pylon songs—except for the Batman theme, which they played exactly like Pylon would play it, mostly because they weren’t capable of playing it any other way. But they’d been creative enough to transform their limitations into something so unique that they’d impressed the critics in New York City, the very epicenter of American art and music, as the harbingers of something dynamic and new.

  The combined influence of the Bs and Pylon spurred a flood of new art-forward bands in Athens. A pair of philosophy students named Vic Varney and David Gamble formed a duo they called the Method Actors, with the former on guitar and vocals and the latter on the drums. Art students Mark Cline and Armistead Wellford teamed up with a Navy veteran/UGA student named Mike Richmond to form the instrumental group Love Tractor, with Cline and Richmond on guitar, Wellford on bass, and a rhythm machine keeping time until the always-eager-to-learn Kit Swartz volunteered to take up the drums. The Tone Tones had been at it for a year or two already, Turtle Bay and Men in Trees were just starting up. Suddenly you couldn’t walk a block in Athens without hearing guitars tangling with the thrum of a bass and the thumping drums of another band trying to find a sound.

  So many bands, so many friends. O’Brien was at the center of it all, so she had plenty of options for her party. The Side Effects had never performed in public before, but of course they’d be happy to play. Men in Trees might have been on the list, too. O’Brien went back to Bill, Peter, Michael, and Mike and laid it on a little thicker. She’d been listening to them, they were more than ready to play in public! And because they lived in the church and played there, they could go last, which would make them headliners and make the crowd that much more drunk by the time they got going. If they made any mistakes, nobody would notice. Finally her entreaties, and their growing eagerness to face a crowd, won them over. Yes, okay, they’d do it. They didn’t have a band name yet, but they’d work on it.