* * *

  —

  They rehearsed regularly until the third week in March, when the foursome split in half for UGA’s spring break. Mike and Bill stayed in Georgia while Michael and Peter climbed into a van with Butchart, Swartz, and a WUOG disc jockey named Kurt Wood for a road trip to New York City. Pylon was playing two shows at Hurrah that week, one night as the headliners and another opening for Lene Lovich, and that was enough of reason to make the trip, particularly for Peter and Michael, who had never seen the city before. They had no idea what else they’d do, or what punishments the big city might exact on a vanful of college kids meandering north in 1980 with next to no money in their pockets and no idea where to go or what to do when they got there. They had more faith than common sense, and a naive confidence that things would break their way. It could have led to disaster. Instead it was like Dorothy’s visit to the Land of Oz: a dreamlike adventure filled with fortuitous meetings, unexpected invitations, and revelations that would resonate for decades.

  The first night Michael, Peter, Butchart, and Wood pooled their money to get a room at the Iroquois hotel. It cost $50, which was far too much to afford for a second night, so they parked the van on a side street near Hurrah and used that as their home base. During the days they roamed the city, visiting museums, scouring record stores, riding the subways, getting lost, finding their way back. They couldn’t shower, they barely had money to eat, it didn’t matter. They saw Alan Vega, half of Suicide, play a solo show in a basement. They saw the German singer/performance artist Klaus Nomi perform. They bumped into Chosei Funahara, the bassist for the Plasmatics, and Michael was so starstruck, he told him they’d come all the way from Athens to see them, a story he made up on the spot. A woman named Karen Moline, a friend of Pylon, invited them to a party for the band, which also turned out to be a celebration of another friend’s birthday. The starving young tourists feasted on jelly beans and cheesecake, and when Peter said hello to Lester Bangs, the famously gonzo critic glared unsteadily and called him a rotten cocksucker. It was the greatest vacation ever.

  This was Pylon’s third run through New York; they’d played Hurrah again in January, this time as headliners, to a smaller but more focused crowd of people who’d happened to see their set at the Gang of Four show the previous summer, or knew someone who had, or read about it in Interview. The January show sparked even more buzz from the likes of The Village Voice’s eminent critic Robert Christgau, and they left the city with a handful of bookings for March: two more shows at Hurrah, a night at the Mudd Club, sets at Tier 3 (TR3), in Tribeca, and at Maxwell’s, just across the river in Hoboken, and as headliners at the epicenter of the punk/new wave scene, CBGB.

  One new song, “Stop It,” became a favorite at Hurrah, and maybe a statement of purpose, showcasing all of the band’s spiky energy, its razored wit, its…can this even be possible…anti-music musicality. The drums thump, Curtis Crowe snug in the mechanized pocket, and Randy Bewley, his strings pegged to some self-invented tuning he came up with because he had no idea how to set them correctly, slides his fingers up and down the neck of his guitar, a harsh yet somehow tuneful melody Michael Lachowski mirrors on his bass while Vanessa Briscoe, standing upright and wide-eyed at her microphone, arms linked behind her back, sounds like she’s conducting raw voltage.

  Don’t rock ’n’ roll, no!

  Don’t rock ’n’ roll, no, no, no, no, no!

  This is the sound, the feeling, the world cracking open. Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, and their friends on the dance floor, moving with everyone else, the whole city, the real city, the only city.

  Don’t rock ’n’ roll, no!

  Don’t rock ’n’ roll, no, no, no, no, no!

  It was electric, and electrifying. Everything Michael had read about in The Village Voice, his dream of New York City, made real.

  * * *

  —

  I see the city rise up tall / The opportunities and possibilities!

  This is how Michael would describe that trip to New York many years later, his eyes still alight with the memory of his younger self, discovering New York and his future in one hectic, unshowered, underfed, and magical week.

  I have never felt so called!

  8

  A Party in the Church

  The road to the party led away from campus, down Broad, over to Oconee Street, and then down. Down and down. Descending from town and heading toward the river, where the mills were, where the industrial buildings hunkered low in the early-spring night. Where the old red-brick church nestled beneath the bare branches of the white oaks. This was St. Mary’s Episcopal. Or that’s what they christened it when its heavy wooden doors swung open for the first time in 1871. Now the doors opened to a cheap, avocado-green kitchen, where cups were stacked on one counter and Kathleen O’Brien stood with a sheet cake, cutting slices onto paper plates. The living room was to the left, a nightmare in fake wood paneling and avocado shag carpet. A hallway led to Kathleen’s room and to her closet, where you’d find your way to the other side.

  A hole in the wall, maybe four feet by four feet, that started around your ankles. You had to hunker down, nearly crawl your way in, and once you were inside it was a whole other world. Dark wood, exposed brick, stone and shadows. The sharp waft of beer, cigarette smoke, the sweet funk of weed and rot. Music pumping. Extension cords snaking to the speakers, drums set up beneath a bedsheet, voices, laughter, college kids standing around with bellies full of beer, maybe some pills, definitely that frisson of being in the right place, with the right people, maybe even at the right time.

  Ingrid Schorr was there, waiting her turn at the keg, everyone chattering and laughing in the murky light. Clip lights reached up through the smoke to the arching church ceiling. She’d heard about the party at the offices of the student newspaper, The Red & Black; people there had been talking about it. Schorr hadn’t been on campus very long, and she was always up for a new band, a party, a new scene. And this ruined church was definitely a scene. The stone and wood and dirty, cobwebbed windows. The first person Schorr recognized, a girl she hadn’t seen since high school in Atlanta, knew the singer in one of the groups. His name was Michael; they both worked in the Steak and Ale and he’d invited everyone there to come see his new band. The girl didn’t know the band’s name; Michael said they hadn’t figured it out yet. This was their first show, she said. Michael said he was terrified, so he was guzzling as much beer as possible.

  Peter Buck, Schorr recognized him from Wuxtry Records, was standing by the keg, a cup of beer in his hand. He was dressed much sharper than usual, in a striped shirt he buttoned to the neck, beneath a tight-cut blazer he wore new wave style, the sleeves pushed up his forearms. A stud glimmered in one of his ears and he gulped from his beer, craning his neck, a young man very much on edge. He drained his cup, stepped to the keg for a refill, took a big swallow, nodded at whoever he was talking to and strode toward the entryway, folding himself in half to squeeze back into O’Brien’s closet and back into the apartments. On his way through he brushed up against Armistead Wellford, the painting student, who was just finding the party side. Nearly colliding with Buck, Wellford noticed that the stud in Peter’s ear was shaped like an electric guitar. A Fender Telecaster. “I remember thinking, Man, that guy’s a star!” he says. “He already had mystique. They all had mystique.”[1]

  * * *

  —

  More bodies through the hole, then more, and more. It got crowded and hot, and even smokier than before. Pylon drummer Curtis Crowe was there too, and so was his band’s singer, Vanessa Briscoe, who knew O’Brien from the Wuoggerz and a hundred other parties. Art students, music people, more. Kit Swartz, Paul Butchart. Mark Cline came with Davy Stevenson, the two of them pinwheeling through the crowd thanks to the ministrations of Jeremy Ayers, Davy’s boyfriend at the time, who pressed LSD onto their tongues just as they were setting out for the church.[2] Gay kids and art kids. Boys who wore skirts and girls who came in short hair and coveralls. The sort of kids a car of frat boys would greet, through the window of a Corvette speeding down Milledge Avenue, with a homophobic curse. All of them passing bottles, handing around joints, trading pills, pieces of birthday cake. You would think of Alice in Wonderland and the looking glass, the portal from one realm to another. Shedding the limitations of one, exulting in the possibilities and pondering the muddles of the next.

  Kathleen O’Brien and her cake stood at the threshold. She was all too familiar with the muddles of life, and the darkness, but she also had a way of knowing things. That Bill Berry would be a good and important friend. That he should meet Peter Buck, that they would get along, and probably know other cool people, and if they decided to get together and play music it’d be worth hearing. She’d heard their first attempt to jam, and the rehearsals that had followed, then set up a party in large part to compel them to play in public. She put the word out across her sprawling network, procured the beer, recruited another new band, talked Bill’s band out of their shyness, then emptied her closet to clear the way to the other side. She knew they could fill that dark place with life and light, and make the night, and her birthday, incandesce.

  At 10:30 p.m. a ripple went through the throng. From the back you could see a few heads rise above the others. Guys turning on amplifiers, pulling the sheet off the drums, switching on microphones. Kit Swartz strapped on a cheap copy of a Fender Jaguar, fiddling with knobs while Paul Butchart plunked down behind the drums. Jimmy Ellison plucked at an orange violin-shaped bass, the notes reverberating as he turned it up. This was the evening’s first band, this trio that called themselves the Side Effects. They had come together in the manner of Pylon, the members first deciding to form a band, then working out who was going to learn which instrument. Their first rehearsals were cacophonous affairs, the musicians trading off bass, guitar, and drumsticks to see who was best at what. Once Swartz picked up a few chords, they started coming up with songs—simple, angular progressions they played with a choppy, driving rhythm that got the lubricated church crowd bopping. O’Brien was in the middle of it all, dancing and laughing with everyone else, their faces glowing with the effort.

  * * *

  —

  The throng danced through the Side Effects’ set, sticking with them even when the groove fractured and Swartz, sinking into a sparkle-eyed LSD trance,[3] lost his grip on the neck of his guitar. They finished to a cheerful ovation, shrugged off their instruments, and loaded them into their cases, coiling cords, kicking aside their drained beer cups, clearing the stage for the next guys. Two of whom had done such a good job of warding off their nerves at the keg that they could barely stand up. As their starting time drew near, it got worse. Michael, who had downed his share of beer, felt the excitement sharpen his senses while Peter, lurking outside, careened into the shadows and threw up into a bush.[4] Bill and Mike might have been a little nervous, and had certainly enjoyed their own share of social lubricants. But the new band’s rhythm section had also been playing together in public since they were fifteen years old. They’d performed at dozens of parties just like this one and had become accustomed to the weight of the eyeballs, everyone watching as they pull together into the moment when someone counts to four, the sticks spank the snare, the air fills with sound, and the anxiety combusts into energy.

  And they were pretty sure they were good. Good enough, at least. Even from the start, when it was just them in the empty church, they could hear how it was all coming together. How Bill and Mike clicked in together like musical Legos, and how Peter’s spare, rhythmic approach to the guitar left room for Mike to fill with countermelodies that played against Michael’s vocal lines, his honeyed Elvis slides embellished with rockabilly hiccups and stutters. All the hand waving and head shaking that greeted Kathleen’s first requests for them to play her party, the insisting that they just weren’t ready, that they were months away from anything like a full public performance, was half-hearted at best. The truth was, all stage fright aside, they were raring to go.

  * * *

  —

  Weeks before the party, chatting aimlessly in the midst of some classroom project in their color theory course, Armistead Wellford started quizzing Michael on his new band. In the midst of a downpour of art department bands, Wellford was looking to get in on the action himself. So what did it take? Who was in Michael’s band, and what were they like? Michael flashed a crooked smile and nodded excitedly. He was happy to share! “And he said, ‘There’s Peter on guitar and he’s really great, and Bill’s on drums and he’s really great, and Mike plays bass and he’s really great, and I sing and I’m really great.’ ”[5] Michael was kidding, but also not, which is what made Wellford laugh so much then, and now. “It was just so funny. He didn’t mean to be stuck-up. He was just telling the truth.”[6] Wellford began to understand this for himself the night before the party, when he came by the church in time to see the two new bands work through their sets. The Side Effects were fun in that high-spirited, low-expertise way, but the Twisted Kites, the placeholder name the foursome came up with when they couldn’t settle on an even halfway decent name, were on another level. The three Side Effects, along with Wellford, Mark Cline, and a couple of other friends, could only listen and gape at one another. “They were just clowning around, working their thing out, but it sounded so great,” Wellford says.[7] Paul Butchart knew exactly what the difference was between his band and this other newly formed group. “They’d play cover songs and you could recognize what they were,” he says. “They sounded like a real band.”[8]

  * * *

  —

  Finally it was time to play. Peter rinsed the taste of puke from his mouth with another swig of beer, Michael standing up on his own two feet, Bill and Mike only slightly distorted by their indulgences. Getting to the stage was a trick. The church, which had been cozy even before a third of the sanctuary was taken up by that crackpot apartment setup, was jammed with partiers. Curtis Crowe had gone outside at some point, and when he realized he’d never be able to squeeze back inside, he went around the outside until he found a window he could peer through. Vanessa Briscoe found a way to climb to the church’s rafters and made herself a perch up there. When the four musicians stepped onto the stage, took up their instruments, and started tuning, Briscoe heard shrieks. “Girls actually screamed and ran to the front of the stage,” she says. “I was like, Oh, wow.”[9]

  Then they started playing, alternating the originals they’d been honing with their quirky array of cover songs. Which ran the gamut, from the Velvet Underground (“There She Goes Again”) to the Monkees (“I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone”) to Johnny Rivers (“Secret Agent Man”) to the Sex Pistols (“God Save the Queen”). The original songs moved like panthers: sure-footed, muscular, agile on the corners. Mike and Bill made a solid, soul-tinged foundation, locked together but swinging, while Peter’s studied guitar parts gave the bassist room to move, climbing, looping, and tumbling around the sure-handed guitarist’s rhythmic chord swipes. Stipe’s lyrics aimed for big adolescent feelings and blasted away with both barrels. I just don’t want you anymore, he proclaimed to a dismissed lover at the end of “All the Right Friends.” You feel so old / I feel so new, he wailed in “Mystery to Me.” Even the most nuanced song, the gimlet view of Elvis Presley’s death, rocketed to a head-spinning conclusion: I can’t see…I’m so goddamn young!

  Michael borrowed that last line from Patti Smith’s “Privilege (Set Me Free),” but the implications, the heady blend of inexperience, wildness, and endless promise, were as true for his new band as it had been for his idol a few years earlier. They had just gotten started, right here and right now, and were already on their way.

  Part II

  “We’re Still Laughing. It’s a Real Shock.”

  9

  Picture James Brown Fronting the Dave Clark Five

  Kathleen O’Brien buttonholed Mike Hobbs and let him have it. You hear that? Pretty great, huh? You should book them. The music was still going, the place was jumping, the dancing and shouting, the air steaming, full of smoke and sweat, the band still up there cooking away. Imagine how they’ll do in a real club. C’mon, Mike, give ’em a chance, Mike. Hobbs held up his hands in surrender. He’d mixed the sound at Tyrone’s long enough to know a solid band when he heard one. He wasn’t a big music guy per se, mostly a jack-of-all-trades who figured out how to run a soundboard and could tell a punk/new wave band from a frat rock band, which was important, since the club had started filling midweek slots with edgier acts. Their audience tended to be skinny kids with eccentric clothes and weird hair. They didn’t drink as much as the old-school rock fans, but none of the other clubs in Athens booked the bands they liked and they’d been doing okay with the new wavers on these weeknights. They had the Brains coming up from Atlanta in early May and could use an opener for them, so, sure, these guys could work. Hobbs, operating in good-sport mode, went up to where the band was standing after their set, gulping beers and wiping the sweat from their faces, and pitched it to them. Would they be up for an opening slot? It wouldn’t pay much, but they didn’t care—of course they’d do it! But what was their name again? Hobbs realized he hadn’t caught it when they came out. They laughed and shook their heads. They’d have to get back to him.