* * *

  —

  The night ended in a blur: so much beer, so many pills, so many joints, so much music and motion. Word of the new bands crackled through their members’ networks of friends and classmates and the other bands, people talking in various shades of excitement, good cheer, competition, and, for the people in the other bands, maybe a little foreboding. That last part wasn’t about the Side Effects, though. Nobody had a cross word for the inventive way Paul, Jimmy, and Kit had spun their limited chops into fun, danceable songs. That was the sweet spot for these punky art bands, the confluence of impulse, amateurism, and pure expression. Like the B-52’s and Pylon, they played whatever they felt, however they could. Those other guys, though…well. Huh.

  It was the old songs that set them off. The Monkees and the Sex Pistols and even the Velvet Underground songs. Cool selections, sure, but hadn’t they already been done? “For us snobbier aficionados the cover songs were a bad sign,” says Pylon drummer Curtis Crowe. “Now you’re a frat rock band, or a cover band. Not a new act.”[1] Still, the fact that their original songs blended so well with the covers was…intriguing. “When they played their own songs, you didn’t feel like they were shifting gears; it was all one continual show.” And as Crowe admits, that’s where the foreboding came from. “They were a real band with real songs with real chord progressions. At the end, everyone knew something had happened.”[2]

  * * *

  —

  The Tyrone’s O.C. booking came even as the final notes of the set were still reverberating in the church eaves. A day or two later they got another show offer, this time from the proprietors of the Koffee Klub, a new, informal coffeehouse tucked into an empty storefront on West Clayton Street, not far from the north side of campus. Dennis Greenia and Rick Hawkins were socially and politically conscious guys who liked the idea of making a communal space where customers would help paint and decorate the walls, bring in entertainment, and help clean up at the end of the evening, too. “Remember that this is YOUR place and it will be whatever YOU make it,” declared a poster on one of the not-quite-painted walls. Hawkins was best known around town as Rick the Printer, since he ran the print shop next door to St. Mary’s Church, the go-to producer of handbills and posters for Athens’s bands, arts groups, and other entertainment concerns. Word of the new band practicing at the church got to the printers and they extended an invitation to the musicians to play their second-ever show at their new coffeehouse on April 19. The foursome took the show eagerly, figuring it would give them a chance to run through their set in a low-profile but still public setting before their big shot at Tyrone’s in early May. The Koffee Klub show also gave them a reason to come up with a suitable band name so Rick the Printer would have something to promote on the show poster.

  Distilling the essence of a band, particularly one built from four distinct personalities, is always a challenge. What word or short phrase could summarize a punk-and-pop band from the South whose influences ranged from the Velvet Underground to the Sex Pistols to the Monkees? The first set of options tilted toward the outrageous. Negro Wives. Negro Eyes. Slut Bank. No, no, and no. Third Wives? No. Cans of Piss? Right, try to imagine explaining that one to your parents. Also: gross. Michael picked up a dictionary, flipped open a page, and saw: R.E.M. An abbreviation for rapid eye movement, the deep state of sleep in which dreaming occurs. Michael wasn’t thinking about sleeping or dreaming when he saw it, he would later insist. He just liked the term. What he really liked the most, he’d say, was the dots: the periods indicating that the R, E, and M were short for something else. It could mean anything, he decided. Anything, everything, and nothing. That was his favorite kind of name. The others agreed and that was that. They’d be R.E.M.

  * * *

  —

  Word about the new band had gotten around, and as the evening of April 19 slipped into the wee hours of the 20th, the tables in the Koffee Klub’s front room filled, then overflowed into the larger back room, where the band had set up their instruments, first with knots of friends, then a small crowd, then a light mob, then a dense one. The club didn’t have a license to serve beer, so folks brought their own. At 1 a.m., when the show was supposed to start, more than a hundred people filled the back room. When the band came out forty-five minutes later, the throng that greeted them was closer to 150, significantly larger than the throng at the church.

  Once again they came out rocking, alternating cover songs with punchy originals that kept the room moving. Again, the danceability came courtesy of the rhythm section, Bill’s propulsive drumming locked in with Mike’s bass, which anchored the deep end while also leaping upward to embroider Peter’s economical rhythm guitar. All of which served as a foundation for Michael’s vocals, which scrambled Elvis’s smoothness with Patti Smith’s poetic urgency, while the backing harmonies by Bill and Mike added a delicious pop shimmer. Watching from the side of the room, Bertis Downs, a law school student nearing the end of his second year in UGA’s program, had a hard time telling the originals from the cover songs, given the band’s quirky tastes. The friend he’d come with, a third-year law student and music nut named Russell Carter, filled in some of the gaps—That’s “Shake Some Action” by the Flamin’ Groovies, that’s the Monkees, “Steppin’ Stone,” maybe this one is one of theirs? Never heard it before…Years later Downs wouldn’t be able to summon the specifics, but he’d never forget the electricity of the moment, of being in the room as the band played for nearly the first time, already channeling the sound that would come to mean so much to so many people, and send him down a road he could never have imagined traveling until he was there, moving so fast the rest of the world was reduced to a smear.

  But first it was just this night, in this room, for forty-five minutes. The whirling, pounding drums and pulsing, melodic bass, the chiming guitar, and the singer whose sonorous voice anchored the music even as his performance, stock-still one minute, erupting in movement the next, animated the band’s spirit. The room was alive with the music. Bodies moving, heads bobbing, hands in the air, feet and shoulders, a happy tangle of youth in all their sweaty exultation and…uh-oh.

  Badges, caps, uniforms. Handcuffs, clubs, sidearms. Notepads. Cameras.

  At the above date and time the above officers (Pritchett, Evans, Deramus) entered the incident location and observed approximately 150 people, a live band, numerous cups, beer cans and bottles. Some of the bottles still contained what smelled like beer in them.[3]

  The cops put it all in their incident report. Apparently there had been a complaint about the music. Something to do with a lot of noise in the middle of the night. Who was in charge here? Dennis Greenia (W M, 28 Yrs, 6´1, 190 lbs) stepped up and spoke to one officer while another took notes and a third snapped photos of the attendees, seemingly to let them know they were now among the usual suspects; troublemakers; headed for a fall. In the front of the room the band segued, wittily, into Johnny Rivers’s “Secret Agent Man.” The cops weren’t tickled. Greenia was served with a summons for running a discotheque without a license, while two or three of Downs’s law-school mates, lightly soused and heavily aggrieved, made slightly slurred inquiries about all this searching and seizing in light of the Fourth Amendment, which officers Pritchett, Evans, and Deramus pretended not to hear.[4]

  That ended that show.

  * * *

  —

  The sun rose on Sunday, the next week passed, then the one after that. Then it was May 6, the day of the Tyrone’s show, and Peter woke up smelling disaster on the late-morning breeze. It reeked of humiliation. His humiliation. Onstage, under the lights. Because he…wasn’t very good. On guitar. He was self-taught, and never bothered to learn much in the way of scales or theory or anything formal. Mike Mills knew all that stuff and could play solos and complex jazz chords Peter couldn’t begin to wrap his fingers around. Mike had shaken off Peter’s offer to let him take over the guitar—he liked the chemistry he and Bill had in the rhythm section, for one thing. And Peter had developed an economical way of playing that sounded like nobody Mike had ever heard before.

  But of course Peter didn’t hear it like that, particularly when he had to play in public. Which was hard enough at the church and at the Koffee Klub, though those were more like parties than proper shows. Even so, he’d been terrified on both of those nights. Anticipating the moment his mind would go blank, his fingers freezing in place as the rest of the band shot off without him, leaving him to the staring eyes, the confused titters giving way to laughter when the other guys turned to face him. The music trailing off, the silence growing, looming, swallowing him whole.

  This was the nightmare that played across Peter’s imagination when he let his mind wander. He’d channel the anxiety into action most days, playing his parts over and over and over, making sure he had every note, pause, and nuance wired down so cold he could play them backward, forward, eyes closed, standing on his head. But somehow that didn’t help on show days. He’d do his best to keep it at bay, slugging down beers, trying to find a place on the inebriation scale that was just on the right side of the line dividing pleasantly numb from completely out of it. But the sight of the empty stage, amp lights glowing red, the crowd pressing close, faces turned up and expectant, would freak him the fuck out. Too many eyes. Too many ears. Too much expectation. Too much attention. He couldn’t stand it. But he also couldn’t resist it.

  So he kept coming back. Kept strapping on his guitar and plugging in, hoping that his instrument would be enough. He could focus on the fretboard, on the motion of his fingers, on the sound of the music, the heartbeat rhythm that tied him to the other guys, that kept him from getting sucked off the stage and hurled through the crust of the earth.

  When he woke up the day of a show, it would already be boiling up inside of him, this restless, rootless terror. He had a buddy from Emory University, Ken Fechtner. They’d met in the dorms not long after Peter got to campus in the fall of ’75 and spent the next couple of years in an endless rolling conversation about bands, records, books, shows, all of Peter’s favorite things. Peter had told him about his band in Athens, so Fechtner drove up for the church show, only to be met outside by an apologetic but firm Bill Berry: Peter doesn’t want you to come…He’ll be too nervous if you’re there.[5] Sigh. Sure, fine, whatever. Fechtner backed off that time, but then Peter was exultant on the phone the next day. It had gone so great…they’d already scored a gig at Tyrone’s, opening for the Brains, a real pro band from Atlanta! So there was no way he was going to miss that one. Tuesday night, May 6, Fechtner drove back from Atlanta and got to Tyrone’s with enough time before the show to find his friend hanging out backstage, pale and sweaty, unable to stand in one place, let alone sit still, wondering aloud if he should just puke now and get it over with. Christ, what a mess.

  * * *

  —

  Maybe he puked, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he slugged down enough beer to stop caring. When the lights went out and the crowd pushed to the front, the four members of R.E.M. stepped onstage, the musicians locked eyes, and Peter launched into the opening riff of “Shakin’ All Over.” The other guys came blasting in after him and the crowd went Oooooh! “The Athens foursome exploded with energy in only their third public performance,” William Haines wrote in a rave review published two days later in The Red & Black. “This was dance music impossible to resist.” Haines might have carried a teeny bit of bias in favor of the hometown band. The review’s headline termed R.E.M. the “underdogs,” and Haines’s lead noted that the Atlanta group, who had a deal with Mercury Records and were behind the popular pop-punk anthem “Money Changes Everything,” had also been blown off the stage in their previous Athens appearance by the Wuoggerz. Still, Haines paints a vivid portrait of a blistering performance by R.E.M., whose original songs, he continued, were “even more amazing than their excellent cover choices.”[6]

  Peter, only just fending off the terrors, strutted through some songs doing all his guitar hero moves, Telecaster held low across his body, machine gun style, slashing at the strings while he spun and jumped to emphasize the beat, only to anticipate a tough passage and, whoops!, ducking away to play it in the safe harbor behind his amp. No matter; Haines singled the guitarist out for praise: “A crackshot ‘Secret Agent Man’ showcased Buck’s guitar talent. He looked like a hired gun, peeling off ancient riffs as if they had just been learned last week. And they could have been.” And Peter was just one quarter of a band that, in Haines’s eyes, had found a way to alchemize pop music’s most magical properties. “Picture James Brown fronting the Dave Clark Five and you only begin to get a handle on the excitement this band causes.”[7]

  * * *

  —

  Of course, Peter hadn’t heard it the way Haines had. Once his excitement had ebbed after their set, Peter made a point of apologizing, first to soundman/stage manager Sean Bourne for the amount of time it had taken R.E.M. to clear their gear off the stage,[8] then to Ken Fechtner for the band’s amateurish performance.[9] They were still working out the kinks, he said; they’d be better soon. But if he was on his way to apologize to anyone else, he was stopped short when the B-52’s’ Cindy Wilson buttonholed him. Their set had been wonderful, she shouted at him. The band was so great, and their songs were so cool! Peter had been agog after that, grabbing Fechtner’s arm and pulling him aside to recount the whole conversation. “I can’t believe Cindy Wilson thinks we’re good,”[10] he crowed. By the end of the evening Tyrone’s’ management had booked R.E.M. to headline a show the next week, and representatives from the student union hired them to open for the Brains at an all-campus event scheduled for the university’s Legion Field two days later.

  They were all thrilled, but for Peter, to find himself playing guitar in a rock band, and a good one that was blowing people away enough to score two new gigs for every gig they played, was living a dream he’d been having since he started listening to rock ’n’ roll radio in grade school. Now if he could only figure out how to do it without puking before the shows, he’d really be happy.

  10

  We Weren’t Really Close in a Lot of Ways

  At Crestwood High School he kept his distance from the crowd.

  The 1975 Arsenal yearbook reveals a single glimpse of the teenage Pete Buck. In his senior portrait, he wears the required tuxedo jacket and formal black bow tie, along with his silky shoulder-length hair and cool, unsmiling detachment. Elsewhere his classmates beam at the camera or look thoughtful, even studious. They disport on the fields, work together to produce the school newspaper and yearbook. They perform in debates, plays, and musicals, serve in student council offices and on advisory committees, or goof with friends in the cafeteria or lounge in groups on the lush green lawn outside the school. Pete is nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  —

  It’s not like he was unwelcome. By the standards of adolescent society, Pete presented well. He was tall and handsome, his eyes sharp and clear, his carriage relaxed. His silence seemed rooted in confidence rather than fear. He never went anywhere without a book, and if he got bored with class he’d prop whatever he had inside the assigned text and read it while the teacher carried on, unaware. Most days he dressed like the other boys, casual but neat in jeans and a T-shirt or button-up. Then one day he’d walk into class in his pajamas and bathrobe and act like nothing was out of the ordinary, sitting back and propping a slippered foot on an empty desk. Pete did well enough in his classes, but his test scores were said to be off the charts. When the junior class’s SAT results came back in early 1975, word spread that Pete Buck had notched the highest score in the entire state of Georgia. It might not have been true, but hardly anyone doubted it. “Everyone knew he had a lot going on up there,” his classmate Joe Craven says.[1]

  Craven was smart too, but he had a lot going on everywhere. Designated an Outstanding Senior, Craven had a half page in the 1975 Arsenal listing his contributions to theater, journalism, student leadership, and the yearbook staff. On that level, he and Pete couldn’t have been more different. But the thing they had in common made them nearly inseparable: they both played guitar. Most days after school, Craven would beeline to the Bucks’ two-story colonial. They’d thump down the stairs to the basement, grab their instruments, and start strumming. They didn’t know enough chords to worry about learning other people’s songs, Craven says. But the absence of mastery freed them to do everything else. “We didn’t have any goals. There were no tunes we wanted to learn, no body of work we wanted to perform. We just had our lab coats on—there we were in the castle and here comes the storm. Let’s see if we can bring anything to life!”[2]

  * * *

  —

  Peter Lawrence Buck was born on December 6, 1956, to parents Peter and Violet Buck, a pair of well-educated professionals living near Los Angeles. The elder Peter’s career with the Simmons Mattress Company soon took them to Richmond, north of Berkeley, where younger son Ken was born in 1958. The family was still in Richmond in February 1964 when Peter, at seven years old, saw the Beatles’ epochal performance on Ed Sullivan’s popular Sunday night variety show on CBS. The music was exciting enough on its own, but the sight of the band on the stage, their shaggy hair and matching suits, and the hysterical reaction of the audience made the boy’s heart hammer in his little chest. As he told author Brett Milano for his book Vinyl Junkies, Peter had already been drawn to the family’s hi-fi system—a Heathkit record player his dad built from a kit—particularly when his father played records by his favorite artist: Ray Charles. Mrs. Buck preferred the pop-folk work of Burl Ives, which her older son came to despise, as he told Milano: “That scarred me for life.”