Cover Story: Dance this dusty mess around

Twenty-five years ago this Valentine’s Day, the B-52’s played their first gig. And with that, Athens, Gee-A., began earning its spot on the map of great pop music burgs.

Music scenes tend to age in dog years. Since 1977, so many generations of musicians have cycled through Athens that almost all traces of the first-wave groups are gone. The downtown is unrecognizable from the days in the late ’70s when it was the daytime shopping district for area farmers, and an empty after-dark playground for rogue art students and streetwalking transvestites. Heading to the museum: all the surviving posters and video props, vinyl 45s and Xeroxed zines, sweat-stained costumes, and spray-painted nightclub marquees from the paradise lost 25 years ago.

But the question is, which museum? As is often the case when you’re dealing with history — particularly the ownership and reselling of it — there is disagreement over who should tell it. Old-time scenesters, downtown Athens developers and curators at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon all want to be the bones-keeper of the relics from the time when Athens was celebrated around the world as “The Land of a Thousand Dances.” As with most such conflicts, everyone has a point.

“There’s a lot of stuff to be collected and catalogued,” says Art Jackson, head of the Athens Downtown Development Authority, which has spearheaded one of the museum efforts. “But mostly all of it is in private collections. We need to protect this collection.”

“Those are the suits who never supported the scene in the first place,” says one disgruntled longtime Athenian, who’s keeping his collection to himself.

“We’re trying to honor them, not get their stuff,” says Joseph Johnson, the curator of popular culture at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, who has begun trying to build the Macon-based museum’s collection for an exhibit this summer on the Athens scene.

Meanwhile, other locals wonder why folks in Macon should be the ones to tell Athens’ story.

The details of the history waiting to be told are fairly clear. It’s a tale of serendipity and coincidence, sin and synchronicity — and it goes a little something like this:

It all started at a Chinese restaurant. Half-a-dozen friends got loopy on flaming rum drinks and decided to jam in a friend’s basement. Locals Keith Strickland, Ricky Wilson and his little sister, Cindy, along with northern transplants Kate Pierson and Fred Schneider, had all messed around with music and performance before. And so they put together the bits and pieces of this and that — Fred’s doggerel verse, Ricky’s offbeat tunings, Kate’s folk singing — and they liked what they came up with. They kept at it.

In February 1977, a friend of theirs said she was having a Valentine’s Day party at her house near the corner of Prince and Milledge avenues. Fred asked if they could play. The friend said yes. Just days before the party, Keith came up with the name in a dream: the B-52’s.

On Valentine’s night, the B-52’s played in public for the first time. They chopped through a six-song set while the girls danced and warbled with fake-fur thrift-store muffs on their heads. The Athens music scene was born.

There had been music in Athens before, of course. Randall Bramblett, who’d played with the Allman Brothers and Sea Level, was in town — still is. Before him, the Jesters were local favorites. Clubs booked rock acts and cover bands and solo singer/songwriters. But what was different was the vibe.

These were the days before VCRs, before MTV, when there was value in rareness and obscurity, and newly discovered 45s were passed from hand to hand and blared and crackled endlessly on dorm-room turntables. The hip-kid culture of the late 1970s was being inspired by the pastiche underground aesthetic of punk/new wave that was creeping out of New York City, L.A. and London. The B-52’s postmodern camp was in perfect synch with this new do-it-yourself ethic. It was a three-chords-and-a-bottle-of-beer school of rock that made it possible for anybody to be a star.

A few more parties, a few trips to New York City in the Wilsons’ parents’ station wagon, and the B-52’s were doing just that. In February 1978 they recorded their first single on Atlantan Danny Beard’s new label, DB Recs. When “Rock Lobster”/”52 Girls” came out in May, the group started getting offers from national record labels. By fall, Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine hailed them as “the fastest rising band in America.” The B-52’s were gone from Athens, to return only for occasional visits. But their success drew attention to the town and paved the way for what was to come.

By 1980, the formation of noteworthy bands in town was catching up with reputation the scene had already started to earn. Pylon’s melodic industrialism and the Method Actors’ two-man primal scream were hits in New York, and in May of that year, Pylon drummer Curtis Crowe opened the first of Athens’ new generation of rock clubs, the 40 Watt East, above a sandwich shop on the corner of College and Broad.

R.E.M., the Side Effects and Love Tractor started playing out that summer. By then, the notice that Athens bands were getting from the national music press marked the beginning of a certain self-consciousness that would come to full bloom in the next couple years. The styles of music varied widely, from the post-punk power-pop of R.E.M. and the Side Effects, to the dissonant noise of Limbo District and the lilting minimalism of Oh-OK. But what bound the bands into a community was a bucolic bohemianism, a sense of Southern distinctiveness and isolation that gave the artistically inclined a license to re-invent themselves over and over again.

The British music magazine New Music Express called attention to Athens in January 1981 when, in a review of a Pylon album, it picked up on the man-bites-dog news value of cool new bands coming from foreign territory: “Buried deep in the land of rednecks, peanut farms and wave-yer-hat-and-shout-yeehaw boogie bands, there’s something stirring.” That summer, Pylon made it onto the cover of influential music paper The New York Rocker, and inside was a survey of the hot Athens bands. In the article, “New Sounds from a New South,” the Rocker declared, “Small town makes good.”

Then slowly, seismically, Athens music shifted again. More kids from campus were turning on to “new wave,” and they had little patience for experimentation. Art rock was fine, but it didn’t move product. The critically acclaimed Method Actors, for example, were now playing to empty clubs and decided to dissolve. Pylon had plateaued. Meanwhile, in October 1982, the more populist R.E.M. nearly sold out the 1,000-seat Agora Ballroom in Atlanta.

As the scene began to transform into an industry — and the 40 Watt moved to the location of a former fern bar — the mainstream took notice. People magazine featured Athens in a 1983 issue. The Washington Post did a big feature, “O Little Town of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” in which it noted that “Athens is inspiring almost everyone to pick up a guitar and get down.” Newsweek followed with its feature “Hot Rockin’ in Athens.”

In April ‘83, R.E.M. released its first album, Murmur. Destined to become a contemporary classic and profoundly impact American music through the ’80s and ’90s, Murmur contributed to a revival of guitar rock over synth-pop, and influenced alt- and grunge-rockers like Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.

The rest followed according to the natural order of great music scenes. Bands broke up, some reformed or made room for others. Prominent locals died, including the B-52’s guitarist Ricky Wilson and Side Effects bassist Jimmy Ellison. Someone came to document it all on film, resulting in the 1986 film Athens, Georgia - Inside/Out. Some in the old guard wind up at the top of the national pop charts, while inevitably, a new generation of bands sprouts up with little connection to the originators.

Of course, the eternal question is: “Why Athens?” How did this little Southern college town become one of the hottest music meccas in the country? Everybody rhetorically rehearsed their own explanations: the water, the heat, cheap rent, the art school, the kudzu, the fried chicken. But there’s really no ultimate explanation — other than a complex algorithm that might calculate the combinations of talent and luck, of moment and milieu, and the almost infinite set of coincidences that led to Bill Berry meeting Mike Mills meeting Michael Stipe meeting Peter Buck, and Fred Schneider meeting Kate Pierson meeting Ricky Wilson, and ever onward in a great chain of “who begat who” that would challenge the Old Testament in its arcane tedium.

At a certain point, however, what once was a mysterious alchemy became a formula, and with the arrival of national renown, what once was a pastoral backwater was now securely on the cultural map. Athens’ characteristic agrarian-thrift fashion became a uniform. Athens had always been a prime destination for Georgia students — having been designated a top party school by Playboy. But now, kids with artistic and musical ambitions began flocking to the town. They came from Atlanta, Chapel Hill, and some, like songwriter Matthew Sweet — who used his early-’80s Athens residency to land his first record deal — from Lincoln, Neb. Cheap rents, cheap beer and good press made the town a great place to get your chops down before heading out onto the road, easily scoring gigs as “a new band from Athens.”

And the growth hasn’t stopped. Once dime stores and wig shops, shoe stores and some pizza joints, a few meat-and-three diners and a couple newsstands populated the downtown area. Businesses purveyed V-neck sweaters, ladies’ dresses, logoed stationery and red-and-black Bulldog paraphernalia. Today, the town has been totally transformed into something unrecognizable from the time when the B-52’s and their pals strolled the streets as the self-proclaimed “Deadbeat Club” and went down to Allen’s Hamburgers for 25-cent beers. Twenty-five years after a simple little Valentine’s Day party, downtown Athens is officially an “entertainment district.”

“We still have a little traditional daytime retail left,” says Jackson, of the Athens Downtown Development Authority. “But the downtown has evolved.”

In 1993, downtown Athens — an area roughly six blocks long and two blocks wide — had 12 bars. Today, according to Jackson, there are 69 licensed beverage establishments: 47 restaurants and 32 bars.

“Some say it’s the most compact entertainment district on the East Coast,” Jackson says. “And people like it that way because you can walk from one place to another; you don’t have to drive or take cabs.”

With such rapid growth recently — much of it directly attributed to the music scene — it didn’t take city fathers long to realize the value of leveraging the scene that they once casually persecuted (like the time they shut down the Koffee Klub during R.E.M.’s first public performance) or, at best, scratched their heads over.

“It’s totally changed,” says Bertis Downs, the manager for R.E.M., who has lived in Athens since the late ’70s. “Back then, sidewalk cafe permits were really out-there. That was seen as such a crazy idea. But now you can’t walk down the street without tripping over them.”

Hotels and restaurants shared in the boom as fans came to town to see what all the talk was about. “A few years ago, it was mostly people on R.E.M. pilgrimages,” Jackson says. “They’d want to see the steeple, where the 40 Watt used to be, that sort of thing. We had R.E.M. fans coming here in motor homes.”

Jackson estimates the local music industry — virtually non-existent 25 years ago — is now the fourth-largest employer in Athens, behind the university, healthcare and poultry processing. “Among the band members, the studios, the management companies, the technicians, graphic designers and all, there are about 1,800-2,000 people directly employed in the music industry,” he says.

What’s more, most of the labor working in the downtown entertainment district comes from the community of musicians and artists who are no longer — or never have been — enrolled at the university.

“With their HOPE scholarships, most students aren’t taking these jobs as waiters and waitresses,” says Jackson. “We’ve got pretty affluent students here, and Mama and Daddy don’t want them working. It’s the musicians who are doing that work.”

And so it is was, with all that in mind — the tax base, the tourism revenues, the labor supply, plus a trend toward using festivals as a tool for economic development — that representatives from the Athens Visitors Center, the Clarke County Information Office and the Development Authority got involved in the 2001 Athfest, the city’s summer street fair. They staged the Athens Exhibit of Musical History, featuring relics, posters, photos and artifacts from the city’s past.

According to the Athfest website, “The exhibit’s organizers believe that once people see what has been gathered so far, they will want to be part of continuing efforts to develop a permanent museum by volunteering their time or donating additional memorabilia.”

Unfortunately, after Athfest, everybody reclaimed their contributions, and the Development Authority’s task force was back to where it started. “That was done on a trial basis,” Jackson says of the exhibit. “We’ll probably pull the committee together again in the spring.”

For the time being, it seems that much of the memorabilia — props from R.E.M. videos, signs from long-defunct clubs — is going to stay in private hands. Paul Butchart, a member of the Side Effects, who played at the same party where R.E.M. debuted, has been pulling posters off telephone polls and clipping newspapers for decades. He helped organize and mount the Athfest exhibit at Athens’ historic Morton Theater. But he later had disagreements with the Development Authority and reclaimed his material.

“I live in the house where the B’s first played, so I plan to clean out the foyer and set up my own museum there,” says Butchart. “I already give tours all the time. People come from all over the world. They bump into me and I take them to the trestle pictured on the back of R.E.M.’s Murmur, Weaver D’s soul food joint that inspired Automatic for the People title, Ricky Wilson’s grave, Barber Street home to famed Athens musicians, tell ‘em stories, take ‘em to Pete Buck’s old house.”

Another longtime Athenian, Doug Hollingsworth, has been collecting artifacts for a display at the 40 Watt Club. “Ultimately, there’s going to be something down there at the club. But considering the site, we want to make sure it’s secure. It’ll be mostly 40 Watt memorabilia — the old Crowe’s Nest sign, the movie screen that Kurt Cobain tore when he swung from it.”

Even Joseph Johnson, the curator of popular culture at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, is running into turf wars surrounding collections of old Athens artifacts. “When we went over to Athfest, we thought it would be great to do something to honor the scene there,” he says. “Then it was the question of, where do we get the stuff?”

Johnson is planning an exhibit on the Athens scene to run July through September 2002 at the Hall of Fame’s Macon headquarters, but he’s aware of the sensitivities of the longtime collectors of local memorabilia. “I tell them our role is to celebrate and document the idea of the Athens scene. Our whole purpose is to honor and extol you guys,” he says. “I explain that people will see the exhibit and then go and buy your stuff. One and one makes cash.”

So far, the B-52’s have given the Hall of Fame some outfits and guitars. But R.E.M. and others Athens legends haven’t been so forthcoming. “We’re just getting started,” Johnson says.

With the land-grab for artifacts and all the interest in laying claims to the past, it can be easy to lose sight of what’s at stake. On one hand, music has done more than anything else to define Athens to the rest of the world and is therefore ripe to be exploited for business and civic aims — even some noble ones. On the other hand, Athens’ music community has managed to remain remarkably intact over the years, due largely to the fact that it was never entirely co-opted by outsiders and remains focused on creating as much as selling.

Maureen McGinley, who managed the B-52’s when they first began and now works as a jury-selection consultant, says that after a lull in the early 1990s, the original impulse that made Athens the hotbed of American music in the ’70s and ’80s seems to have returned.

In recent years, Athens has seen a new efflorescence of creativity: the arena-rocking jams of Widespread Panic; the Indonesian alt-rock fusion of Macha; the Southern-rock revisionism of the Drive-By Truckers; the twisted psychedelic pop of Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, Of Montreal and other bands that formed the Elephant Six collective. Athens musicians have even made some inroads into new terrain, including I Am the World Trade Center (electronic pop) and Bubba Sparxxx (hip-hop). Meanwhile, veteran songwriters like Bramblett and Vic Chesnutt continue to turn out first-rate work. The Kindercore record label, Chase Park Transduction studio and other businesses provide a healthy infrastructure for the still largely independent music industry in Athens.

Just as it was during the heyday of the scene, “people care about each other, artists and musicians help each other out,” notes McGinley. And a sense of community emerges out of the rituals of daily life.

McGinley continues, and nails the ineffable answer to the question “Why Athens?”: “It’s like grace — it settles on a place, stays for a while, then leaves. And it’s back now. We’re still doing just what we were doing 25 years ago. All this history stuff is fine, but I just want to dance.”

music@creativeloafing.com

Rodger Lyle Brown is the author of Party Out of Bounds: The B-52’s, R.E.M. and the Kids Who Rocked Athens GA. A former CL staffer, he created, wrote and drew the Blotter for 10 years.’‘??

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