Begin the Begin - Robert Dean Lurie

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zoot suits. Stipe took the stage name “Michael Valentine.” According to Rodger Lyle Brown, the group played “all covers, from Tom Petty to Elvis.” Stipe’s sisters attended every show, cheering their brother on.

      It’s safe to assume that Gangster was not a huge draw for the nascent art-school party crowd. It seems, in fact, that very few people saw the band play other than Stipe’s sisters and a big, fun-loving, hard-drinking loudmouth named Billy Holmes. Holmes, who was knocking around Athens playing in folk duos and hard rock outfits at the time, was decidedly not of the art school scene; his tastes ran more in the direction of classical music and the much-maligned genre of progressive rock (he counts Yes and Genesis as two of his favorite bands) than the primitivism of the B-52’s and Pylon. What brought him to see Gangster perform at the Last Resort on Clayton Street was not any kind of premonition about the singer’s future but rather his friendship with Gangster’s bassist, Danny Bell.

      “I just thought, poor Danny. There was nobody there,” Billy tells me in his thick drawl.

      But that was the first time I ever laid eyes on Michael Stipe. I was really happy for him when R.E.M. did something years later, because I was sort of an outcast, and was eccentric, and had been picked on my whole life. And Michael—I did not really know him, but I had heard he had tried to get in bands with people, and people would not play with him. Nobody would give him a shot, and that is why he ended up singing Lynyrd Skynyrd covers with guys from Monroe. You know, he didn’t really want to join a bunch of—quite frankly, let’s just put it like it is—Monroe rednecks. But he had acne, and you never saw his face because he grew his hair out long and he would put his hair all over his face.

      Compounding the feelings of alienation was the very real grief he felt at having been uprooted from his peer group in St. Louis. Earlier moves had not had such traumatic consequences, but this time he had really begun to find his voice—both figuratively and literally. Mike Doskocil might have found the place intolerable, but in St. Louis Michael Stipe had made friends and had been playing music. Consequently, Stipe viewed his family’s abrupt move to small-town Georgia as a catastrophe. In at least one interview, he has said that he remained behind in St. Louis for a few months, but finally caved and joined his family out of economic necessity. At that point, the familiar pattern of spending most of his time with his sisters reasserted itself. His youngest sister, Lynda, in particular, seems to have served as a sounding board and kindred spirit as Michael began exploring his artistic side in earnest. She was still in high school at the time, but she accompanied Michael practically everywhere.

      Lynda and Michael Stipe, ca. 1985. Photo by Ingrid Schorr.

      “Lynda Stipe is an awesome gal,” Billy Holmes says. “I worked with her, actually, at Sons of Italy pizzeria, up in Five Points. She is very creative, always has been, and I always thought she deserved more recognition than she got.”

      In several respects, Lynda bears a striking resemblance to her older brother: full lips, piercing eyes, extremely curly brown hair, and the same smile. She also shares with Michael an intuitive, almost childlike approach to creativity and artmaking, unencumbered by formal theory or over-intellectualization. Less is known of Michael’s other sister, Cyndy (or “Cindy” or “Cyndi” as her name has been spelled in various accounts)—mainly because she went on to something resembling a conventional career (in education), started a family, and consequently faded from the Athens scene fairly early. But initially she was right there with the other two, running around town, checking things out. So when Stipe strode in to the Wuxtry Records store on Baxter Street sometime in early 1979 flanked by two attractive young women, it made an impression. The clerk behind the counter was a towering, mop-topped guy who carried himself with a jaded “I’ve seen it all” air. But the sight of this skinny reverse-mullet guy with a hot girl on each arm threw him for a loop. The clerk’s name? Peter Buck.

      So here we are at last. “Pete” Buck: the gangly, hawk-nosed motormouth and autodidact with idiosyncratic tastes and an encyclopedic knowledge of rock ’n’ roll and more. He’s seen every episode of both The Monkees and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And he can drink you under the table.

      Born in Berkeley, California, Buck moved with his family to Atlanta in his teens and graduated from Crestwood High School. He has, over the years, told extravagant, Beat Generation–tinged tales of a young adulthood filled with cross-country hitchhiking, sleeping in ditches, and taking odd jobs washing dishes and cleaning toilets. He stops just shy of saying he rode the rails and hung out with hoboes. Occasionally, he has also intimated some sort of dark criminal past. No evidence to substantiate these claims has ever surfaced.

      It seems likely that Buck took a cue here from Bob Dylan, who told outlandish tales about his past in order to liven up a rather boring middle-class backstory. What is known for certain is that Buck attended Atlanta’s Emory University for a time and was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. As we have already seen, he first came in contact with a young Kathleen O’Brien while working at a record store near the campus. He had the requisite childhood for a future rock star, which is to say he spent most of his adolescence sequestered in his bedroom listening to records and perusing the latest issues of Rolling Stone and Creem, dreaming of a wild on-the-road life while likely living a confined, isolated one. His early interest in the Monkees and the Beatles (in that order of preference) gave way eventually to the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and the New York Dolls. He was aware of “punk” from the moment the term was coined. Oddly, though, this passionate interest in listening to music was not accompanied at first by a desire to play music. He had learned a few guitar chords from his younger brother Ken and occasionally noodled around, but that was the extent of his involvement with the instrument.

      It was quiet, studious Ken who seemed destined for a musical career. Billy Holmes, who knew the younger Buck during the latter’s time at the University of Georgia, says, “Ken is one of the best musicians I have ever known. He has a classical guitar degree from UGA. And he took his knowledge of classical guitar and he taught himself to play classical piano from it, which is astounding to me. He is a really good bass player and a really good singer. Like Lynda Stipe, he ended up getting overshadowed by his famous sibling.”

      The brothers Buck both arrived in Athens at roughly the same time, though by different means. Ken came as a student. Peter, whose vague ambitions of getting an education degree had fizzled at Emory, became aware of an open Wuxtry job via a contact at its sister store in Decatur. With his previous record store experience and his impressive storehouse of musical lore, he was a shoo-in. He reported for work in January 1979, around the same time that Bill Berry, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe all arrived in town, and quickly established himself as something of an in-house oracle. He was immediately recognizable, due to his height and the purple high school letter jacket he wore like a second skin, and few customers made it through a visit without receiving a lecture on some aspect of music history.

      “He listened to or had in his collection pretty much everything,” says Billy Holmes,

      from John Coltrane to Karlheinz Stockhausen. Dunno if he listened to it all, but he had it, and would gladly tape copies. If he had something he thought was cool, he would tell you all about it and ask if you wanted a copy. He wanted to share his finds. He was a big fan of James Bond and spy shows and stuff like that.

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