LITMIR.BIZ

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Letters to the Monkees . . . all of that stuff.

      This is the den of geeks that Michael Stipe began frequenting, sometimes in the company of his sisters, sometimes alone. He was fronting Gangster at that point, and his musical knowledge remained spotty; mainstream rock from the ’70s, country music from his childhood, Henry Mancini soundtracks, and Patti Smith made up the bulk of his diet. But in his reading of Creem and other music periodicals he was beginning to note certain names that kept popping up: the Velvet Underground, Big Star, the Stooges. It was Stipe’s attractive sisters who first piqued Peter Buck’s interest in his new customer, but what kept Buck’s attention was Stipe’s tendency to purchase records that Buck had earmarked for himself.

      It quickly emerged over the course of their conversations that both men harbored musical ambitions. Buck was by now chomping at the bit to write music of his own and make some kind of contribution to the ongoing rock ’n’ roll dialogue. Stipe, while already actively fronting a band, appreciated the fact that Buck had a more expansive musical palette than his Gangster bandmates. That seemed to override any apparent lack of practical musical ability on Buck’s part. They decided they would try their hand at writing some songs together.

      Here, like a comet, is where Kathleen O’Brien comes back into view. She had begun drifting into Wuxtry around the same time as Michael Stipe. Throughout much of the 1978–79 academic year she had hosted a new wave show on WUOG (the university’s radio station) called Purely Physical. “I knew everybody at the record stores,” she says,

      because that’s what we DJs did. And the musicians and everybody that was into the music thing were all at the stores because there was so much coming in. There was the early rap coming out of New York and then there was—not real garage bands, but what had evolved from the B-52’s.

      The people following these developments were, O’Brien explains, “the same group that just kept coming together and coming together and coming together.” They included many of the characters from the raucous “subwastement” parties: Mark Cline, Rodger Lyle Brown, Sandi Phipps, Kurt Wood (another WUOG DJ), Paul Butchart, Carol Levy, Linda Hopper, and more.

      Kathleen had tried her hand at music-making herself, albeit in what she referred to as a “mockery band” called the Wuoggerz: a train wreck of an ensemble consisting of O’Brien on vocals and tambourine along with several of her colleagues from WUOG. They performed, as she puts it, “horrible obscure bad covers” of punk, alternative, and classic rock songs. At the time, the thing that distinguished the Wuoggerz was their outlandish costumes. What distinguishes them in the annals of Athens music history now is the fact that they elicited Bill Berry’s return to the drum kit for the first time since his Macon days, thereby ending his supposed swearing-off of rock ’n’ roll.

      Bill and Kathleen were still circling each other at that point. Whether it was due to shyness or just a general attitude of circumspection, Bill hadn’t responded—at least overtly—to Kathleen’s obvious interest. And yet, when she asked if he would drum for her ragtag group, he accepted without hesitation. His actual words: “Hell yeah!”

      Bill’s connections with the Copelands enabled the Wuoggerz to land a plum opening slot for the Police—then in the lift-off stage of their meteoric rise to stardom—at a campus May Day concert. During the gig, Bill clearly had eyes for the gyrating Kathleen. But nothing happened—for now. The Wuoggerz fizzled out, since none of the band members were all that interested in actually playing music. It was only ever a rambunctious group of friends anyway, and those friendships persisted.

      Fall 1979 found Kathleen on the hunt for a new place to live, having finally outgrown Reed Hall in spite of its ineffable charms, and at some point she got to talking with Dan Wall (the owner of Wuxtry Records) about her predicament. Wall had been living in a room in a converted church on Oconee Street but was in the process of moving out and needed someone to take over the lease.

      “Hey, I’d like to move into the church,” she told him. “So who’s the landlord? Who do I talk to?”

      “Well, I kind of promised it to one of my employees.”

      “Oh well,” she said. “They might need a roommate. Who is it?”

      “Well, it’s Pete Buck.”

      “I know Pete Buck!”

      And so it was that Kathleen and Peter moved into the old church. And, being young, heterosexual, and living in such close quarters, they also became romantically involved for a brief period of time. So Kathleen was on hand to witness some of Peter Buck and Michael Stipe’s earliest songwriting sessions. “Michael was coming over frequently,” she says, “and they were writing songs. It was more like Pete sitting around with the guitar and Michael doing the lyrics. They had good stuff, and they were also doing covers together. Pete was still kind of rough around the edges on the guitar, but it was interesting. It was fun.”

      Regarding the church—it had become known as Steeplechase—where this all transpired, Peter Buck has said, “[It] has been romanticized beyond all belief. It was just a rotten, dumpy little shithole where college kids, only college kids, could be convinced to live.” Buck is often given to hyperbole, but in this instance there is no reason to doubt his appraisal. If the place wasn’t already on the verge of being condemned when Dan Wall moved out, then Buck, O’Brien, Stipe (who moved in shortly after the songwriting collaborations began), and their rotating cast of roommates—who included a drug dealer at one point, and later the other two future members of R.E.M.—surely hastened its demise. In many ways it was the subwastement writ large: one nonstop party. And it’s saying something that Kathleen O’Brien, who certainly knew how to turn a place upside down in the name of a good party, was apparently the tidiest person in the bunch.

      The old church on Oconee Street, ca. 1980. Photo by Rick Hawkins, © Rick Hawkins 2010.

      So yes, the place was a dump. No one who set foot there has ever suggested otherwise. Nevertheless, there are a number of valid reasons why Steeplechase has been “romanticized beyond all belief,” all stemming from the fact that it became the birthplace of R.E.M. There was the metaphorical significance of it having been a house of worship—with its exterior still intact. Lots of bands have started out in garages or basements, but very few have begun in churches, and it’s fitting that a band such as R.E.M., which would come to be distinguished by its gnomic lyrics and—at least early on—its out-of-focus, not-quite-there public image, had its genesis in such a place.

      And yet this wasn’t really a church. It was the shell of a church with a two-story bunker built inside. The tale of how such a structure came to be has been lost to history. Did the developers have superstitious reservations about destroying a church to make way for their planned rental units, and therefore decide to build the apartments inside the church? Or did they simply think that a church-on-the-outside, wood-grain-paneled-“house”-on-the-inside was a neat idea that gave the place an edge over traditional apartment complexes?

      In either case, the execution was half-assed at best. Even without the 24-7 hell-raising of its inhabitants, the place would have been in bad shape. The exterior windows had either been deliberately removed or had fallen out over time; they’d been replaced with wooden shutters. It was clear that no one had laid a paintbrush on the place in decades. Also, there was the small matter of the gaping hole in Kathleen’s bedroom closet, which led to the still-intact sanctuary of the original church—which, incidentally, made for a killer rehearsal space for a fledgling band. But not yet, not yet.

      Across town, Billy Holmes had made the acquaintance of Mike Mills and Bill Berry. Paul “Crumpy” Edwards, Holmes’s bandmate in the Red Scare, had known Mills and Berry in Macon and introduced them to Holmes. The four of them (and others) often congregated around Express Pizza on Baxter Street to play video games and avail themselves of the two-dollar pitchers of beer on offer. What most struck Holmes at the time was Mills’s brown bomber jacket (“like a fly jacket”) that, much like Buck’s letter jacket, never seemed to leave its wearer’s body. As musicians, though, the duo didn’t strike Holmes as anything other than dilettantes.

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