LITMIR.BIZ

      Lynda Stipe [facing camera], Carol Levy [behind Lynda Stipe], Cyndy Stipe [back to camera], ca. 1982.

      Photo by Ingrid Schorr.

      One of the biggest challenges to having consistent, focused rehearsals was the increasingly wild partying going on at the church. A scene began to coalesce around Steeplechase that included many familiar faces from Reed Hall, such as Carol Levy, Linda Hopper, Sandi Phipps, and WUOG DJ Kurt Wood, a wiry, bushy-haired former Reed resident. Paul Butchart was there, as were a number of Stipe’s acquaintances from the art school, including David Pierce and his professor Jim Herbert. So too were other future stars of the Athens music scene like Paul Lombard, Mark Cline, and Mike Richmond. (This is, by its very nature, a woefully incomplete list).

      If Rodger Lyle Brown’s account is to be believed (and he was there, too), many of these folks were fucking each other rather indiscriminately.

      It was a heavily sexual time. Rutting in the dirt. At parties. In the bathrooms. Making somebody before passing out and then loving whomever you wake up next to, found groping from floor to couch. The worst thing to worry about was herpes, but that scare didn’t really hit too hard until the next year. But even with that negligible fear you can still just do it anyway. You meet somebody and you can just see it in their eyes and in fifteen minutes you are out in the car.

      This group of misfits may not have been breaking new ground, but like those crazy kids who gave the Summer of Love its name a little over a decade earlier, the Steeplechase crew celebrated their newfound sexual freedom with all the vigor and urgency that came with the belief that they had invented the orgy. In the reminiscences of Brown and others, one picks up on the subtle but very real melancholy of a post-party comedown—the impression, intentional or not, that nothing that came afterward burned quite so brightly or joyously as those days and nights in Athens in 1979 and 1980.

      Inevitably, human nature interceded. Just because a bunch of young adults were high and horny didn’t mean that jealousy and possessiveness could be staved off forever. And anyway, not knowing who you’re going to bed with on any given night can be a little exhausting. Out of chaos came some kind of order—for at least some of the individuals involved. Peter Buck and Bill Berry, in particular, emerged as having slightly more conventional approaches to relationships than some of their peers. Buck drifted into what would become a long-term relationship with Ann Boyles. And Berry finally began dating Kathleen O’Brien.

      “I was attracted from the very beginning,” Kathleen says. “But once we started going out I was a goner.”

      It was just one of those feelings like he was a compatible soul or something. I thought he was incredibly talented and once you got to know him, he had a great sense of humor. He was a gentleman. He had a very cool sense of dress and style. I love his voice; I mean, you could just listen to him for hours. And even though he was quiet, he was very intense. He was real adventurous, which you wouldn’t know if you didn’t know him.

      One particular incident remains embedded in Kathleen’s mind. During a seemingly aimless car ride through north Georgia farmland, the two spotted a man on a tractor working his fields. That was when Bill confided to Kathleen that his ultimate ambition was not to be a rock musician but rather to own a farm and be a farmer. They parked their car and walked over to the guy on the tractor, and somehow Bill talked the man into letting him take a spin on the machine. They spent the better part of the afternoon riding the tractor over the man’s fields, and Bill was about the happiest Kathleen had ever seen him.

      ***

      Though not much of a hedonist (at least in relation to his peers), Michael Stipe was philosophically in sync with at least one aspect of the emerging Athens party culture, shunning conventional romantic relationships in favor of unburdened, no-fuss encounters. It’s not that he flew though a succession of partners at this point in his life, but he nevertheless displayed an aversion to commitment. Stipe has claimed in recent interviews that he had never been in love or experienced a real relationship prior to becoming involved with the photographer Thomas Dozol in the late 1990s. He characterizes all partners prior to Dozol as simply “lovers.”

      Whatever the nature and extent of the relationships, in his early years in Athens he was involved most visibly with women. He obliquely acknowledged in a 2011 Interview profile that one of his early partners had been Carol Levy, the dark-haired provocateur Kathleen and others had known in their Reed Hall days. According to one of his friends from this period, Stipe was also involved at some point with another Reed Hall alum, Linda Hopper. This friend says, with a laugh, “I’m old enough to remember when Michael Stipe liked girls.” In one respect she’s kidding: she’s not really suggesting that Stipe was once straight and somehow turned gay over time. But she is underscoring the fact that his relationships with women were not in any sense fraudulent ones. Stipe, by his own account, “enjoyed” having sex with women, and he chose partners who were kindred spirits. Both Levy and Hopper were artistic and “nonlinear” thinkers like himself.

      For the first half of R.E.M.’s thirty-year run, journalists and biographers skirted the subject of Stipe’s sexuality entirely. It’s unclear whether this was due to some kind of direct mandate from R.E.M.’s management, or simply out of fear of libel suits. (Stipe, after all, did not make any public statement on the topic of his sexuality until the release of the Monster album in 1994.) By 2011, though, Stipe was ready to talk specifics. He told the Observer’s Sean O’Hagan, “On a sliding scale of sexuality I’d place myself around 80–20, but I definitely prefer men to women.”

      In 1979–80, Stipe seemed to be making the most of that 20 percent heterosexual side, and who can blame him? Despite the powerful influence of gay culture on Athens’ burgeoning art and music scene, local attitudes toward homosexuality varied widely. Stipe’s new songwriting partner Peter Buck didn’t at first seem especially sensitive to the issue. (Party Out of Bounds contains a storyin which the young Peter threatened Paul Lombard with physical violence after Lombard called him a “faggot”: “How can he call me a fag? I sleep with ten times as many women as he does!” Peter is quoted as saying.) In the larger culture, pop music itself seemed to be going back into the closet after a brief flirtation with open expressions of homosexuality in the 1970s. The dawn of the new decade saw David Bowie—previously the de facto spokesman for the more flamboyant side of gay culture—backpedaling from his earlier assertions that he was gay, or even bisexual. Queen’s Freddie Mercury, despite a provocative onstage persona, remained firmly in the closet. Even Elton John wore a mask of heterosexuality. Fred Schneider of the B-52’s aside, being openly gay must have seemed a career-threatening move for just about any aspiring rock singer at the dawn of the 1980s.

      Many of Stipe’s friends in Athens viewed him as quirky, shy, and emotionally guarded, but they seemed at first to have little inkling that he might be gay. Given Stipe’s later statement that he had always been open about his sexuality to his closest friends and loved ones, that circle must have been small. Velena Vego, who got to know him a few years later, says: “At the time I was around [the mid-’80s], Michael wasn’t out. He was dating Natalie Merchant from 10,000 Maniacs. So things did change over the years.”

And yet Stipe didn’t make himself out to be super-hetero either. His early lyrics, many of which had been jettisoned by the time R.E.M. began making records, represent perhaps his only attempt to put forward any kind of macho swagger. R.E.M. biographer Tony Fletcher has characterized this material as misogynistic, but that’s a bit of a stretch—at least when judged by the usual rock ’n’ roll standards. “Hey, Hey Nadine” (aka

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