LITMIR.BIZ

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Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb” in the sexist anthem sweepstakes. No, these songs were merely exercises in rock ’n’ roll affectation: an instance of Stipe trying on the ill-fitting coat of machismo on his way to abstract expressionism.

      There will always be people who feel that an artist’s sexuality has no relevance to an appreciation or understanding of their work. In one sense, that’s probably correct: most artists, gay or straight, strive for universality. A song, poem, story, or novel that deals with the subject of relationships—even if those relationships are cast in an unambiguously homosexual context—is typically deemed successful if it connects with a wide audience of diverse backgrounds. The successful artist, in this scenario, is tapping into the human condition; his or her sexual orientation is deemed irrelevant when the art is viewed in that way.

      But from another perspective, an artist’s sexual orientation has everything to do with the work. I remember having a debate with a visual artist a few years ago, brought on by my reading of a biography of the composer John Cage. I said I found the biographer’s refusal to address the topic of Cage’s homosexuality beyond a few cursory sentences surprising and frustrating. I was taken aback when my artist friend retorted, “Well, whose business is it who he fucked?” I suppose the Stipean response to that question would be, “Only the business of Cage and the people he was fucking.” (This is a paraphrase of something Stipe once said in response to a journalist’s questions about his sexuality.) But at least one later Cage biographer found the subject of who the composer fucked—or their gender, at least—to be of great import. In Where the Heart Beats, author Kay Larson makes the argument that an “acute personal crisis” stemming from Cage’s difficulty in reconciling his sexual orientation and politics with those of society at large led him to the study of Zen Buddhism, which, in turn, transformed his art. Perhaps there will come a day when it really won’t make a difference to anyone whether a person is gay or straight, but during Cage’s time, and during at least the first phase of Michael Stipe’s career, straight people and gay people often led radically different lives. The former could air their preference openly and confidently, secure in the knowledge that their actions were sanctioned by mainstream society. The latter often felt compelled to lead veiled and compartmentalized lives. Straight people rarely stop to think of what that must feel like—to keep such an elemental part of one’s psyche so closely under wraps. How could such a situation not affect a person’s art, when just the act of being oneself in front of one’s friends and co-workers—something that should be effortless and even mundane—requires great fortitude?

      Given the above factors, Stipe’s lifelong friendship with Charles Jerry (Jeremy) Ayers, who passed away in 2016, is significant. The son of a UGA religion professor, Ayers had already been to New York, participated in Warhol’s Factory scene (assuming the drag persona “Silva Thin”), and returned to Athens by the time Stipe met him in 1979. Alongside friends Keith Strickland, Fred Schneider, Kate Pierson, and the Wilson siblings, Ayers played a key role in the creation of the visual and musical aesthetic of the B-52’s. All of this would have been impressive enough to Stipe, but by 1979 Ayers had begun to move into a new style of dress, behavior, and performance that likely played a role in the formation of Stipe’s public persona. “Jerry was quieting,” Rodger Lyle Brown writes in Party Out of Bounds,

      now quitting the campy drag that had dressed the B-52’s for their success. He was turning away from the audacious glitter fag assault and was now falling silent, retreating to mystery, a coyote trickster, but still pretty.... Michael Stipe saw Jerry Ayers . . . He watched him. He was intrigued.

      Stipe, too, had passed through flamboyance on the way to something else. It seems significant that in Volume 1, Stipe’s 2018 book of photography (described in its press release as “centering around [Stipe’s] unconventional and deeply personal understanding of queerness”), Ayers appears more than any other figure, and over a larger span of time (from 1980 through 2015). He is depicted on both the first and last pages of the book.

      With all that was going on around them, the four musicians’ focus on band practice was scattered at best. But that was about to change. Kathleen had a birthday coming up, and she wanted all her musician friends—Paul Butchart, for example, her old friend from German camp, who had recently formed a band called the Side Effects—to play at the inevitable party.

      O’Brien was just as insistent that her roommates’ new band should play. They were reluctant at first, feeling they didn’t have enough material. But when it became clear that she wouldn’t take no for an answer, they buckled down and began rehearsing as if they were preparing for a high-profile concert (which in a sense they were; having already experienced several bacchanals at the church, they knew that this would not be a small party). For Buck and Stipe, at least, the stakes were high. Given the abysmal attendance at pretty much every Gangster gig ever, Stipe might as well have never been in a band before—in fact, this was the image he liked to convey to his new friends. And everyone knew Buck as the opinionated guy from Wuxtry; it was time for him to show how he would do this rock ’n’ roll thing.

      Or something along these lines; as usual, his words are hard to discern.

      Chapter Four

      Paul Butchart stands on a sidewalk corner in downtown Athens, gazing vaguely in my direction. Alone, he looks a lot taller than he actually is. I think the illusion is mostly created by his cascading white beard. As I will learn, he makes good use of this in the holiday season, suiting up every year as a professional Santa (“like his father before him,” a mutual acquaintance tells me). He wears loose clothes that are hanging off him, has a mischievous glow in his eyes—and then there are his pointy eyebrows. He’s not Santa, he’s Jeremiah Johnson crossed with Merlin. An imposing presence, for sure.

      Of the various people I’ve contacted up to this point, Paul has been the most guarded, and it has taken a while for us to get to this face-to-face meeting. During our first e-mail exchanges, he remained noncommittal about being interviewed, and he’s still wary this afternoon. I had a backup plan in case he bowed out: I would simply figure out a way to tag along on one of his Athens Music History walking tours and jot down everything he said. For the past several years he has been showing paying customers the town’s hidden musical landmarks: the old railway trestle from the back cover of R.E.M.’s first album, the cemetery where Ricky Wilson from the B-52’s is buried, the various locations of the 40 Watt Club through the years, and the remains of that church on Oconee Street where R.E.M. formed and eventually played their first gig. That event, and Butchart’s role in it, is what we are here to discuss tonight, and it is my great good luck that he has finally acquiesced. As I will learn, spending one-on-one time with Paul over a few beers is time to be treasured.

      We shake hands on the street corner and he motions me into the doorway of the Globe. We make small talk as we step out of the cold, and I can sense that he’s still on his guard, but his slow, syrupy Georgia accent undercuts that tension, and when he cracks the first of several broad smiles he will bestow over the course of the evening and the corners of his eyes crinkle, I know we’ll be fine. I can’t say we part friends, but our conversation is easy and relaxed.

      Paul’s towering shadow looms over our story at several key intervals. As we have seen, he met Kathleen O’Brien early on at a German-language camp for high school students. Like several of our principal actors he attended the Sex Pistols concert at the Great American Music Hall in 1978 and was galvanized by that event. (“By November,” he says, “I had traded in my Styx and Boston albums for Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Talking Heads and the Ramones.”) In Athens, he landed a job at the local Steak and Ale alongside prep cook Michael Stipe. (“He’d cut the vegetables and I’d cook them and serve them.”) And, like everyone else, he got to know Peter Buck at Wuxtry Records.

      It almost seems like fate might have been actively conspiring to put Paul Butchart in R.E.M., except that he misread the signals. Around the time Michael Stipe and Peter Buck began circling each other, Paul and his best friend, Kit Swartz, started writing songs together. They were not art students, but their efforts were very much in the primitive, anti-technique school of music-making that David Pierce described earlier. Butchart

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