LITMIR.BIZ

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were art majors at UGA, and so the arrival of the B-52’s initiated a symbiotic relationship between the University of Georgia Art Department and the fledgling Athens music scene. For those first few years, the former would feed the latter with both talent and an audience. The connection solidified with the second major band to emerge from the scene: Pylon, all four of whose members—Randall Bewley, Michael Lachowski, Curtis Crowe, and Vanessa Briscoe—were art students.

      There are a number of people out there who believe to this day that Pylon was the greatest band ever to come out of Athens. Millions of R.E.M. fans would dismiss that statement outright, yet it deserves serious examination. Certainly, Pylon was unique among the first wave of Athens bands. Virtually every aspect of their sound—from the minimalist, trancelike groove laid down by Lachowski and Crowe, to Bewley’s jagged, atonal guitar textures, to Briscoe’s yelps and guttural grunts—was unlike anything the Athens party crowd had heard before. And only in the Athens art community could such a pointedly anti-mainstream ensemble have become that community’s “resident dance party band” (Brown’s description). But there it was. Something in that locked-down rhythm section and those stuttering guitars got people moving, jerking their bodies across living-room floors.

      Much of Pylon’s genius can be attributed to the fact that the band was built from scratch by people with no preconceived notions about what they were doing. Lachowski and Bewley had begun writing songs together almost immediately after purchasing their instruments (at a yard sale and a pawn shop, respectively). Crowe had been playing drums for less than a year. Briscoe had apparently sung in her high school chorus, but you wouldn’t know it; seemingly unschooled in the rudiments of rhythm and intonation, she created her own alternative parameters. Pylon were cluelessly overconfident art students coming at rock ’n’ roll from the outside. They rebuilt it in their own image and lo, it was great.

      The success of Pylon inspired many other art school kids, few of whom had any previous musical training, to form bands of their own. They threw themselves into the endeavor with naïveté and passion. When I get him to step out of his Romeo Cologne persona and think back to those days, David Pierce recalls:

      The whole Athens scene was against all the virtuosity that was prevalent in rock music. You know, the prog-rock thing. In a way, the art school confronted music with no feelings of pressure or sense of duty to tradition. That was the basis of much of the Athens music. People were experimenting and creating—not just their own music but in some cases their own instruments too. There might be situations where you’d say, “I’ve got you and me in the room, so let’s just play this. We don’t need a guitarist. We don’t need a keyboard.” People would try to work their way around all of that.

      The art department occupied a unique place—both physically and spiritually—at UGA in the 1970s. During the period when David Pierce and Michael Stipe were attending classes, the department was housed in a white, angular, futuristic-looking structure nestled incongruously among the classical 19th-century buildings that made up most of the university’s North Campus. This building, constructed in the 1960s, was often derisively referred to as “the ice plant,” and it certainly stuck out in an area of the campus that prided itself on its antebellum Southern aesthetic. (The South Campus, which housed most of the science, math, and agricultural departments, was a different story altogether; its buildings were distinguished by their fealty to the worst architectural fads of the 1960s and ’70s).

      Taken on its own terms, the Visual Arts building was quite striking. The emphasis was less on discrete classrooms than on open studio space and abundant utilization of natural light. Its flat, blocky exterior clearly owed much to Frank Lloyd Wright’s visionary late period (exemplified by Fallingwater and the Robie House). The building’s modern aesthetic was an appropriate outward manifestation of the art department’s deeply subversive character. This was a dense cluster of fre-thinking individuals planted smack in the middle of a student body obsessed with football and alcohol and not much else. And yet perhaps these two populations were not as dissimilar as they first appeared. If one strolled across North Campus on a football Saturday, one would encounter grown men decked out in red and black (the Georgia colors) dancing around coolers and transistor radios, willing their team on to victory with shaman-like intensity. And despite these football fans’ conservative hairstyles and general antipathy to both the hippies and the art school crowd (the only viable subcultures at the time), in their fervor they would often attain a “derangement of the senses” that would have given Rimbaud pause.

      By 1979, the year that Bill Berry and Mike Mills arrived on campus and David Pierce began taking classes at the art school, the Athens music scene was beginning to assert itself at the national level. Through a combination of grit and Southern charm, the B-52’s had secured a gig at the Manhattan nightclub Max’s Kansas City and had used the performance as a sort of beachhead to insinuate themselves into the New York nightlife scene. Their outrageous costumes and wigs, along with their catchy, ultra-positive music, caught on like wildfire with jaded New York audiences. Their infectious debut single, “Rock Lobster”—produced and released independently by an aspiring music impresario named Danny Beard—further solidified their success and led to a major-label record deal.

      Pylon quickly followed in the wake of the B-52’s, playing the same New York clubs and working the same connections. They secured a slot opening for British postpunk band Gang of Four in both New York and Philadelphia and duly impressed audiences and critics alike. In the magazine New York Rocker and elsewhere, a buzz began building about the mysterious Georgia town that kept producing great bands.

      Meanwhile, the town in question remained largely oblivious to the new music it had incubated. One of the reasons the B-52’s and Pylon had hightailed it to New York was the lack of available local venues willing to host new music. Very few of the eateries and clubs that now make up so much of the heart of Athens were in existence back in the 1970s. The exceptions were the Mayflower Restaurant—a traditional meat-and-two-veg establishment that gives the impression of predating the Confederacy; the Last Resort—now a restaurant but back then a nightclub; and the Georgia Theatre—primarily a movie theater in the ’70s, but now one of the city’s premier concert venues. Sidewalk dining was not allowed at the time due to the city government’s concerns about garbage; the downtown consisted mostly of department stores such as Belk, Davison’s, and Woolworth’s, and a Five and Ten that had a diner inside. Apart from the Last Resort, there were just a few bars scattered on the edge of downtown, among them T.K. Harty’s Saloon and Tyrone’s O.C. Perhaps the biggest difference between those days and now was the fact that the art scene—and by that I mean the parties, the associated bands, and the various other “happenings” and projects that had their origins in the art school—was confined almost exclusively to individual houses and neighborhoods; very little of it penetrated the downtown area.

      That was all about to change. Against a backdrop of creative possibilities and social and artistic experimentation within the growing scene, David Pierce—who did have a musical background—met and befriended Michael Stipe in a survey-level art class. “We started gravitating toward each other because everybody else was so preppy at the time,” Pierce says. “We just kind of hung out. He was just a guy from St. Louis.”

      Stipe most certainly was not preppy. For one thing, he wore his hair in a style some of his friends have affectionately called a “reverse mullet”: it was cut short in the back but in front it hung down over his face. Not only did this serve notice of Stipe’s individuality, it also had a practical function: the young Stipe suffered from severe acne and his long bangs obscured this affliction.

      John Michael Stipe first enters the historical record via grainy 1970s video footage from a St. Louis TV station. In the segment, two newscasters of the Ron Burgundy school awkwardly pontificate over the then-new phenomenon of young people dressing up as characters from The Rocky Horror Picture Show when attending screenings of the movie. Cut to some footage of the costumed audience waiting outside the movie theater, with the newscaster’s voice solemnly intoning, “No, these people are not crazy. Yes, all of their decks are completely stacked. They’re here to see a movie. The characters in the movie are dressed like these people . . . which explains why these people are dressed as they are.” At the 1:25 mark we see the young, leather-clad Michael Stipe, heavily made up in an approximation of the character

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