Athens!!

This spring, my entire grade had to pick a topic to write a semester-long research paper about for our American Studies History and English classes. I obviously had to do something related to music, and my teacher suggested I should focus on the scene of a specific place, like Athens. I already knew that R.E.M. and the B-52's were from there, and thought a cool paper could come of that. Mind you, I hated R.E.M. But I went to work making a playlist of Athens artists to listen to while I did my research. My dad, who was in Athens when the scene first broke out and has been in the music business for over 30 years now, was all over it. He connected me with his friend DeWitt Burton, R.E.M.'s tech manager, who was able to score me interviews with some of the biggest names in Athens music history. A week in, I was already addicted. I became obsessed with everything Athens and that playlist was the only thing I listened to for 4 months, R.E.M. most of all. My first time even visiting wasn't until March, for a Love Tractor show, where I met Mike Mills himself. My first time in Athens!

I was so into this project; it was my favorite thing I had ever done. But for some reason, I just couldn't get the paper right. I had so much information but no focus. My teacher and I decided to structure it around the 5 main events that brought the Athens counterculture to the mainstream. I turned it in in April, unfinished. It was hard for me to write without inserting any of my own experiences with the scene and and to have to cite everything from a book or website.

I revisited my paper today for the first time since I turned it in. It's painful to look back on something that you're not proud of. I don't have my interview notes or books on hand, but I have tried to make it a bit more readable. Eventually I'd like to rewrite the whole thing entirely, how I want to, but for now, here is my research paper. Just because I love Athens so much and want people to be able to learn about it!

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That’s Me in the Corner, That’s Me in the Spotlight: An Exploration of How the Athens Music Scene of the Late 1970’s Through the Early 1990’s Brought Counterculture to the Mainstream

By 1991, the longbox, a form of CD packaging the same height as records but half the width, had already been ditched by many artists because of its excessive waste of plastic used in its manufacturing. R.E.M. was one band opposed to the packaging for their new record, Out of Time, though because the longbox was still popular among consumers, they had no choice but to release it as a longbox. They agreed to do so on one condition: each copy of the album was sold with a printed Rock the Vote petition on the back. Rock the Vote was an organization founded to help pass the Motor Voter Act, a bill that would allow voters to register when getting or renewing their license at the DMV, in hopes of getting more young people to vote. Within the first three weeks of the album’s release, “they had received 10,000 petitions, 100 per senator, and they just kept coming in droves,” (Mars). The bill was eventually passed in 1993 by President Clinton and finally went into effect January 1, 1995. This would not have been possible without the help of R.E.M., who were able to reach and influence millions after the release of their eighth studio album, Out Of Time. But who were R.E.M. and how did they become a household name? R.E.M. was a band of four outcasts from the University of Georgia in Athens. And they weren’t the only ones. They were one of many bands formed in Athens, Georgia between the late 1970’s and early 90’s, such as Pylon, Love Tractor, and the B-52’s, the latter of which became a national success with their hits “Rock Lobster” and “Love Shack”. The music of these bands was unlike anything that had come before, both in sound and in meaning. Perhaps the most striking, however, was the fact that they all came from the small college town of Athens, Georgia. This previously unremarkable small town had gone from a typical 15,000 student campus to a booming new musical scene out of nowhere. The alternative music scene in Athens, Georgia of the late ‘70s through the early ‘90s brought counterculture to the mainstream by creating a space for young people to find a sense of belonging and express themselves creatively in the conservative South.

The Athens, Georgia before the B-52’s were born in the late 1970’s was a desolate southern town populated mostly by fraternity brothers and sorority sisters, not a safe place for young creatives hoping to play a local party with their band and create a scene. Before the B-52’s, there was nothing happening, and art had not yet been introduced. In a “new version of the South created by desegregation, interstates, air conditioning, and airports'', Georgia schools “practiced a form of neglect that suggested racial integration was easy, feminism unnecessary, and gay sexuality nonexistent,” (Hale, 2). The LGBTQ community came to be a large part of the scene; every Athens band had at least one member in art school at UGA, and many art school students were a part of the gay community. When an iron horse sculpture commissioned by the university was installed on the campus in the 1950’s, it was vandalized and set on fire, and “students issued statements that they didn’t want art in the middle of their quad. It was a monstrosity, a foreign, urban derived hallucination. It was ‘mod’ren art’, the work of some ‘feygit’ imagination,” (Brown, 14). The art was neither accepted nor supported by the university students, making it difficult for both art school students and gay students to feel welcome in Athens.

The story of the Athens music scene began on the day that the B-52’s played their first party on February 14, 1977. It was Valentine's Day, and the Jewish country club was filled with booming speakers, barbie dolls hanging from the ceiling, and two girls wearing fake fur muff wigs, what writer and historian Roger Lyle Brown described as “Athens drag camp underground going public,” (Brown 34). When speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, Kate Pierson said, “I think more people feel like they’re outside of the mainstream these days — there’s more people who are doing their own thing, feeling that it’s not bad to be a weirdo and respecting other people’s differences. And all that kind of goes into the big ol’ B-52 philosophy,” (Azzerad). The B-52’s were the first band to encourage people to be different, not try to fit in. Teresa Randolph shouted “I can't believe this is happening in Athens, Georgia!” (Brown 37). Well, happening it was - and it never stopped.

The B-52’s were just the first of these quirky new Athens bands. Two years later, R.E.M. played their first party on April 5, 1980, a night that would birth the most successful band of the Athens scene. It was Kathleen O’Brien’s birthday, and she was trying to get her boyfriend and his best friend, Bill Berry and Mike Mills, to play with her roommates, Peter Buck and Michael Stipe. The party was in the local church, through the hole in the closet, where onstage, “Peter practices his first tentative swirls and Michael hangs onto the microphone like he would for the next swift decade, entrancing a stunned and surprised audience,” (Brown 133). They picked the name ‘R.E.M.’ out of a dictionary before their next gig at Rick the Printer’s 11:11 Koffee Klub. The next year they released their first single, “Radio Free Europe”, to critical acclaim. Murmur, R.E.M.’s debut album, came out two years later, followed by a new album each year through 1988. They saw national success in 1987 when single “The One I Love” hit number 9 on the US Billboard Hot 100.

The documentary, Athens, GA: Inside/Out, was released in February of the same year and gave the rest of the world a look at the Athens scene for the first time. In January 1986, film cameras showed up in Athens to try and capture the aura of “the Athens scene”, but “while much of the footage was interesting, the historical information in the movie was inaccurate; the filmmakers ignored a number of crucial characters and players in the town,” (Brown 204). The film left out characters like Danny Beard, founder of DB Recs, who had signed Pylon, the B-52’s, and more, and made characters out of artists who didn’t even live in Athens. After its release, Athens, GA: Inside/Out “received mixed reviews from critics outside the state, but an almost unanimous thumbs down from the locals in Athens itself,” (Brown 203). While it wasn’t an authentic look at the town, it was seen nationwide and put Athens on the map, and people from all over the country flocked to where the magic was happening.

The climax of the Athens scene came with the 1991 release of the single, “Losing My Religion” off of the album Out of Time by R.E.M., which saw the band reach international success and proved indefinitely that outcasts with dreams and passion can break through all barriers. After a decade of constant recording and touring, R.E.M. came back with a bang with Out of Time, and R.E.M.’s partnership with Rock the Vote was not the only significant thing about this album. “Losing My Religion” was the song of the summer in 1991; Out of Time had become Billboard’s number one album in America that May, and the hit single was only becoming more popular. The song, whose title is a southern phrase meaning someone is so desperate or frustrated they lose faith over it, resonated with listeners all over the world. Writer Grace Elizabeth Hale recalled that “during a coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev that August, you could hear ‘Losing My Religion’ all over Moscow, soaring through the open windows of apartments and the doors of stores and telling everyone that life continued even as the things you thought were permanent slipped away,” (Hale 281). This event showed that listeners don’t even have to speak the same language to resonate with Stipe’s lyrics. 10 years after their formation, R.E.M. was reaching the most people they ever had, exposing audiences to their music new and old.

Today, 30 years after the release of “Losing My Religion” and over 40 years since the B-52’s played their first party, the music of the original Athens bands lives on. Radio stations still play “Love Shack” and “Losing My Religion”, and ex-scene participants now teach new generations about their favorite band when they were in college. R.E.M. broke up in 2011, but they are still one of the most famous and successful bands in the world and its members often reunite and play together. The B-52’s are still touring and remaining Pylon members now perform as the Pylon Reenactment Society. But the Athens music scene is still alive and thriving. Hundreds of artists have come out of Athens since the B’s, with bands like Of Montreal and Futurebirds finding success. A question I found myself asking from the beginning of this journey was “Why Athens?” What was it about this town that produced so many artists, and why were so many of them able to find success? Through this project, I met so many cool and interesting people and I had the amazing opportunity to talk to Mark Cline of Love Tractor and Vanessa Briscoe-Hay of Pylon. What they both mentioned to me was that so many artists lived and stayed in Athens because it was a cheap place to live and that there were so many artists to begin with because of the art department at the university (Briscoe-Hay). Mark added that people played music because there was nothing else to do. What made Athens different from other scenes, he said, was that other scenes were “commercial”; people in Seattle and New York went there because they were trying to “make it”, but Athens wasn’t like that. The artists of Athens played “simply for the art of doing it,” (Cline). So, to conclude, it wasn’t just Athens that brought counterculture to the mainstream - it was the people that created a space for and encouraged students to express themselves through their own art, no matter what it sounded like.

...and I couldn't leave you hanging without my Athens playlist!!