Читать книгу Begin the Begin - Robert Dean Lurie - Страница 11
ОглавлениеChapter Two
The Clermont Lounge occupies the bottom floor of a condemned hotel in downtown Atlanta. Somehow the lounge, billed as “Atlanta’s oldest strip club,” remains open in spite of the mold, bedbugs, and (in the words of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) “black water spilling from faucets” that plague the building that houses it. I arrive on a Saturday night, better known to the locals as Disco Funk Night, ten-dollar cover charge in my hand. The DJs this Saturday—every Saturday, for that matter—are an oddly mismatched pair who bill themselves as “the Illuminaughty.” First up, at 10 p.m., is an affable young party animal known as Quasi Mandisco. He plays hits of today and the recent past such as “Dick in a Box” by Justin Timberlake and the Lonely Island, and “Sexy MF” by Prince. Then, at 11:30, the proceedings get turned over to Quasi’s mentor: a shadowy, semi-legendary local figure known as Romeo Cologne. Cologne makes no concessions to the present day; his clock is turned back to 1977. He’s the man I’m here to see.
The Clermont Lounge is the type of strip club you’d expect to see in a David Lynch movie: cramped, dimly lit, and filled with a menagerie of characters who don’t seem quite real. A short, slightly overweight black stripper with burning candles protruding from her nipples sways awkwardly on a very thin walkway. She looks to be in her late sixties. A tall, big-haired white stripper who looks vaguely like the woman in the old Whitesnake videos (you know, the lady writhing on the car) dances across the bar. Male and female patrons gaze up adoringly.
Romeo Cologne, meanwhile, works his magic in a small booth beside the dance floor. He sports a black fedora, an ascot, and a carefully sculpted mustache that gives just the right accent to his narrow, kind face. His sloping, spidery fingers gingerly pick through a booklet of CDs, searching for the perfect track to play next. Among his selections for the evening: “Take Your Time” by the S.O.S. Band, “Early in the Morning” by the Gap Band, “Let It Whip” by the Dazz Band, and “Get Off” by Foxie. He’s immersed in the music, mouthing the words and jabbing his index finger at some vague destination beyond the confines of the room, somehow managing to get the room dancing while at the same time remaining entirely inside himself. In this last respect he reminds me very much of his old friend Michael Stipe.
As you may have guessed, “Romeo Cologne” is not the mysterious DJ’s birth name, though in this day and age he answers to no other. When he first arrived in Athens, Georgia, he was David Hannon Pierce, a recently discharged Air Force vet eager to pour himself into a more carefree civilian life. It was 1976, the year of the bicentennial. Pierce had served stateside during the Vietnam War, working as a medic in an Air Force unit set up specifically to treat former POWs returning from the conflict. He may not have seen combat himself, but this was nevertheless emotionally wrenching work. The most he’ll say about it now is that “a lot of the POWs were in pretty bad shape.”
That first visit to Athens, then, was a welcome change. Pierce’s brother was working his way toward a drama degree at UGA, and as soon as Pierce took stock of the surroundings, he decided this was where he needed to be. “I loved it,” he says. “There were three girls to every guy. And I was like, ‘Yes, I’m staying here!’” Although he initially failed the preliminary entrance exam, as a veteran Pierce qualified for night school. He spent the next couple of years completing his core curriculum requirements and began attending day classes at the art school in 1979.
Athens underwent some pretty significant changes during those years. When he first arrived, in 1976, the mainstream culture at the University of Georgia still centered almost entirely around football. That year fell smack in the middle of Vince Dooley’s long and storied career as head coach, and in that year the Georgia Bulldogs—“the Dawgs,” as they are affectionately known—were in contention for the national title, which ensured a season of particularly heavy partying all across town.
Not that Athenians waited until football season to throw a party. Throughout the academic year and beyond, the social calendar was dictated from the ostentatiously columned fraternity and sorority houses that lined Milledge Avenue. There was not yet much of a bar scene, apart from a popular hangout called the Station, so students vied eagerly for invitations to the fraternity blowouts. And these parties did not disappoint: kegs arrived by the truckload, the music got cranked pretty loud, and sometimes a live band would play. Everyone lost their minds pretty quickly, and a lot of fucking ensued.
There was a dark side to this, as there is any time alcohol and hormones mix freely. Given the long list of incidents that were documented in later years, it seems probable that the sex at these parties was not always consensual. And sometimes ancillary violence was inflicted on those who were seen as not fitting in. Fraternities were regularly suspended or expelled for various infractions, but others always popped up to take their place.
Over time an alternative to these frat parties emerged—one that seems almost pathetic by comparison. Rodger Lyle Brown describes the hippie parties of the time as “a dozen guys in flannel shirts . . . listening to the Grateful Dead or old Rolling Stones; smoking joints and waiting in teeth-gritting rough-house futility for stray good-smelling girls to show up.”
This would all change in 1977, when this long-suffering hippie scene bumped into Athens’s heretofore below-the-radar gay scene and begat a band called the B-52’s. The group consisted of former flower-girl hippie Kate Pierson on vocals, Keith Strickland on drums, Ricky Wilson on guitar, Cindy Wilson on vocals, and a flamboyant gay man with a bullhorn voice named Fred Schneider. The band seemed to have been willed into existence in order to facilitate some honest-to-god parties for all the weird kids who didn’t fit in with the “Dawg” culture.
As it happened, many of those weird kids 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 Frank N Furter, his five feet nine inches considerably enhanced by platform shoes. A Blue Öyster Cult medallion dangles from the lapel of his leather jacket. While another fan is being interviewed, Stipe cuts in to declare, in a slight Midwestern accent, “This is an excellent movie. It really is. And we’re all quite normal, really.”
This version of Stipe—flamboyant, confident, attention-hungry—seems on the face of it to stand in marked contrast to the carefully cultivated image he would present to the world just a few years later: that of the introverted, fame-shy art student who just happened to blunder his way into fronting a major rock band. In truth, all these aspects seemed to coexist in his personality. His attempts at extroversion would always carry the awkwardness of an imperfectly tailored jacket hanging off a diminutive frame. At the same time, the pose of extreme shyness came with an almost imperceptible wink and a slight whiff of bullshit. From an early age, Stipe wanted to be noticed—but he wanted to be noticed on his terms.
Stipe was born in 1960 in Decatur, Georgia. Athens is little more than sixty miles away, but his route to the city in which he would establish himself proved to be a circuitous one. His father was a career military man, and Stipe had the typical childhood of an Army brat: being frequently uprooted and having to reassert himself in a new, not always friendly social environment. Like many children thrust into such a situation, Stipe developed especially close ties to his siblings—Lynda and Cyndy—and his parents. The family was a solid foundation in an ever-shifting outside world. This solidity held even during the long periods when his dad left to pilot helicopters in the Vietnam conflict. Stipe has since characterized this upbringing, which dropped him in Germany, Alabama, Texas, and Illinois, and finally took him back to Georgia, as “enormously happy.”
Of the four members of R.E.M., only Michael Stipe can lay claim to being Southern by birth. Even though he spent almost all his youth about as far from the South as you can get, he came from solidly Southern stock. “My people,” as he has referred to them, were from Georgia. The Stipes were a churchgoing Methodist family complete with a preacher grandfather. And since Michael spent much of his youth in such a tight-knit family, he picked up the Georgia influences, even if they are sometimes only discernible in trace elements: the accent, the religion, the values, the music. But this was a theoretical Southernness, acquired far from actual Southern neighbors, from the Southern landscape—and from the complicated racial negotiations that were and are such a prominent aspect of daily life in the South. It was at once more closely held and less tied to reality than the day-to-day culture of resident Southerners.
This is not to say that the Stipe children sat around mourning the Lost Cause. Rather, Michael Stipe’s “South” consisted of his grandparents’ stories, an accent that set his family apart, a collection of country records, and some books—including, apparently, the fiction of Joel Chandler Harris, whose Brer Rabbit character would later be referenced in a number of Stipe’s songs.
If there is one man whose life illustrates the complexities and contradictions of the post–Civil War South and its refusal to fit neatly into the “black” and “white” categories the rest of the world continually foists upon it, it is Harris. A pale, kindly-looking man with a shock of bright red hair, he became the unlikely ambassador of African American folklore to the world at large. The Brer Rabbit stories, first published in a series of columns in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, were allegedly transcriptions of fables Harris had heard from the slaves at Turnwold Plantation, where he had lived as a teenager in the early 1860s while working as a printer’s apprentice for plantation owner Joseph Turner, who also owned the newspaper the Countryman. Harris made painstaking efforts to render the slaves’ dialect as phonetically accurately as he could, and for several decades the stories, collected in several books, were embraced by white and black readers alike. Harris’s views on race relations were, in the context of his times, progressive verging on radical; in his editorials he enthusiastically cited W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who was a personal friend. Viewed through a modern lens, however, Harris is a problematic figure, not just due to the paternalism that permeates the Remus stories, but also because of his nostalgia for the institution of slavery, the realities of which, he felt, “possess a romantic beauty and tenderness all their own.” He maintained this view even while championing racial reconciliation in the aftermath of Reconstruction.
What did the young Michael Stipe get out of these stories? Most likely he was oblivious to their racial complexity, and at any rate, he probably didn’t encounter a whole lot of racial diversity during his early years. But if his later lyrics are any guide, he was apparently much taken with the crafty, anthropomorphized animals who populated the fables—particularly the trickster Brer Rabbit—and also with the enduring image of the Tar-Baby, derived from one of the most popular Uncle Remus tales, in which Brer Rabbit finds himself physically stuck to a tar-and-turpentine doll that has been cunningly laid in his path by his nemesis, Brer Fox. The harder Brer Rabbit fights to extricate himself, the more deeply stuck he becomes.
***
Almost all of the information we have about Michael Stipe’s childhood comes from Stipe himself, and it is not a great deal. As for his young adult years, until very recently those remained largely obscure. For much of the duration of R.E.M.’s existence, no one who knew him prior to his move to Athens surfaced to corroborate or contradict the singer’s recollections, fueling a rumor—perpetuated in print by both Rodger Lyle Brown and Marcus Gray—that Stipe had sworn all of his pre-Athens friends to secrecy. But in the age of the Internet the blanks are slowly being filled in.
If I may break the fourth wall for a moment, let me say that you are going to meet some unusual people in this book. You’ve already met Mr. Cologne, so perhaps you’ve picked up on this. Sometimes the outlandishness of the supporting cast has given me the impression—wrongly, it turns out—that the members of R.E.M. might actually be the least interesting characters in their own story. Certainly they’ve happened to bump up against some pretty colorful individuals. But the freaks and head cases waiting for you in later chapters will have a hard time competing with Mike Doskocil of St. Louis. If this were a novel I would save him until later in the story and give him a more prominent role, but I have to play the nonfiction hand as it is dealt. In truth, Doskocil was never more than a passing acquaintance—barely even that—of the teenaged Michael Stipe, but he happened to be in the right place at the right time, and he has some interesting things to say.
First, some background: Doskocil is remembered in St. Louis for his role in two 1980s bands. White Pride was intended as a parody of white supremacist hardcore groups—the fact that one of the members was part Chinese should perhaps have made this obvious, but the earnest neo-Nazis of the day missed the sarcasm and embraced the group, ensuring that White Pride’s reign was short-lived. Doskocil’s next effort, Drunks with Guns, for which he served as vocalist and primary songwriter, attempted to do the same thing for beer-swilling troglodytes. Songs such as “Dick in One Hand” (featuring the refrain “I got my dick in one hand and a rope in the other”), “Punched in the Head,” “Hell House,” and “Wonderful Subdivision” have an appealing primal energy and purity of intent.
The many rumors surrounding Doskocil suggest the same bad-taste prankster energy that is readily apparent in his music. Many of them imply criminal activity, and I can’t in good conscience print them. But there is one widely circulated story to the effect that he once told all of his acquaintances that he had AIDS—just so he could see how they would react. I have no idea if the story is true, but it would certainly be consistent with his musical MO.
Given the punishing abrasiveness of Doskocil’s singing, the many stories of antisocial behavior, the White Pride thing, and the hints of a criminal past, I was a little nervous going into our interview. But Doskocil is actually an extremely friendly, funny, thoughtful guy, albeit one who sometimes begins sentences with the words, “So, when I got shot during the carjacking” or variations thereof. When I tell him I’ve been listening to Drunks with Guns, he says, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
Mike Doskocil first met Michael Stipe in the late 1970s. Stipe was a few years older and had just begun attending classes at Southern Illinois University, while Doskocil was still in high school. Both men’s music careers lay well ahead of them. They had both drifted into the Rocky Horror Picture Show subculture. “Everybody would go down to the Loop in U City and hang out till midnight to see the film,” Doskocil recalls.
I remember we used to go down there and hang out, because for somebody who’d just discovered the Sex Pistols, that was pretty much the only alternative thing to do, go and sit on the wall. The hipsters with spray-painted hair would do their catwalk down Delmar Boulevard in their homemade stacked-heel tennis shoes.
There was the Underground FM radio(1) and then there were the weirdos, and the weirdos predated the punk-rocky. In the mid to late ’70s, St. Louis was a pretty redneck town, and—you’ve got to remember—you just needed to drive ten miles south of the city into Jefferson County and you were in Klan territory. White chicks got beaten up for dating black dudes; white guys got beaten up for being suspected of being homosexual. To a certain extent, it still is a really tough town. There’s a reason I live in Ohio. There’s a reason why I’ve lived in ten major cities—because I couldn’t get out of St. Louis fast enough. And I think Michael was also one of those people. He couldn’t get out fast enough either. That was obvious.
One of the first nights I remember him being there, he was sitting on the wall. He was a spindly little guy and he had a book of poetry and he was trying to grow his hair out, you could tell, and he was dressed up as one of the Rocky Horror people. But just the fact that he had brought his journal with him, that was really out of place. And I remember that made an impact on me. When three, four, five years later I see the guy on David Letterman, I was like, “That’s the guy with the goddamn journal, oh my God.”
I ask Mike if there had been any indication back then that Stipe had musical ambitions. “Absolutely none,” he says.
Because back then, any guy with an earring I would approach to find out if he also had a guitar. If Stipe was talented as a lyricist, if he was a great singer, he wasn’t then and he certainly gave nobody the impression that he ever wanted to be. Because if he would have, we’d be talking about all the deep conversations I had with the guy I almost started a band with instead of that weirdo who carried a spiral binder drawing the one-footed head people on it.
This would seem to contradict a story Stipe has told about his St. Louis years: that he sang in a new wave band called Nasty Habits (or Bad Habits) and they even played a few shows. If I only had Doskocil’s impressions to go on, I’d be inclined to conclude that this group only ever performed in Stipe’s imagination. But wait—here’s a 2004 post on Murmurs.com (a fan-run message board dedicated to R.E.M.) from someone calling himself Polyman31(2) claiming to have played in a band with Stipe over two years prior to the formation of R.E.M. When asked by the other forum members to elaborate, he said, “Our band had different names since it was very loose, Nasty Habits, the Jotz (both Michael’s ideas), and the Band, even though there was already a band called ‘the Band’—like it really mattered. Most of the time [it] was just jam and try to play a few songs all the way thru.” He mentioned that he and Stipe liked to talk about “punk rock, skinny people, beer, girls (respectfully).”
Further research revealed that Polyman31 is one Craig Franklin, a former longtime resident of Austin, Texas, and current Minnesotan who continues to write and record music to this day. Like Doskocil, he’s happy to talk. Franklin’s relationship with Stipe actually predates Doskocil’s run-ins with the singer, and was far more substantial. They first met in Collinsville, Illinois, some twenty minutes east of St. Louis, in the summer of 1976, when Stipe was heading into his junior year at Collinsville High and Craig was about to become a freshman. The Stipes lived adjacent to the only major public swimming pool in the town, Town N Country, which has long since been filled in and built over. Michael’s backyard was on the other side of a four-foot chain-link fence. Craig was introduced to Stipe through a mutual acquaintance. He was immediately struck by Stipe’s hair, which he describes as “big, bushy, and curly”—the kind of hairstyle you’d see on a rock star like Roger Daltry. When they parted after their casual “hello,” Franklin’s friend muttered, “This guy is kind of weird.” But Franklin was intrigued. Being a budding musician, he could sense that Stipe was something of a kindred spirit, and the two became friends—though Stipe’s shyness initially presented a challenge. “He’s probably the shyest person I’ve ever met,” Franklin says. “The difference between him and all my other friends was that he was very slow to talk and to respond. You’d ask him a question and it’s like he would think of everything he was going to say, and then say it. And it was just different. He was very quiet, but he also had a very good, bizarre sense of humor. He was a funny guy, once the ice was melted.”
As will become clear, it’s quite likely that R.E.M. fans owe a major debt of gratitude to Craig Franklin, because it was Franklin who cajoled a reluctant Stipe into singing in public for the first time. But first, we need to deal with the Patti Smith angle . . .
Perhaps Stipe’s most oft-told story concerning his teenage years—one that, to be quite honest, I thought was a complete fabrication until I met Franklin—is that of his dramatic discovery of Patti Smith’s music. Supposedly, at the end of 1975, Stipe had an epiphany. The story goes like this: he purchased a copy of Smith’s debut album, Horses, and stayed up all night listening to it on headphones while absentmindedly munching from a bowl of cherries. Then, apparently stricken by some sort of cherry poisoning, he vomited. The deeper significance of this story is that he allegedly made a vow the following morning to become a rock star.
While there is no reason to doubt the key details here, the reality may not be nearly so clear-cut as Stipe remembers it. For one thing, there is the question of the date. Craig Franklin relates a story that seems to pin Stipe’s discovery of Smith not to the release date of Horses in December 1975, but to the following school year.
Collinsville High, 1978. L to R: Scott Jentsch, Michael Anthony Edson, Craig Heimback, Michael Stipe. Photo by Sandra Casson.
He calls me up and says, “Craig, you got to hear this record.” I think it had already been out awhile, but I said, “Okay.” I still didn’t have my driver’s license, so I had my mother drive me over to his house, you know, the one by the swimming pool. And he was so excited. I remember him standing outside the house eating a big ball of cheese; you know, the cheese that you get during Christmastime where it’s a ball and it’s got all those nuts or whatever on it? He was eating one of those like an apple.
Anyway, I pull up and tell my mom, “Okay, I’ll call you when I’m done.” I went into his house. His parents had a big stereo, but in a cabinet—a console stereo. So he put this record on and it was just so different. I was like “What?” because at the time I think I was listening to Peter Frampton, Kansas, Boston, Styx—highly produced, very smooth, glossy types of music, a lot of keyboards, a lot of strings, and all kinds of stuff like that. This was very raw. And I looked at him and I said something like, “This is terrible.” And he looked at me like I had just killed his two poodles in the kitchen or something. Later on I found out that this record was his epiphany. It was Patti Smith’s Horses. At first listen I just didn’t get it . . . Because you didn’t hear it on the radio, for sure . . . And then later on I got it.
That was his thing, and then he showed me . . . he got this magazine from New York in the mail called the Village Voice. He really was into that.
Franklin is quick to point out that his account doesn’t necessarily contradict Stipe’s story. It’s not unthinkable that the teenaged Stipe purchased the record earlier, had his epiphany, then got fired up later about sharing the discovery with his new friend.(3) Regardless of when he discovered Smith (and in either scenario he was an early adopter of Smith’s brand of punk ethos), Stipe quickly began to model his fashion sense on the photos he had seen of Smith and her sometime boyfriend/muse/photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Franklin remembers Stipe tying his shirt at the waist “almost like a girl would tie it at the beach,” mimicking a well-known picture of Mapplethorpe.
He started wearing a blue, and sometimes red, bandana out of his left back pocket and had some very large safety pins he would attach to the black vest he would wear to school. That drew a lot of comments from classmates. Then he started having a few friends that were kind of copying him and kind of had this punk rock thing going, whereas, in the Midwest in 1976, my typical outfit would have been blue jeans and a Rush T-shirt.
There were other fashion influences too, not all of them from the realm of music. One afternoon not too long after the Patti Smith revelation, Stipe asked Franklin if he’d like to go see a movie. When Stipe appeared at Franklin’s house that evening, Franklin’s mother said, “Craig, there’s a girl here to see you.” When Franklin acted surprised, his mother scrutinized the impish figure decked out in a vest, white collared shirt, baggy pants, and hat, and corrected herself: “Oh, it’s a boy.” Franklin felt sheepish; Stipe had gotten dressed up for the movie, and here he was in his Rush T-shirt. Michael also brought along his two sisters, who’d been waiting in the car. Later, as the movie began—Woody Allen’s Annie Hall—Franklin realized with a start that Stipe seemed to have patterned his wardrobe after the style Diane Keaton adopted for the title role. “If you look at early R.E.M. photos,” Franklin says, “they were trying to be like Patti Smith as far as their dress and their attitude, especially Michael, but Peter Buck and the other guys too. But that look of the black vest with the white shirt and all that—that was really Annie Hall.”
A number of journalists and R.E.M. biographers have concluded that it was Stipe’s discovery of Patti Smith that inspired him to become a singer, but that does not seem to have been the case. It’s true that he began singing around this time, but he had to be cajoled into doing so, it seems. The impetus was a high school talent show. Franklin had a loose band ready to play, but he needed a front man. He stopped Stipe in the hallway between classes one day and said, “Michael, we’re going to do a talent show. Would you like to sing?”
Stipe’s response: “I don’t sing.”
“But you look like a rock star,” Franklin said. “I’ve got microphones and amplifiers. Come on over to the garage.”
Stipe began going over to Franklin’s house, where the two tentatively ran through some songs together. “The first time he came over,” Franklin says, “I remember he had two books of sheet music—one of them was the Who, and the other was the Rolling Stones.” After a couple of these informal sessions, Franklin introduced Stipe to his classmates Andy and Danny Gruber, the rhythm section of his hypothetical band, and rehearsals began in earnest. The most pressing task was to select two songs for the talent show. Franklin recalls:
We did “Working Man” by Rush—which he [Michael] probably would never admit; I’ve never heard him talk about it—and “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones. Actually, that was his choice. “Working Man” was my choice because that was one song we all knew pretty well as far as the drums, bass, and my lead guitar. So those were the two songs. I knew he was not too excited about singing the Rush stuff, but, you know, you got to do what you got to do!
I ask Franklin if Stipe’s singing voice circa 1977 was anything like the distinctive, gravelly voice listeners fell in love with during the subsequent decade. “I think you would definitely recognize it,” he says. “And here’s something I remember: the first time he came over and brought that sheet music book and all that stuff, he brought along some of that stuff you spray in your throat that’s for sore throats. I don’t know what that’s called. It’s a red spray. And every time we’d stop, he’d grab that spray and he’s like, ‘My throat is kind of rough.’ And I told him, ‘That’s fine. It sounded good.’ I was encouraging him because he was really self-conscious.”
Franklin’s recollection of the talent show itself is that it came off quite well. “My mother and an older brother were there,” he says. “My brother told me, ‘It sounded pretty good but that singer is kinda different.’ That would prove to be an understatement. We received second place behind a pianist and a classmate singing Bette Midler’s ‘The Rose,’ if I remember correctly.” Right before the group went on, someone asked Franklin what the band was called. Various names had been discussed, including Nasty Habits, but nothing had been decided, so Franklin just said “the Band.” When the Collinsville Kahokian 1978 yearbook arrived at the end of the school year, it contained a single photo from that night—a close-up shot of the drummer. The caption read, “The Band plays punk rock.”
Top and bottom left: Collinsville High yearbook photos of Michael Stipe and Craig Franklin; top right: Michael Stipe and Craig Franklin; bottom right: the former Stipe family home in Collinsville in 2015, photograph by Craig Franklin. All images courtesy of Craig Franklin.
It’s difficult to tell how seriously Stipe took his singing at the outset. Franklin recalls that Stipe did sing for a brief spell in another covers band (perhaps also called Nasty Habits, or Bad Habits) while still living in Collinsville, and it’s true that upon his arrival in Athens Stipe joined the Southern rock–oriented Gangster. But he harbored a strong desire to become a visual artist, and his choice of major at UGA reflected that ambition. His subsequent career as a rock vocalist was therefore by no means assured. And if we look back to the St. Louis years, it would seem that Stipe also toyed with the idea of being a poet. “He wanted to be a writer,” Mike Doskocil recalls. “Who didn’t want to be a writer? There were only two options in 1978. You were into the Clash and the Sex Pistols and the Dickies and all that other shit. You were going to be a musician, or you were going to be a writer.”
Stipe initially presented his Patti Smith epiphany to journalists as the start of his interest in music. He later amended this account to acknowledge an earlier love of David Essex’s “Rock On” and Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets.” But this still left out his mid-’70s love of solidly mainstream rock, as betrayed by that telltale Blue Öyster Cult medallion(4) and an affection (presumably pre-Smith) for REO Speedwagon and Boston. Stipe finally fessed up to his classic rock predilections in a May 2006 interview with Death & Taxes, in which he stated, “What I’ve never told anyone, and this is an exclusive, is that I also bought four other albums that day [of the Horses purchase]. One of them was Hall and Oates, one of them Foghat: Fool for the City. I gravitated towards one over all the others. But the others were still there, and still in my consciousness.”
Going further back, Stipe had a particular fondness for the country music that had constituted much of the sonic background in the Stipe household during his upbringing—Tammy Wynette, Patsy Cline, and Glen Campbell in particular—and for such ’60s stalwarts as the Kinks and the Who.(5)
So it’s likely that the Patti Smith moment may not have been quite the road to Damascus conversion that Stipe has made it out to be. Yet it’s also clear that Smith had a tremendous influence on Stipe’s personality and visual aesthetic. She served as a model for how an outsider like Stipe might move through the world.
What was it about Patti Smith’s music and persona that spoke so strongly to the young Michael Stipe? Beyond stating that her debut album “tore my limbs off and put them back in a whole different order” (whatever that means), he hasn’t given much by way of specifics. Certainly, Horses would have sounded quite unlike anything a teenager had heard on mainstream radio at the time. On December 13, 1975, the day the album was released, KC and the Sunshine Band, the Bay City Rollers, Barry Manilow, and the Bee Gees ruled the US pop charts. Compared to those artists’ precision-engineered hits, the John Cale–produced Horses sounded like something recorded in a cave. Smith herself could barely carry a tune and preferred to yelp and growl when she was not sing-speaking. At its best, the album has a hypnotic, incantatory quality, with Smith—arguably more talented as a poet than a musician—building elaborate cathedrals of language atop crashing, plodding, drone-like rhythms.
The lyrical content would have stood out to Stipe. Smith had a crowded lexicon of left-of-center influences and idols, and referenced them liberally in her songs: characters like Wilhelm Reich, the radical psychoanalyst pursued by the FBI and FDA throughout the 1940s and ’50s because of his “unorthodox sex and energy theories” (in the words of Time magazine), who died in prison; and the renegade 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, famed for his incendiary verse, his scandalous affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, and his renouncing of all literary pursuits by the age of 21. These figures make spectral appearances on Smith’s “Birdland” (cited by Stipe as a pivotal track) and “Land,” respectively. Also in “Land,” a character commits suicide by slitting his own throat, which Smith describes by intoning, “His vocal cords started shooting like mad pituitary glands . . . No one heard the butterfly flapping in his throat.”
In contrast to Stipe’s other alleged purchases that day (Hall and Oates, Foghat, and two more whose identity we can only speculate about), Horses offered a window into an enticing and somewhat frightening world of brutal rhythms, surrealistic imagery, and streetwise attitude. Then there was the cover itself: a stark black-and-white photo of Smith taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, in which she looks almost as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa. Is that a defiant stare or merely a pretension to world-weariness? Is “Patti” female or male? Her slender figure and gender-neutral attire of white blouse, undone tie, dark pants, and dark coat slung over her shoulder make it difficult to tell. There’s something darkly attractive about the young Patti Smith as portrayed in this photo, something outside the “normal” parameters of sexual attraction. There is very little skin on display and nothing in the way of feminine curves, and yet there is nothing overtly masculine either. In short, there is nothing in the photo that would normally excite either heterosexual or homosexual onlookers, and yet it is an undeniably sexual cover. This is a different sort of sex appeal, one based primarily on attitude and intellect. Smith looks smart in this photo; she seduces the observer with her intelligence—and her otherness. This would have been a key difference between Smith and the other musical acts Stipe was listening to at the time. Hall and Oates, Foghat, R.E.O. Speedwagon, and even Elton John all invited the listener in with songs that appealed to a wide demographic. Their lyrics spoke to the concerns of the common listener, and their straightforward melodies sealed the deal. Smith’s appeal, on the other hand, lay in her alienness. No one sang quite like her. No one looked quite like her. And certainly no one juxtaposed lyrical imagery like she did. No one since Rimbaud, anyway.
Smith was heterosexual, but her perceived lack of conventional feminine beauty had prompted her to play up her tomboy side to an extreme degree—so much so that early on she had attracted the amorous attentions of the poet Allen Ginsberg, who mistook her for a fetching young man. Smith’s deliberately ambiguous image, and her determination to define herself by her own rules, would almost certainly have struck a chord with the teenaged Stipe, who was then in the process of working out his own sexual identity.
When asked in 2011 by journalist Sean O’Hagan if he had been troubled by his sexuality while growing up, the singer claimed, “Not troubled, no.”
Not confused either. But I just felt there wasn’t a place for me . . . I never identified with [the term] “gay,” that’s all. I will always honor anyone who had to make a different choice, then stand by them, and I would hope that honor would extend to me and my choices as well. I’m talking about how one chooses to define oneself, the community within which one feels comfortable.
These words were spoken with the advantage of 36 years of hindsight. It is difficult to believe that the 15-year-old Georgia-born Stipe was really so serene about his nascent sexuality, when virtually every other young person throughout history has, at one point or another, been troubled and/or frightened by the sudden onset of sexual desire that comes with puberty. But perhaps we’re getting overly caught up in semantics here. Stipe’s frustration at there not having been any place for him sounds an awful lot like what his interviewer probably meant by “troubled,” whether Stipe wants to use that term or not.
One key to Stipe’s apparent sereneness on this subject may lie in his discovery, in eighth grade, of the novel Dhalgren by science fiction author Samuel R. Delany. “Where I learned,” Stipe later told the New York Times, “that in the future you could have unbridled sci-fi sex with every man and woman within reach, without guilt, fear or weirdness, and have great end-of-times adventures.” Indeed. The sexual encounters depicted in Dhalgren are varied and explicit, and take place in a post-apocalyptic city in which traditional authority has vanished, along with its attendant social mores—a handy metaphor for the post-revolutionary society wished for by ’60s radicals. To be fair, Delany does not shy away from the inevitable violence and chaos that would accompany such a scenario, and the novel is surely tempered by its author’s observation of the hippie movement’s decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even so, there is a giddy exhilaration to its depiction of unconstrained sexual possibilities.
It is unclear if Stipe learned anything about Delany’s personal life after discovering this book, but the parallels in the two men’s approaches to sexual identity are striking. Like Stipe, Delany came to accept his sexuality in adolescence, but nevertheless went on to have a long-term relationship with a woman (as Stipe would do a number of times). In adulthood, both remained wary of labels and hard-and-fast definitions of something so malleable as sexuality. While generally homosexual in orientation, both could be strongly attracted to kindred spirits of the opposite gender. Whether or not Stipe knew any of this, Dhalgren itself—which was a sort of coming-out for this side of Delany—would surely have been a powerful confidence booster at such a crucial age.
One thing is clear: attempting to shoehorn Stipe’s early predilections into separate categories of “gay” or “straight” is an exercise in futility. Stipe has said as much in interviews, time and time again, though when he first trotted out this line of thinking in the 1990s, many journalists and observers concluded that he was simply obfuscating because he didn’t want to declare that he was gay. That is a view I also held until I began researching this book. Mike Doskocil’s recollection of Stipe during the Rocky Horror days seems to further muddy the waters. Or, looked at another way, perhaps it clarifies them. “I remember that, at least to me, he seemed like he really wanted to be quite the player,” Doskocil says.
Come on, you walk around with a journal under your arm, especially in Missouri in 1978, somebody is going to ask you what the hell it is. And he was always ready, willing, and able to break it open for any piece of trim. I remember that myself and my friends that I spoke to, that I hung out with, we looked at Michael Stipe as a bit of a weirdo, because he didn’t seem to ever score [laughs]. We were all getting hand jobs out back behind our VW bugs, and he never seemed to close the deal. He just didn’t seem to be very successful at it. I remember thinking, “Boy, that guy is just never going to get laid.” He needed to come up with something new, because his “Will Work for Pussy” sign just wasn’t happening.
Perhaps the young seeker found, in the form of Patti Smith, a role model and a perceived kindred spirit—someone who provided an alternative to the confusing and maddening rituals of gender expression, teen courtship, and sex he saw all around him. Even as Stipe did his best to conform to the parameters of the world he found himself in, the strength that this newfound identification gave him would carry him through his bewildering first few years in the public eye.
No discussion of Michael Stipe’s origins would be complete without an acknowledgment of his unusual speaking voice. We have no way of knowing what he sounded like pre-adolescence: whether he engaged his family and friends with a full dynamic range or employed a modulated squeak. We do know that from puberty until fairly recently he addressed the world in a deep, unvarying monotone: a flat tire of a voice, not unpleasant in its sonorousness, but difficult for the listener to latch onto.(6) It was as if he reserved all of his emotion and dynamics for his singing voice, which is a different story entirely. His singing would evolve over time, but on R.E.M.’s earliest recordings the Patti Smith elements were firmly in place, to be showcased or modulated depending on the occasion. Yelps. Strange throat noises. Guttural grunts. An occasional dropping of consonants following an o (more becomes moe, etc.) He emphasized what he called the “acid e”: an elongation and overemphasis on that vowel (“What noisy cats are weeeeeeeeee...”), a technique that had more in common with the country and bluegrass he’d heard in his youth than with the punk and garage rock he was listening to in the late ’70s. This vocal quirk alone set him apart from just about every other rock singer in his age group.
It is possible that the mumbling style that would become his vocal signature initially served a purely utilitarian purpose. Stipe began his musical career singing in cover bands and often had difficulty remembering other people’s (and, later, his own) lyrics. The mumble, then, may have come about so he could fake his way through some of these songs, wrapping a hodgepodge of vowels and consonants in the cloak of the song’s melody and just barreling through. That’s certainly what he did when R.E.M. performed covers, and there’s no reason to presume that the practice didn’t begin earlier.
Gangster, the Athens-based band Stipe joined shortly after his family left Illinois and moved back to Georgia in 1979, was the brainchild of Derek Nunally, a local guitarist who had allegedly once been a roadie for Molly Hatchet. They had a shtick: all the band members wore zoot suits. Stipe took the stage name “Michael Valentine.” According to Rodger Lyle Brown, the group played “all covers, from Tom Petty to Elvis.” Stipe’s sisters attended every show, cheering their brother on.
It’s safe to assume that Gangster was not a huge draw for the nascent art-school party crowd. It seems, in fact, that very few people saw the band play other than Stipe’s sisters and a big, fun-loving, hard-drinking loudmouth named Billy Holmes. Holmes, who was knocking around Athens playing in folk duos and hard rock outfits at the time, was decidedly not of the art school scene; his tastes ran more in the direction of classical music and the much-maligned genre of progressive rock (he counts Yes and Genesis as two of his favorite bands) than the primitivism of the B-52’s and Pylon. What brought him to see Gangster perform at the Last Resort on Clayton Street was not any kind of premonition about the singer’s future but rather his friendship with Gangster’s bassist, Danny Bell.
“I just thought, poor Danny. There was nobody there,” Billy tells me in his thick drawl.
But that was the first time I ever laid eyes on Michael Stipe. I was really happy for him when R.E.M. did something years later, because I was sort of an outcast, and was eccentric, and had been picked on my whole life. And Michael—I did not really know him, but I had heard he had tried to get in bands with people, and people would not play with him. Nobody would give him a shot, and that is why he ended up singing Lynyrd Skynyrd covers with guys from Monroe. You know, he didn’t really want to join a bunch of—quite frankly, let’s just put it like it is—Monroe rednecks. But he had acne, and you never saw his face because he grew his hair out long and he would put his hair all over his face.
Michael Stipe has claimed in numerous interviews that he spent his entire first year in Athens not talking to anyone. This is surely an exaggeration, since it’s awfully hard to maintain a vow of silence when performing live every few weeks in a rock ’n’ roll band.(7) It’s also not likely that his family, with whom he remained very close, would have gone along with a ban on verbal communication. But perhaps there is some emotional truth to the statement. Gangster clearly didn’t represent the summit of Stipe’s artistic ambitions, and his concurrent job at Steak and Ale was not exactly in line with any of his career goals. One source who knew some of the waitresses at the steakhouse says that the future rock star and sex symbol earned the name “Pigpen” from his female co-workers due to his (allegedly) slovenly demeanor. Given the shunning he seemed to be experiencing in his new hometown, perhaps he did feel as if he were not communicating with another living soul.
Compounding the feelings of alienation was the very real grief he felt at having been uprooted from his peer group in St. Louis. Earlier moves had not had such traumatic consequences, but this time he had really begun to find his voice—both figuratively and literally. Mike Doskocil might have found the place intolerable, but in St. Louis Michael Stipe had made friends and had been playing music. Consequently, Stipe viewed his family’s abrupt move to small-town Georgia as a catastrophe. In at least one interview, he has said that he remained behind in St. Louis for a few months, but finally caved and joined his family out of economic necessity. At that point, the familiar pattern of spending most of his time with his sisters reasserted itself. His youngest sister, Lynda, in particular, seems to have served as a sounding board and kindred spirit as Michael began exploring his artistic side in earnest. She was still in high school at the time, but she accompanied Michael practically everywhere.
Lynda and Michael Stipe, ca. 1985. Photo by Ingrid Schorr.
“Lynda Stipe is an awesome gal,” Billy Holmes says. “I worked with her, actually, at Sons of Italy pizzeria, up in Five Points. She is very creative, always has been, and I always thought she deserved more recognition than she got.”
In several respects, Lynda bears a striking resemblance to her older brother: full lips, piercing eyes, extremely curly brown hair, and the same smile. She also shares with Michael an intuitive, almost childlike approach to creativity and artmaking, unencumbered by formal theory or over-intellectualization. Less is known of Michael’s other sister, Cyndy (or “Cindy” or “Cyndi” as her name has been spelled in various accounts)—mainly because she went on to something resembling a conventional career (in education), started a family, and consequently faded from the Athens scene fairly early. But initially she was right there with the other two, running around town, checking things out. So when Stipe strode in to the Wuxtry Records store on Baxter Street sometime in early 1979 flanked by two attractive young women, it made an impression. The clerk behind the counter was a towering, mop-topped guy who carried himself with a jaded “I’ve seen it all” air. But the sight of this skinny reverse-mullet guy with a hot girl on each arm threw him for a loop. The clerk’s name? Peter Buck.
So here we are at last. “Pete” Buck: the gangly, hawk-nosed motormouth and autodidact with idiosyncratic tastes and an encyclopedic knowledge of rock ’n’ roll and more. He’s seen every episode of both The Monkees and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And he can drink you under the table.
Born in Berkeley, California, Buck moved with his family to Atlanta in his teens and graduated from Crestwood High School. He has, over the years, told extravagant, Beat Generation–tinged tales of a young adulthood filled with cross-country hitchhiking, sleeping in ditches, and taking odd jobs washing dishes and cleaning toilets. He stops just shy of saying he rode the rails and hung out with hoboes. Occasionally, he has also intimated some sort of dark criminal past. No evidence to substantiate these claims has ever surfaced.
It seems likely that Buck took a cue here from Bob Dylan, who told outlandish tales about his past in order to liven up a rather boring middle-class backstory. What is known for certain is that Buck attended Atlanta’s Emory University for a time and was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. As we have already seen, he first came in contact with a young Kathleen O’Brien while working at a record store near the campus. He had the requisite childhood for a future rock star, which is to say he spent most of his adolescence sequestered in his bedroom listening to records and perusing the latest issues of Rolling Stone and Creem, dreaming of a wild on-the-road life while likely living a confined, isolated one. His early interest in the Monkees and the Beatles (in that order of preference) gave way eventually to the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and the New York Dolls. He was aware of “punk” from the moment the term was coined. Oddly, though, this passionate interest in listening to music was not accompanied at first by a desire to play music. He had learned a few guitar chords from his younger brother Ken and occasionally noodled around, but that was the extent of his involvement with the instrument.
It was quiet, studious Ken who seemed destined for a musical career. Billy Holmes, who knew the younger Buck during the latter’s time at the University of Georgia, says, “Ken is one of the best musicians I have ever known. He has a classical guitar degree from UGA. And he took his knowledge of classical guitar and he taught himself to play classical piano from it, which is astounding to me. He is a really good bass player and a really good singer. Like Lynda Stipe, he ended up getting overshadowed by his famous sibling.”
The brothers Buck both arrived in Athens at roughly the same time, though by different means. Ken came as a student. Peter, whose vague ambitions of getting an education degree had fizzled at Emory, became aware of an open Wuxtry job via a contact at its sister store in Decatur. With his previous record store experience and his impressive storehouse of musical lore, he was a shoo-in. He reported for work in January 1979, around the same time that Bill Berry, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe all arrived in town, and quickly established himself as something of an in-house oracle. He was immediately recognizable, due to his height and the purple high school letter jacket he wore like a second skin, and few customers made it through a visit without receiving a lecture on some aspect of music history.
“He listened to or had in his collection pretty much everything,” says Billy Holmes,
from John Coltrane to Karlheinz Stockhausen. Dunno if he listened to it all, but he had it, and would gladly tape copies. If he had something he thought was cool, he would tell you all about it and ask if you wanted a copy. He wanted to share his finds. He was a big fan of James Bond and spy shows and stuff like that. He made me VHS tapes of [the entire run of] The Man from U.N.C.L.E. . . . We both would buy and swap those little paperbacks that you used to buy in grade school: Monkees Go Mod, Love 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.
“I was a snob,” Holmes says, laughing. “I was a long-haired hippie type and I had been heavily into all the seventies prog music. A buddy of mine named Richard Marlow swears up and down that Mike and Bill told me over beers one night in Express Pizza that they were going to start a band and asked me if I was interested in playing with them. And I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.’ So . . . I may have blown my shot at playing with R.E.M.” He pauses, then adds, “I would have just screwed them up anyway!”
Holmes describes Bill Berry—the man who just two years earlier had struck Ian Copeland as a motormouth—as “always kind of quiet. I don’t remember Bill as being all that talkative. The main thing that stuck out to me about Bill is that he had a warped sense of humor, which I liked. Sometimes he would crack jokes, and he was trying to be funny, and people wouldn’t get it. The other thing was, we all made fun of Bill because he had one eyebrow.”
Billy Holmes, then, has the distinction of being one of the few people who knew all four members of R.E.M. prior to the formation of R.E.M. But he never thought to put the guys together. And why would he? Here was a so-so rhythm section from Macon, good for a couple of beers and some jokes on any given night, but not too promising musically, and there was the singer from Gangster with the reverse mullet—you know, the Steak and Ale guy, Pigpen—who did the Thin Lizzy covers. And Pete Buck? Are you kidding me?
It took a twisted sort of genius to see that these elements could be mixed to create some kind of radioactive cocktail. Only Kathleen O’Brien could make that leap.
Washington University’s student-run station, KWUR 90.3 FM, calls itself “St Louis Underground Radio.”
Just to be clear, the “poly” in this nickname refers to complex polymers (the person in question is a chemist), not to polyamory.
One possible explanation for Stipe’s delayed communication of his epiphany to Franklin is that he had just been fired up all over again after seeing Patti Smith’s rendition of “Gloria” on Saturday Night Live, on April 17, 1976. The show had a huge youth audience, so it seems quite likely he would have seen it, and Smith’s incendiary performance would certainly have reinforced the impact of her album on the young Stipe.
Patti Smith was in a long-term relationship with Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult in the mid-1970s, which underscores the fact that many musicians of the period were not nearly as concerned with the divide between punk and classic rock as fans and critics were.
He has repeatedly claimed to have disliked the Beatles. “I’ve always referred to the Beatles as elevator music, because that’s exactly what they were,” he told Rolling Stone in 1994. “Those guys just didn’t mean a fucking thing to me.”
Intriguingly, Stipe seems to have abandoned this modulated style of speaking since the breakup of R.E.M. In recent televised and audio interviews, Stipe’s speaking voice is relaxed and dynamic; in other words, he now talks like a “regular” person. This either points to a personal evolution or the possibility that what may have seemed like a vocal quirk during those earlier years was actually a deliberate choice.
Stipe apparently continued to propagate this tale well into the 1990s. The poet Douglas A. Martin, in his fictionalized account of his four-year relationship with Stipe, Outline of My Lover, recalls the singer boasting of this ascetic phase.
