Читать книгу Begin the Begin - Robert Dean Lurie - Страница 12

Chapter Three

Her fling with Peter Buck notwithstanding, Kathleen still harbored a strong interest in Bill Berry. A year is a pretty long time to carry a torch at that age, particularly when there are so many other potential companions available. So that probably says something about both Berry’s appeal and O’Brien’s ardor.

Meanwhile, Michael Stipe and Peter Buck found themselves in need of a rhythm section. They had already played with a few other people in the sanctuary—most notably Dan Wall—but nothing had clicked. To Peter’s way of thinking, they were just fucking around, but Michael had latched on to some kind of vision. It was a blurred vision, but it was his. “These are dangerous times / I don’t want to get old,” began one of those early songs. Two lines, both heartfelt expressions, but they don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. Or do they? “I don’t want to get old” is not typically a statement that would flow out of musings on the precarious state of the world; it would be much more likely to indicate a desire to remain in the present. But if the present is so dangerous, as indicated in the preceding line, why would one want to do that? An alternative explanation is that the prospect of growing old is, in itself, what makes these times so dangerous—maybe not physically (aging from 20 to 21 is not going to slow someone down) but perhaps the danger in growing old is the possibility of giving in to convention and losing one’s present identity.

My tortured attempt here to make sense of lyrics that are—let’s face it—a bit off, somewhat misshapen, is a microcosm of what a generation of listeners and critics would end up doing with Michael Stipe’s words. It was never clear—then or for a while later—if the “offness” was a calculated effect, or if Stipe’s unintentionally awkward phrasing had opened a space of ambiguity into which people could read all kinds of meanings. In either case, opaqueness was a component of Stipe’s writing from the very outset, and it set him apart from most other fledgling songwriters.

Musically the duo worked the same handful of chords over and over. Buck harbored no illusions concerning his ability on the guitar, but he had enthusiasm and a willingness to learn. Plus, he already looked and acted the part, with his shaggy hair and penchant for wearing vests and carrying knives around. He was a rock star minus the fame and success, which may be the purest sort of rock star there is. Still, the pair needed a bassist and a drummer, no two ways about it. They would not be playing folk gigs at T.K. Harty’s as “Buck and Stipe.” They wanted to play—oh, never mind where; they hadn’t thought that far ahead. But they wanted to play loud—electric.

It should come as no surprise to the reader that Kathleen O’Brien immediately thought of Bill Berry as the solution to the new duo’s quandary. Sure, she had an ulterior motive—she wanted to bring Berry into the band for the same reason she had recruited him for the Wuoggerz: to be closer to him. But she also knew from that earlier experience that Berry could play, and that he came with an added bonus: Mike Mills.

What happened next is a matter of some conjecture. We know for certain that Kathleen introduced Michael and Peter to Bill at a party and that Michael was rather taken with Berry’s unusual appearance—particularly his eyebrow. But Kathleen vaguely remembers also introducing the duo to Mike Mills at that same party, whereas the version of the story told by the band members over the years has Berry introducing Buck and Stipe to Mills at Tyrone’s O.C. nightclub a few weeks later. Whatever the exact circumstances, Michael Stipe was initially adamant that Mills not be part of their fledgling band. It wasn’t the fact that the bassist was drunk off his ass that evening, crawling around the floor in his bomber jacket; it was simply that Mills didn’t look cool. No matter his musical talent, his bowl haircut and penchant for bell-bottoms were violently at odds with the mental image Stipe had constructed of his hypothetical ensemble. Buck had some initial concerns too, though his were of a more practical nature: based on the state Mills was in that evening, Buck worried that he might be too out-of-control to shoulder the commitment of being in a band.

Fortunately for posterity, Berry was equally adamant that he wouldn’t participate in any new musical undertaking without Mills. Since Stipe and Buck had immediately warmed to Berry and desperately wanted him to be in the band, they had no choice but to acquiesce.

Kathleen still remembers the first rehearsal vividly: “It was just there. You know, the dynamics between the personalities—what Peter and Michael had been doing and then what Mike and Bill already had established from years of playing together . . . it just immediately fit. I had thought it would, but it was one of those things where I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect. This is perfect.’”

Mike moved into the church, followed in close succession by Bill. The as-yet-unnamed band rehearsed regularly, working up covers of songs by ’60s garage bands (practically the only material that Buck felt competent—and confident—enough to play) along with full-band arrangements of some of the Buck and Stipe originals. With all four musicians now under the same roof, they made steady progress in laying the foundations of their sound. Many distractions surrounded the young men at Steeplechase, though, and it was not initially clear how far this new project of theirs would go.

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

Photo by Ingrid Schorr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

And yet Stipe didn’t make himself out to be super-hetero either. His early lyrics, many of which had been jettisoned by the time R.E.M. began making records, represent perhaps his only attempt to put forward any kind of macho swagger. R.E.M. biographer Tony Fletcher has characterized this material as misogynistic, but that’s a bit of a stretch—at least when judged by the usual rock ’n’ roll standards. “Hey, Hey Nadine” (aka “Small Town Girl”), in which Stipe sings “Pretty blond hair singing as she walks / China-like smile bitchin’ as she talks”(1) doesn’t exactly threaten the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb” in the sexist anthem sweepstakes. No, these songs were merely exercises in rock ’n’ roll affectation: an instance of Stipe trying on the ill-fitting coat of machismo on his way to abstract expressionism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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