Читать книгу Begin the Begin - Robert Dean Lurie - Страница 9

Chapter One

There are not many allusions to sex—even to romantic love—on those early R.E.M. albums. Not that the four band members were cloistered ascetics—far from it; it’s just that Michael Stipe was trying to get something else across in those days, something to do with two-headed cows, Man Ray, a drunk named Pee Wee, and Brer Rabbit. So it may come as a surprise to learn that R.E.M. was born of an old-fashioned instance of boy-meets-girl physical infatuation.

When Kathleen O’Brien first laid eyes on Bill Berry at the beginning of 1979, she had already been a student at the University of Georgia for several months, having taken up residence at Reed Hall in fall 1978. Situated directly alongside the gargantuan Sanford Stadium on the north side of campus, Reed Hall was a paradoxical place: a dump by any conventional standards, yet fondly remembered to this day by generations of alumni for the very qualities that made it seem so inhospitable at the time: lack of air-conditioning; small, cramped rooms; loud, clanking pipes; the very same horrendous carpeting that must have lined the rings of Dante’s Inferno (you know, the type where the threads have been ground down into the rubberized base so the whole surface is smooth and sticky, the color of Georgia red clay mixed with shit). And the men’s wing had communal shower rooms reminiscent of those found in prisons. Such adverse conditions really brought people together, and during the early fall and late spring months, it was impossible to survive in that building without leaving your door wide open; otherwise you’d have suffocated in the stale, humid, cigarette smoke–saturated air.

The consequence of all those open doors was dorm-wide conviviality. Let’s say you’re walking down the hall of the first-floor men’s wing, you casually glance in one of the doorways, and, hey, wait a minute, that guy’s pulling a Clash record out of its sleeve. And you thought everyone here only listened to Southern rock. Lifelong friendships were kindled by such chance encounters. If you had, say, a fondness for marijuana, you could discern pretty quickly which rooms were occupied by fellow enthusiasts. Some believed that if they exhaled into a poster tube stuffed with socks they could mask the smell, but in those cramped surroundings they weren’t fooling anyone. Everybody was in everybody’s business, and for a certain concentrated period in a person’s life, that can actually be comforting.

The Reed Hall I’m describing here no longer exists. With the best of intentions, the powers that be overhauled the building in the late 1990s and equipped it with all the modern conveniences—air-conditioning and individual shower stalls, for instance—that tuition-paying parents expect for their children. Now those kids sit squirreled away in their little climate-controlled dens. Doors remain closed, and the soul of the building is gone.

But back to Kathleen and Bill.

After catching that first glimpse of young Mr. Berry, Kathleen told her friend Sandi Phipps that Bill was a “fox.” It’s easy to see the appeal. He had a feral, wolfish appearance: wiry body; thick, tousled hair; hooded Robert Mitchum eyes; a complexion that looked slightly Mediterranean; and thick eyebrows that stretched across his forehead in a nearly unbroken line—a feature that would have been distinctly unattractive on just about anyone else but on Berry served to accentuate his uniqueness.

That initial encounter occurred in the Reed Hall mail room, right off the first-floor lobby. Few, if any, words were exchanged, but Kathleen ascertained through the grapevine that Bill had recently arrived at UGA from the central Georgia town of Macon, home of the Allman Brothers. To this day, nearly everyone who has known Bill characterizes him as “a good old boy from Macon,” even though he actually hails from Duluth, Minnesota, and did not set foot on Georgia soil until the age of 14. Something of the South got into his blood, though. Some years later he would tell an interviewer that he and his bandmates were “not ashamed of being Southerners; we’re proud of the fact . . . Like most Southerners, we’re easygoing and don’t usually get uptight.” Berry had fully internalized this mind-set by the time he arrived at UGA. He even had a slight drawl.

Nineteen-year-old Kathleen was lean and long-legged (her friend Diane Loring Aiken reckons she had the greatest legs of anyone ever). Her sleepy green eyes, perpetually arched eyebrows, and devilish grin hinted at a worldliness that most of her peers did not yet possess. She had already lived on her own and was more self-sufficient than many of her friends in Reed, most of whom had come straight from their family home and were accustomed to being taken care of (and cleaned up after). And she was often the instigator of some seriously high-octane blowouts that transpired in Reed’s previously mentioned subbasement (or “subwastement,” as she calls it), of which more later.

Kathleen O’Brien grew up in the Atlanta suburbs during an era of significant racial upheaval. Government-mandated integration was in full swing, and for the first time in Georgia’s history, a robust black middle class was emerging. Half a century later, few would argue that this was in any way a bad thing, but any great social transition carries with it considerable tensions. The newly affluent black families did what anyone in their position would have done: they began to move into the more upscale (read: historically white) neighborhoods. Kathleen’s family lived in one of those neighborhoods, in southern DeKalb County.

“We stayed,” she recalls now.

We didn’t really have a problem with [integration]. But massive white flight ensued and we were one of the few white families left in the neighborhood. By the time I got to seventh grade, pretty much all of my friends had already moved. I had plenty of black friends at that point, but what I experienced was that some of their parents didn’t really want their kids hanging out with a white girl.

Once she reached high school, Kathleen herself became an involuntary white flighter. “The high school I was supposed to go to had become predominantly black at that point,” she says.

This happened over a period of, oh, maybe three years. It went from pretty much lily white to completely black, and it was a very strange time. My brother ended up going there but he had been mugged a couple of times. And my mother was afraid that if I went to that high school, something horrible would happen to me because of my tint of birth, you know, since I wasn’t going to put up with any bullshit.

Because of these concerns, Kathleen’s parents devised an elaborate plan that would enable her to attend high school close to where her mother worked at the CDC, then known as the Center for Disease Control. They rented an apartment off Claremont Street that they proceeded to furnish and stock with food. “It was basically a little high school pad for me and my brother,” Kathleen says. The family held on to the apartment for a year—long enough to convince the county that they really had moved. Then they ditched the apartment while continuing to use the address for school documentation.

From our current vantage point, it’s easy to ascribe racist motives to those parents who pulled their kids out of schools en masse in the 1970s, although most of them acted out of genuine, if often exaggerated, concern for their children’s safety. The “white flight kids” themselves by and large accepted racial equality as a given. Many of the protagonists of this book came from such a background, and, as we will see, they mostly developed markedly progressive political and social views. Had their parents all been virulent racists that would likely not have been the case.

Georgia-based lawyer and sportswriter T. Kyle King grew up in a section of Atlanta where the transitions were not quite so extreme as they were in Kathleen’s neighborhood (his family did not feel the need to uproot, for instance), but his views reflect those of the majority of white kids who grew up in Atlanta in the 1970s and early ’80s: “In the 1970s, metro Atlanta still felt like ‘the South,’” he says.

But it was changing, though we didn’t know it at the time. Race was as ancillary an issue as it ever is; the South had come through a tumultuous time in the ’50s and ’60s, so the tone of race relations was subdued in the ’70s and early ’80s. I know I never thought much about the rather remarkable fact that I was going to school with black kids my own age, and, in retrospect, it’s noteworthy that the reality of integration no longer seemed noteworthy. Atlanta had passed from a period of having white mayors to a period of having black mayors, which again, from a kid’s perspective, seemed rather unremarkable, given the swiftness with which we moved from Ivan Allen, who presided over the civil rights era, to Maynard Jackson [Atlanta’s first African American mayor, who took office in 1974].

As King’s comments indicate, integration in urban Georgia was fairly successful—at least compared to the much rockier experiences of adjoining states. By the time of the 2010 Census, DeKalb County, which included Kathleen’s former home of South DeKalb, had become the second most affluent majority-black county in the United States. The path to that outcome was rocky and generated the collateral damage of many self-uprooted white families, but the outcome was one that most of the white flight kids supported.

It is the first of many ironies in our story that the politically incorrect phenomenon of white flight played a part in the birth of one of the most liberal rock bands in history: the O’Briens’ flight to what Kathleen’s parents perceived as the more hospitable environs of Druid Hills High School led directly to her first meeting with a towering, stick-thin record store clerk named Peter Buck, who was at that time working two doors down from the restaurant where Kathleen waitressed in the evenings. Buck was—and still is—loud, gregarious, opinionated, and, according to at least one of his friends, “kind of obnoxious.” As such, his character is trying mightily to insert itself into our narrative at this point and dominate the proceedings. But let’s keep him in the wings a bit longer. Suffice to say for now that Kathleen was exposed to Buck’s personality and forceful opinions on music during her many visits to browse the latest releases at his store in Emory Village. These chance encounters created the first strands of a tangled web of relationships that would ultimately beget R.E.M.

Another important strand came in the form of Kathleen’s friendship with Paul Butchart, who, like Buck, was tall, opinionated (though a bit more reserved in his delivery), and fiercely loyal. Paul worked with Kathleen’s brother at a steakhouse and shared with Kathleen interests in the German language (they had first met at German camp one summer) and, of course, music. Paul, too, would become a pivotal player in the genesis of R.E.M.

By the late 1970s, Kathleen was listening to music that, as she says, “pretty much no one else had heard of at Druid Hills.” This included such now-mainstream artists as Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, and Blondie, all considered very much “alternative” at the time. What’s more, she says, “I already had a reputation as being weird because I read weird poetry and I dressed strangely.”

Frictions with her mom prompted Kathleen to leave the family home and live on her own at age 18, giving her that crucial taste of independence (and lack of adult supervision) before she moved into Reed Hall the following fall. No sooner had she arrived in that charmingly dilapidated building than she became involved in a seemingly nonstop party in the girls’ subbasement. The rotating cast of characters in this bacchanal included several Kathys (Russo, Fain, and another that Kathleen simply remembers as “Kat”), Sandi Phipps, Linda Hopper, and a Patti Smith–emulating interloper from the fourth floor named Carol Levy. In Party Out of Bounds, Rodger Lyle Brown (Phipps’s boyfriend at the time, and a frequenter of these “subwastement” parties) describes their activities thusly:

The girls were rowdy. They knocked out ceiling panels just to see the dust fly. They broke windows to hear the glass shatter. […] Mark Cline, who would form the band Love Tractor, lived on the fourth floor of Reed, and when he came down to the subbasement he and the girls pasted pornography on the walls and sat smoking cigarettes, carving genitalia into Barbie dolls.

Where were the dorm authorities, you may be wondering? Well, the subbasement was apparently too small to warrant its own dedicated RA (Resident Assistant), so the girls who lived there fell under the jurisdiction of the already overworked main-basement RA, who never came down because, Kathleen says, “everybody was so afraid of us.”

It was perhaps inevitable that Bill Berry would get drawn into this crowd. (Hard partying, sexually provocative young women with a taste for cool and edgy music? What’s not to love?) But his engagement with the subbasement scene was initially shy and tentative. For that first month or so after Kathleen saw him, the two would pass each other only occasionally on the Reed quad or in the mail room. Bill was on the exact opposite side of the building, his fourth-floor room facing out over the parking lot. And despite the wildness she displayed when in her own environment, Kathleen was too shy—or too cautious—to venture up to the men’s wing on her own. But she did begin to piece together Bill’s backstory from what she gleaned through the grapevine.

She learned that Bill was a drummer, though he maintained a strangely ambivalent attitude toward playing music, or at least toward the idea of a performing career. “I’d like to say that playing the drums and being a rock ’n’ roll drummer were big dreams I had for as long as I can remember,” he told an interviewer years later. “But they weren’t. I never considered the possibilities of being a musician. Back then I thought that was what others did.” Despite this reticence, he did exhibit a simple joy at playing for its own sake, spurred, no doubt, by the enthusiasm of his best friend and frequent musical partner, Mike Mills.

The story of how Bill Berry and Mike Mills became best friends and bandmates is one of the most oft-told tales in all of R.E.M. lore. It has a neat-and-tidy fairy-tale quality to it, though it lacks any corroborating sources. If it’s true, it is something that could only happen to kids.

The story goes like this: In high school, Bill Berry was a self-described “juvenile delinquent,” heavily into alcohol, pot, and general malfeasance. Mills is on record saying that Berry ran with a “rough crowd” in Macon and was “on the wrong side of the law” (Marlon Brando and his Wild One gang spring to mind). Mills, who at the time resembled—there’s really no other way to put this—an endearing rodent in glasses, was a straight-A student and all-around overachiever. R.E.M. biographer Johnny Black lays it on perhaps a bit thick in describing the young Mills (a future hellraiser par excellence) as a “clean-living, hard-working lad,” and the young Berry (a future teetotaling recluse) as a “wayward youth,” but it does appear that the teenaged Mills and Berry were opposites in several ways and that some low-level hostility may have existed between them because of this.

Along came music to smooth over their differences. Sometime early on in high school, Berry got invited to take part in an afternoon jam session with a friend’s fledgling band. He duly arrived at the designated house and began setting up his drum kit. In walked Mills, his supposed nemesis, who had been recruited to play bass. (Berry has stated that he would have left at that point if he hadn’t already set up his gear.) They began playing, and sometime during that afternoon Berry’s musical instincts overrode his thuggish instincts and he came to realize that he’d stumbled into something pretty special—not this nascent band, per se, which would go on to play under the names Shadowfax and, later, the Back Door Band—but this effortless groove he had going with Mills. They were in the pocket, as the saying goes.

And just like that, they became best friends forever. Or something along those lines.

Mike Mills did present himself to the world as a nerd, that much is true. The California native wore thick glasses, styled his hair in a manner that resembled a muddy toupee, had the pallor of someone who spent a lot of time indoors, and was generally out of step with his peers sartorially. Compounding this uncool appearance was the fact that he played tuba and sousaphone in the school band.

But beneath the contrasts in Mills’s and Berry’s exteriors lay some notable similarities. For one thing, both could play a variety of instruments. In addition to the aforementioned horns—and bass, of course—Mills was proficient on piano and guitar and had a solid grasp of music theory. Berry, too, could navigate the piano, guitar, and ukulele, though his approach to music was more intuitive and less schooled than that of his new friend. Both young men came from households in which music was appreciated. Mills’s father, Fred, had been an operatic tenor and instilled in his son a love of melody from an early age. Bill Berry’s passion for music had been sparked by an older sibling. “I was five or six when my older brother bought Meet the Beatles and listened to it incessantly,” he told reporter Erin Rossiter in 2007. “Well, I met the Beatles all right, and it was a magical revelation.” Both listened to a wide variety of musical genres and paid little attention to what their peers considered to be cool. They liked what sounded good to them. For Mills this included Seals and Crofts, Harry Nilsson, and even a bit of Yes. For Berry it included Gene Krupa and all things Motown. Mills and Berry were, in fact, kindred musical spirits. They were both highly unorthodox players: Berry a self-styled “basher” more interested in the overall structure and cohesion of a song than in innovating on his particular instrument, Mills favoring a high-on-the-neck lead bass style (think Paul McCartney’s noodly bass line on the Beatles’ “Rain”). In light of these philosophical bonds, then, it becomes easier to understand why two supposedly opposite personalities became the fastest of friends and decades-long bandmates.

Berry and Mills, like Kathleen O’Brien, Paul Butchart, and others in their future peer group, were affected by the wave of desegregation policies that had begun in the 1960s and escalated sharply with the Supreme Court’s 1969 order that all US public school districts desegregate “at once.” The court had offered no practical instructions for achieving this aim, which threw open the door to all manner of well-meaning (but not always successful) social experiments. One of these was busing, which involved transporting kids to schools outside their own (typically segregated) neighborhoods in order to create a more even racial mix. In the South this meant that some black students found themselves bussed great distances in order to attend school with white students, while some white students found themselves getting bussed in the opposite direction. Both Mike and Bill ended up attending a high school that was 80 percent black. For the most part they navigated these circumstances about as well as teenagers could be expected to, though Bill did run afoul of some of the black male students over his perceived interest in a black girl. “(She and I) would sit around the lunch room discussing things,” he said. “But it wasn’t long before she suddenly stopped paying attention to me. The day after she wouldn’t even talk to me, six black guys jumped me and beat me up.”

This episode underscores the complexity and ever-shifting nature of race relations in the South in the 1970s. Forcibly putting kids of different backgrounds together for their daily schooling didn’t automatically erase the deep-seated tendencies toward tribalism and self-segregation that many white and black students had inherited from their parents. And it would not prevent some of them from continuing to self-segregate into the future. And yet, around the same time that Bill Berry and Kathleen O’Brien’s brother (in Decatur) found themselves the unwitting victims of racially motivated violence, and countless black students continued to receive the same, or worse, treatment from their white peers, younger students like T. Kyle King began making their way through grade school blissfully unaware of the remarkableness of their newly desegregated classrooms. Bill Berry himself harbored no discernible racial prejudice (as is probably clear from the behavior that got him into his predicament) and the beating seems to have done nothing to instill any such feelings in him. If anything, the incident may have reinforced his distaste for segregation.

Bill and Mike continued to hone their groove as members of Shadowfax—the band that had emerged from their fateful jam session.(1) After a few lineup changes, the group would eventually mutate into the Back Door Band. Their musical style was solidly mainstream rock ’n’ roll, or what is now referred to as “classic rock”: they played covers of songs by Bachman Turner Overdrive, Foreigner, the Doobie Brothers, and the ubiquitous Allman Brothers. The Back Door Band introduced more straight blues into that mix, along with some original compositions in the vein of the artists listed above. In subsequent years—in the wake of the punk and postpunk revolutions—Berry and Mills would feel compelled to distance themselves from their musical endeavors in Macon, but in truth both men continued to harbor a fondness for this style of straightforward, foot-stomping rock ’n’ roll.

Regionally, the Back Door Band was quite successful. They played Atlanta’s Great Southeast Music Hall, no mean feat for a group of high school students. Yet any dreams of further glory the other members might have harbored were squashed when Mike and Bill quit the band on graduating high school in 1976. In It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M. Companion, Marcus Gray characterizes Mills and Berry’s decision as the result of the pair being “heartily sick of the Capricorn roster’s domination of the local scene with the likes of Marshall Tucker and the Allman Brothers, and bored with a public that discouraged anything straying too far beyond the Doobies and Lynyrd Skynyrd.” Whether this is supposition on Gray’s part or actually derives from interviews with Berry and Mills, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a retroactive attempt to impose rarefied tastes on two teenagers who probably didn’t possess them at the time. The two friends would not be exposed to the more challenging music of punk and various underground ancillaries until the following year, so it seems a stretch to imagine these “good old boys” attempting to push their high school band in directions they were not yet aware of.

The real reason the duo briefly abandoned their musical calling seems to have been more prosaic: the band was doing well, but not well enough. High school was over and so were the eighteen years of free room and board that came with living under your parents’ roof. It was time to go out and get real jobs. The two moved into an apartment together and proceeded to do just that.

From our current vantage point, with the vaunted Athens music scene still going strong alongside a thriving hip-hop community in Atlanta that has produced artists such as Outkast, Ludacris, Arrested Development, and Cee Lo Green, it’s easy to forget that Macon was unquestionably the music hub in Georgia in the 1970s. The establishment of Capricorn Records by Macon natives Phil and Alan Walden in 1969 was crucial in this, but so was the fact that the Allman Brothers Band, the label’s enormously successful group, were a local act. The Capricorn roster also included such disparate artists as Wet Willie, the Marshall Tucker Band, Dobie Gray, and Kitty Wells. It surely did not go unnoticed by Berry and Mills that the Walden brothers had chosen to establish their thriving music empire right in their sleepy Southern hometown, rather than decamping for Nashville, New York, or Los Angeles. Had Bill and Mike truly wished to become professional musicians in 1976, they were already geographically well positioned to do so.

Yet Berry continued to believe that the life of a musician did not constitute a legitimate career. He did, however, harbor an interest in the business side of music. (It’s unclear what Mills’s career ambitions were at this point; we only know that the type A, overachieving impulse that had so distinguished him in high school seemed to have evaporated upon graduation. He took a job at Sears.) Bill was the recipient of an unbelievable stroke of luck: he landed a job with Paragon, the booking arm of Capricorn Records. “Get this,” he later told Rodger Lyle Brown, “[the Back Door Band’s] guitarist’s girlfriend’s brother had this . . . great job at Paragon, but he couldn’t keep it since he was going to become a cop, so he said to me, ‘You want the job?’ And I said, ‘Fuck!’”

The work was a combination of menial paperwork-oriented tasks during the day and the opportunity to chauffeur big-time rock stars at night. “I would have paid to do it,” he told Brown. “Here’s this 18-year-old kid who got double-time to go spend the night out with rock stars.”

Although he didn’t realize it at the time, Berry’s career received a further boost with the arrival of the London-based agent Ian Copeland in 1977. Copeland had been brought in at the behest of Paragon head Alex Hodges to introduce a new, more modern musical sensibility into the organization. The timing could not have been better for the once and future musical duo of Berry and Mills. Ian Copeland and his brothers Stewart and Miles were on the verge of becoming serious players in the music industry: Stewart would soon be enjoying international success as the drummer for the Police, and Miles was putting together an independent record label he would name I.R.S.

We can say with some degree of certainty that when Bill Berry arrived at the Atlanta airport in his chauffeur cap to escort the new agent back to Macon, he had never met anyone quite like Ian Copeland. For one thing, while Berry had halfheartedly aspired to the role of juvenile delinquent in high school, Copeland had been a full-on renegade in his day. The fact that his father, Miles Copeland II, had been an active CIA field officer involved in engineering coups d’état in Egypt and Iran (among other places) seems to have inspired some spectacular acts of defiance on Ian’s part. In his teens, Ian had: 1) fallen in with a biker gang in Lebanon (where Copeland Sr. was stationed for a time); 2) become a serial car thief (a perilous vocation in an Arab country); 3) run away from home, crossing several countries in the process; 4) dropped out of school and volunteered to fight in the war in Vietnam. According to his memoir Wild Thing, Copeland had “mostly fond memories” of his time at war, which coincided with the Tet Offensive. He was, in other words, a bona fide badass. He also happened to be more passionate about new and interesting music than just about anyone Berry had ever met. This last detail must have seemed surprising given that Ian was a decade older than Berry and, with his long hair and shaggy beard, appeared an otherwise perfect addition to the hirsute, Southern boogie–loving Paragon staff.

Ian took an immediate liking to his new chauffeur. He later characterized the young Berry as a “compulsive talker” who “probably knew more about Paragon than anyone else on the payroll.”

[He] explained that he was not only Paragon’s chauffeur, but also the gofer, mail clerk, tea boy, messenger, and odd-jobs man. He gave me a full run-down on all of the people who worked there . . . Before long I knew the whole company’s chain of command and all of the players.

Additionally, Bill—himself a transplant from another region—was perhaps the ideal person to ease Copeland through the culture shock he was about to experience. Despite looking the part, and even though his father hailed from this part of the country, Copeland had little familiarity with the people and history of the American South and knew next to nothing about Southern rock. Berry helped fill in the blanks.

It’s a toss-up as to which of the following factors was more transformative in the lives of Mike Mills and Bill Berry: their newfound friendship with the well-connected Ian Copeland or the record collection he had brought with him. It’s probably not true that Ian single-handedly introduced the city of Macon to punk rock, but he does seem to have been the first person to turn Bill and Mike on to the new sound, exposing them to such bands as the Damned, the Ramones, the Dead Boys, Chelsea, and the Sex Pistols. Mills credits this adrenaline shot of raw rock ’n’ roll with inspiring in him a renewed interest in playing. “We would play along to the Ramones’ first record,” he recalled later. “And the first Police single, which was ‘Fall Out’ and ‘Nothing Achieving’: That was huge. That was the sort of stuff that got us playing again.”

Bill and Mike were essentially hearing this stuff in a vacuum. Outside of Ian’s apartment, there was no punk subculture in Macon. There were no clubs where the music could be heard live. And any fashion aesthetic had to be gleaned solely from the album covers. Thus they missed out on much of UK punk’s Cultural Revolution–style emphasis on demolishing the past and rebuilding from scratch. They either missed or disregarded the Clash’s declaration of “No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977!” For these two, the lean, hard-charging sound of this first wave of punk was simply an exciting new chapter in the ongoing narrative of popular music. Mike still loved Harry Nilsson and Bill still loved Motown. Punk for them functioned as a renewal rather than any kind of ground zero.

Ian’s attitude was much the same, even though he had been to the punk clubs in London and had spent time with the progenitors of the movement. A ’60s kid at heart, he retained his earlier love of classic and progressive rock and very quickly grew to appreciate the Southern rock bands he was initially tasked with booking. Still, this new music invigorated him with its leanness and ferocity, and he longed to bring it to the United States.

The rest of the Paragon office did not initially share his enthusiasm. Alex Hodges had told Ian, “I want you to sign bands I can’t stand,” and that’s exactly what happened. In January 1978, Copeland talked his co-workers into attending the Sex Pistols’ debut US concert at the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta. He figured that if any group could turn his colleagues on to the new sound, it would be the flagship band of British punk. This turned out to be an overly optimistic goal: “Not to put too fine a point on it,” he later wrote, but [the Sex Pistols] sucked.”(2) For a time afterward, he found himself socially ostracized by virtually everyone at Paragon except for Bill Berry. But things turned around when he once again managed to drag everyone out to the Macon performance of a band he himself had booked, a new wave band from London called Squeeze, who were signed to A&M Records. Their tight musicianship onstage and friendliness offstage softened the hearts of the Paragon staff. From that point forward the company got on board with the new wave program.(3)

The Squeeze tour turned out to be a major game-changer, not just for Copeland and Paragon but for the music industry as a whole. Circumventing A&M’s lack of financial support for their own band, Ian lined up a series of dates at small clubs mostly off the beaten path and booked the musicians into the cheapest motels possible—the whole band often had to cram into a single room.

Bill Berry and Mike Mills were heavily involved in Ian’s guerrilla promotional tactics for Squeeze’s Macon show. As Ian wrote:

Bill and Mike hung me upside down over a bridge where I spray-painted UK Squeeze(4) (with the e’s the wrong way round) on the overpass to the interstate. Then we climbed up on an enormous billboard out by the airport as you come into town, and sprayed it in big letters on top of where they had just freshly painted it white. It stayed there for several months . . .

The combination of such “outside the box” marketing techniques with Ian’s many cost-cutting measures enabled Squeeze to turn a decent profit at the conclusion of the tour. Perhaps even more significantly for posterity, ­Copeland had single-handedly cobbled together a club circuit that could be utilized and adapted by subsequent under-the-radar bands. Ian himself reused this template when booking the first American tour for his brother Stewart’s band, the Police, in October–November 1978. This was an even more audacious endeavor, given that the band had decided to tour prior to the release of their debut album. But the Police’s incendiary live performances created a word-of-mouth buzz that preceded them wherever they went. Bill Berry was on hand throughout the planning and execution of this tour and, perhaps unbeknown to Ian, absorbed all its details and lessons.

Bill put in only two years at Paragon, though he might have remained in Macon had it not been for an eventful phone call between Mike Mills and his father in the fall of 1978, during which the elder Mills berated his son for squandering his excellent SAT score by hanging around Macon and working at Sears. This prompted Mike to talk with Bill about pulling up stakes and enrolling at the University of Georgia together. Bill didn’t need much of a push; he continued to nurse dreams of working on the management side of the entertainment industry, or as an agent or manager for professional athletes. In either case, he would need some type of higher degree, an MBA perhaps. His departure from Paragon turned out to be well timed; the company, along with Capricorn Records, collapsed into bankruptcy shortly thereafter.

The two friends arrived in Athens in January 1979. The town was not altogether different from Macon in appearance, but its massive preponderance of young people gave it a different temperament. Athens is often described as a sleepy little college town, which does it a disservice. Yes, it has always been a college town: it was actually willed into being by the Georgia State Legislature for the express purpose of hosting a “college or seminary of learning”—what became UGA. And yes, relative to Atlanta, New Orleans, Birmingham, and the large cities of the South, it is small, even little. But sleepy? As far back as anyone can remember, the place has had a reputation for hedonism and alcoholic excess.

Perhaps the “sleepy” label is due to the impression the town gives of being enclosed; long branches of Darlington oaks and other towering trees arch over many of the streets. Back in the 1970s, the only way to get to Athens from Atlanta was via a two-lane road, the “Atlanta Highway” later immortalized in the B-52’s’ hit “Love Shack.” For long stretches a driver could feel like Moses parting a sea of Georgia pine. After miles and miles of this, Athens would appear seemingly out of nowhere—an oasis of buildings and street lamps at the end of a long, lonely road. Yet the impression of a great canopy of vegetation—a second sky of branches and leaves—persisted throughout the town. This was by no means unique to Athens; many Georgia towns, including Macon, had nearly identical blueprints: the central courthouse, the post office, and streets lined with sturdy old trees. But downtown Athens was certainly different from downtown Atlanta, which was dominated by large, modern, impersonal buildings and obsessively manicured tracts of “green space” that seemed soulless and antiseptic.

Some residents of Athens, particularly the art school students who harbored (usually New York–centric) dreams of recognition and success in the big city, felt hemmed in and stifled by the town. But many other artistic people felt cradled and supported both emotionally (as we will see, there was a growing community of like-minded souls ready to support all kinds of creative ventures, provided alcohol was somehow in the offing) and physically (a person could just about rest in the palm of this town, or wrap it around themselves like a blanket).

In one respect, Athens may have seemed like a step backward to Bill and Mike. Although the University of Georgia was integrated at the classroom level, the students still tended to self-segregate in other settings. Black ­students had their own fraternities and sororities and gravitated toward certain residence halls, and so did their white peers. Outside the university, the color line was even more pronounced. The town was divided into white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods, with very little overlap. This dynamic would remain in place throughout the following decade with only marginal changes.

Having submitted their names to the school’s lottery-style dorm assignment system, Berry and Mills ended up in different buildings. Bill, as we have seen, landed in Reed, and Mike took up residence in Myers Hall, at the time a virtual clone of Reed, further south of the stadium, a modest walk or short bus ride away. Bill believed he had left music-making behind him. Mike, however, brought along his bass.

Discerning readers of a certain bent will recognize the Lord of the Rings origins of the band’s name. Shadowfax was the preferred steed—the “lord of all horses”—of the wizard Gandalf. Perhaps this tells us something about the nature of the music we’re dealing with here.

It’s interesting, given Copeland’s recollection, that virtually every musician and scenester I interviewed for this book pointed to this particular concert as a watershed moment in the formation of the Athens music scene. This probably had less to do with the Sex Pistols’ performance and more with the fact that the event opened everyone’s eyes to the existence of a hitherto hidden, robust subculture of seekers and misfits dissatisfied with the musical status quo.

Ian Copeland claimed to have coined the phrase “new wave” as a less-fraught descriptor for the new bands he was bringing in.

The band was required to add the “UK” prefix because another band was already using the name “Squeeze” in the US.