Automatic From the People

“Cool Town – How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture,” by Grace Hale, 2020

“Place is the space,” to flip a lyric from Sun Ra.  This is one of the rules of creativity, especially in U.S. music scenes.  Athens, Georgia became one of those hotbeds of original musical talent, a smaller version of places like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Laurel Canyon in L.A., Greenwich Village in New York, New Orleans in Louisiana, the Mississippi Delta or Detroit, Chicago, Seattle, Nashville and Memphis. 

Hale was part of the ‘80s scene in Athens and she tracks the bands and artists that initially emerged from that small college town – bands like R.E.M., the B-52s, Pylon, Vic Chesnutt and Mathew Sweet.  She does not deal with later Athens’ bands like the Drive-By Truckers, Neutral Milk Hotel and Widespread Panic.  All were nurtured by the presence of the University of Georgia (UGA), but later the town became a magnet for musicians throughout the South.  Today many still live in Athens, which has a great number of music venues and is still partially affordable.  The remnants of the former Georgia Music Museum in Macon are now housed at UGA.

Whether Athens alone ‘launched’ alternative music is certainly questionable and typical southern tub-thumping, but that is beside the point.  Hale goes into incredible detail on the many individual artists and band members who built the Athens music scene.  She starts with local Jeremy Ayers, one of Warhol’s original Factory members, who died in 2016.  These individuals played in the bands and built or benefited from local institutions - the famous 40 Watt Club, the Georgia Theater, local college radio station WUOG and student paper The Red & Black, the Wuxtry record store, the Grit coffeehouse, the UGA art school, the North Georgia Folk Festival and Hale’s own café, the Downstairs.  The Athenian musicians also had direct and essential connections with the punk, CBGB and Warhol scenes in New York City, which lifted them to fame.

Sexual ambiguity – bisexual, drag, gay and lesbian – was one of the ‘transgressive’ conditions that inspired the Athens music scene, along with a very unorthodox art school.  Both attracted gay, ‘bohemian,’ hippie, punk or outcast kids from conservative Georgia to attend UGA or to live in town. Hale thinks they were mostly middle class, though she does not define the concept. Whether these kids knew music or not, they became DIY artists or formed a band, even if it was performance art, even if they were broke, even if they had to work low-paying food jobs to survive.

Hale covers the origins of the retro B-52s, who first played at a Valentine’s Day house party in Athens, and a few months later, played in NYC’s punk clubs.  And Pylon, an art rock band that refused to consider music a career and disbanded in 1983 when it was no longer fun.  Most famously, R.E.M. – Rapid Eye Movement – who took a different, intentional tack and became an internationally-known alternative rock band.  R.E.M. started out playing a raucous Athens birthday party at an abandoned church.  Many of these bands were received well by the rock press, got recording contracts and went on tour with other punk or new wave acts like Gang of Four or Talking Heads.  Hale goes into other Athens bands that are known to the alternative and punk rock cognoscenti – Love Tractor, the Squalls, Guadalcanal Diary, the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies.  This detail sometimes reads like a journalistic “What’s Happenin’?” column in the local Flagpole alternative paper.  Part of this is her nostalgia.

Drive By Truckers w/Peter Buck at the 40 Watt club

Hale is now a history professor and so puts the music in a socio-political context.  She describes the vibrant original Athens scene as ‘post-modernism in sonic form,’ generally a-political, a cultural rebellion instead of a political one.  R.E.M. members Michael Stipe and Peter Buck initially wanted the band to be non-political and ambiguous.  The focus on sexuality, clothing, pop culture, individualism, apolitical art, ‘coolness’ were actually cultural moves to the right after the defeat of the sixties and seventies rebellions.  

In this context Hale wrestles with the ‘colorblind’ approach to the legacy of Jim Crow in the South, as the art scene in town was unavoidably light-skinned, as was UGA.  Especially during the 1980s Reaganite political counter-revolution, the Athens boho atmosphere comes off as inward and abstentionist.  But after 8 years of Reagan and Christian fundamentalism according to Hale, even the Athens’ indies had to turn towards preserving their retro pocket downtown, the cradle of the scene, and then to liberal-left politics.  

As Thomas Frank explained in The Conquest of Cool, capital can co-opt any amount of purely cultural rebellion. To this day, Athens is a mildly liberal city still dominated as a company town by UGA.  Due to the heavy southern color-caste and class structure, Athens-Clarke County is one of the most unequal counties in the U.S., combining high-earning mostly-white professionals living in the same town as proletarian black people working for barely minimum wage.  Drinking beer seems to be the main student occupation.  Yeah, there is still a counter-culture - venues, cafes, bars and bands, house parties and art shows, hipsters, hippies, folkies and scenesters - but there is no cultural revolution here.  In short, ‘cool’ is overrated, even if the music is not. 

The real fun here is how this ‘cool’ town connects to the rock music scene all over the country in the 1970s and beyond.  New York rockers like the Ramones and Patti Smith take precedence, with nods to famous music magazines and critics like Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau.  The Athens rockers intersected with local rural traditions and musicians, New York bands, British punks, new wave acts, LA punk metal, Minnesota alternative bands like the Replacements and Husker Dü and more.  If you like music, art and creativity, you’ll get a kick out of this in-depth look at a place in time, a place that still endures despite being in politically reactionary Georgia.

P.S. –  In Athens I’ve sat on a blanket at the North Georgia Folk Festival, heard locals sing love duets at the Foundry, listened to crappy noise bands in the basement Caledonia Lounge, been to dancin’ house parties with Stipe in attendance, enjoyed banjo, beer, bong and bonfire bashes in the Georgia countryside, attended music shows at Hendershott’s, seen Gang of Four at the 40 Watt, shared a joint at the Georgia Theater, read the Flagpole, drank at the Manhattan, Little Kings and the Globe, eaten at the Grit and gone to art shows at the Lamar Dodd School of Art.  For 14 years of visits I’ve known Athens as an outsider knows Athens.

 
Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left (if its working):  “Kids”(Patti Smith); “Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,” “Grateful Dead,” “Mississippi Delta,” “Life”(Keith Richards); “Janis Joplin,” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” "33 Revolutions Per Minute," "Searching for Sugarman," "Marie and Rosetta."

And I bought it at May Day Books’ music section!

The Cranky Yankee

August 4, 2020