Notes

The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

The late 1970s punk explosion that ignited first Europe and then the United States created more than just a burgeoning market for green hair dye.  Inspired by the same D.I.Y. attitude that prompted bands like the Sex Pistols and Black Flag to pick up the musical instruments they could barely play, punk fans from Akron, Ohio to Zion, Illinois launched independent record labels and rock clubs, and concomitant with the rise of what would eventually be called “alternative rock” came a regional slant unseen in American pop music for two decades. 

Nowhere was this trend more evident than in the theretofore sleepy southern college town that became one of the most fecund musical hotbeds of the late 20th century… Athens, Georgia. 

Athens’ reputation as a cultural nexus started in October, 1976, when five inveterate thrift store divers gathered at a local Chinese restaurant and drunkenly decided to form a band, undeterred by their near-complete lack of musical experience.   When this motley crew played their first gig at a Valentine’s Day party in Athens four months later, they took their name from the slang term for the bouffant wigs worn by the makeshift combo’s distaff members.  From this unlikely melange of simple twang guitar riffs, booming bass presence and ironic, shouted lyrics (the latter inspired in equal measure by monster movies and girl groups of the 1960s) emerged the B-52s… and their first homemade single, the now classic “Rock Lobster,” was the opening salvo in Athens’ assault on an unsuspecting world of popular music.

Another Athens band that would go on to dominate record charts the world over came together in early 1980 when a local record store manager with guitar aspirations began to jam in an abandoned Episcopal church with three like-minded University of Georgia students.  Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, and childhood buddies Mike Mills and Bill Berry played their first official gig together without a name.  But by their second appearance, they were known as R.E.M., and within just a couple years, their unique songs — combining influences as disparate as Big Star, the Velvet Underground and Robyn Hitchcock — would put these three initials on the lips of music-loving college students across the country.  Like the B-52s, R.E.M. would transform in the late ’80s from cult favorites to mainstream chart-toppers with songs like “Losing My Religion” and “The One I Love.”

But one group from Athens would achieve huge notoriety without ever scoring a hit record.  Another group of former University of Georgia students came together in 1983 to form Widespread Panic which — like Vermont’s Phish — inherited the Grateful Dead’s mantle as an intensely popular “jam band.”  Although Widespread Panic has released over a dozen albums since their 1988 debut, SPACE WRANGLER, the outfit’s enormous success owes to their constant touring and blues-based improvisation.