PREFACE
I guess this is just not going to stop. Not that it is a bad thing.. and not that looking back is terrible ( hello, have we met ? ) Endings cause reflection... you gather, you talk, you laugh, you morn.... set the place in time and move forward. It just ALWAYS ( always ) shocks me that there were so many folks involved. Back in the day .....I did not just want REM, I needed REM. I was from the small town gene pool of pure Skynyrd , but my FREEBIRDS were always meant as ironic. Even in a pre ironic universe , I was putting it out there. Trust me, the folks I went to high school with , were not. Creaky, creaky... Athens changed. Any , even a short time , reader of this little blog knows the first time I saw them was at the I & I club, which was all, I guess hip and " new wave " , but you have to know the actual space was part of my world view as the infamous B&L Warehouse, and I did not belong to the land of denim/flannel and beer , it was very much a part of my older brothers, long hair and rock and roll world. But, I thought it was just me that needed something new... some sort of deliverance from the norm of sleepy Southern small town. It was a line in the sand, you were either B&L or I&I ( not that I have a single clear memory of the stupid bar other than many many sweaty nights at the tragically named BUCKHEAD BEACH, which it became after about an hour of being the I&I. ( which I bet , if someone could find a photo was i & i, had something to do with SKA, which all the cool kids were listening too ( see : Chrissie Hynde in ... one of those Sex Pistols R 4 movies... Filth and the fury ? or hell, was it a VH1 behind the music.. I don't know..)
Who knows, I think the entire planet has a rose colored rear view window, and we all walked to school five miles in the snow, uphill. I have always held the Rodger Lyle Brown / 2011 view of that magic Athens, Ga. ( 1978 - 1986 ) suspect, because it holds it in such a tight bubble. Magic Athens, Ga. ( 1978 - 1986 ) was not an Avalon for little proto hipsters, every garage band two days away from CBGB's. It was a FOOTBALL TOWN with a drinking problem, that was MUCH more pink and green than cross dressed. I just don't want to come across as it all being too too romantic, that's all. Not that it was not lovely, but I think everyone thinks their time in college was, ours just happens to have a world famous rock band from it, that just broke up.
WTF are you talking about, Kyle. Are you high ?
I just do not want to come across as life " was great then and is shit now " , thats all. It was a great run, one of the best in American Rock and Roll, and yes, were / are/ am/ is my favorite band, but it was more than that, and I'm not fully alone in thinking that, and now you get todays installment of REM MANIA :
"In the spring of 1980 I was at college in Athens, Georgia. My once-good grades had given way to behavior that my parents were starting to get wind of, and they instructed me to come back home to Maryland for the summer. I didn’t want to go. Everything in Athens was so… fresh and exciting. I had just started taking part in the innocent decadence that would sustain the scene for the next several years. And I was just beginning a romance with Mike Mills, the bass player in the weeks-old R.E.M. A few weeks before the end of spring quarter he said to me — we were at Tyrone’s, the local rock club, standing between the Rolling Stones pinball machine and the Space Invaders game, playing neither — “I finally meet a girl I like and she’s got to go back to Rockville.” ( the rest, or click on the link above )
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| Rockville Girl "So on a boiling hot September afternoon in 1981 we had The Loud Family Reunion. And Ingrid Schorr, as Minnie Minnola, doused her hair with vegetable oil (’cause that’s what New Yorkers do!), borrowed a loud ugly ’60s print dress and hung those sunglasses from its neckline (’cause that’s what New Yorkers wear!), ate several slabs of chocolate cake with hash baked into it, and went nuts. The photo in R.E.M. Inside Out of Ingrid/Minnie was evidently taken sometime before she took off the dress, squirted herself with canned frosting, and danced naked around the party to the B-52′s second album. |
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