Double Whammy!
Some B-52 Memories...

Up until 1981, my taste in music was dictated solely by Casey Kasem. Each Saturday morning—well, pushing noon, really—I'd tune into the Weekly Top 40, late but in plenty of time to catch the top 10 or 15. This was music meant for me—country music was for my grandmother and other fogies, classical was boring, hard rock—defined in my narrow scope as anything by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band—was for bad boys like Bobbie Gwinn, who bragged of drinking beer and getting it on with "Mary Jane." Jazz and blues and punk and anything else didn't even register on my personal sonar.
I'd recently been transplanted as a high school sophomore from Akron, Ohio, to Maryville, Tennessee. Reeling from culture shock, I found myself knee-deep in what I was convinced was the Old South. My high school football team was nicknamed the Rebels, pick-up horns played Dixie, and in pep rallies I was urged to "Git Fahred Euwp." Below the Mason-Dixon line—in this teenager's eyes—only the Top 40 remained the same.
Until that fateful January afternoon in 1981—the day The B-52s blew my mind. It was in the suburban bedroom of my new friend Sarah—a fellow misfit. We were listening to the record player, and she asked me if I wanted to hear something "really good." Of course I said yes, expecting something along the lines of "The Pina Colada Song." But instead she flashed a bright yellow album cover inhabited by a suspicious looking quintet, the girls sporting bee-hive hairdos. I rolled my eyes and sighed, "Whatever."
As the unforgettable strains of "Rock Lobster" emanated from her portable, I struggled to make sense of this new sound. Was it rock? No—pop? No. Definitely not country or classical. Was it some sort of novelty music, along the lines of "Mr. Jaws" or "The Streak"? Yes, but then...no. Had I heard it before? No. What was it? Sarah only grinned, and shook her blond curls.
What it was, I see now, was my very first brush with "cool" music. That first playing of B-52s was my first inkling that other musical sounds were out there, just waiting to be discovered. It was the start of a beautiful relationship, and set in motion a lifelong affinity for rockabilly (Southern Culture, Horton Heat, the Cramps, et. al) and goof rock (Violent Femmes, They Might be Giants, and Oingo Boingo, etc.).
The B-52s literally rocked my post-adolescent world, having offered me my first taste of music that in meaning nothing, meant everything.
—Hillari Dowdle

The B-52s were cool when I first heard them, the way things are cool when they're kind of weird and not many people know about them. I had just started listening to college radio—I was 12 or so—and the carnival barking and police-siren girl harmonies of "Dance This Mess Around" were staple sounds, as much a part of the atmosphere as Gordon Gano's whine or Richard Butler's rasp (Violent Femmes and Psychedelic Furs, respectively, for those of you too young or too old to remember). When the Mesopotamia EP came out, the title track went into heavy rotation. I liked the way Fred Schneider said "Mesopotamia," like some sort of New Wave incantation.
Then they went away for awhile. Not really away, I guess (anybody remember "Butterbean"?), but away like Thompson Twins and Adam Ant and the rest of the painted tribes, chased out of partytown by Bruce and Prince and Michael. By the time I started college, "Rock Lobster" had somehow become a golden oldie. Like a lot of other songs that never came near the Top 40, it seemed like everybody knew the words, had the album, had it on a tape from a friend. At a dorm dance freshman year, the kind of ice cream social you only went to if you couldn't get into a frat party or off-campus beer bust, everybody went nuts when "Lobster" came on, especially the "down, down, down" part where you're supposed to hold your nose and pretend you're drowning. The B-52s made it seem cool to be writhing around on the cement floor like dying sea creatures, cool enough to not care you were too young and unconnected to get drunk.
And then came the comeback, which was more than a comeback because suddenly the B-52s were on MTV every five minutes and "Love Shack" was in the top 10. They still sounded exactly the same, but the country had finally caught up with them. I was in a band my senior year, a dance-rock combo, and we played "Love Shack" at a Halloween party. One of the singers did her hair up in a beehive just like Cindy Wilson. I don't remember if we were any good or not, but a few minutes later the cops came and shut us down for violating a noise ordinance.
Now they're a nostalgia act. Kids today probably think they're like the Beach Boys or something. But I bet they still play "Rock Lobster" at dorm dances, and I bet it still sounds cool.
—Jesse Fox Mayshark

In 1982, "Planet Claire" made absolutely no sense to me. There was no epiphany, no mind-bending musical awakening. In fact, the only awakening was purely physical, because nearly every night at around 2 a.m., the guy at the end of my dorm floor would crank up his four-foot tall speakers with the ethereal sounds of The B-52's first album. Maybe he thought he'd impress the girls on the other end of the quad. Regardless, my only inspiration was to fantasize about repeatedly jamming a screw driver into the paper cones of his sub-woofers in a mouth-foaming rage.
The epiphany didn't actually occur until years later, when 1989's Cosmic Thing became the band's biggest commercial success. I had been living in Los Angeles for about a year, having split Knoxville for fame and fortune on the coast. But things weren't going as planned—no fame, no fortune—and I felt like my soul was being siphoned off a little more each day. The people there all seemed to be auditioning 24 hours a day for unseen directors, living in a kind of perpetual music video of the mind. Nobody seemed to understand my points of reference, or I theirs. I ended up doing everything by myself—and I generally can't stand myself to begin with. So, in a word, I was going nuts.
Then one night I saw "Love Shack" on MTV—where the band sets sail in a Chrysler "as big as a whale" on the Atlanta Highway for a party in the middle of nowhere filled with people who want to get down. And I thought: This is what I miss. The song reminded me of all the things I took for granted in Knoxville—where the eccentrics are genuine, where you make your own fun and are the better for it, and where people like to dance for the sake of dancing (not just being noticed). It reminded me of my friends.
I soon bought the Cosmic Thing album and found it to be a valentine to life in small Southern cities, from "Deadbeat Club" to "Dry County." I listened to it obsessively for another year until I couldn't take the homesickness any longer, and split L.A. for no fame and no fortune in Knoxville—which was much more fulfilling. Now I've got every B-52 album and am convinced that "Planet Claire" is one of the most important singles of the last 30 years.
—Coury Turczyn

A chat with The B-52s' Cindy Wilson

by Coury Turczyn

The year was 1982. The place was the Knoxville World's Fair Park. It was an environment teeming with jiggling deely boppers, oozing Petros, and many sunburnt tourists ogling that shiny new icon of the sort-of solar power age, the Sunsphere. Stepping into this international bazaar of strange behavior were four figures attired in futuristic, post-Star Trek gear and heavy eyeliner. What did these ambassadors of pop culture camp think of their unwittingly campy surroundings?

"I was a little disappointed," admits Cindy Wilson of The B-52s, who were in town for a show. "But it wasn't the city's fault."

No, and it wasn't the fault of the assembled nations of the world, either. Who could have known that out of all the bold visions of the future on display at the World's Fair, The B-52s themselves would be the most accurate depiction of life at the turn of the century? At a time when most rock bands were committed to reviling popular culture, The B-52s glorified it. With their thrift shop clothes, '50s sci-fi movie obsessions, and acid-surf sound, they weren't just from another planet, they were from another time—say, the mid- to late-'90s. Today, our nation's youth attires itself in thrift store clothes, listens to surf music, and generally swallows most any bits of retro pop culture being regurgitated at the moment. In other words, The B-52s unknowingly set the template for life today.

So it's no wonder that The B-52s have reappeared on the edge of a new millennium, hitting the road after a nearly 10-year respite to back a new "best of" album: Time Capsule: Songs For A Future Generation. They're celebrating two decades of making vibrant, singular rock 'n' roll—and playfully staking their claim on a pop culture legacy.

"It's been a long road," says singer and percussionist Wilson from a tour bus parked outside of Buffalo, New York. "We started 22 years ago. We didn't realize, after the first record, how far it was going to go. So it's really amazing that here we are going back out again—and we're getting a healthy audience."

That first self-titled album—loaded with such bizarre dance tunes as "Planet Claire" and "Rock Lobster"—seemed to come from an entirely different dimension where '60s style fused with B-movie dramatics to create its own weird party. But listeners were ready for it; the album sold around 500,000 copies and the odd little Athens, Ga., band—singer Fred Schneider, guitarist Ricky Wilson, drummer Keith Strickland, and keyboardist Kate Pierson—became famous for its on-stage antics and its singers' beehive hairdos. Although distinctly different from their peers, they helped spark a mini-boom of interest in Southern bands (R.E.M., for instance) and created timeless dance music. Now, after seven albums, a tragedy (Ricky Wilson's death from AIDS in 1985), a split (Cindy amicably left the band in 1990), and a hiatus (their last album was 1992's Good Stuff), the band felt the time was right to reunite.

"We'd been jamming for a few years, doing some music together—we started playing corporate parties," says Wilson. "So we just decided to put a collection of our favorites together and some of the new songs we've been jamming on, and do two months on the road—and that's what we're doing. I had to build up my vocals again, you forget it does take a lot of work. So we had to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse."

For the past year and a half, Wilson had been concentrating on a much different creative endeavor—raising her baby daughter, India ("She's a charmer, out to meet people and have fun"). Did she miss performing after eight years of non-B-52 life?

"Oh yeah—it's a creative thing, and also it just feels like a freeing thing, to be outrageous," she says. "There's no other feeling like that. It's a part of my personality and I missed doing it, so it's been great to have it back."

Unlike most "reunion" tours by dino-rock has-beens, that energy should be back in spades since The B-52s never really stopped being cool. The group performs because the members clearly enjoy it, not because they want to cash in on old hits.

"It's 1998, it's a different vibe and our sound is changing," says Wilson. "We're trying to put a new sound in, to extend the middle parts of songs and make a psychedelic edge to them. It's been a lot of fun to let it do its own thing, to make it a little bit different, to get a fresh kind of feeling to it."

So, although The B-52s probably raised a few eyebrows at the World's Fair Site in 1982, this Friday they'll be back in the same place to mostly raise a little fun—and dance their singular mess around.