the ’Zine

A Salute to Athens, GA

January 10, 2008 by Brett Milano

40 Watt Club It's been said that a music town is only as good as the bands playing there this weekend. In which case, Athens GA comes out smelling like a rose. Headlining all three nights this coming weekend at the 40 Watt — a club that looms large in the history of R.E.M. and other great Georgia bands — are the Drive-By Truckers, who are about to release "Brighter Than Creation's Dark," an early pick for one of the best rock albums of 2008. They'll be playing the entire album live each night — no small feat, since it's a 79-minute CD with 19 songs on it. If they pull it off, there will be few better shows this weekend in clubland anywhere.

Makes sense that a maverick band like the Truckers would be based in Athens, which was always proud to be outside the mainstream. We all heard the legends about Athens in the late 70s and 80s: How the B-52's would play college parties, come onstage in full thrift-store regalia and somehow sneak those songs past the straight crowd. How R.E.M. would rehearse in an abandoned church, tap a keg in somebody's backyard, and play early versions of "Radio Free Europe" for drunk art students.

Automatic for the People? Somebody should use that as an album title.

The general picture we have on Athens — which may not be far from the truth — is that it's a town that created its rock scene as an antidote to the town's prevailing college-football culture, and fostered a lot of overlap between the weird artists and the rock'n'rollers. There was even a film in the 80s that celebrated the town's indie scene: "Athens Inside/Out," which you can still find on DVD.

That was certainly true of Pylon, one of the first great Athens bands, which was formed by four art students who allegedly had no idea how to play their instruments. They apparently got lucky, because they turned into a funky, offbeat dance band whose lyrics were as surreal as Gang of Four's were political, but who operated in the same musical world. Slinky bass grooves, a haunted-sounding female singer, and pop hooks that came out of nowhere — a recipe for cult herodom if we ever heard it. Pylon broke up in the mid-80s; but they've come back for the occasional reunion; the latest of which is still going on.

And you have to love a city that's produced artists as diverse as Vic Chesnutt — the wheelchair-bound singer/songwriter whose songs are self-laceratingly beautiful — and Widespread Panic, now at the front of the jam-band circuit (Far apart as those two acts may seem, they're good friends and have made a couple albums together). And I'm leaving out a bunch of worthy bands from the 80s/90s college-rock era, who made a couple good albums and disappeared, like the jangly Dreams So Real and the grisly Bar-B-Q Killers.

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