Ellington

It's September 1983, and I'm hanging around the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, regretting that I've shown up six months too late to get into grad school and waiting to catch a bus to wherever. With evening settling in and the campus growing quiet, I drift into town, wander around awhile, and stumble into a little music lounge with handbill-covered windows called The Secret Garden—a bare-bones joint, nowhere near as sumptuous as its name, but one I'll still remember even 20 years later as the place where I first paid attention to the music of R.E.M.

Messrs. Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe aren't on hand this night, though mere months before, when R.E.M.'s total recorded output consisted of one shimmering single and an uneven five-song EP, they might well have been. Some local band is on stage instead, performing a jangly number by "our friends from Athens" called "Gardening at Night." Ah, a title tune, a soundtrack of sorts. Is it this wistful theme song or the winsome singer and her post-punk shimmy (a diffident dance done with downcast eyes) that's so heart-achingly lovely to a brooding boy of 25 like me? Maybe it's just that these folks—the band and its audience of six or eight pals—have got themselves a sweet little scene going, and I'm the only one in the room who's not part of it.

The last bus out of town leaves in an hour. Meanwhile, R.E.M.'s new album plays over the club's sound system between sets. The music is moody, melancholic folk-pop—nothing like the refried boogie I was force-fed in childhood. The comparison doesn't come to mind simply because the band is from Georgia; there's something unmistakably Southern in Michael Stipe's locutions and enunciations, even if I can't make out the actual words—which, don't get me wrong, I feel no compulsion to decipher. The mumbly vocals are just another instrument in the mix, content like the others with being half-buried. (This won't always be so: the second album and especially the gorgeous third one—"Reconstruction of the Fables," a record described by Stipe at the time as sounding like two oranges being nailed together—will be marked or marred, depending on your taste, by literariness, and subsequent releases will wield an increasingly explicit political sensibility, for better or worse.)

"Murmur," with its spiffed-up version of "Radio Free Europe" (the indelible debut 45), is already selling well enough and racking up enough critical praise to have catapulted R.E.M. into such venerable halls as the Beacon Theater in New York—that same city being the destination of my midnight bus out of Greensboro, as it develops, and the city in which I will take a job bartending at a 10th Avenue dive and mire myself in squabbles with surly regulars who don't love having "So. Central Rain" on the jukebox like I do and who keep insisting, "They sound exactly like the goddam Byrds."

Fast forward to the fall of 1986 and "Life's Rich Pageant," the album that introduced booming drums and intelligible vocals to the previously murky R.E.M. sound (and, not surprisingly, brought the band its first taste of real commercial success). They're playing Jackson tonight, and outside the auditorium downtown lurks Terry Butler, proprietor of W.C. Don's, handing out flyers and inviting showgoers to what promises to be a special evening at the club he's operated since that same fateful (for me) autumn of '83. Sure enough, all four members of R.E.M. turn up at Don's later, the three instrumentalists jamming for hours onstage and shy Stipe engaged in earnest conversation at a table with Butler. I'm too big a fan by now to get within actual greeting distance of the band, so I keep a hip distance apart, confining myself to the Recovery Room across town and to plying friends later for details on the parking-lot skirmish they claim broke out when Stipe, in a fit of performance-art pique, brandished a pair of chopsticks and threw brown rice at some thick-necks who proceeded to whip up on his bandmates as he pranced away.

"I was never a Lynyrd Skynyrd or Allman Brothers fan," Butler says today, and he seems to mean that while there's no denying those guys their place in somebody's pantheon, "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Rambling Man" just don't and never did move all us homeboys the same way. Some of us, that is, still get prickly recalling how little else seemed to be offered once upon a time.

As influential as Big Star may have become, they didn't make much of a wide-ranging impression in their day, in the South or elsewhere, no matter that they came from Memphis. It took Let's Active, the dB's, and other Alex Chilton acolytes to add noticeable new wrinkles to the face of Southern rock—not that any of them were all that successful either in the course of doing so—along with help from R.E.M. cohorts like Pylon, with its plus-size proto-riot-grrl singer, and Love Tractor, which in its first days didn't have a singer at all. (And I can't leave out the B-52's, a retro-cool combo with an openly gay vocalist and guitar player; still, I always associated them more with the New York scene than with the Athens from whence they sprang. I am not filled with nostalgia to hear they're playing the casino circuit now.)

Bands like these may just have been catching the do-it-yourself wave that was rolling into college towns all over the country then, but in Reagan-era Alabama (which spawned Will and the Bushmen) and Mississippi (birthplace of the Windbreakers) they were the alt-rock crest, the harbingers of a broader notion of what it means to be both Southern and born to rock.

By the way: Folks who fondly recall W.C. Don's as the unlikely hub of the 1980s Jackson music scene it became (they Couldn't even Decide On a Name when it first opened, remember, and the place was never much more than a tinderstick hut) will be heartened to know that Terry Butler is making serious headway toward opening W.C. Don's II, next door to Martin's, across the parking lot from Hal & Mal's.