‘‘Think about,” Fred Schneider tells Uncut, “one week I’m washing dishes to make ends meet as a result of I’d stop my job to do the band, after which the subsequent week we’re flying to Nassau to report…”
On the Bahamas’ luxurious Compass Level Studios over three weeks in early 1979, The B-52s laid down their self-titled debut album. These 5 skint musicians have been a daring signing for Island and Warners, even amid the joy of post-punk: a deeply unusual and subtly transgressive group, they shared as a lot DNA with the avant-garde, from Solar Ra to Yoko Ono to Captain Beefheart, as with surf music, woman group pop, disco and punk.
Fashioned in Athens, Georgia, in 1976, The B-52s had been nourished by town’s distinctive atmosphere. This was a farm city of eccentrics, led by the likes of Jeremy Ayers (later of Limbo District) and report store proprietor William Orten Carlton, a spot that welcomed outsider artwork and queerness.
From the beginning, The B-52s have been uncommon. They have been a collective with no chief, a five-piece with three singers and no bassist (vocalist Kate Pierson dealt with keyboard bass together with organ) that sculpted songs through group improvisations, with a postmodern eye on the previous. This was clearest of their look – all atomic bouffant wigs, shiny materials and garish make-up, a stunning forerunner to the seedy Lynchian Technicolor of Wild At Coronary heart or Blue Velvet – but additionally of their music, which blended surf, punk and underground experimentation with the novelty weirdness and outer-space obsessions of the Nineteen Fifties.
They have been kitsch, definitely, however surreal and absurdist somewhat than camp or ironic; an American response to Roxy Music’s high-art trash aesthetic. But these have been the times when bands as weird as The B-52s may discover a residence on main labels, and Island and Warners’ guess paid off.
To say that their catalogue – now being reissued on this 9LP or 8CD field, minus 2008’s Funplex – begins robust could be an understatement: The B-52’s is a shocking debut, a airtight manifesto that appeared out of the ether. Its first facet particularly is near-perfection: from the ragged space-garage of “Planet Claire”, with its “Peter Gunn” riff, and the breakneck, proto-Strokes “52 Ladies”, to the swinging chaos of “Dance This Mess Round”.
Facet One’s nearer, “Rock Lobster”, is the album’s crowning glory. Seven minutes of demented storage constructed round a detuned surf riff, with absurdist lyrics a few seaside get together, it evolves right into a savage outro showcasing guitarist Ricky Wilson’s genius. Involving detuned, lacking and unison strings, his novel method – half Ventures, half Magic Band’s Zoot Horn Rollo, half Sonic Youth earlier than Sonic Youth – allowed him to play slashing components that also sound like little else, and hit tougher than most punk or no wave. With Schneider dealing with declamatory spoken phrase, The B-52’s, particularly “Rock Lobster”, exhibits off Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson’s Ono-esque vocal experimentation, and famously impressed John Lennon to name Ono from Bermuda to inform her that her “time had come”. Double Fantasy was the outcome.
Producer Chris Blackwell sensibly saved the preparations minimal and the sound dry on The B-52’s, mimicking the band’s exhibits, which provides the report a superbly crisp really feel. Rhett Davies was equally strict on the follow-up, 1980’s Wild Planet. Regardless of songs about poodles known as Quiche and demonic automobiles, there’s loads of edge: “Get together Out Of Bounds” is interspersed with eerie discord, the raunchy “Soiled Again Street” doesn’t cover very onerous behind its driving metaphor, and single “Non-public Idaho” is consumed with paranoia, Schneider warning over considered one of Wilson’s best riffs: “Don’t let the chlorine in your eyes/Blind you to the terrible shock/That waits for you on the backside of the bottomless blue, blue, blue pool…”
The B-52’s and Wild Planet used up their pre-fame materials, and now the group wanted contemporary songs. To purchase a while, in July 1981 they launched Get together Combine!, a pioneering but inessential remix album that squashed three songs from each LPs into side-long medleys. Within the meantime, they have been recording with David Byrne, however varied difficulties meant the outcomes have been trimmed to a mini-album, 1982’s Mesopotamia. Their makes an attempt to fill out their sound with horns, synths and the like don’t at all times succeed, however the Levantine disco title monitor stays a high-quality instance of their interlocking vocal components, overflowing hooks taking the place of conventional choruses.
The group modified their course of for 1983’s Whammy!, with Ricky Wilson and drummer Keith Strickland dealing with all of the music on drum machines, synths and guitars. Jamaican engineer Steven Stanley, one of many sonic wranglers on Get together Combine!, produced the delightfully out-there outcomes. Whereas they embraced electronics, this wasn’t your standard mid-’80s sound: the frantic likes of “Whammy Kiss” and “Butterbean” are extra akin to Suicide protecting Beefheart at Black Ark.
“Track For A Future Era” was a weird, good single, every of the group delivering a spoken verse about themselves, then coming collectively to trill “let’s meet and have a child now”. Whammy! initially included a canopy of Ono’s “Don’t Fear…”, sadly changed with the inferior “Moon 83” on subsequent pressings, together with this one.
Issues started to go fallacious for The B-52s about now. Ricky Wilson turned ailing with AIDS, holding it a secret from all however Strickland, whereas relationships within the band fractured. When Wilson handed away in 1985, Bouncing Off The Satellites was virtually completed and was launched the next yr with no lively group and little promotion. Maybe unsurprisingly, solely the joyous, rockabilly-powered “Wig”, reworked from a decade-old jam, captures their standard zest.
No-one may exchange Wilson, so the brand new songs the group wrote after they reunited later within the decade have been much less manic, much less experimental, however extra soulful and in tune with the instances. Because of this, 1989’s Cosmic Factor turned an enormous hit, one of many best-selling albums within the US that yr. It was a heat, welcoming report: the group regarded again fondly on their Athens days on “Deadbeat Membership”, and indulged their interstellar fixation on “Topaz” and the title monitor, even whereas “Channel Z” took photographs at political “disinformation”. Granted, the snare sounds have been gargantuan, however that was onerous to keep away from in 1989.
Equally inescapable was “Love Shack”: if it suffers considerably from overfamiliarity nowadays, it’s nonetheless a playful piece of Southern groove, with Schneider, Wilson and Pierson’s vocals freeform and important.
1992’s Good Stuff has its moments – “Is That You Mo-Dean?” was one other house basic – however suffered from the absence of Cindy Wilson, overlong tracks and more and more slick manufacturing from Don Was and Nile Rodgers. The B-52s would later carry out the title tune for 1994’s The Flintstones – a peak in visibility, a dip in high quality – tour extensively and, on this decade, take pleasure in residencies in Las Vegas.
Whereas there’s one thing very B-52s about Nevada’s atomic testing websites, casinos and cheesy Strip, Vegas remains to be an surprising vacation spot for a gaggle so conceived within the underground; but it’s maybe no weirder than Bryan Ferry, a fellow explorer of the kitsch and the curious, staking out his patch on Clean Radio.
The B-52s have been calling themselves “the world’s biggest get together band” for years now. They’re not solely fallacious, in fact, however the Athens troupe are a lot greater than that. For one, the way in which they’ve lived their lives and offered themselves has lengthy been an instance to marginalised outsiders, whether or not queer or in any other case. And the music collected right here – particularly their effervescent debut – has impressed acolytes from Beat Taking place to Boy George, Sleater-Kinney to Stephen Malkmus, to not point out Lennon and Ono. As this field charts, they’re a type of uncommon teams who can genuinely declare to have launched the counterculture gloriously into the mainstream.
