Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture

by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Overview

In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics—a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities.

In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469664057
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/01/2021
Series:	A Ferris and Ferris Book
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	468,971
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. Her previous books include A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America and Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890@–1940.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Not only is Cool Town the most detailed account we'll get of the music of Athens, Georgia, the out-of-the-way college town that gave us the B-52's and R.E.M. It's also a thorough, deeply felt history of a seminal local bohemia that even as it matured changed the surrounding culture more than that culture changed it.—Robert Christgau

In Cool Town, Grace Hale captures the heyday of the Athens scene as she lived it: vibrant, surprising, full of possibility. The relationships formed, the songs and stories spun, the art created, the uncertainty embraced—all that continues to inspire four decades later. Hale doesn't merely recall what happened. She explains it as well as one can. This remembrance of things not passed resonates all these years later and results in an essential read."—Bertis Downs, adviser, R.E.M.

'It was like New York City, only safer and cheaper.' This is the axiom American bohemia runs on—in few places more brilliantly than Athens, Georgia, in the eighties. From the B-52's reconfiguring drag as dance-punk to R.E.M. 'translating postmodern theory into sonic form,' to both bands' bittersweet commercial apexes, Hale's clear-eyed, heart-full testament depicts an era so radiant it felt like it could live a million years.—Michaelangelo Matos, author of Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year

A delightful dive into the rich history of the Athens, Georgia, music and arts scene that has nurtured and inspired so many. Grace Hale experienced the scene firsthand, and her recollections are warm, but she doesn't shy away from difficult subjects. I was honored by her inclusion of Pylon as a central part of the story."—Vanessa Briscoe Hay, vocalist, Pylon and Pylon Reenactment Society

An absolutely brilliant account of an essential American scene—one that helped define what was hip and cool in the 1980s. Hale's story of Athens and why it matters is smart, probing, revealing, moving, fun, propulsive, and engaging.—Bryant Simon, author of The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives

Editorial Reviews

Delivers more than a love song to the music. Cool Town also serves up a textured portrait of a generation caught between baby and tech booms, wriggling under the thumb of the mainstream—in the pre-internet days when 'mainstream' was a discernible thing—and rummaging through thrift-store bins both literal and figurative in an effort to create something new.—New York Times Book Review

Hale's rich, personal narrative draws readers in. . . . This colorfully rendered reverie will delight indie music fans.—Publishers Weekly

Both a historian and a participant in the music scene, Hale crafts a lively account of 1980s Athens: the artists, their stories, and the haunts they frequented, such as the Grit and the 40 Watt Club.—Library Journal

A carefully constructed history of how Athens, Georgia became a cultural hot spot. . . . A welcome history of an overlooked milieu, one that provides ample inspiration for art makers today.—Kirkus Reviews

Captivating. . . . A deeply researched, highly engaging history of the Athens music scene.—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

While the Athens buzz may have been manufactured, Athens is a very real place, and Hale writes with real passion about her formative years there.—The Current's Rock and Roll Book Club, Minnesota Public Radio

Reconstructs the musical hotbed that birthed R.
E.M., The B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel.—The AV Club

Hale brings to this project the keen insights of. A talented historian and deep personal knowledge. . . . [Cool Town] is a rewarding read, with crackling prose that well matches such a captivating topic." —Journal of Southern History

[The Athens Effect] propagated a thrift-store, sexually fluid, avant-pop aesthetic that seemed more accessible than the extremes of punk or of successors such as goth. The fun of Cool Town is to hear where those elements came from, illuminated by Hale's theories about why, and, most poignantly, what it means today.—Bookforum

A detailed work of art. . . . It's hard to imagine an author better qualified or a book more up to the task. Cool Town has done its job admirably.—level:deepsouth

From the Publisher

12/23/2019

This entertaining history takes a nostalgic look at the 1970s and ’80s indie music mecca of Athens, Ga. A onetime devotee of the scene—having helped run a local music venue and café, and played in a band—Hale (A Nation of Outsiders) paints a generous portrait of how artistic kids turned a semiremote college town into “the first important small-town American music scene.” Cheap rents; a hip, avant-garde arts scene; and a cool historic downtown made for a fertile cultural petri dish. Athens birthed such bands as the new wave B-52s, post-punkers Pylon, and college rock band R.E.M. Hale then puts on her critic’s hat (“My historian self has interviewed everyone who will talk to me”) and zooms out to analyze how regional bohemias such as Athens feed into a society’s creative gestalt. The writing at times can get knotted with hipster detail, but Hale’s rich, personal narrative draws readers in (“I knew every cracked sidewalk and narrow back alley and flaking brick façade”). This colorfully rendered reverie will delight indie music fans. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

02/01/2020

Readers may be surprised to learn that the "first postmodern rock band," according to Hale (American studies & history, Univ. of Virginia; A Nation of Outsiders), emerged not in the so-called musical mecca of New York City but in Athens, GA. Releasing their self-titled debut album in 1978, the B-52s caused a stir with their danceable art pop and campy, drag-inspired performances, drawing a national spotlight onto the bohemian art scene that flourished in their hometown. What united artists such as the B-52s, R.E.M., and Pylon was less a cohesive sound than a shared ethos. While punk rockers believed that anyone could start a band, these artists went a step further—anyone could start a band aanywhere. With this egalitarian mentality, the author convincingly argues, they ushered in the alternative rock era of the Nineties. Both a historian and a participant in the music scene, Hale crafts a lively account of 1980s Athens: the artists, their stories, and the haunts they frequented, such as the Grit and the 40 Watt Club. VERDICT This exhaustive history will please fans of obscure indie movements, though readers with a more general interest in the groups should try Robert Dean Lurie's Begin the Begin.—Amanda Westfall, Emmet O'Neal P.L., Mountain Brook, AL

Library Journal

2019-12-08
A carefully constructed history of how Athens, Georgia, became a cultural hot spot.

Everyone's heard of R.E.M. These days, fewer are familiar with the B-52's, and almost no one outside the musical cognoscenti knows the Flat Duo Jets and Pylon. All of these bands, writes Hale (American Studies and History/Univ. of Virginia; A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love With Rebellion in Postwar America, 2011, etc.), were ingredients in the cultural stew in which she grew up. The author combines her insider's perspective with her academic skills, creating a book that is scholarly without being arid, popular without being condescending—a pleasing mix, as were the sounds produced by Athens bands from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. During that period, Hale writes, "the Athens scene produced amazingly good music…but the scene also transformed the punk idea that anyone could start a band into the even more radical idea that people in unlikely places could make a new culture and imagine new ways of thinking about the meaning of the good life and the ties that bind humans to each other." It wasn't just bands: The hipster/hippie/bohemian set neatly interacted (and often shared memberships) with the gay community, drawing like-minded people in from the surrounding countryside and outstripping larger cities such as Charleston and Atlanta in building a community in which writers, painters, musicians, poets, and scholars wandered between media and genres. Not much has changed, writes the author. In Athens today, "the currency remains DIY culture," with primacy placed on the homemade rather than the appropriated. Many of Hale's cases are happy ones, but some end tragically—e.g., Vic Chesnutt, for whom the Athens scene "worked pretty well…until it didn't," whereupon, ever on the verge of fame, he killed himself. He would doubtless be pleased to be included among the many "outcasts or weirdos" whom Hale respectfully recounts.

A welcome history of an overlooked milieu, one that provides ample inspiration for art makers today.

Kirkus Reviews