The B-52s and Me

hoppinjohns.net/

For John's
books and
stone-
ground grits
sales go to

HoppinJohns.com
Navigation
Home » Other writing » The B-52s and Me
Posted on February 16, 2008 in Other writing

The B-52s and Me

In which I reminisce about our 30+ year friendship.

In 1989, Charleston, South Carolina, where I was living at the time, was hit by Hurricane
Hugo, a harbinger of worse storms to come, but, at the time, one of the worst natural
disasters the country had ever seen. I had made my living for years as a painter and
photographer, but had changed careers abruptly when I landed the job in Paris as the food
editor of a magazine. It was perhaps a good thing that I was making my living in another
1/32
medium when the storm hit, because I lost nearly all of my negatives and slides, most of
my drawings, and several of my journals as well. The photos I do have have for the most
part been reproduced here from slides taken of prints. Most of my prints were one-of-a-
kind.I mention this because normally I write these memoirs with hundreds of my own
photos at my disposal to jar my memory. Hugo had taken most of my images and many of
my notes as well. Fortunately, when I opened my culinary bookstore in the late 80s, I had
sent most of my negatives of photos of the B-52s to them for their archives. I had taken
some of the first photos of the band. Even when I was living in Athens in the late 70s when
the band was first performing, I would see my photos on t-shirts and posters here and
there. I always wondered how someone had gotten them. But I never cared. We were all so
excited about some music that we could dance to while laughing – without disco banality –
that we were always thrilled with theirs – and anyone’s, for that matter – success.

First Heard

I was visiting Bill Foy in Atlanta in 1976, and he had a tape that Fred Schneider had given
him of some songs that he, Keith Strickland, Kate Pierson, and Cindy and Ricky Wilson had
just recorded. I knew Keith and Ricky and Fred pretty well at that point. I had first met Keith
in Athens at a Bruce Hampton concert at Memorial Hall on Halloween in 1970, my senior
year at the University of Georgia. He was an impossibly pretty boy, and he was wearing a
purplish wig that stuck out from his head like the hair on those little troll dolls from the 60s,
thus predating Darryl Hannah’s look in Blade Runner by 12 years. He and Maureen
McLaughlin and I pretty much took over the dance floor that night. Back in Athens for
graduate school, in 1974 I had lived in a big half-timbered Tudor style mansion with David
Thompson (in the photo, below) and John Hoard, Maureen (who later managed the band
for awhile), Bob Tallini, and Keith Spikes (who was the first person I ever heard use the
term “B-52” to mean a big hairdo). We called the house “The Crystal Palace.” I cooked
supper instead of paying rent. We had a huge vegetable garden out back. Keith (Strickland)
found this old photobooth shot of him and Kelly Bugden and me, circa ’74.
The dance parties that summer were amazing. At one, in Ellen Bargeron and “Dazzling
Deb’s” apartment, the wooden floor bounced up and down at least a foot in each direction
as we danced to Bowie’s “Suffragette City.” At another, everyone was asked to bring blue
food, which George Carlin had wondered why there was none of on Saturday Night Live.
2/32
At Christmas that year, I moved to Charleston, but moved back to Georgia in 1976 to
complete my Masters. Fred was one of the first
people I saw. He gave me a copy of his book of
poems, “Bleb,” which included the inspiration for
several of the band’s songs.

1977-1978

In February 1977 the Bs first performed in front of

an audience at Julia Stimpson and Gray Lippett’s
apartment across the street from the Dunkin’
Donuts on the corner of Prince and Milledge
Avenues in Athens. Zeke Addison, who was
working on his MFA in painting, loaned the band
his giant Voice of the Theater speakers. Kelly hung
a Barbie doll from a chandelier. I had had a t-shirt
made at the County Fair, with an awful airbrush
painting of a woman with a bouffant hairdo with
“B-52” sprawled across the back. I wore it over a
cowhide print shirt tucked into white drawstring
pants I had bought in the Caribbean somewhere;
they were tucked into boots. An atrocious sight.
Everyone was wearing similar makeshift thrift
store fashion. Sally Stafford had wildly patterned
curtains from the 50s wrapped around her as a
skirt. That’s me and Sally and Julia in this photo by
Kelly dancing that night at the band’s first gig.In
many ways, we were typical twenty-something pot-
smoking, beer-drinking college students, though
we were mostly involved in the arts: I was
majoring in film; Kelly, Julia, Tommy Adams, John
Beal, Tekla Torell, Greg Whittington, Keith Bennett,
and Betty Alice Fowler were art majors;
Dana Downs was studying philosophy.
In other ways, we were special:
curious, well-read, and knowledgeable
about painting, film, and contemporary
music. We listened to Terry Riley, Yma
Sumac, Steve Reich, Captain
Beefheart, and Perez Prado, as well as
Brian Eno, the Ramones, and Patti
Smith. We loved to dance. John Beal
went on to do so professionally,
performing with both Twyla Tharp and John Kelly. We still loved Booker T and Aretha, but
were bored with disco and mainstream film. We watched Pasolini, Truffaut, and, especially
Fellini, and we began making our own individual ways in the arts. Dana went on to perform
with bands both here and abroad, and regularly exhibits her paintings as well. (Here she is
3/32
on assignment for Vanity Fair, in Randy Travis’s living room!) Nanette Consovoy became a
successful painter in Berlin. Angel
Dean has recorded several albums and
is now showing her visual art as well.
Mike Green studied music at IRCAM in
Paris. Betty Alice has curated
fascinating museum exhibitions. The
decorative work of Julia and her
husband Bob Christian is much-
sought-after. Kelly has taken the
photos for some gorgeous books,
including one of mine, and has gone
on to do decorative work with his
partner Van Wifvat. Michael
Lachowski, Curtis Crowe, Vanessa
Briscoe, and Randy Bewley formed the
band Pylon. (Love Tractor and
R.E.M. formed after I left town.) Kent
Brown, Greg, Kelly, John, Adele Maddry,
Tekla, Tommy, Bob and Julia, Angel,
and Ken Bullock all moved to New
York to pursue their dreams. We all
kept in touch with homemade
postcards, such as the following red
image of Betty Alice by Nicky
Giannaris and the postcard from Kent,
showing him and Bobby Adams (both
no longer with us), with the message,
“Some people just don’t know the third
world. And some people have to shout
it out. It’s red.”

The painters in our crowd were

incredibly good, at least partially due to
the fact that the Art Department at
UGA has long been an excellent one,
with teachers who are successful practicing artists, such as Jim Herbert and Andy
Nasisse. Two young, exceptionally talented painting students – mere teenagers at the time
– were Margaret Katz and Debbie McMahon, whose neo-expressionist work presaged the
genre in Germany. (The portrait of me on the right here was painted by Margaret when she
was 19. She didn’t have a photograph to work from and she hadn’t seen me in several
months at the time.) In this photo I took of them for their first exhibit, I purposely made
them appear androgynous.
We were all influenced by Herbert’s films of dreamlike re-photographed images of nudes in
abstract emotional situations and by his bold, oversized canvases covered with huge
smears of paint. The black and white image below is a postcard from Herbert, a still from
4/32
his lovely film, “Silk.”

Several of us were making our way as serious

photographers, exploring the then-popular theme of
visual bleakness as urban blight tweaked
environmental awareness. This 1974 shot of an
abandoned supper club in a shopping center in
Athens is typical of my work and the work of many
other photographers at the time.
Ironically, sensitive photographic portraiture also
emerged, I think, simply because we found each other
so interesting. Here’s a photo I took of a hirsute Kelly,
as well as a postcard from Dana picturing Vic Varney,
Teresa Randolph, and Tekla (with Dana’s blurred
reflection in the mirror).
Sometimes I would cut people’s heads off while
composing my picture, purposely reducing the image
to a more painterly figure-ground study.

Julia painted zaftig, often limbless women

in blocks of color fields that resembled
Milton Avery’s work. Tommy’s huge
canvases stylized our poolside lives,
colorful cartoons of Helmut Newton’s
models in pink and green. My major
professor was Barbara McKenzie, the
skillful writer, photographer and potter;
Elaine de Kooning (photo, below) headed
up my reading committee, along with the painter
Bill Marriott.

In the photo below, Marriott and I are

contemplating my one-man show in the Art
Department’s gallery.
We all painted and photographed each other
relentlessly, knowing that we were documenting a
very special time in American art. Kelly began
taking photographs at the same time he explored
abstraction in his paintings (below).

We lived simply, Kate more dramatically so than

anyone else. She rented a sharecropper’s cabin 6
miles out of town.
(That’s her driveway in the photo.) She had
electricity, but only a wood-burning stove. Her
water came in rain barrels placed under her eaves and from a well several hundred feet
from the house. She had five female goats that she hand-milked. She would ride her bicycle
5/32
into town, often bringing me a quart of fresh goats’ milk. Later in the day we would sip big
cups of cafe au lait de chevre, to this
day my favored version of the drink.
Here’s a photo of Kenny, who was a
teenager at the time, at my table
during the winter of 78. Note the
coffee cup.But we also lived wildly,
seldom conforming to anyone else’s
sense of fashion or decorum. We didn’t
need Halloween as an excuse to dress
up – or down. Skinny dipping was de
rigueur and we’d shed our clothes at
the mere hint of a summer rainstorm. “The Deadbeat
Club” is for real.
At this party at Teresa’s, B.A., Tekla (in nurse’s
uniform, with her back to the camera), and Tommy
are in the swing of it. Tommy was especially inventive
in his outfits, and would often perform on stage in a
woman’s bathing suit and high heels.

A few years later, when I was caring for my dying

mother, I took a break and went to Athens to visit
Tommy, who had moved back from New York and put
himself through detox. He had begun working for a
design firm owned by Paula, with whom, he confessed
to me, had had fallen madly in love. They married a
couple of years later and moved to Charleston right
after Hurricane Hugo, so I got to live in the same town
with them and Dana all over again! The photo above is
by Kelly. Here’s another shot of
Tommy at Bobby Adams’s Jet Age
Voodoo party in Atlanta, circa
1976.When I finished my Masters
in Film, I got a two-year
government grant to be the staff
artist at a local wildlife preserve.
Kate Pierson and I were among the
real nature lovers in the crowd, and
we forged our friendship watching
birds together. Sandy Creek Nature
Center, where I worked, would have
nature-themed poetry readings, and Fred’s “Purple! Purple! Purple!,” which describes the
audacious outburst of color the first week of April when escaped wisteria vines explode
throughout the South, was always read by popular demand. Here’s an oil pastel of mine (of
wisteria) from that time period.
The nature preserve was several miles outside of town at the confluence of two rivers, with
a beaver pond. The folks who attended our events were not usually college kids or rock-n-
6/32
rollers, but upstanding members of the
community, quite often older ladies,
bankers, and parents of small children
who didn’t own televisions (which I never
had, either). Tommy and I held a natural
cosmetics workshop and we had to turn
folks away.

We were ab-fab before the term was

coined. (Here’s Dana and John striking a
pose for me. Dana was particularly
distraught when Elvis died that summer. I found this
incredilbe sheared beaver coat with a red fox collar for
her at the Potter’s House, a thrift store that was our
favorite place to shop. The coat had big art deco buttons.
I remember that I paid $2 for it.)

7/32
8/32
9/32
10/32
In the evenings, folks would often gather in my kitchen; it became one of several homes
that served as the arts community salons. We’d mix daiquiris and sketch each other, plan
parties and trips to the nearby mountains or Cumberland Island. Mostly, we laughed, To
this day we all still still howl uncontrollably when we’re together. Here’s a group of us a
couple of years ago when we met in NYC to see Christo’s “Gates” in Central Park. I can’t
remember how many bottles of Champagne we had at lunch in the Met!
After the band’s first gig at Julia’s and
Gray’s, the buzz began. Jerry (now
Jeremy) Ayers had written the Silva
Thin column in Warhol’s Interview
before he returned to Athens, and he
had connections in New York. Their
debut there was not far behind. A
second party in Athens, at the old
Jewish country club, where Teresa
Randolph was living at the time, saw
the band drawing hundreds of curiosity
seekers as well as their ever-expanding group of friends and fans. Robert Waldrop had
written them some killer lyrics, and Jerry had penned “52 Girls.”

11/32
They had just started singing the song, and Kate wrote the lyrics down for me in one of the
dozens of ubiquitous sketchbooks that stayed on my kitchen table. Cindy sketched me in

12/32
crayon in the same book.

The night of the band’s second appearance, John Beal

(left), one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen,
decided that I was his boyfriend. Before long, I moved
in with him, knowing that he was living with Dana, but
not knowing that she was his girlfriend at the time.
I’ve since come to believe that that’s pretty standard
love life in college towns. Athens was becoming very
LGBT-friendly. We lost John to AIDS in the 90s, but
Dana and I have remained best of friends.Athens, like
most college towns, has always been liberal, in spite
of its founding fathers’ having purposely placed the
university way up in the hinterlands of Georgia in
1785, far away from the bawdy port of Savannah,
which was then the capital of the state. UGA has
apparently always been a party town, probably
because it is isolated and because of its strong fine
arts traditions. Until the 70s, those parties more
closely resembled frat parties a la Animal House. As
pot replaced beer, and rock replaced beach music,
and glam aesthetics entered the everyday vernacular,
Athens gatherings became more mind- and gender-
bending than keg parties had ever been. Teresa’s
house, Vic’s house, and my house became regular
party pads. We wore fake fur and drank cocktails. The
war was over. Jimmy Carter, a Georgian and a
Democrat, was in the White House. As far as we were
concerned, times were good.At one point, I think I was
the only person who had a job. I was certainly one of
few with a phone.
After the band played Max’s in New York, the press
began to bubble with interest. In the summer of ’78,
the band released their first single. I took it on a
vacation to St George’s Island in the Florida panhandle where I was visiting Julia and Bob’s
family, and Sally, who is Bob’s first cousin. They didn’t know I had the record, so one day
when we were all out on the deck overlooking the ocean, I went inside for a minute and put
on Rock Lobster, which everyone had only heard live. Immediately everyone started
dancing and I got this impromptu photo, one of my favorites of all time.

13/32
Earlier that year, Sally and I went to New York for the band’s CBGB’s gig, where we met
Robert Molnar, who became Fred’s boyfriend.They’ve been together 30 years now! Here’s a
photo that Dana took of Fred and
Robert in Brian Eno’s apartment, above
the Mudd Club, in 1979.Maureen was
traveling the country as a jury
consultant, but she based herself out
of my apartment on Boulevard. She
had one of the first answering
machines any of us had ever seen. To
retrieve messages from the road, she
would call the house and use a remote
that sounded a high note that caused
the machine to rewind the tape and
play back the messages. Kate, with her 4-octave range and perfect pitch, would call my
house, sing the note, and check to see if any of the messages on the machine were for the
band. Frank Zappa called one day and I nearly fainted, having long been a fan.I was always
cooking supper for the masses, but it was a bit odd because I’m such an omnivore and all
of the band members except Cindy were vegetarians. I’d make a skillet of cornbread and it
would be devoured in minutes, drowned in butter and sorghum. Ricky was especially fond
of it. Everyone knew that I used a teaspoon of bacon grease in the pan so that I’d get that
special crust, but they always ate it anyway. The band got a gig at the local Georgia
Theater, and Robert Waldrop and I spent all day hanging neon tubes on stage and
suspending them in the air. Kelly and I had been collecting the neon from abandoned
burger joints and ice cream shops for several years. Dana (on bass, from a photo that
night), Vic, Nicky Giannaris, and David Gamble had a band called the Tone-Tones, and they
opened for the B-52s. It was the social event of the year for anyone NOT a football fan or a
14/32
sorority girl, although they showed up as well. Dancing is, after all, tribal, and Athens is
definitely a dance town. When folks tell
me that they don’t dance, I know it’s all
about where they were brought up. In
Orangeburg, South Carolina, where I
was reared, EVERYONE danced. You
even “had to” take a couple of years of
ballroom dancing. I not only took the
lessons, but went on to teach it
throughout my high school years. If
you grow up in a dancing community,
you probably dance.
At the concert, there was a contest for
the world’s tallest hairdo. As I recall,
Phyllis Stapler won. Fred had helped her
rig a 10’ tall cage of chicken wire on top of
her head. It was braced somehow with
something like a base drum harness. The
frame was filled with the dozens of wigs
that we had all been buying at the Potter’s
House.It looked like Marge Simpson’s
hairdo, only taller, and streaked blonde,
brunette, and auburn.

In September, I went to New York to see the band at CBGBs again. I struck up a friendship
with Linda France of the Urban Verbs, who always
sent the best postcards that she had hand-
painted, such as this one, below.
In October, my sister Sue drove up from
Charleston with her then 12-year-old son Duke for
my 29th birthday. She brought with her several
bushels of oysters and we had a great party that
folks sauntered in and out of all night. I drew
illustrations for folks who didn’t know how to open
them, and, years later in Boston, I saw one of the
drawings framed on Betty Alice’s wall. My house
had a
big porch out front where there were always a dozen or so folks during parties. Any time
someone would see a cop car coming, they’d jump in the front window and we’d ditch the
lights and the music while they rode by. Kate and I both remember ending up dancing till
the wee hours, making music with alarm clocks, kitchen spoons, and anything else we
could get our hands on. We would take turns being deejay, alternating an old American
rhythm and blues number such as Jr Walker’s “Shotgun” with some British rock like the
Stones’ “Shattered.” Devo’s “Satisfaction” followed by the original. Aretha, then Patti Smith.
They were all on vinyl. Keith’s birthday is the same week as mine. Here we are reminiscing
about the Georgia Theatre concert at the party.For my birthday, Fred wrote me a poem,
which he published in 1987 in Fred Schneider and Other Unrelated Works, illustrated by
15/32
Kenny Scharf. The poem is called “Points” and
here’s a scan of the original:

16/32
By then, of course, the band was world-renowned, with homes in Manhattan. Ricky had died
of AIDS, and I was back in Charleston again, running my culinary bookstore. But I’m getting
ahead of myself.Earlier in the year, Keith’s parents, who ran the bus station, were getting a
little angsty about his career choice. He had, after all, never really worked anywhere but the
bus station. The band enlisted my help drumming up some free publicity for a gig they had
booked at the Last Resort, a local venue. Never mind that they had already wowed New
Yorkers several times at Max’s and CBGBs and at the Great Southeast Music Hall in
Atlanta. They definitely had a following. Nevertheless, they needed to win Athens over, at
least partially to appease Keith and Ricky’s parents. I called Pete McCommons, who was
the editor of the Athens Observer, and asked him if I could write something about the band.
I promised to provide photos as well. I knew Pete from when we both lived in cabins on El
Robledal, Vella Stephens’s vast estate out on Jefferson Highway. (That’s another story, for
another webpage.)

17/32
Sure, he said, but I need it this afternoon: so many words, typed, double-spaced, and the
photos, too. Kate was working as a paste-up artist at the other newspaper in town, Fred
was driving old folks in a community service van, and Cindy was nowhere to be found, but I
had some photos I had taken of them a few days before in the blood-letting room of the
mortuary where they rented studio space, and Keith said we could use the typewriter at the
bus station. No computers back then. Here’s the article, in which I coined the term “Thrift
Store Rock,” which was to be used in many articles to come. (As a film student, I never liked
the term “New Wave” that so many critics were using, and the band certainly wasn’t PUNK.)

/bs%20at%20last%20resort.jpg”>
In New York, I met George Dubose, who invited me to come over to his studio where he was
shooting what would become the band’s first album cover. The band was standing on a
sheet of thin mylar that Robert Waldrop and I were trying to keep lying flat, but Kate had on
stilettos that snagged it and Cindy had on some polyester stirrup pants that created static
electricity. She kept telling me songs to put on the stereo. I remember playing “Tramp” by
Otis Redding and Carla Thomas. (Photo copyright George Dubose.)

18/32
Here’s a postcard Dana sent me when I was living in the Caribbean. That’s George on the
right, with Richard Cramer, who was an assistant art director at Interview. Dana was living
in New York then.
1979-1986

The band was already recording its

first album when I moved to the Virgin
Islands. Someone airmailed me a copy
when it came out and I all but wore it
out that year. Rock Lobster was of
course the party song of the year, but
I’ve always loved Dance This Mess
Around. Hero Worship is pretty
amazing, too, with its golden lyrics by
Robert Waldrop. Idolize his idol eyes, indeed!

The sketch below is the view from my apartment in Charlotte Amalie, sent as a postcard to
my mother.
19/32
At Christmas that year I went to New
York for a few months, where I worked
as the personal chef to an eccentric
young millionairess. The band had
moved to New York as well, but they
had bought a big house on Lake
Mahopac, north of the city. Ironically, it,
too, had been a Jewish country club of
sorts. Or at least a very big house with
two kitchens. Ricky was one of the first
people I knew to have a computer, and he had a small sailboat there as well. Every time I
went to Mahopac, he was either on the computer or out on his boat. Kate and I would go
birdwatching and we could get the chickadees to land on our outstretched arms.
Here’s a shot of Kate that I took in Central Park one day when we were out birdwatching
together.

I moved back to South Carolina, and,

later in the year, Kate, Keith, and
Robert Waldrop came to visit me on
the plantation where I was caretaker.
There were marsh tackies (wild
horses), a herd of cattle, and lots of
snakes and alligators. The band had
been recording with Chris Blackwell in
the Bahamas, and they had a copy of
the master on a cassette tape. They
had also been in Japan and brought
back with them the first Walkman®. As Keith and Robert rowed me out in a jonboat on the
pond in front of the house, Robert said, “You’re gonna die!” From that opening smash of
glass and burst of guitar, I fell in love with their second album, Wild Planet. There’s much to
love, from the plaintive yearning of Give Me Back My Man (“I’ll give you fish! I’ll give you
candy!” has got to be one of the best lines of any rock song) to the manic dance numbers,
Stobe Light, Private Idaho, and Devil in My Car , their sophomore effort easily matched their
debut album.

20/32
A year later, Keith and Ricky and
Jerry (in photo) came to visit me on
Folly Beach. They wanted to go out to
a club, but I was such a recluse that I
knew nothing about night life in
Charleston. At the time in South
Carolina, to serve alcohol you either
had to make most of your money from
food, or you had to be a private club. I
called my sister Sue, who was a
member of the Garden and Gun Club, a
big dance club in an old J. C. Penney’s downtown, where gays and straights danced, played
pool, and enjoyed the drag shows. We went, but were bored (it was a weeknight and
Charleston had a total of about 4 restaurants then and very few hotels), so I called my
sister again, who called her friend Ron Crawford, who called another club called Les
Jardins, and asked them to let us in. No way, they told us. “It’s the B-52s,” he told them.
Mike Hartzog was running the front desk and referred the call to Richard Little, the owner.
The club, at the time South Carolina’s premier gay nightspot, usually played disco music for
its regulars, who came from every small town in the state. Richard told “Aunt Mikey” that he
would know the band when he saw them, to let them come in.
When we got there, he was standing on the steps that led upstairs to the dance hall with
his arms crossed on his chest. He let Ricky and Keith and Jerry get in, then stopped me:
“Who are you and what do you do for a living?” he asked. “You’re not in the band.”“No,” I
told him, “but it’s me they’re visiting. I’m an artist, but I don’t know if what I do could be
called making a living.”“Perfect!” he said, “My artist just moved to San Francisco and I have
a lot of work that needs to be done. Be in my office Tuesday at one o’clock.”
When I got upstairs, the loudspeakers were blaring B-
52s’ songs as the regulars looked around in awe.
“Make them stop,” Keith begged, so I went and asked
Richard to please change the music and just go
ahead and play the disco music. We danced for a
couple of hours and had some beer.
On Tuesday I went to see Richard and we have been
best of friends ever since. He’s now a bigwig doctor
here in DC at the National Cancer Institute,
specializing in AIDS-related malignancies. Here’s one
of the many commissioned works I did for him, this
one for a Mardi Gras party at Les Jardins.

Having a hard time making a living in Charleston, I

went to Florida with Master Chef Thom Tillman on the
112-foot yacht High Spirits, the sister ship to the

21/32
Presidential Yacht Sequoia, a Trumpy built in 1929 of gleaming mahogany and black
walnut. He taught me classic French cooking skills as we catered parties at the Boca Raton
Club, Thom splitting the profits with me. Teresa was living in Miami at the time, and we got
together often.

At the end of the season, I decided to move to Europe. I had turned 30 and figured I better
go while I was still young. I was promised a job on a barge in Burgundy, but when I got to
the offices in London, the person who had had the job the year before decided to come
back to work after all. I moved to Paris and began presenting my art portfolio to galleries.
When I was running low on cash and when my month in the hotel room I had rented was
coming up, I happened to run into Mike Green, who I had heard was there, but whom I did
not know how to contact. He was renting a room from Joel Patrick, who was being
transferred. Did I need a place to stay? How does Ile St Louis sound?

In the meantime, the band released Mesopotamia, which was produced by David Byrne of
Talking Heads. It was widely criticized for being too arty, though the dreamy quality of
some of the songs was beguiling and the eponymous track is one of my favorites of all
time, especially if I’m on the treadmill at the gym. I would walk for hours in the city, where I
was inexplicably depressed for the first time in my life, even though I had never been down
before. (Years later I would realize that
it was light deprivation. Paris was
incredibly dark and gray the entire time
I lived there. The photo of the window
display is indicative of what caught my
eye then.) When I had to go to South
Carolina because my mother was
dying of leukemia, I made dozens of
cassettes of my favorite records and
bought a Walkman, thinking that I was
probably depressed because my
friends weren’t around. But by then I
had made lots of friends, and had fallen in love with an Italian, and was living most of the
time in Genoa, Italy. I also used language cassettes to teach myself Italian.

In Genoa I spent hours every day

making art. A couple of years went by,
during which time I made my living as
both a photographer (shooting
environmental portraits of ridiculously
wealthy people and charging them a
fortune for a contact sheet and one
platinum print) and drawing life-size
nudes in pastels. I remember walking
through the carrugi, as the narrow
alleys of the old historic center of
Genoa are called, and seeing the B-
52s’ Whammy! album in a window and buying it. I think it was the first thing I bought with
22/32
some money that my mother had left me in her will. The second thing was to buy a big pile
of huge handmade paper to draw on. I would spend days in my darkroom and basement
studio, working by the light of the bare light bulb that hung there, but comforted by my
friends’ music coming through the headphones. I was not depressed.

The light in Genoa is very special, as the British poets

have long known. Bryon, Shelley, and Keats all lived
there and described the special golden quality of the
Ligurian sun. It reminded me of the light in
Charleston, and I flourished there. I would emerge
from the darkroom and walk the streets for hours,
even though light barely made it down to the ground
in the old part of town where we lived, the largest
intact medieval city in the world. Nanette was living in
Berlin and she came to visit; Greg was living in Rome,
studying with John Pope Hennessy, and he came. My
nephew Duke graduated from high school and came
to Rome, where I visited him.Alas, I kept having visa
problems (residency, not credit cards), and I would
have to leave the country every six months. So I’d go
to Paris. The band, who had become very popular,
toured a lot, but we missed each other in Paris and Rome more than a few times. We
stayed in touch with postcards, usually homemade, which had been a popular form of
communication among artists for ten years at that point. Here’s one from Barbara, of
RuPaul performing with the Now Explosion in Atlanta. In Paris, I heard that there was a hip
new magazine forming, so I applied for the
job as Art Director, and, after cooking for
the investors,
I was hired instead as the Food Editor. My
life changed overnight.Ici New York was
indeed hip: an oversized monthly
magazine in French about the Big Apple. I
moved back to the city and began writing
about not only the food world, but also
about my artist friends from Athens, many
of whom had moved there shortly after the band. We published Kent Brown’s poems as
well as Fred’s. We featured photos of Kate and quoted Ken (pictured below), who was
beginning a career as a comedian.

23/32
We wrote about Robert Molnar’s
fashions. Kate used to call the
magazine, “J.T.’s Friends.” I began
meeting lots of other food writers. I got
assignments from The New York
Times.

Here’s a photo of me in our office,

holding up a page featuring a portrait I
took of Kent. I should have reached out
more to Kent in his final years, but we
had grown apart, complicated by
distance.My mother had left me over a
thousand cookbooks, which I had read through as she
lay dying. My apartment in New York was just a
couple of blocks from Nach Waxman’s cookbook
store, Kitchen Arts & Letters. I think the first time I
walked in, I introduced myself, told him that I would
be a good customer, and then told him that I fully
intended to steal his idea and open a shop like his
back in South Carolina, where I had never been able to
find a way to make a living. Certainly not taking the
kind of photos I took or drawing the big male nudes I
drew. And surely not writing about food.On the
weekends, I would go out to Mahopac with Kate. The
band had hired me to manage getting the house
together for sale. All of them had places in the city by
then. And there were both spoken and
unspoken tensions from having lived
and worked together all those years.
When Ricky died in 1985, we were all
shocked. Only Keith knew that he was
ill, and he had remarkably kept the
secret to himself as Ricky taught him
all the guitar parts and he began
writing much of the material himself.
I’ve always admired Keith for his quiet
strength in that period, and, as much
as I loved Ricky’s innovative and funky
guitar, I found that Keith’s music spoke
to me much more. Ricky is credited on
many of the songs of Bouncing Off the Satellites, which was released in 1986, but the fuller
sound of Summer of Love, She Brakes for Rainbows, Ain’t It a Shame, and Girl From
Ipanema Goes to Greenland marked a necessary new direction that I know Keith was
leading the band toward. The album was criticized for being all over the place, with band
members doing their own songs instead of a more cohesive group effort, but the band was

24/32
fractured at the time, if only from Ricky’s death, and many friends and fans were glad to see
them move forward.
At a memorial service we had for Ricky at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where we had
replaced some trees in the cherry esplanade in his honor, many of us spoke personally
about Ricky, toasting his life. I realized that it was Ricky who had first turned me on to real
Mexican food and who had first led me to the work of Diana Kennedy. Shortly thereafter,
and on several occasions, Kate and I got together to prepare elaborate vegetarian feasts,
following Diana’s explicit instructions. A labor of love, yes, but delicious and a worthy tribute
to our deceased friend.

As the band stumbled in the aftermath

of Ricky’s death, I moved a final time
back to Charleston to open my culinary
bookstore. The years in Europe and
New York had been fun, but I was
really a fish out of water, and didn’t
have enough money, to really
appreciate life in a big city, though we
always entertained ourselves.
The photo at right is from a party we
had at my apartment in Spanish
Harlem in February 1984. Beaujolais
and mushrooms, followed by pitchers
of margaritas in a Mexican restaurant. One of the best dance parties I ever had, but also
the worst hangover I’ve ever had (and, fortunately, one of the last! Ah, youth!)

1987-1993

It is said that one’s best work comes out of adversity and/or despair. It certainly helped
both the B-52s and me. Cosmic Thing was released in the summer of ’89 and was
considered by many to be the best B-52s album yet. It certainly was the most successful. It
made them even bigger international stars, with Number One hits and an ensuing,
seemingly never-ending tour. Hugo hit Charleston in September, just as the deadline for my
first book was approaching. I continued to write, and turned in my first draft, but my editor
politely told me that it was full of angst and anger, to go back to the drawing board. I
honestly didn’t know where my next meal was going to come from. I had borrowed all the
money to open the store. My insurance company had screwed me. And I was out of
business for a year. Somehow I managed to pull it all together, though, and Hoppin’ John’s
Lowcountry Cookingwas a critical success, being reviewed by nearly every newspaper and
magazine in the country. I made dozens of television appearances and became something
of a celebrity myself.I knew that the band had really made it when a raunchy southern rock
band playing at an oyster roast in a parking lot on Edisto Island played Love Shackand the
crowd went crazy. They had come a long way from guitars with missing strings and thrift
store clothes!Several years later, I knew that I, too, had also made it when Kate came to
visit during a rare break in another grueling tour, for Good Stuff. I love every song on that
album, even if I do miss Cindy’s voice. Kate did a great job on the album, and on the tour,
but she was tired. We rented a funky house on the beach at Edisto. I went to see the band
25/32
play in Charlotte and Kate came home with me for a week. I promised her that I wouldn’t let
folks know that she was there, and I assured her that no one would bother her on Edisto. I
had the car all packed, coolers full of food, and only had to stop once at the Piggly Wiggly
on Edisto for last minute staples like milk, bread, and juice. There were some things that
Kate wanted, but she was reluctant to go in the store. (She says that I was being
overprotective. In fact, Kate has always accommodated her fans, making appearances,
signing autographs, posing for pictures.) We went in and got what we needed so that we
needn’t go shopping again that week, and, just as we were leaving the checkout counter, a
woman came rushing toward us, saying, “Aren’t you…??” while following us. We began
rushing to the car with the woman following us, “Excuse me, aren’t you… aren’t you…
Hoppin’ John?”
We both started laughing so hard. It was so silly. The parking lot of a Piggly Wiggly on
Edisto Island, South Carolina! The best part is that the woman then said, “My husband is
gonna shit! He loves you!”

Kate and I had a great week together,

including a wonderful canoe trip down
the Edisto River, where cypress knees
are four feet tall. I, too, had needed the
break from running my store, working
on my second book, and from my own
book tour. But my life was simple
compared to the band’s. When I look
at their nearly nonstop tour schedule
for 1989 and 1990, it’s a wonder they
didn’t drop dead from exhaustion or
kill each other. I saw them perform
several times during that schedule, and the stress
was beginning to wear on them. Cindy, of course,
dropped out for awhile to have kids and rethink her
life. (The band’s tour schedule in 92 and 93 was
nearly as bad.)

I, too, had had to rebuild my life, finally re-opening my

store, fighting an awful trademark infringement
lawsuit, and finishing my first book. When it was
getting ready to come out, I went to New York to plan
my book tour with my publishers and went to visit
Kate, Keith, and Fred, who were working on Good Stuff
at Bearsville Studio. Here’s a photo of Keith at his
house on the mountain. Don Was was mixing the title
track, and Kate kept asking me which of a dozen
tracks of her parts I liked best – for each phrase of
the song! I wondered how on earth she would be able
to pull off a live performance of the song, but I saw her perform those songs several times
as well, and her command of her vocal skills had become awe-inspiring. She would half-
jokingly refer to herself at the time as “the hardest working woman in show business,” as
26/32
her voice appeared on songs with
R.E.M. and Iggy Pop, and as she began
branching out to sing in various
projects with the other female rockers
Maggie Moore, Tina Weymouth, and
Debbie Harry.

I kept my store open until 1999. During

those 13 years, Keith and Kate came
to Charleston several times, as did
Robert Waldrop, Dana (who moved
there in ’94), Ken, Betty Alice, and John
Beal, before we lost him to AIDS. I saw so many people succumb: Thom Tillman, Bobby
Adams, Greg Whittington, Ron Crawford, and Michael Conyers; the list goes on. I had left
the country during the Reagan years, at least partially because I couldn’t stand his politics.
When And The Band Played On was released in 1987, I got copies donated and I let folks
pay whatever they wanted, all of the money going to the local Charleston charity that
helped AIDS victims. I had a column in a local alternative paper in which I usually wrote
about food, but the editors sometimes let me rant about the ills of society. I think I guilt-
tripped folks into writing checks that were much bigger than the book’s retail value. We
raised lots of money. Later Clinton was elected, promising us some hope, but he failed to
clean out the conservative administrators in most areas of government, and then he signed
not only “Don’t ask; don’t tell,” but also the Defense of Marriage Act, two of the most
insidious pieces of legislation I’ve ever read.

1994-Present

In 1994, I traveled with the band for awhile on assignment for The Washington Post, writing
an article about their cook, Jan Waggoner (in the center of the photo). The article was never
publised, but we had fun.

Cindy and Keith Bennett rented a

beach house at Folly one year. That’s
Tommy with Cindy below.
Robert moved to Charleston for
awhile. Here he is with Dana’s
daughter Ella Grace, before they
moved there. (She’s now 17.)

Our universe of friends is

expanding! Ken came to visit one year
with members of the band Pavement.

Every few years or so, we’ll all get together at one of the band’s concerts. Here’s a group of
us partying at Bob and Julia’s showroom in Savannah, where they moved to raise their kids
many moons ago.

Left to right in the photo: back row: Cindy, Sally, Julia, Keith and Fred; front row: me and
Bob.
27/32
Everyone accepted Mikel, my partner of 15 years,
from the beginning as though he had been one of
us from Athens days. In the photo on the right,
he’s on the left with Kate with Dean Riddle in
Dean’s garden in the Catskills in 1997, when Dean
was the garden editor of Elle Decor.

I wrote 3 more cookbooks (and an unpublished

novel) before deciding to retire from the public
eye in order to pursue other writing and artistic
endeavors. All of the members of the B-52s
settled into their own private home lives. Kate
built her dream house atop a mountain, where I
have visited her several times, and restored her
Lazy Meadow Motel, which has to be the funkiest
inn in America! We’ve all managed to stay pretty
close. Here’s a recent Christms card from
Fred.
Above is a shot of some of the gang in a
Vietnamese restaurant in New York, where
we gathered after going to see the musical
Hairspray. From left to right: David
McCullough, Kelly, Mikel, Kate, Richard,
and Fran McCullough, who edited my first
two books.

Keith moved out of his mountain house

and down to Key West with his partner
Mark Hayda. Fred bought a house in the
Hamptons. And Cindy had another kid and
is in the midst of settling into her new
home, close to where she has been
living in Georgia all these years. We’ve
all grown older, wiser, and calmer. But
we all still love to dance.

If you don’t believe me, check out their

new album, FUNPLEX, being released
in March.
Last year, Kate and her partner Monica
Coleman (above) and Mikel and I
rented a big fancy house with three
other couples down on the Riviera
Maya, where we drank tequila and danced till the wee hours to some early mixes of the new
songs. Get ready to pump it up!!! Here are Kate and I dancing in Mexico. During one
particular dance move that came to me during Juliet of the Spirits, one of their new songs,

28/32
Kate and I started laughing so hard that we were gasping for air. The next day she
christened it “the birthing dance.” You
don’t wanna know.

***************

P.S. I’ve heard from lots of folks about this

posting on my blog. Keith’s email, with
photos, is posted on the Readers’
Comments page.
Here’s what he wrote. He also sent the
beautiful picture of the girls that he
recently took in Paris:
John,

The beat goes on.

This is so cool. You should write a
book about this. I have tried to convey
what our scene was like in interviews;
that The B-52s were born out of a
larger circle of artists, poets and
friends in Athens, Georgia.

I have a beautiful book by the German photographer

Astrid Kirchherr. She is the photographer who took
those wonderfully sophisticated photographs of the
Beatles when they were all very young and hanging
out together in Hamburg, Germany. She loved styling
the boys and girls … she created the Beatle haircut
and would dress everyone in thin black slacks and
turtle necks. She was so ahead of her time.

I’m fascinated by the fact that this small group of

artists, poets and friends in Hamburg in the late 50s
and early 60s, who were reading French existentialist
writers and eastern philosophies, had such an
influence on The Beatles, and pop culture as we know
it today.
I believe that our little scene in Athens in the 70s was
also a part of that bohemian lineage.

Thank you,
Keith
(The photo of Keith and me was taken in my courtyard in Charleston in 1987. The one of
Kate and me was taken in the same courtyard a few years later.)

Everyone keeps writing me and saying that I should write a book about all this, but I think
that I’ve pretty much shot my wad here on the blog. There’s so much more to say, but I will
continue to update and revise this as folks remind me of chronological errors and exciting
29/32
highlights I somehow missed.

Getting such positive responses

from not only the band members,
but also Mark Cline, Michael
Lachowski, Bob and Julia Christian,
Betty Alice Fowler, Robert Waldrop, Vic
Varney, and others has been fun. I’ve
never lost touch with any of these folks
anyway. Dana Downs and I are like
twins.

I’ll post more comments and photos

on the Readers’ Comment page.
Here’s an email from Kate, from
Februrary 21:

Hey J.T. and Everyone,Thanks so

much for your enthusiastic
comments about the B-52s ( we
dropped the ‘ for grammar’s sake,
like the B-52′s WHAT?)
We’ve been doing a boatload of
interviews to promote the new cd
and also the single on radio (so
y’all please call your local stations
and ask them to play it ’till the juice
runs out of it!)
We can’t wait for it to finally be
released (March 23ish) – but we’ve
already incorporated 6 of the new
songs into our set- wait till you hear
“pump”, “juliet of the spirits” , “hot
corner” and “love in the year 3,000″
and all the other tracks- i hope they
rock your world!
In the interviews we always mention
that we were part of a whole group of
like-minded ,wildly creative friends
back in the day that helped inspire and
fuel the whole thing-
I’ll never forget the first party at Julia and Gray’s , Sally workin’ her skirt,
or all of us going over to J.T.’s for fresh-made cornbread and breaking into a conga line
over “shotgun”!
Or Teresa Randolf screaming “I can’t believe this is happening here in Athens, Georgia”!
Doing our first jam at Owen Scott’s basement and writing “killer bees”
Tommy Adams a go go boying in that crazy video Spencer Thornton did!
30/32
Dana Downs gettin’ DOWN!
and Robert Waldrop writing beautiful lyrics and
being such an inspiration.
Ken Bullock as “Tony James” sitting on a tree
branch at my little shack on Jefferson River Road
and always making us laugh ourselves silly! Adele
Maddry dancing and laughing wildly!
Anyway, love you all and let the blogs continue!
and more and more- John you’ve done a great job
of BLOG! It’s great to be part of it all-
(and i’ll NEVER forget that mushroom party at
your apt. in nyc!)
Love,
Kate

31/32
32/32