You mention the Gorge. It’s an amazing experience from the audience perspective looking at the stage with the Columbia River Gorge behind the band. But in your case you’re on stage with the river is to your back. I take it that doesn’t detract from your experience?
I’m only working for 3 hours a night, Dean. For the rest I’m sitting around backstage going, “What a beautiful view…” [Laughs].
“How do you like living in CA as opposed to GA? What do you miss most about the south?” Jen K.
I love living in California not as opposed to Georgia. I just love California. Up here I love the temperate nature of the weather. Especially where we live, we have this micro climate that makes it like 95 degrees and zero humidity with coastal breezes during the day and then it gets down to 50 degrees at night and we get the coastal effect with fog. So everything stays green and happy and we don’t worry too much about fires, knock wood.
I definitely don’t miss the heat and humidity of Georgia but what I do miss is how it looks in the fall and the spring in Georgia. And I miss my friends and there’s a lot of aspects about Athens that can be got nowhere else in the world. There’s an intangible spirit there that people pick up on even if they just pass through town to play a gig or see a football game, heaven forbid.
Believe me, I’ve played every cool college town in the country and they don’t have it. They might have something different that’s just as positive but there really is something special about Athens, especially the way that the arts flourish there. The music is just incredible and you cannot count the number of bands who made a worldwide impact or even a dent that came from Athens. You can’t count them on two hands.
I also miss my friends a lot. I have great friends there. But when you live somewhere for 25 years that insular and small, those are friends that you keep with you forever. I try to get back there as often as I can. I’m really glad we rehearse there and we’ll probably be recording our next record there, which will give me a chance to spend more time in Athens.
In terms of Athens, was it around your freshman year that [R.E.M.’s] Murmur or Reckoning came out?
Reckoning came out when I was a sophomore. Murmur was already out when I was a freshman, I believe. I remember the night of my high school graduation party. I went and got into a little trouble with a friend of mine who was dating a guy at the University of Georgia. And while we were getting into a little bit of trouble, we were listening to the Chronic Town EP and he was saying, “This is a band that’s going to be big and they’re from the town where you’re about to go to school.” And it was pretty cool to come down and see all that happen because I did see it happen. I didn’t see the playing in bars but I saw their entire rise to superstardom.
Did that resonate throughout the Athens music scene in any way or were there so many bands that it was just part of a larger whole?
Here’s how uber hip Athens is. They weren’t national stars yet. They were maybe one or two records away from being national stars although they were certainly critical darlings. But Athens was so uber hip that there was a backlash against them. When I first arrived there bands that were really hip were really arty or really punky. Bands like the BBQ Killers, which I actually played bass for before they settled on their real bass player, were about as arty uber punk as you could get. And other bands that were popular like Love Tractor and Time Toy didn’t sound anything like R.E.M. There was always a lot of eclecticism, just as there is today. Everybody knows everybody, no one hates anyone. There’s not that big city L.A. or Boston or New York sort of thing like, “We’re going to slash the headliner band’s tires and hope that they don’t get to the gig so the opening band can headline now.” That doesn’t happen there. It’s more like, “Oh, hey look, the headliner band’s broken down on the side of the road, can we give you a lift?” It’s always been that way there.
But in terms of what the bands were playing, R.E.M. had already left and the bands were on to something else in the clubs. What was simmering was going to become something else.
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