Cool Town
How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 caf , 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 fa ade"). This colorfully rendered reverie will delight indie music fans.
