Gardening at Night

My sister found them before I did, back in the days that we bought records we read about in Rolling Stone magazine. She was a fan, bought album after album, knew their names. And maybe that was why I didn’t; she had her stuff and I had mine.

Even if she was the bigger fan, I always thought they had it. I didn’t follow them obsessively for the past thirty years, and I don’t own every record. I remember when Bill Berry quit the band. I heard them on the radio not long after and thought, well, they’ve still got it.

My life has been ridiculously influenced by them. They were part of why I chose the college I did. I am no longer embarrassed to admit this, though for years I was, and so didn’t. We were living in east Tennessee and neither my sister nor I wanted to go to Knoxville, the town an hour away where the majority of the college-bound in our class were going (and college-bound was not a majority).

So, my sister, my mother, my grandmother and I engaged in that truly bizarre American ritual, the college campus drive-around. We visited Chapel Hill, North Carolina, though we read that they’d accept less than 1% of out-of-staters. We looked at Clemson. And we drove to Athens. At the time, we both thought we wanted to make films. A UGA faculty member sat with us at a formica table and told us that in less than ten years, film would be dead. It would all be digital, blasted to the few remaining theaters via satellite. We were told we ought to pursue other ideas.

We both got in a couple of dream schools that my family could not afford. We were not well guided; my sister recalls reading about a deal where you could pay in-state tuition and attend Bard College, but our school counselor told her it wasn’t a great idea. The place was so far away. And quite small.

Because R.E.M. was from Athens, we determined something must be happening there. Our parents agreed to pay out-of-state tuition if we’d stay gone a year, establishing residency.

There were a lot of people who came to Athens because of R.E.M. Not everybody admitted it at first. But as that first fall got underway, the truth came out. Some were bonafide groupies, some played in bands, others just smoked endlessly and wondered what Michael was doing this very second. A lot of people said we came five years too late. The heyday of Love Tractor, Pylon, the B-52s and the Kilkenny Cats was all over. But people still wanted to live in Reed, the dorm where Michael and Peter met. We hung out at the 40 Watt, to this day one of the coolest clubs I’ve ever been in, managed by Peter’s alluring, mysterious, remote, dark-haired wife. We found the church, that decrepit old place where people said they’d lived, and was the site of their first show. We found the kudzu-covered railroad trestle featured on the cover of an early album.

It’s often said that REM put Athens on the map, but I think it’s the other way around. Those four guys succeeded because of where they were from. We were too late for their launch, but we could still feel the electricity in that place, the way the trees shimmered at night, which is different in the south when you’re eighteen. Especially that place. There was some kind of mainline to the artistic there. It was mournful, winsome, romantic, dripping with sentiment. The university was part of it; though it was big, it wasn’t totally corporate the way most SEC universities are now. Campus itself was heartbreakingly beautiful, with buildings dating back a hundred fifty years, the lawns and courtyards lined with giant live oaks. The clubs downtown were not in the least modern, just simple, concrete places with a bar in one corner and a stage at the far end. You could go out alone and be certain you’d see someone you knew. I fell in love in that place, sitting on the sill of a six-foot window overlooking downtown. I can still recall the way my earring got caught in his sweater when I put my head on his shoulder.

They came back. A ripple would go through the campus library, from the top floor down to the smoking lounge. People were tripping over themselves to get the 40 Watt. They’d play under a pseudonym. That was the only time I saw them, one of those sneak shows. It lasted about four songs before the crowd got too big and the four of them vanished. On random evenings, you’d see Michael at the Grit, before he owned the place, back when it was the weird spot on the far end of the depot, which also housed a massive frat bar. The Grit in those days was a coffee shack. You ordered your coffee and toasted bagel with cream cheese from a small plywood window in back. Michael sat up top in the loft area, the entire room abuzz with his presence. A friend of mine felt sorry for him. I simply stared. One of the most thrilling hours of my youth was spent playing stare-off with Michael Stipe.

As the years passed and we became upper classmen, we began to see them as part of Athens life. Somebody saw Peter Buck in the Walmart; the checker even called a price check on the air filters he was buying. My favorite English professor bragged that he’d taught Bill Berry, an honors student. I worked in a bookstore and once waited on their lawyer. By then, we all knew their lawyer. It was a high point of my retail career, as the guy left with nearly a thousand dollars in books. This was before computerized check-out; I wrote his ticket by hand on one of those carbon copy pads that waitresses use.

It’s not a stretch to call that band my—our—Harry Potter, me and all those kids I went to undergraduate school with. Saying good-bye to these guys, I feel a little like the twenty-something saps heartbroken over a wizard. Really, it’s better this way. Were they going to go out like Mick Jagger and the boys? Nope. Too dignified.

Perhaps this is really about youth. Certainly there is no actual name for what we felt in that place at that time. The electricity of that music, its effect on all of us was exaggerated by a portentous certainty that none of it was going to last. It was already mostly over. The south is irrevocably entwined with nostalgia, true. But it is just as true that we lived there at the end of a musical renaissance. Perhaps the place doesn’t make the artist, but the artist makes the place, the way lighting travels through the ground and into the surrounding trees.

This is one of those circular arguments that confund the subject of creativity, like, are you depressed because you’re an artist, or are you an artist because you’re depressed? Which comes first? The impulse, or the setting? Fascinating to ponder, but there’ll never be an answer. I’m not sure it matters. The essential part, for me, is only that that place, that time, and that music were a tremendous release. I found freedom in trading the isolated, unimaginative hills of east Tennessee for this group of raging romantics, all posing, full of longing for a way to express themselves in a college town that was ripe for it. For me, it wasn’t films or music or art, or even endless brooding, though I did a lot of that. It was books. Reading and writing, character and plot. Setting and scene. Making things up.

After all these years, I still feel the need to get out in the night air, skip through row after row of plants,  flowers, and trees, neighborhoods, buildings, and fields, this big delicious garden that is the unknowable world.