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

“In her new book, “Cool Town,” Grace Elizabeth Hale, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia, describes how Athens found itself at Generation X’s artistic vanguard, birthing the glorious notes-on-camp party band the B-52’s, the jangly art-rock juggernaut R.E.M., and scores of other provocative and influential groups — along the way becoming “the model,” as Hale argues, “for the small, deeply local bohemias that together formed ’80s indie culture.” It’s fair to ask why the world needs a book about an ’80s indie-rock hot spot at a moment when rock ’n’ roll, as a genre, seems to be in retrograde, and the pop universe blazes with San Juan polyrhythms, Seoul choreography and Atlanta Afro-futurism. But with this meticulously reported microhistory, Hale, who once played in a band and ran an underground club in Athens, 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.” —Richard Fausset, “Dance This Mess Around: When Georgia Recreated Rock ‘n’ Roll”, The New York Times

“‘In Athens, Georgia, in the 1980s, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible,’ Grace Elizabeth Hale opens her new book Cool Town, about how the B-52s, R.E.M., Vic Chesnutt, and scads of lesser-known alternative-rock artists sprang out of one small southern college town four decades ago. My first impulse was to substitute the line Tolstoy might have written if Tolstoy had been really into rock bands: All local music scenes are the same, but every music scene is local in its own way. Young people coalesce around a few emerging performers or spaces or haircuts, then start becoming event-makers themselves. Combine over a few years with sex, drugs, and alarmingly intense friendships, and the work that results can vault beyond anyone’s individual gifts—Brian Eno called this collective super-creativity “scenius.” Then people become somewhat less young and less willing to live without money, rent goes up, venues shut down, relationships split, people go back to school, people get famous and others get resentful, sometimes people die, and the utopian bubble deflates. When the next one forms, the veterans say the new bands (or rappers, or DJs, etc.) aren’t as exciting anymore.”

“But Hale’s proposition is that before the late 1970s, this kind of activity was mainly confined to cultural capitals like Manhattan or San Francisco. If you were gay, weird, or otherwise unfit for your place of origin, that was where you migrated. “Athens kids,” she claims, “built the first important small-town American music scene and the key early site of what would become alternative or indie culture.” It became the template for what would unfold soon in Minneapolis, or Louisville, and even Seattle, making Cool Town a kind of unofficial prequel to Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life. It’s easy to suspect Hale of bias: Now a professor at the University of Virginia, she was herself an undergrad at the University of Georgia in Athens in the 1980s, and soon a highly active member of the scene. She acknowledges that Austin could stake a claim to being first, and I might add the mid-1970s Akron/Cleveland nexus (Devo, Pere Ubu). But it’s hard to deny that the Athens Effect was of unusual proportions, suggesting not just that anybody could be a musician and artist, but that they could do it anywhere. It 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.”

“…I think all the labor and imagination that went into building a network of mini-cultures—back when indie still meant independent, as in creating noncorporate labels and media and other DIY infrastructure—is too easily shrugged off today. Yes, it didn’t “work,” because cultural escape tunnels are rickety by nature, and have to be rebuilt under ever-changing conditions. But Hale does us a favor by recapturing the experience. Something goes astray when people forget what it feels like to have those ideals and aims, to immerse themselves in that long conversation, and, as the B-52s put it, to dance that mess around.”

Carl Wilson, “Pass the Alt: The start of the (indie) world as we know it,” Bookforum

“Hale asks all the right questions about Athens (and about herself), inviting readers to consider what the escape of counterculture really means. Along the way, she recovers something of the bliss it was in that muggy, hungover dawn to be alive. “I remember feeling drunk on the luck part of life,” she writes, “the web of decisions and chance that put me in Athens at that moment.” —Andrew Holter , “Among the Athenians: A Conversation with Grace Elizabeth Hale”, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The history of American indie rock music is all about scenes—and in the 1970s and ’80s, wow, was there a scene in the sleepy college town of Athens, Georgia. For music geeks, historian Grace Elizabeth Hale’s treasure of a book gives Athens the love it deserves for giving the world some great bands (R.E.M., the B-52s, and the hugely underrated Pylon). But perhaps more importantly, Athens showed the world that you don’t need to be in New York, or LA, or London to make your cultural mark. Fair warning—this is a not an extended SPIN article—it’s a real work of history, written by an accomplished historian. The book is 300 tightly-packed pages, not including the endnotes, and is published by a venerable academic press (in fact, this will be the first title published under the University of North Carolina Press’s promising new endowed trade imprint, Ferris & Ferris Books). But let’s be honest—if you’re inclined to pick up a book on the indie scene in Athens in the first place, this is exactly what you want. And not a word of Hale’s deeply researched, yet also deeply personal narrative is wasted. As with many of the books I read (given my job here at PW) this book isn’t out until March—so, mark your calendar, and maybe give your local bookstore a heads up. And I recommend enjoying this book like I did—with a good bottle, and Spotify at the ready.” ­–Andrew R. Albanese, “PW Staff Picks: The Best Books We Read in 2019”, Publishers Weekly

“If all you know of Athens is the B-52’s and R.E.M. you are in for a wild ride with Cool Town, Grace Elizabeth Hale’s hybrid ethnography-memoir. And even if Pylon and Love Tractor are old hat to you, Cool Town is still going to teach you a whole lot about thrift store culture in the 1980s, the importance of the University of Georgia’s art department to the development of “college” rock, the surprising genealogical thread connecting Warhol’s Factory to this scene, and the centrality of alternative sexualities to its artistic production … The strength of Grace Hale’s Cool Town is that she convinces us that, at least for a time, the bohemians of Athens, Georgia, gave the lie to that darkly ironic title.” —Jeff Melnick, “All in This Together?: On Grace Elizabeth Hale’s “Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture””, Los Angeles Review of Books

“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.” -Publishers Weekly

“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

Suzanne Van Atten, “Captivating ‘Cool Town’ chronicles history of Athens’ music scene”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (interview)

“On paper, a professor of American studies and history at the University of Virginia writing a book about the 1980s music scene in Athens and the birth of alternative music sounds more square than cool. But Grace Elizabeth Hale is not your average academic. The author of “Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South” was a student at the University of Georgia during the early days of R.E.M., the B-52s and other bands of that era. As a member of the band Cordy Lon with her future husband, David Levitt, she was also part of the scene. Her personal experience as an insider, combined with a scholarly approach to research, results in a fascinating examination of a seminal era in rock history and what made Athens a hotbed of musical creativity.” Suzanne Van Atten, “10 Southern books we can’t wait to read in 2020”, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Jay Gabler, Rock and Roll Book Club: 'Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture', The Current, Minnesota Public Radio