Music geeks around my age love to wax rhapsodic about the first time they heard certain artists and having that epiphany, ...that bolt of lightning that immediately changed everything for them. While it’s ostensibly a statement about the groundbreaking nature of the music in question, all it often boils down to is a desperate assertion on the part of the storyteller, designed to subtly telegraph the notion that he or she was hip enough to immediately recognize said music’s groundbreaking significance and was cool enough to get in on the ground floor (i.e. “when it mattered, maaaaaaaan). This is how gatekeepers are born.
While I was indeed fortunate enough to hear a lot of bands “early on,” it was usually either (a) purely by accident or (b) via the good graces of genuinely hipper friends. As has been said, people who introduce you to new music are good people to have around. People who laboriously lord it over you? Not so much.
In any case, while I was fully onboard upon my first exposures to outfits like The Ramones, Devo, Blondie and the Sex Pistols, there were indeed several artists that I was either very slow to appreciate or that I simply “did not get,” at the time. I am somewhat to ashamed to admit, for example, that I did NOT immediately warm to the B-52’s.
Having cut my teeth on the juvenile spectacle & bombast of KISS and the po-faced pomp & circumstance of Pink Floyd, I didn’t quite know what to make of the first B-52s record, the one in the blindingly dayglo-yellow sleeve. It was my older sister that first brought it home, having already introduced the household to records by Blondie and The Police. At this stage, I’d sank my teeth into Devo, The Ramones, the `Pistols and the Clash, but …this wasn’t that. The B-52’s lacked the buzzsaw attack of those latter three bands. And while the B-52’s certainly shared a lot of the willfully odd aesthetics of early Devo, they lacked the Akron quintet’s pronounced penchant for confrontation. The B-52’s weren’t cynical iconoclasts. They just wanted to have a good time.
Beyond that, though, they were just silly. I mean “Rock Lobster”? What the Hell is that? My sister’s tireless spins of that now-iconic single and “Dance This Mess Around” frequently prompted me to skulk back into my own room for yet another world-weary spin of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, the ponderously self-indulgent magnum opus unleashed on the world just four months after the Athens’ band’s comparatively spritely debut. I suppose I figured I’d find more solace in the bitterly heavy-handed exhortations of Roger Waters than the giddily nonsensical declarations of Fred Schneider. It’s odd, now, to think that these two vastly different records were released in the same era.
While they basically annoyed me, at first, I did gradually warm to certain tracks, notably “Planet Claire” and “52 Girls,” the former for its spacey re-imagining of the Peter Gunn riff and the latter for its insistent surf guitars, both courtesy of B-52’s string-bender Ricky Wilson, a crucial element of the band that stopped them from being just a kitschy novelty act. He may not have been Ace Frehley or David Gilmour, but Ricky played his battered Mosrite (the same brand of guitar used manfully by Johnny Ramone, though you’d never know it, given the differing styles of the respective players) to incendiary effect, adding a muscular, pugnacious shove to even tracks like the otherwise idiotic “Rock Lobster.” It’s no accident that Ricky’s guitar is pictured prominently on the album’s back cover. Beyond the retro outfits, Fred’s inane barking and Kate & Cindy’s signature harmonies, it was the B-52’s’ secret weapon.
While I’d indeed started to slowly appreciate the first record, all it took was a solitary spin of “Private Idaho,” the first single of the follow up album, 1980’s Wild Planet for me to completely surrender. The opening notes of Ricky’s guitar alone were so goddamn satisfying. While I still have absolutely zero idea of what the song’s actually about, “Private Idaho” completely redefined the band for me, and I became fully invested from that point forward.
The only reason I’m thinking about them today was on my walk to work today, “Private Idaho” came up on my iPod just I was turning off Canal Street onto Cortlandt Alley, formerly the forbidding pathway towards the former Mudd Club at 77 White Street, a venue the B-52s were no strangers to.
The clip below, meanwhile, was not captured at the Mudd Club, but rather several blocks to northwest at Hurrah’s (also gone) courtesy of maverick videographer Charles Libin.
And, again, at the time, I did not get it. But now? It’s practically sacred.
Look out for the bikini whale!
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