by While bands and artists are what ultimately make the music industry so fascinating, it’s hard to deny the intrigue of these small, obscure locations that become geographical microcosms of culture.
The way in which Nashville has become a musical hub in the heart of America, or how Ghent in Belgium is fostering a hidden music scene ready to rival the likes of Berlin and Paris. Perhaps the greatest example of one city punching above its cultural weight and fighting the might of America’s booming art hubs is the story of Athens, in Georgia.
In the mid-1970s, when New York was platforming a new punk resurgence, Detroit was playing host to the warm arrival of soul, and California was breeding the opulence of stadium rock, this quiet pocket of America’s southeast offered a vortex whereby musicians could enter and come out as musical gods.
It all started with The B-52’s, who played their first show at a house party on the University of Georgia campus, on Valentine’s night of 1977. In a bizarre meteoric rise, the band were headlining Max’s Kansas City in New York, where they would start a cultural chain of events that ended in the emergence of bands like The Bangles, Nirvana, and REM.
The latter, in particular, were another that came from this otherwise unassuming town, helping it become what historian Grace Elizabeth Hale describes in her book Cool Town as “the most important model for the new alternative culture rooted in unlikely places”.
But why? Why did this Athens in Georgia create what has since been dubbed the “Athens Miracle?” Well, it largely came from isolation. The fallout from the Vietnam War essentially cut the town off from all cultural imports, and so The B-52’s decided to write music out of a sense of self-entertainment. Not hemmed in by overbearing influence, they stumbled on innovation with their suitably obscure track ‘Rock Lobster’.
They spearheaded a sense of innovative rebellion. As Hale described, “If punk taught people that anyone could play, Athens taught them that this music making could happen anywhere, even in the South, even in small town America.”
So everyone caught up in Athens’s orbit learned that music was a genuine pathway for them, so long as they approached it with authenticity. Entirely at odds with what culture has taught us about major cities and their fostering of boundary-pushing culture, it was, in fact, societal isolation that broke ground.
But it wasn’t just The B-52’s pedalling this creativity machine. Perhaps the most important and nationally undervalued figure in this small town renaissance was Jerry Ayers. Both a civil rights advocate and theology lecturer at the University of Georgia, Ayers laid the essential foundations for this bohemian utopia.
He beat a path that started in Athens, ended in New York, under the stewardship of Andy Warhol, where he subsequently created an artistic link between the two cities. It meant that relatively obscure and unknown artists like The B-52’s could export their art, under the reputable name of Athens, the town led by the great Jerry Ayers.
It injected the town with a forward-thinking sense of bohemia while facilitating its own unique artistic identity. It didn’t become a knock-off of New York’s liberal communities. Instead, it took their attitudes and merged them with the sense of creative originality it was enjoying under the influence of isolation.
When REM continued on this underdog’s legacy into the following decades, the importance of this otherwise unknown town had become everlasting. It was, against all odds, a titan of American culture and brought a modernised meaning to the ancient phrase of the “Athens Miracle”.
As Hale crucially explained in her book, “Athens is the place that made it clear to young people across the country that you could do something interesting, creative, important wherever you were,” concluding, “The place that put no limits on you, even if you stayed in a small place.”
