Pink Floyd told us that we don't need no education.
I don't want no argument with rock-and-roll royalty, but perhapsthe band failed to considered higher education. I say this because -- to borrow one of Jack Black's lines from the movie "School ofRock" -- colleges quite clearly "service society by rocking."
Think of it this way: Without colleges, we would have no collegetowns. And without college towns, we'd be out a lot of great music.No Athens, Ga.? No R.E.M. Get rid of Charlottesville? Get rid of thebirthplace of the Dave Matthews Band. Axe Chapel Hill, N.C.? Lose thelaunching pad for the piano tunes of Ben Folds.
These college towns are laboratories, creative enclaves wheremusic bubbles, swirls and mutates into more infectious strains. Theyare the primordial ooze in which some of the best American musicevolves -- or, if you prefer, is created.
I'm no music clerk, but I knew all this in a book-learning kind ofway. But to really understand the workings of college music towns, Ineeded more than that.
I needed a field trip.
Days would include driving, browsing record stores, hanging out incoffee shops and strolling leafy, attractive campuses. Nights wouldbe spent partying like a rock star -- or, at least, with one.
My planned stops -- Charlottesville, Chapel Hill and Athens -- are three of the Southeast's classic college music towns. In additionto bad parking, each has a vibrant music scene and a good recordstore or two. They also support a variety of small and mid-sizevenues: That means you can chat with musicians after sets, not justsquint through binoculars or stare at the Jumbotron.
So in mid-September, I was excited to leave my home in Atlanta formy first stop. The moment reminded me of another great rock-and-rollmovie: It was 550 miles to Charlottesville. I had a full tank of gas,half a box of Wheat Thins, it was daylight and I forgot mysunglasses.
Hit it.
Eight hours later, my Blues Brother impression still sucked. But Ihad arrived at the home of the University of Virginia, whose elegantRotunda and stately "academical village" were designed by ThomasJefferson himself.
A stroll around the U-Va. grounds was tempting, but my first stopwas the downtown mall, a pedestrian corridor paved in bricks andlined with restaurants. I passed the afternoon and early evening inthe area, snacking on cantaloupe gelato in the shade of willow oaks,surfing the Internet at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, and eatingoysters and egg rolls at Bang!, an Asian-accented tapas restaurant acouple blocks off the mall.
Yes, I'd already morphed from rock-and-roll pilgrim to yuppietourist.
Then again, Charlottesville didn't immediately strike me as a punk-rock kind of town. The Corner, a classic collegiate strip across thestreet from U-Va.'s grounds, has bands, bars and debauchery, butmusic there seems to serve mainly as background for college kidsdrinking and socializing (the relatively new Satellite Ballroom is anoteworthy exception).
The mall and its environs have better venues, but the bookshops,boutiques and art galleries there ooze an easy, affluentcosmopolitanism. That's not bad, but it's a vibe more conducive tomusic that's fun, mellow or rootsy -- Matthews, who took off herein the early '90s, seems to fit, as does the bluegrass-inflectedAmericana of the up-and-coming Hackensaw Boys.
Yet you can't quite pigeonhole Charlottesville -- not when oneof its more successful bands is Bella Morte, which established itsdark, gothic sound on releases like "The Death Rock EP."
This mix of styles can carry over to audiences. My first nightout, I hit Gravity Lounge, a bookstore/art gallery/music venue offthe mall, where I joined a roughly 40-person melange of mohawkedpunks, middle-aged couples and even a toddler-toting mom. Theaudience was united only by the rapt attention they paid to raven-haired Lauren Hoffman, a Charlottesville singer-songwriter now basedin New York who is, apparently, possessed of a history of passionateyet ill-fated romance.
"Don't ever fall in love with a solipsist," she sang under a lineof blue lights hanging from the ceiling.
Good advice, but I ducked out to grab a table at Miller's, a topspot for jazz and a magnet for Dave Matthews pilgrims who know theiridol used to tend bar there. Gushing about Matthews at Miller's willonly make locals roll their eyes, but there are other reasons tovisit -- like jazz trumpeter John D'earth, who's also the U-Va.music department's director of jazz performance.
With a lanky frame and burst of white hair, D'earth has playedwith Lionel Hampton, Bruce Hornsby and a slew of Charlottesvilleartists, including Matthews. D'earth's current group, the ThompsonD'earth Band (singer Dawn Thompson is D'earth's wife), still squeezesjust inside Miller's front window on Thursday nights.
That's when I visited, sipping a Pabst Blue Ribbon and watchingband members trade solos as red neon glowed behind them.
The next night, I joined the shaggy-haired and white-kids-with-dreadlocks crowd at Starr Hill Music Hall, perhaps Charlottesville'spremier venue. Drinking a microbrew produced at Starr Hill's ownbrewery, I watched high school and college kids stream up the stairsuntil I felt ancient . . . at age 28.
Reinvigoration came from the reggae beats and high-energy vocalsof New York's Easy Star All-Stars, who got me -- and everyone else -- dancing on the hardwood floor. So this was currentCharlottesville music, I thought: folksy, jazzy and funky, butwithout a hard edge.
Then I headed to the Outback Lodge, a restaurant and nightclub ashort drive from downtown. Kim Dylla, singer for local metal act ThisMeans You, was pacing the stage in fishnet stockings and a leathertwo-piece. Her primal shrieks convulsed a small mosh pit dominated bya large man with a mohawk, tattoos down both arms and a black tanktop reading "Die Yuppie Scum."
Afterward, metal fan William Drumheller complained that suchperformances were too rare in Charlottesville. "Nothing coming out ofthis town," he said, "is something your parents would hate."
A 1999 graduate of the University of North Carolina, I always findChapel Hill pleasantly isolated from the world, with students amblingalong brick walkways and beside the town's low stone walls. EastFranklin Street, the main drag, distills the college town essence:It's got an old-timey drugstore (Sutton's), a neon movie marquee (atthe Varsity Theatre), a killer indie music store (Schoolkids, in twoadjoining storefronts) and a string of bars and cheap restaurants.
But for a hip, vaguely countercultural atmosphere, you've got togo to West Franklin Street, where fine dining restaurants and winebars mix with stores selling everything from vintage clothing tobongs and hookahs ("All products intended for tobacco use only," saysthe sign at Hazmat). At Internationalist Books, you'll find literarymagazines and left-wing periodicals with names like the NortheasternAnarchist.
Happily, the music listings in the Independent, a free weeklynewspaper, led me to a West Franklin venue: Local 506, a concrete-floored, smoke-filled club whose entryway is covered in handbills andwhose vertical gutters are plastered with band stickers.
Inside, in the glow of a black light, I scanned a club schedulebefore moving to the building's back half, where boxy, riser-stylebenches (not to mention a cage for dancing) lined a small room with amodest stage. From an inky corner near the soundboard, I watched twolocal bands open for the Makers, a punk rock/glam rock hybrid thatrecords on Seattle's Sub Pop label.
The Makers exploded onto the stage behind frontman MichaelShelley, who looked like Prince and strutted like Mick Jagger. Givenhis persona, it didn't seem too surprising when Shelley pulled downhis shirt mid-set so a female audience member could touch his nipple.It did seem a bit odd when she massaged it with an ice cube beforeabout 30 onlookers.
Nipple icings aside, Chapel Hill's scene struck me as darker,edgier and weirder than Charlottesville's. The town's top clubs haveless light, more graffiti in the bathrooms and a spareness thatoccasionally verges on dilapidation. One, the Cave, has beenplastered to resemble a dank tunnel.
The gritty ambiance jibes with Chapel Hill's reputation as anindie rock town. In the early 1990s, it was widely tagged the "nextSeattle" because several local bands -- indie rockers Superchunk,Polvo and Archers of Loaf -- seemed poised to duplicate themeteoric rise of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the rest of Seattle's grungescene. Instead, it was Ben Folds's piano, as well as the Squirrel NutZippers' hot jazz, that went big time.
Since grunge was still a dominant influence at the time, thoseartists were innovators, local music journalist Gavin O'Hara told meover coffee. "Some of the most restless and experimental music in thecountry has been made here."
It's not just rock, either -- bluegrass, alternative country andhip-hop (though that scene is more Durham-centric) live here, too.Grammy-nominated Tift Merritt, for example, whose mix of country,rock and soul sits a bit outside the Nashville mainstream, launchedher career in the area.
You have to go to nearby Carrboro for Cat's Cradle, the localscene's most prestigious (and possibly dirtiest) venue. Still, I wasat Wetlands Dance Hall, a newer spot near campus, when I saw one ofmy favorite bands of this odyssey, Chicago-based Palaxy Tracks. Aftera set of wistful, slightly melancholy rock, I told one of theguitarists they'd played a great show and that it was a shame it hadbeen to a nearly empty room.
He smiled and thanked me. The band had, in fact, already jokedabout the "crowd" from the stage.
This is what you don't learn at stadium shows: In music, you'dbetter have a sense of humor.
All that remains of St. Mary's Episcopal Church is a red steeple,a chunky, orphaned monolith with vines crawling across its cupola.Three letters carved near the steeple's plywood-covered door explainwhy I was staring as if I'd found a Mayan pyramid. They read "R.E.M."
Back when those initials referred primarily to a stage of sleep,not to a collection of stadium-filling rock gods, the band practicedand played its first show -- a 1980 birthday party -- at thechurch. Its steeple is now a stop on the Athens Music History WalkingTour, produced by Flagpole, a free weekly paper.
The fact such a tour exists -- much less that it attractsvisitors from Europe -- underscores the influence of a music scenethat began its rise to international prominence in the early 1980s,when bands such as Pylon, Love Tractor and R.E.M. played houseparties and small clubs. Wuxtry Records, a music-geek heavendowntown, also operates the Athens Music Museum, a room filled withmemorabilia including concert handbills and rare releases from actslike the B-52's, the original Athens party band.
Mike Richmond, guitarist and vocalist of Love Tractor, couldn'tquite put into words the magical atmosphere that has spawned so muchcreativity. Instead, he showed it, driving me though neighborhoods -- a Southern Gothic world of white-columned mansions and small-but-elegant porches -- where he and others lived, partied and playedshows on staircase landings.
"Everyone lived in these houses and it was cheap, you know, it wasjust really out of the spotlight of the world," Richmond said. "Itwas kind of a paradise, the deep, sleepy South."
"Sleepy" no longer describes downtown Athens.
Legions of bars and restaurants populate its Victorianstorefronts, tables spilling onto sidewalks. Mutually hostile tribesof khaki-clad University of Georgia frat boys and hipsters withunkempt hair and canvas Converse sneakers roam the streets. Thelatter's home turf, though, is the epicenter of the music scene: WestWashington Street, which hosts venues like the 40 Watt Club -- Athens's best-known rock spot -- as well as the Pain and WonderTattoo shop, its windows edged in painted flames.
The sheer number of musical options on any given night isdaunting. Flagpole publishes a music directory that lists nearly 550local bands and solo artists and more than 30 music venues, the bestof which are within walking distance of each other.
On a Thursday evening, I started out with an early show by the BoxDevils, a trippy, psychedelic blues duo who played the intimateFlicker Theatre and Bar, another West Washington club where a lamp inthe shape of an owl sits atop an upright piano and wall lamps castgentle puddles of light.
Then I faced a choice: the fun, synthesizer-laden pop that OfMontreal was playing at the 40 Watt, where I could commandeer a rattysofa? The reunited Pylon, playing at Nuci's Space, a music-resourcecenter next to the R.E.M. steeple? Or the heavier sounds ofCinemechanica at the Caledonia Lounge, a bare box for indie rock?
In the end, I split time between Of Montreal and Cinemechanica,mostly because they were playing almost next door to each other. Bothgood shows, but I later learned that Michael Stipe and Mike Mills ofR.E.M. -- who still live in Athens -- had been dancing to Pylon.
Now that would have been cool.
Beginning with the arty alterna-rock of the early '80s, Athens'smusic has gone through phases; the late '90s and early 2000s, forinstance, belonged to the psychedelic pop of the Elephant 6collective, an amorphous group of musicians involved in such bands asOlivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel. Widespread Panic,Phish's apparent successor as the nation's jam-band kings, has alsoleft its mark.
Now, locals say the scene is diverse, with a strong bluegrass andAmericana scene, as well as jazz, hard rock and country.
"Not only will you get to see anything, but you'll get to seegreat music," said Bob Sleppy, executive director of Nuci's Space. "Ithink one of the great things about Athens is that kind of friendlycompetition breeds really great work. The people sitting herewatching you are musicians, too, so you want to put on your bestshow."
True. But after more than 1,200 miles driving, nearly 30 musicalacts and many, many cheap beers, I needed sleep. And water. Andprobably hearing aids.
Luckily, I went out one more night, because I discovered myfavorite band of the trip -- an all-female, Chapel Hill rock duocalled the Moaners -- at Tasty World, a club across the street fromthe university campus.
Alternately reclining against the bar and the red steel girdersthat support the building's upper floors, I tapped my foot as singer-guitarist Melissa Swingle sneered her wicked Southern accent over aslide guitar. After the show, I made a halfhearted, exhausted attemptto strike up a conversation as Swingle ordered a beer, but shebrushed me off.
Yup, time to go home. I was starting to feel like a groupie.
Ben Brazil last wrote for Travel on Ouray, Colo.
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