TURN OVER!
DRUMMER KEITH STRICKLAND ON BURROUGHS, DEBUTS AND BEING GREEN.
“People didn’t quite know what to make of us, but they liked the songs. We had some friends in an Atlanta band called The Fans and they said, ‘You should go to New York and play,’ and it really didn’t enter our minds before to do that. There was an odd thing about us – there was no leader, really. I would say, for the musical direction, Ricky and I were writing the songs, so that kind of formed the way the sound was going. Then Kate, Fred and Cindy would improvise over that, and it was sort of a cut-and-paste method, sort of sticking it all together, a group effort. We’d collectively make a decision. It was perplexing to our manager and to the people who were in the business – we would all sit there and we were all a little bit shy and a little bit green. [So] when we went to play Max’s Kansas City for the first time, which was our first professional gig outside of Athens, we thought, This is great, we played where The Velvet Underground used to play. We thought that was it, the apex of our career. So we went back to Athens and they wanted us to come right back up, so we played there again. There was just a real dynamic between all the bands [on the scene], and everybody was really encouraging. I remember this little dive restaurant near CBGB’s and after our shows, we would hang out there with Brian Eno and Richard Hell. William Burroughs was there one night too. Later, before we released a single, Lux Interior [The Cramps] told us, ‘You gotta put out Rock Lobster.’ There was this sort of innocence [we had] – ‘We’re just doing this for art.’ We did the first album [The B-52’s, 1979] really fast. It was songs we’d been playing for a while so we didn’t have to rehearse. We just showed up in the studio and [producer and Island records boss] Chris Blackwell just wanted to get it on tape. I remember him saying, ‘I just want to record you. I don’t want any effects, I don’t want any overdubs. I just want the way you sound.’ I thought, It’ll be fine. So we go into the studio and the sound was very sterile. I was saying, What? This is awful! It was very naked, there wasn’t a lot of ambience. We were all pretty mortified with the way it sounded, and I thought it was going to bomb. But in retrospect, it was a really smart move because it’s a document, and it was something that did give us a singularity where we weren’t that polished, but it was really together. When you’re in the midst of it, you really don’t realise what’s going on – you’re thinking, It’s always been like this, it will always be like this. But now I see it and I go, Nope! (laughs) It’s definitely not that way now. And I realise what an amazing, historic time that was.”
The B-52’s Live! 8-24-1979 is out in August on Real Gone Music
Drummer Keith Strickland on dreaming of art, Lux Interior and hating their debut album. “PLAYING MAX’S KANSAS CITY… THE APEX OF OUR CAREER.”