The B-52s and Ricky Wilson: Reckless Drivin'

Lost Masterpieces

Doing laundry the other day, and looking for some way to entertain myself, I decide to listen to the entire B-52s discography.

Is this because David Lynch recently died, and I’m craving actual, real (“real”), camp? Maybe. Until the aforementioned “other day”, I’d never for a second have given this band any serious thought (they sing about food), although, I will always admit that “Love Shack” really rules and has not just survived but thrived in my head. Though not nearly as much as the lifetime-playing-in-my-head-chart-topper, and I put my face in my hands as I admit this given the current context— YMCA.

Anyway less than a minute into their first single Rock Lobster (1978), I feel like a zen master of serendipity and magical instinct, because I’m immediately a fanatic of this band from Athens, Georgia. This is the band I need right now, for so many reasons, and I thought I knew nothing about them but everything I’m now remembering makes me just love them more and more and more.

How to sum them up for the uninitiated reading this post. Maybe the first lyric on a band’s first release is a good touchstone to get a feel for the essence of who they are?

The Beatles “Love, love me do”

Pink Floyd “Arnold Layne had a strange hobby”

Stooges “So messed up, I want you here”

Led Zeppelin “In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man”

Velvet Underground “Sunday morning brings the dawn in”

Black Sabbath “What is this that stands before me?”

ABBA “People need hope, people need lovin'“

Aerosmith “Good evening people, welcome to the show”

Joy Division “I was there in the backstage”

Sonic Youth “I'm not afraid to say I'm scared”

Pavement “You’re killing me, killing me again”

Eminem “My pen and paper cause a chain reaction”

Jay-Z “I'm out for presidents to represent me”

In the case of the B-52s, it’s “We were at a party”. I rest my case.

The band has this beautiful dynamic where the leader, singer, and senoir member are all unclear. Fred leads, but doesn’t sing or play an instrument. Katie Pierson is the oldest member of the band and sings lead on most tunes, but it does not feel like it’s more her band than anyone else’s. Given the band’s improvisational approach to songwriting, Ricky’s guitar playing in unconventional tunings has got to carry as much weight as the other personalities in defining their aesthetic and the edge to their mood. And somehow their fashion and expressive identity, based in very little taste, and so much trend or fad energy, has actually got raw power in its disconnection from anything that has ever been meaningfully popular or cool. Cue the convoluted essays on camp, etc. or rather just enjoy these beautiful freaks.

That first self-titled record has everything the band needs to claim major turf— in fact Rock Lobster has enough on its own. Nothing good is not funny, and one song opens with the lyrics

“There’s a moon in the sky

It’s called “the moon””

This song also shows off Ricky’s alternate tunings on the guitar, which I ignorantly thought until now were invented by Glenn Branca and only used by Sonic Youth and 90’s bands influenced by them. I’m owning it and taking my talking to.

That first record made a resonant splash for an otherwise unknown band, and helped start post-punk in 1979, about five minutes after punk had started.

But it’s on the second record, Wild Planet, that this band becomes something so much more than the sum of its parts. Three songs are really blowing me out of the water:

“Party out of Bounds” — “who’s to blame when parties get out of hand?” has any poet ever asked a question that has such enduring relevance? Endlessly prescient. The sampled breaking glass, the way they create an atmostphere of sustainable interest with the simplest of tools, this is classy stuff. Inspired leftfield backing vocal melodies on par with Contraction.

“Dirty Back Road” — Ricky’s tuning approach in full effect. A groove I know I love, but doesn’t get stuck in my head, cannot be played there, I have to listen to it to enjoy it. The camp melts into something pretty deep and vulnerable in this one, and like the next, it shows this band has more to say than just who ate all the ranch dip.

“West of Venus”— The overarching theme here is a complete lack of narcissism, vanity, conceit, egotism, I can’t quite land on it. But this band is just bloomingly emotionally healthy. The sound manipulation is as good as anything touting itself to be 10 times more psychedelic than this band.

As for their name— Fred heard it in a dream, someone whispering in his ear that he should name the band the B-52s. No they are not named after an airplane, but after a hairdo, a variation on the beehive that was said to resemble the nose cone of the famous bomber. “Nose cone” … poetry follows this band everywhere it goes.

Ricky died in the mid-80s. I stopped there with the discography. The band sort of jumped the shark anyway with “Wig”, anticipating Katie’s collaborations with R.E.M. and Iggy Pop, which in retrospect feel like she was co-opted a bit— like the uncomfortable feeling of mainstream culture catching up with the B-52s positive vibes, and record execs putting her voice and sound front and centre on some swan songs of shaky blokes, burning out those posi vibes while Nirvana had started working on “Bleach” and the next wave of moody guitar people would totally submerge them.

But not before they reached greater heights than ever before with “Love Shack” and “Roam”… possibly helped by said collaborations I guess… and really well-deserved, gorgeous songs. I can’t think of a more successful transition of a band surviving the death of a major contributor besides AC/DC. And the Love Shack video was RuPaul’s first television appearance. Maybe that’s another post. But yeah the 90’s saw the band peak and then quickly vanish. You’d think that between David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino this band would have survived but those two were too cool and too straight to hope to adhere to these beautiful people’s energy.

Recently in Canada the legality of psylocibin, the hallucinogenic component of 116 species of mushrooms, has entered a grey area, and as such a shop called Golden Teacher opened on Dalhousie Ave. (duh) by the corner of Rideau (duh). I did not know about this change of law, and on a visit the shop to find out just what the hell is going on I spoke to the dude behind the desk, behind a pair of holographic potleaf sunglasses. I asked about the typical customer, and he divided them into two camps. He eexplained that some come in saying they’re very nervous and have never tried the drug before, and are looking for something very gentle with a small dose, to find out what it feels like and ease into it. Others, he said with a grin, come in and say to him, “I need a reset”.

Imagine walking into a liquor store, and when the clerk asks what you might be looking for, you reply “I need a reset”.

In these times of (insert gripes about current social/political/cultural conditions) my soul needs a reset, and the B-52s is it. Their camp doesn’t combine sympathy and revulsion like Sontag’s— the revulsion is nowhere to be found. Sympathy, or rather compassion alone expresses the detachment necessary to take aesthetic excess and calmly make a beautiful living out of it that everyone can enjoy.

<3

Anyway back to laundry. Relatable: