2005-08-27 - 2:37 a.m. - Party Out Of Bounds, by Rodger Brown
A gappy, jumpy history of the "Golden Age" of the Athens, GA scene that always has just enough detail to offer delicious anecdotes, and not enough to really be useful as a biography of any of the bands or really the scene as a whole. The overall arc is shaped well - Brown sells the idea of the Athens scene coming together mostly by coincidence and boredom, and it growing stale once it gets too big and well-known. Unfortunately, the individual personalities sort of blur together, with only a handful seeming to have distinct voices, motivations, and attitudes. Almost everybody just sort of comes across as wild party people saying "Hell yeah!" a lot to life's little opportunities, which I guess is sort of the point but it means you don't get to learn much beyond the halfway point that you wouldn't learn better from a book specifically about REM. (The non-REM bands after Pylon all get mentioned, repeatedly, but their personnel changes and lack of success don't make for big stories or even, it seems, juicy anecdotes.)
Really, the biggest pleasure in reading this is spotting all the local landmarks that we now know and love and/or hate. For example, I learned that Bill Berry once worked the breakfast buffet at the Ginkgo Tree Restaurant & Lounge, which is the one cool thing I've ever heard about the breakfast buffet at my job. The book also offers a healthy reminder of how scuzzy and cheap Athens used to be, which makes one nostalgic even more than all the talk of reckless abandon, easy dirty sex, and people actually doing crazy, spontaneous shit that didn't just amount to "getting really wasted." The last bits of the book sort of manage to convey how the rot set in, and in a sense how inevitable that was. So you kind of finish on a bummer note, which doesn't exactly make you feel like you've been through an out-of-bounds party.
As an incidental note, this guy has a sickening fondness for overworked, overheated prose and horrific phrasings like "This was the summer of the thrashdance, the newpunk." (That's not actually a quotation, but it might be by accident.)
Long story short, if you've lived among the Athens scenesters, and especially if you've grown kind of sick of them, this book will offer some fun tidbits and maybe some food for thought; outside of that, it's crummily-assembled post-punk sociology with rather little to recommend it, even to fans of the bands (the B-52's, REM and Pylon) that get the most treatment within.