If you go
› What: Pylon Reenactment Society› Where: Songbirds Guitar Museum, 41 Station St.› When: 7 p.m. Saturday, March 3› Admission: $20› Online: songbirdsguitars.com
While a student at the University of Georgia in Athens in the late '70s and early '80s, Vanessa Briscoe (now Vanessa Briscoe Hay) thought it would be fun to join a few fellow art students and form a band. She certainly didn't know she was about to be part of history.
"It was exciting because it was such a brand new thing," she said in a phone interview.
"We were all very young, but one night I was downtown and R.E.M. was playing upstairs in the original 40 Watt Club. There was nothing else going on outside, but there were these two girls standing on top of a big ol' landboat convertible and one of them said, 'We're making history.' I was thinking, 'This is not a major city, so how could all this be happening?'"
‘Athens,Ga/Inside/Out’ screening
As an added bonus to the Pylon Reenactment Society’s show, Bill Cody, producer of “Athens, Ga/Inside/Out” is sending a special reel of performances from that movie to be shown prior to the performance. The 40-minute video reel will start promptly at 7 p.m., then the band will perform.
Vanessa and her classmates - Randall Bewley, Curtis Crowe, Michael Lachowski - formed Pylon, and for many, including the guys in R.E.M. who have repeatedly said that Pylon deserved more credit, they were one of best of the Athens New Wave groups that also included The B-52s. Pylon was at the forefront of the movement and Hay was the lead singer.
Pylon's debut single, "Cool," was released on DB Records in 1979, and was followed by their first full-length album, "Gyrate," in 1980. "Crazy" (1981) charted at No. 61 for club play in Billboard and was followed by "Beep" (1982).
For Hay and the rest of the band, however, it was always about having fun, and when they started feeling outside pressure to tour and record more and to sell more records, it stopped being fun.
"About 1983, Pylon decided to break up for the first time," Hay said. "It had become more business-like and less fun. There were a lot of pressures and we were all like 27 years old and people were telling us what we had to do. We were like, 'We don't have to do anything. We are going to just stop.'"
She said they didn't give it another thought for awhile, but when some of the bands they'd left back in Athens took off, they did wonder if they'd gotten out of the game too early.
"You can't predict the past 'cause something else ... something bad ... might have happened, but we went on to live our lives. Then R.E.M. took off and we kept getting fan mail and we talked with B-52s and they all said maybe the world might get you now."
R.E.M covered "Crazy" on their album "Dead Letter Office" in 1987, the same year that the film "Athens, Ga/Inside/Out" came out and featured several local bands giving props to Pylon.
They reformed in 1989, opening some shows for R.E.M., and for the next several years got back together on occasion for mini tours. Bewley died of a heart attack while driving his van in 2009, and Hay said at the time that "Pylon died when Randy died."
Interest in the band did not.
Hay joined several Athens-area musicians in forming the Pylon Reenactment Society in 2014. Always a force during the band's live shows, spinning, kicking and pogoing, she says "I can't do all the kicks and spins, but I still have a lot of energy. The music takes you somewhere."
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.