Begin the Begin. Robert Dean Lurie

from the “old days.”

       Atlanta Civic Center, December 31, 1984. Photo © Joanna Schwartz.

      Chapter One

      There are not many allusions to sex—even to romantic love—on those early R.E.M. albums. Not that the four band members were cloistered ascetics—far from it; it’s just that Michael Stipe was trying to get something else across in those days, something to do with two-headed cows, Man Ray, a drunk named Pee Wee, and Brer Rabbit. So it may come as a surprise to learn that R.E.M. was born of an old-fashioned instance of boy-meets-girl physical infatuation.

      When Kathleen O’Brien first laid eyes on Bill Berry at the beginning of 1979, she had already been a student at the University of Georgia for several months, having taken up residence at Reed Hall in fall 1978. Situated directly alongside the gargantuan Sanford Stadium on the north side of campus, Reed Hall was a paradoxical place: a dump by any conventional standards, yet fondly remembered to this day by generations of alumni for the very qualities that made it seem so inhospitable at the time: lack of air-conditioning; small, cramped rooms; loud, clanking pipes; the very same horrendous carpeting that must have lined the rings of Dante’s Inferno (you know, the type where the threads have been ground down into the rubberized base so the whole surface is smooth and sticky, the color of Georgia red clay mixed with shit). And the men’s wing had communal shower rooms reminiscent of those found in prisons. Such adverse conditions really brought people together, and during the early fall and late spring months, it was impossible to survive in that building without leaving your door wide open; otherwise you’d have suffocated in the stale, humid, cigarette smoke–saturated air.

      The consequence of all those open doors was dorm-wide conviviality. Let’s say you’re walking down the hall of the first-floor men’s wing, you casually glance in one of the doorways, and, hey, wait a minute, that guy’s pulling a Clash record out of its sleeve. And you thought everyone here only listened to Southern rock. Lifelong friendships were kindled by such chance encounters. If you had, say, a fondness for marijuana, you could discern pretty quickly which rooms were occupied by fellow enthusiasts. Some believed that if they exhaled into a poster tube stuffed with socks they could mask the smell, but in those cramped surroundings they weren’t fooling anyone. Everybody was in everybody’s business, and for a certain concentrated period in a person’s life, that can actually be comforting.

      The Reed Hall I’m describing here no longer exists. With the best of intentions, the powers that be overhauled the building in the late 1990s and equipped it with all the modern conveniences—air-conditioning and individual shower stalls, for instance—that tuition-paying parents expect for their children. Now those kids sit squirreled away in their little climate-controlled dens. Doors remain closed, and the soul of the building is gone.

      But back to Kathleen and Bill.

      After catching that first glimpse of young Mr. Berry, Kathleen told her friend Sandi Phipps that Bill was a “fox.” It’s easy to see the appeal. He had a feral, wolfish appearance: wiry body; thick, tousled hair; hooded Robert Mitchum eyes; a complexion that looked slightly Mediterranean; and thick eyebrows that stretched across his forehead in a nearly unbroken line—a feature that would have been distinctly unattractive on just about anyone else but on Berry served to accentuate his uniqueness.

      That initial encounter occurred in the Reed Hall mail room, right off the first-floor lobby. Few, if any, words were exchanged, but Kathleen ascertained through the grapevine that Bill had recently arrived at UGA from the central Georgia town of Macon, home of the Allman Brothers. To this day, nearly everyone who has known Bill characterizes him as “a good old boy from Macon,” even though he actually hails from Duluth, Minnesota, and did not set foot on Georgia soil until the age of 14. Something of the South got into his blood, though. Some years later he would tell an interviewer that he and his bandmates were “not ashamed of being Southerners; we’re proud of the fact . . . Like most Southerners, we’re easygoing and don’t usually get uptight.” Berry had fully internalized this mind-set by the time he arrived at UGA. He even had a slight drawl.

      Nineteen-year-old Kathleen was lean and long-legged (her friend Diane Loring Aiken reckons she had the greatest legs of anyone ever). Her sleepy green eyes, perpetually arched eyebrows, and devilish grin hinted at a worldliness that most of her peers did not yet possess. She had already lived on her own and was more self-sufficient than many of her friends in Reed, most of whom had come straight from their family home and were accustomed to being taken care of (and cleaned up after). And she was often the instigator of some seriously high-octane blowouts that transpired in Reed’s previously mentioned subbasement (or “subwastement,” as she calls it), of which more later.

      Kathleen O’Brien grew up in the Atlanta suburbs during an era of significant racial upheaval. Government-mandated integration was in full swing, and for the first time in Georgia’s history, a robust black middle class was emerging. Half a century later, few would argue that this was in any way a bad thing, but any great social transition carries with it considerable tensions. The newly affluent black families did what anyone in their position would have done: they began to move into the more upscale (read: historically white) neighborhoods. Kathleen’s family lived in one of those neighborhoods, in southern DeKalb County.

      “We stayed,” she recalls now.

      We didn’t really have a problem with [integration]. But massive white flight ensued and we were one of the few white families left in the neighborhood. By the time I got to seventh grade, pretty much all of my friends had already moved. I had plenty of black friends at that point, but what I experienced was that some of their parents didn’t really want their kids hanging out with a white girl.

      Once she reached high school, Kathleen herself became an involuntary white flighter. “The high school I was supposed to go to had become predominantly black at that point,” she says.

      This happened over a period of, oh, maybe three years. It went from pretty much lily white to completely black, and it was a very strange time. My brother ended up going there but he had been mugged a couple of times. And my mother was afraid that if I went to that high school, something horrible would happen to me because of my tint of birth, you know, since I wasn’t going to put up with any bullshit.

      Because of these concerns, Kathleen’s parents devised an elaborate plan that would enable her to attend high school close to where her mother worked at the CDC, then known as the Center for Disease Control. They rented an apartment off Claremont Street that they proceeded to furnish and stock with food. “It was basically a little high school pad for me and my brother,” Kathleen says. The family held on to the apartment for a year—long enough to convince the county that they really had moved. Then they ditched the apartment while continuing to use the address for school documentation.

      From our current vantage point, it’s easy to ascribe racist motives to those parents who pulled their kids out of schools en masse in the 1970s, although most of them acted out of genuine, if often exaggerated, concern for their children’s safety. The “white flight kids” themselves by and large accepted racial equality as a given. Many of the protagonists of this book came from such a background, and, as we will see, they mostly developed markedly progressive political and social views. Had their parents all been virulent racists that would likely not have been the case.

      Georgia-based lawyer and sportswriter T. Kyle King grew up in a section of Atlanta where the transitions were not quite so extreme as they were in Kathleen’s neighborhood (his family did not feel the need to uproot, for instance), but his views reflect those of the majority of white kids who grew up in Atlanta in the 1970s and early ’80s: “In the 1970s, metro Atlanta still felt like ‘the South,’” he says.

      But it was changing, though we didn’t know it at the time. Race was as ancillary an issue as it ever is; the South had come through a tumultuous time in the ’50s and ’60s, so the tone of race relations was subdued in the ’70s and early ’80s. I know I never thought much about the rather remarkable fact that I was going to school with black kids my own age, and, in retrospect,