Interview: The B-52’s
Everybody goes to parties
They dance this mess around
They do all 16 dances
Do the Coo-ca-choo
Do the Aqua-velva
Do the Dirty Dog
Do the Escalator
— “Dance This Mess Around”
The Crowd crammed to capacity inside the Greek Theater, a 4,700-seat amphitheater nestled in the hills above Hollywood, looks like it’d be more at home at some bizarre, early-Sixties fashion show than at a rock & roll concert. Take, for example, the three girls sitting a couple of rows in front of me. They couldn’t be more than about fourteen years old; they’re so young, in fact, that one of their fathers is along as a chaperone. Each girl is wearing a brightly colored miniskirt — one’s fire-engine red, another’s fluorescent orange, the other’s indigo blue — and their faces are piled with scads of makeup to match. Then there are their hairdos: One has little pigtails sticking straight out each side of her head like TV antennas, another has a braided ponytail hanging down to the middle of her back, and the other has her hair puffed up bouffant style.
In this crowd, though, those three young ladies don’t exactly stick out. The aisles are full of kids, mostly of junior-high and high-school ages, dressed in equally out-of-date garb. There’re plenty of baggy trousers and miniskirts, lots of oddly shaped sunglasses and conservative sports shirts. One thing’s for sure: A good portion of the people here didn’t show up solely to see a concert — they showed up to be seen. And to dance.
Already, as Talking Heads’ new album, Remain in Light, blasts from the PA, several fans are up out of their seats and dancing. When the houselights finally go down, the crowd goes gaga. The response — the cheering, the yelling, the clapping — is so manic, one could easily be led to believe the Beatles had re-formed and were about to walk onstage. Instead, the five musicians who do take the stage — to the wacky accompaniment of a taped African tribal trumpet solo that sounds like the incessant honking of twenty Toyotas in a Tokyo traffic jam — are the B-52’s, the self-proclaimed “tacky little dance band” from Athens, Georgia.
And what a wonderfully ridiculous-looking band they are. At stage left is vocalist-bongo player Cindy Wilson, twenty-three years old, wearing a multi-colored, floor-length strapless wrap. Her dark hair is bundled into a mound on top of her head, and a ponytail hangs down almost to her waist. Next to her is her brother, Ricky Wilson, the group’s twenty-seven-year-old guitarist, who has on a black-and-white checkered sports hat, an orange plaid shirt and pale-blue slacks. At center stage is twenty-eight-year-old Fred Schneider. With his short-cropped hair, white sports shirt with rolled-up sleeves and tan Sta-Prest pants, he looks like Mr. Collegiate U.S.A., circa 1962. Next to him, standing behind the keyboards and dressed in a bright-red cocktail-waitress dress and black nylons, is thirty-two-year-old Kate Pierson. Her red hair is done up in a perfect bouffant, and her red purse is sitting on top of the organ. Finally, back behind the drum kit and dressed all in black, is twenty-seven-year-old Keith Strickland.
As Strickland pounds out the opening beat to “Lava,” from the band’s first album, and Ricky Wilson and Kate Pierson join in on guitar and keyboards, the stage is suddenly transformed into a go-go-style dance floor. Fred Schneider and Cindy Wilson romp back and forth, one minute doing the pony, the next minute the frug. And Kate Pierson, tending to her keyboards with her left hand, throws her right hand into the air and sways up and down and from side to side with robotlike precision.
Out in the audience, the fans are doing their best to follow the band’s lead. Before almost every song, Schneider drolly reminds the crowd that “this is a dance tune.” And, in fact, almost all fifteen numbers in the set are dance tunes — relentless, rhythmic songs built around Ricky Wilson’s scratchy, one- and two-chord guitar riffs, Kate Pierson’s throbbing keyboard bass lines and Keith Strickland’s propulsive drumming, which has wisely been given a dominant place in the group’s live sound mix. Layered on top of all that are the band’s goofy lyrics and trademark vocals: Schneider’s detached, monotone proclamations and Cindy and Kate’s alternately sexy and shrill singing and shrieking.
The members of the audience love it all. Not only do they wildly applaud the opening notes of the group’s best-known songs — “Rock Lobster,” “Dance This Mess Around,” “Planet Claire” and “Give Me Back My Man” — but they greet every number as if it were an anthem. And on certain key lines — like when Fred says, “Then I’m gonna kiss your pineapple” during “Strobe Light,” or when Cindy pleads, “Why don’t you dance with me? I’m not no Limburger” during “Dance This Mess Around” — the audience’s cheers almost drown out the music.
By the end of the hour-long show, I’m convinced of one thing: like them or not, the B-52’s certainly have tapped some nerve in the rock marketplace.
Who’s to blame when the parties really get out of hand?
Who’s to blame when they get poorly planned?…
Who’s to blame when the situations degenerate?
Disgusting things you’d never anticipate
People get sick
They play the wrong games
You know, it can ruin your day
— “Party out of Bounds”
There’s Something I have to tell you,” B-52’s manager Gary Kurfirst says, pulling me aside. “These guys are really quiet. I mean, they barely talk at all. I’ve been managing them for nearly two years, and even I don’t know them. And they’re not very comfortable doing interviews. They’re extremely shy, private people.” It’s three days after the first show at the Greek Theater, and the B-52’s have just finished a concert at the Palladium, a Forties-era ballroom in the heart of Hollywood. The band has played to roughly 18,000 people over the course of its four L. A. shows — and the response at each has been at least as enthusiastic as that first night at the Greek.
Interview: The B-52’s, Page 1 of 5