Review: 'Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture'

In the late seventies, The B-52’s magnetized the pop world’s attention to Athens, Georgia, where a new scene was starting to coalesce. There was no particular Athens sound. The-B-52’s kitschy retro party rock was nothing like Pylons angular avant-funk or Bar-B-Q Killer’s chaotic punk or Vic Chesnutt’s gritty songcraft or R.E.M.’s jangly Nuevo folk rock. But the fact that so much varied creativity was blossoming in a particular location was noteworthy and highly influential. That creativity expanded beyond pop as students and artists attracted to a bohemian oasis in the conservative state invented new ways to express themselves and hang out. They got inventive on the cheap with weird food-oriented art shows or made spectacles of themselves while people watching. Outside artists such as Matthew Sweet were drawn to the Athens to catch some of its magic.

A member of local band Cordy Lon and cofounder of the Athens venue Downstairs, Grace Elizabeth Hale pours her memories into Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture. Her book is not a memoire, although she provides a personal perspective of the scene and pops up in the narrative. It is a thorough history of the scene told from an insider’s p.o.v. and buttressed on thorough research (she conducted over 50 interviews to flesh out the story). Like Timothy White’s The Nearest Faraway Place, Cool Town is a pop history inseparably entwined with geographical history. It surveys the location and the breadth of the art scene while also providing satisfying mini-biographies of the biggest Athens artists.

 

Cool Town is nostalgic without wearing rose-colored glasses. Hale takes issue with the outside press’ stereotyping of southern culture while acknowledging the local prejudices within and without the scene. She acknowledges its progressiveness while recognizing and lamenting its lack of gender and racial diversity. She expresses the kind of unshakable love and heartfelt disappointment usually reserved for family members. The Cool Town story is multifaceted enough to be interesting without Hale’s personal perspective, but that perspective is what makes the storytelling moving and absorbing.