The Return of the Love Shack's House Band : The B-52's hot 'n' sweaty party hit recalls Athens, Ga., beginnings

--From "Love Shack" by the B-52's

The B-52's' irresistible party hit of the fall is a spirited, sultry salute to the days when the band members and their friends passed their time drinking flaming volcanoes and dancing away their youth in their Athens, Ga., enclave.

"There was a club outside of Athens called the Hawaiian Ha-Le," guitarist Keith Strickland reminisced. "Great soul bands would play, people would go there and dance.

"The Love Shack was also an image in our minds, a place that would be out in the country in the middle of a field. A little like 'The Color Purple,' the club scene. A place where people just go to have fun and get down and they're not all concerned with how they look. Hot and sweaty."

If there was ever a group qualified to be the house band at this mythical dive, it's the B-52's themselves, a band of four gyrating vegetarians and cultural cut-ups whose return to the big party is one of the rock decade's more surprising comeback sagas. The band caps its year of the rebound with a New Year's Eve show at the San Diego Sports Arena, then opens a four-night stand at the Universal Amphitheatre on Tuesday.

"It's also a bit like parties we would go to out in the country," Strickland continued during a recent interview in his West Hollywood hotel room. "Somebody would have a keg on the porch. The music would just be blasting and everybody'd be dancing. Everything from Ramones to Patti Smith to James Brown, Jr. Walker."

"Perez Prado," interjected Kate Pierson, half of the '52's' high-profile female vocal twosome. "We had a conga line once where we had an alarm clock: DA-da-da-da-DA-RIING! and we'd set of the alarm. . . . The party would spill out to outside. The doors would be open. Cars and dogs in the yard. . . ."

Strickland and Pierson's nostalgic mood is much like the one that possessed the B-52's when they were writing the songs for "Cosmic Thing," the album where the celebratory "Love Shack" follows some richly-textured, wistful reveries that summon those impossibly ideal days.

While those songs--notably "Dry County" and "Deadbeat Club"--help make it the band's most musically substantial and emotionally rounded album, "Love Shack" has helped make it by far their biggest. It's already joined their first two LPs as a million seller and reached No. 6 on the charts. "Love Shack," their first mainstream hit single ever, made it to No. 3.

They've moved into America's heart not merely from the underground, but from career oblivion and the darkest of tragedies.

Ricky Wilson, the B-52's' original guitarist and the brother of Pierson's vocal cohort Cindy Wilson, died of AIDS in October, 1985, at age 32. His death deprived the group of its musical catalyst and emotionally ravaged the close-knit band.

"It was very difficult," said Strickland, whose serene demeanor and open manner suggest a new age mystic more than a party rocker. "We went to high school together and we had been very close. We were musical partners for years, so I lost someone I loved. We all did."

Pierson attributes much of the new album's maturity and depth to their reaction to Wilson's death.

"When you come out of that situation it is like being reborn," she said. "You can sort of get a spiritual reawakening from it, or you can really slide downhill for a while. But I think creative forces are definitely strengthened after a while."

Added Strickland: "I think we also realized the preciousness of life and what we had together. I think that's why a lot of the Southern imagery and themes kept re-occurring in the new songs. In the back of our minds we kept thinking about when we were together and what we had together."

It's ironic that death would strike a band whose press clips were dominated by the words \o7 zany \f7 and \o7 wacky\f7 .

The B-52's shimmied out of the same college town that later produced R.E.M., crashing the seriously \o7 serious\f7 punk/new wave party with snappy, minimalist dance anthems like "Rock Lobster" and "Dance This Mess Around." With their astounding, junk-store duds and the girls' sky-high beehive hairdos (popularly known as B-52's, hence the group's name), the band brought a Day-Glo sensibility to the scene's gray and black color scheme.

The whole thing grew organically from the Athens way of life. Strickland and the two Wilsons were friends from high school, and New Jersey natives Pierson and lead singer Fred Schneider had gravitated to town independently. Then it was just a matter of time.