DO YOU DIG THE B-52'S?

DO YOU DIG THE B-52'S? MESOPOTAMIAN ARTIFACTS FOUND ON PARTY BEACH

FEATURES

Toby Goldstein

Forgive me, but I didn’t recognize them without their hair. Minus those awesome creations that are equal parts Towering Inferno and laundromat leftovers, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson—two out of three B-52’s who lounged around their manager’s office—were simply petite, friendly girls who talked funny. Kate’s been in charge of the desk, planning to conquer the world by making up the world’s biggest guest list. ‘I love lists,” she drawled, with an evil gleam in her blue eyes, but that you could have guessed from the epic tale of “52 Girls” and all the Betty Crocker variations in “Cake.” Kate’s real hair, a shock of perm growing longer by the minute, is a bright carroty color.

Across from her, sitting on a sofa, are Cindy and Keith Strickland. Keith’s soft attractive features must have made him a real crush-able type in high school, and when he speaks, each line is a zinger. Any of the 52-men would please Central Casting as mild-mannered reporters for a great metropolitan newspaper. I later learn that singer Fred Schneider almost was one, switching his college major from forestry to journalism when they asked him to cut down a tree and he refused. But he dropped out after sea creatures started crowding his dreams.

Cindy is what I have always perceived as the image of a cheerleader, except her giggly sweetness has a soul-saving weird warp right through the middle. She has long, yellow-blonde hair that hangs straighter than you’d get with an iron. Deep hatred. She smiles widely and laughs often, showing a set of gleaming white teeth. Massive envy. She has big, saucer eyes and a perfect complexion. Arrggh! She’s so cute I can’t stand it. Fortunately, the girl says Slime was one of her favorite toys which, she reveal with mock horror, used to stain the walls even though the manufacturers promised it wouldn’t.

"When you're on a soap opera, in the TV Guide, you've really made it. --Cindy Wilson"

The B-52’s always were good consumers, experts at recycling the flotsam of the marketplace, and their 'mastery of items like super-powered wigs and beach-side lingo is one of the talents that makes them permanent fun. Another is the fact that, from the first moments of “Planet Claire” on their first album straight through the final strains of “Nip It In The Bud” on Mesopotamia, the B-52’s have remained true to the shake ’n’ fingerpop spirit of the dance. They are synonymous with the iconic phrase that still wins records a “95” in the eyes of American Bandstand’s gumcracking teenage judges: “It’s got a good beat, maaan, andja can daaance to it.”

And so you can and thus it was for almost 90 minutes in at New York’s Roseland^jphere upwc of 10,000 paid admisltojT contdded themselves along the 52’s tour trail. While there weren’t too many spectacular dressups in the mob (the best wig was"ct-darki tower on promoter Ron Delsener’s prPwP descent daughter), the audience was appropriately frenetic, bobbing and weaving on the rose colored carpet, shaking and shimmering under the 60-year-old spidery light fixtures. Where there was no more room to execute lavish steps, they leaped in the air and landed in place, apologizing when a bead of beer landed in someone else’s Pepsi bottle. The B-52’s draw a pleasure-seeking crowd, equally at home in minidresses and button-down collars, quietly proud and deliciously past being trendy. Despite their apparent disposability this group could never be fad-of-the-week, then conveniently forgotten.

When the band, assisted in the set by two vigorous horn players, returns to sing “Rock Lobster,” the room starts to resemble front row at a midnight “Rocky Horror Show” screening. Everybody sings the words, mimes jumping in the water, shrieks in terror at the approach of a bikini whale. “At a lot of our shows, the audience is singing louder than we are,” says Keith with pride. “There was a bunch of scremers in the front row last night." adds Kate. "Every five seconds—AAHHHH!!!" She lets fly a blood-chilling roar, and since she was located maybe two feet away from me, several inches into the ether. This band is not kidding when they say their greatest pleasures come from mutual freak-outs with their audience.

The B-52’s invite excess, and immediately turn the resulting shock waves into a very commercial sound. You probe the parameters of the absurd, I speculate. “We probe the parameters and the perimeters,” Kate agrees. The idea of a Three Mile Island wig comes to my mind, a sleek funnel with a smoke machine inside little white deadly plumes. Since Kate already owns one wig called “The Guiding Light,” in honor of the group’s "Appearance on that particular soap opera, anything is possible. “It’s a flip with a real beacon at the top, a real tower, with things falling off it.”

Says Keith, “We did that show a few weeks ago. They have this club called Wired for Sound, and a lot of things take place there, so they were getting real groups. We did ‘Private Idaho’ and ‘Throw That Beat In The Garbage Can.’ What’s that town—Springville, Springfield?” Kate: “We were thinking of moving there for a while.” Cindy: “My parents got a real kick out of that. They were really impressed. When you’re on a soap opera, in the TV Guide, you’ve really made it.”

We ponder the prospects of future tube conquests by the B-52’s: guest shots on CHiPs, a commercial with Barbara Mandrell, a visit to the Harper Valley P.T.A. Hey, this is America, land of opportunity. It can happen. “We were accused in the British press of spreading the ‘American trash aesthetic,’ ” says Keith, with obvious glee. On the other hand, the Japanese were so involved in emulating the B-52’s that Kate and Cindy were fooled by photos of their fans looking exactly like them. Among other souvenirs of that visit, the group was given a shopping bag full of seaweed, which they are consuming even now.

Kate reveals another shocking fact: she will not eat lobster, as she recoils from the scream the poor creature emits as it is chucked into boiling water. As Keith says, the lobster has become the group’s own albatross. Yet they get all the crustacean capers out of the way with nary a grumble. Let’s' face it, these routines are now five years old and aging fast.

1)The giant lobster episode: Kate: “Once at the Mudd Club the stage collapsed when this giant lobster jumped up on it.” Cindy: “That was the silliest guy in the world!.We warned him not to do it, but he jumps onstage during ‘Rock Lobster’ and everything caves in and there’s this big hole and the drums start sinking in. And that night Frank Zappa and William Burroughs were there.”

2)Lobster hats, or that was no tentacle, that was my wife: Kate: “We’ll go play somewhere and there'll be lots of people with those plastic lobster hats. I feel like we’ve spawned a Frankenstein lobster. They’ve got these big crustacean legs on ’em. I see them chasing me in my sleep.” I find it unlikely that I’ve never seen a set of lobster claws adorning headgear on the streets of New York City, where nothing is abnormal and nobody looks twice.

Part of the reason we started the band was because you had to create your own entertainment. -Kate Pierson

However, enough of this overgrown seafood. Leave it to Woody Allen and let’s return to our discussion of the serious stuff of life—namely, Kate and Cindy’s wigs. Wigs have not been given their proper place in society. Dorks like the Rolling Stones make fun of ’em by slipping their heads into the cheap street jobs on the cover of Some Girls, and it’s just another way for that pseudo-transvestite mob to be oh-so-ambisexually brave. Hah! Unfunny comedians working the borscht belt and over-the-hill crooners infesting the television talk shows to do their act with obvious rugs on the bonce. This hole-in-the-wall joint in my Queens neighborhood has a window display of “macho hair”—fake goatees and mustaches, right next to a pair of full headpieces that wouldn’t look matching on dimestore dummies. With all this dreck dominant, you have to admire the unsparing artistry of the B-52’s’ toppers. I must have earned the right to enter the inner sanctum, because Keith suddenly consults with the girls. “You have to tell her about Phyllis,” he says.

The northern Westchester suburb of Yorktown Heights hides the secret soul of the B-52’s. Run by animposing, curly headed woman named Phyllis, Tiffany Wigs in the Triangle Shopping Center is the source of all this headmania. Phyllis can do anything, chorus Kate and Cindy, judging her a “wig sculptress. People bring her their roots from all over. The wigs got reviewed in the New York Post and she was ecstatic. They’ve got all sorts of structures in ’em—steel girders, flying buttresses.” “Industrial webbing,” adds Keith, only in my delirium, I hear what he’s said as “industrial waste.” Now there’s a thought, they agree, imagining wigs as a hiding place for toxic effluent. After all, the one Kate had worn at the show last night was a high-topped oval sufficient to conceal either enemy radar or pods from an alien vessel. “It hit the microphone last night. When I bent over to adjust the synthesizer, the mike nearly went through the middle of it. I would have been stuck on it.” WIG IMPALES WOMAN BEFORE GAPING THOUSANDS-MORE NEWS AT 11...

"We’d play pygmy music and all the cows In the field would gather ’round. One night they all dropped their heads In rhythm to the music. —Kate Pierson"

For anyone who’s been living in Borneo since ’ 1978 and has just discovered this motley crew of Georgians (with two New Jersey transplants), the B-52’s took their very name from a voluminous wig style, not the offensive weapon. Kate: “The wigs have become bigger but we always wore ’em before we started the band, at parties. The big thing was to go to the Potter’s House, the thrift store, and find an old ratty wig. Sometimes we’d find a good one and two people would tear at it and get it all knotty. Sometimes we’d put two wigs on top of each other and a high heel on the very top. That made a festive atmosphere.

“We were inspired by wigs in Fellini movies and hairdos from when Diana Vreeland was editor of Vogue, all those abstract hairstyles.” Cindy: “And in Georgia, here too, there’s lots of waitresses. And don’t forget the trailer-park gang.” Kate concludes, with a straight face, “there’s always that desire to do something with your hair.” This is all the result of some collective drug-induced hysteria, I believe, but soon realize that in fact, the B-52’s grew up like garden variety youth, only they had a strange way with hair, and with animals.

Descended as we all are in a long line from Mesopotamia and other of civilization’s origin points, the B-52’s congregated in the college town of Athens, Ga.; where Cindy, her brother Ricky and Keith were raised. Fred came to town for educational purposes, Kate to raise goats and cower whenever tornadoes loomed darkly in the sky. Gradually they grew to understand each other, to drink vast quantities of coffee in the town’s thriving after-hours hipster haunts and discover that they were brought together to party, for their own sakes as well as those of the hollow-eyed millions who now own B-52’s records and feel fast relief.

Here’s where the animal part comes in. Kate recalls, “we had eclipse parties. We’d play pygmy music and all the cows in the field would gather ’round, ’cause they were curious and mainly ’cause they thought we’d have food, and nod their heads. One night they all dropped their heads in rhythm to the music; it was real eerie. A cow cult.” Cindy: “Don’t forget about how the goats jumped on your car. You’d always have these hoofprints going across the roof.” Add to these tales the weeks spent indoors because it was caterpillar season and the crawlies would get in their hair, and a band of much-needed escape was born.

Kate: “Part of the reason we started the band was because you had to create your own entertainment.” Cindy: “And we couldn’t afford to drink except on quarter nights. I was a waitress, and you had to pay the rent.” Keith: “Especially at the beginning, the one idea we did have was that we wanted to be a dance band. We haven’t thought about it too much since then, now that’s we’ve got this momenttm. It’s just how we write.”

The B-52’s developed as naturally and inexorably as spontaneous combustion. Their traveling vehicles grew larger, from an old station wagon dubbed Kroton to a van where they slept on top of the equipment to a country ’n’ western bus, rented from George Jones, with an interior “like a Mexican restaurant,” says Keith. Their method of composing has remained the same, as the quintet retreat into their house (especially during bug season), jam and free associate for all they’re worth. Divine poetry like Cindy’s wailing, “Why don’t you dance with me, I’m not no Limburger” is the consistent result. All the B-52’s are asking anyone to do is dance this Mesopotamia around, and when Kate gets handed a Biblical tract about that imaginary land, she reads it, shrugs it off, and returns to expanding her knowledge with a set of antique World Books. “We take what we do seriously, but we don’t wanna take ourselves too seriously,” she states.

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And that is certainly a key to the B-52’s bringing David Byrne along to produce Mesopotamia. He’s been lambasted for making the band ponderous and too weighty, but, they hasten to point out, asking the head Head around was their idea. As far as they’re concerned, it was an ideal team-up. Even if he didn’t wear a wig. Byrne would regularly tape his eyebrows up or down, expressing his anger or sadness at a given moment. The group agrees that David would make an ideal host for a rock ’n’ roll nature program on TV, starring the B-52s and others of that ilk. Imagine, like a Marlon Perkins of the cosmic beyond, a Byrne wading onscreen in hip boots and casting a line, only to snare Cindy’s coiffure. Take them to the river.

Kate: “We went on the Mojo radio show after;our show in Detroit. Mojo initiated us into the Funk Association. [Say whoa! —Ed.] He had us doing everything, made us sound like chickens. He took us to the Outer Sublimina.”’And I’ll bet that, to the. B-52’s, it looked just like home. Except maybe without the caterpillars.