Pylon

TOURISTS IN ROCK AND ROLL

Legendary Athens Band Pylon Finally Gets the Deluxe Treatment

BY LEE VALENTINE SMITH the collection, it’s the return of Pylon music. 2020 HAS BEEN AN HISTORIC year in many ways and in the Athens Music Community it’s also a time a celebration of Pylon, not only one of the classic bands of the Georgia Music Scene People can finally get it on vinyl again, or online or in the box set. I think eventually they’ll all be gone because it’s a pretty limited edition. It’s pretty expensive, but there’s a lot of information inside. but of the entire new wave movement. The influential band of UGA art students played their first live show in 1979 and by 1980 were getting noticed nationally, thanks to support from The B-52’s and interest in the nascent Classic City art-music-party landscape. Fast forward four decades and the early music and artifacts of the group are getting international attention again, due to an incredible new box set and reissue campaign from New West Records. In addition to a massive box set which includes an albumsized book and four remastered LPs, their first two albums are finally back in print and the band even has its own signature blend of coffee from Jittery Joe’s in Athens. The quartet comprised of Vanessa BriscoeHay, bass guitarist Michael Lachowski, drummer Curtis Crowe and the late Randy Bewley remain one of the most-lauded and referenced of their generation. In a press release Crowe marvels: “We fully intended Pylon to be an almost seasonal thing that we were gonna do for a minute and then get on with our lives. But it just never went away. It still doesn’t go away. There’s a new subterranean class of kids that are coming into this kind of music, and they’re just now discovering Pylon. That blows my mind. We didn’t see that coming.” INsite recently spoke with Briscoe-Hay and Lachowski by phone from Athens. The book contains some extremely rare stuff. I saw pictures I’d never seen before. Michael: It was a big effort, to try to dig a little deeper in the images and to find some stuff that hadn’t been used over the years, much or in some cases, at all. Some of the pictures hadn’t been seen by anybody other than the photographer all these years later. How long has this project been in the works? It’s obviously not something that happened in a few months or probably even this calendar year. Vanessa: It’s been percolating in my mind for quite a while. After Randy died and then DFA reissued some of the stuff. The first two albums. I kept having people come up to me and say, I’d really like to get a copy of Gyrate or Chomp but I can’t find one. Or I can find one and it’s seventy-five or a hundred dollars on the internet.’ I started seeing that there was some interest in the band and I started getting the business side of things back together. You know, the unglamourous side of things that nobody really wants to talk about or deal with. But it’s important. We were a young band and when we started, we didn’t have a lot of things in place. We didn’t do it correctly but we were kids and we didn’t really care about all of that. I knew if we were going to move to a label that had any business side in place, we’d have to get organized. Phillip Walden, YOU’RE RIGHT, WHEN WE MADE THAT FIRST SINGLE, WE HAD NO IDEA IT WOULD EVEN BE AROUND THIS LONG. IT’S PRETTY EXHILARATING, REALLY. Who would have thought, when you released that first single [“Cool” backed with “Dub”] in 1979, one day you’d have a $150 box set on the market? Vanessa: (Laughs) I know! But it’s been a Junior helped us at first before he passed away very tragically. We got our publishing rights back, set up a publishing company and set up an LLC. We knew we’d need all of this stuff in place. lot of work. Michael: It’s quite a testament. But when you add in a book and four records, it’s a lot of stuff. Part of the fun is the box set but part two is the first two zalbum are finally being reissued on vinyl. And just as important to that, everything from the box will be available on streaming platforms again. A lot is already on there now. Aside from our third album, which isn’t a part of The very necessary part of a working band. Vanessa: Exactly. It’s stuff that nobody really wants to do but it has to be done. After all that was in place, a couple of years ago, we started gathering up all the tapes and masters that we could find. Stuff that was probably used a doorstop, just gathering dust in a studio somewhere. So we rounded up all of that. We got some

stuff from Mitch Easter in North Carolina, Jeff Calder in Atlanta brought some stuff from Southern Tracks, I had some, Randy had some. Then it all had to be baked and digitized. It took a long time.

Did you pitch the project to labels once all the pieces were in place? Vanessa: We got a business plan together and David Barbe helped us get a lawyer. Once we had the pieces all together, we saw that we had quite a bit of stuff. At first we thought it might make a double album set with all the outtakes and singles. We would’ve never even considered doing that in the old days. We proposed it to several people and got three offers back. The one that really stood out was New West. Not because of how big it was or how much money they had, it was just a good fit for us. They have an office in Athens and roots here. They put out the Glands’ box set a while back and it was very well done. Jason Nesmith was so helpful with the heavy lifting. But almost everybody that heard about the project wanted to help us. And they really did! But then we needed graphics. Of course, Michael is our graphics guru. I’d been contacting photographers for years, looking for stuff. Michael is also a photographer and he had a lot of stuff that he’d never printed. So it turns out that most of us had saved stuff except for Curtis who really didn’t have much due to all of his travelling around.

Then you actually donated the Pylon archives to the library at UGA. How did it feel to let go of stuff that you’d saved for forty years? Vanessa: It actually feels good to let go of stuff. We had boxes of stuff to sort through. Then for the book, Brady Brock at New West, the executive producer of it all, he had an idea to show a lot of these items in book form, to really make it comprehensive collection and a little bit of a behind-thescenes look at the band and what it was like to be a young touring band in those days. Every now and then I’d look at all the stuff I’d saved but it wasn’t often. I asked my girls several times if they wanted any of it. They love Pylon and they love me but I don’t think they have any interest in inheriting twenty boxes of magazines, clippings and flyers. Old clothes and whatever. It should be somewhere where people can have access to it and maybe get a picture of what it was like to be a band in those days. It’s so different than now. Those were very exciting days. Now some of it is in the exhibit and that’s pretty exciting to know that what we did will live on in some way. There’s an exhibit at UGA of some of it, named after a line that I used to say about the band. I said we were “tourists in rock and roll” because we were geeks just having a good time.

How did the book evolve? Michael: [Chunklet Magazine founder] Henry Owings helped a lot. He’d done a book for New West before and any idea I had, he ran with. I had in mind that it’d be a sixteen or even thirty-two pages. Just a little fun thing to flip through as you listened to the music. But Brady had in mind that we should include a history of the band in sizable detail and he was really fond of including images of ephemera, like the expense book or reels of tape and clothing. So that all ended up in the book and it kept expanding. Now its 200 pages and the whole thing, the whole campaign really is a way to provide something new and exciting for existing fans of Pylon and new fans, too. It tells the story in full for someone who might be completely new to Pylon and it’s been exciting to see the whole project come alive. You’re right, when we made that first single, we had no idea it would even be around this long. It’s pretty exhilarating, really.

Pylon Box and individual reissues will drop Friday, November 6. Visit newwestrecords.com for more information. Additionally, the exhibit Pylon: Tourists In Rock and Roll runs through May 31, 2021 at the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Libraries, Brown Media Archives Gallery, located at 300 South Hull Street in Athens.