"Pylon Box,” a set of four LPs and a 208-page book, is out on November 6, 2020. The collection comprehensively showcases the legendary band from 1978-1983. Gordon Lamb examines these five intense years of music and productivity during which Pylon made its mark on Athens, Georgia, and modern music.
Story by Gordon Lamb | Photos by Christy Bush
It was Valentine’s Day 1979 when singer Vanessa Briscoe Hay belted out her first rehearsal with the fledgling band that would become Athens, Georgia’s, Pylon. Recognized for decades as the Athens Art Vanguard, or, at a minimum, a harbinger of it, Pylon took the plain language of industrial production and orderly living, crafted it into poetry, wrapped it around majestically incongruent guitar and bass lines, and laid it all across a solid and dependable drum-based backbone. The second Briscoe Hay first picked up that practice mic to sing was the moment all four would begin a five-year journey that would last their lifetimes.
Not that anyone knew that at the time. Even so, there was deliberateness to the quickly coalescing tunes that her art school friends — guitarist Randy Bewley, bassist Michael Lachowski, and drummer Curtis Crowe — had been working up. “I think that Michael and Randy kind of came into this with a sort of manifesto mindset,” says Crowe. Lachoswki and Bewley were approaching their musical excursions as a new creative space. And, as actual amateurs with no acquired bad habits, the possibilities were limitless. “Randy and I had no background; we patiently just kept experimenting as a team … But, it’s pretty obvious that our expected result would be songs that we could play,” Lachowski says.
That same Valentine’s Day night marked exactly two years since The B-52's had sparked the birth of the modern Athens music scene with their house party debut and a mere two weeks since the now-New York favorites, and residents, had packed their hometown’s Georgia Theatre.
This first group meeting, occurring in that cosmic space between coincidence and convergence, was an auspicious start for the group that is celebrated this month with a vinyl boxed set release (a CD version is forthcoming) courtesy of New West Records. Its title, both descriptive and economical, is simply “Pylon Box.” It compiles the band’s recorded efforts between its first, and most creatively robust, period of 1978-1983. The collected work includes both full albums (1980’s “Gyrate” and 1983’s “Chomp,”) an album of true rarities — no fluff here — named “Extra,” and the oft-rumored but never heard “Razz Tape,” named for its engineer and recorded at the band’s rehearsal space. There’s also a beautifully designed and thoughtfully executed 200-page book with more information and photos than even the most ardent fan could not reasonably consume in short order.
From left: Randy Bewley, Curtis Crowe, Vanessa Briscoe Hay, and Michael Lachowski. Photo by Brian Shanley
Neither Briscoe Hay nor Lachowski had any designs on being in a band. Briscoe Hay never dreamed it was possible, though she had become deeply steeped in the new music of the day. “The new music that entered our consciousness around 1976-77 made a huge impact on what I was interested in listening to at the time,” she says. “Art students had parties where this vinyl was spun or get-togethers where we shared our new records along with a six-pack.” Pretty much everyone in the band had similar tastes in records and there was an unsurprising, if not yet prescient, agreement among them with regard to artists like Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, and Gang of Four. Loosely speaking, Briscoe Hay and Bewley veered more toward tune-oriented vocal new wave and punk, while Lachowski was more taken with the harsher groups like Cabaret Voltaire and DNA. Crowe, perhaps the most traditional rocker of the entire gang, mentions James Brown’s “Live At The Apollo” and the Rolling Stones’ “Some Girls” among his favorites of the time.
With The B-52’s’ exodus, the sudden momentum they’d ginned up was in danger of simmering out. “Randy was my close friend and roommate, and he had to talk me into forming a band together. Music was such a big part of our experience at the time, and The B-52’s had left town,” says Lachowski. “So, Randy just thought that we needed to be a band for Athens. I was hesitant because I was less confident about this particular transgression against my supposed area[s] of expertise, but I’m glad I agreed to pursue it.”
The only one with any experience being in a band was Crowe, and he’d stepped up to the task with this group to break the monotony of hearing Bewley and Lachowski’s near-constant rehearsal of the same riffs over and over. Crowe was acting “landlord” of the dilapidated upstairs office suites at the Myers Building in downtown Athens and had rented them some space. Both intrigued by, and respectful of, the pair’s experiments, he knew he had something to contribute even though his initial, self-declared status in the group was strictly temporary. “I just wanted to be part of a machine. I really thought of my bit as being like part of a machine or power plant,” Crowe says.
For a town so many recall as having very little going on, mainstream observers might have argued otherwise. There was no shortage of pizza parlors, movie theaters, and on-campus entertainment; not to mention multiple middle-of-the-road bars hosting cover bands and serving endless draft beer. However, the University of Georgia and Athens at large could seem woefully out of touch and in no particular hurry to change. Although soon to become a home for all things new wave, campus radio station WUOG 90.5 FM still featured radio plays like “The Best of Sherlock Holmes” and “The Lone Ranger” twice a day. Also, that spring, The Public Safety Commission of the Athens City Council was considering amending its 1960 ordinance banning pinball machines but would not solidify this move toward modernity until later that summer.
Pylon made its live debut a mere three weeks after Briscoe Hay’s audition. In the second floor office space above Chapter Three Records in downtown Athens, in front of a window that overlooked UGA’s expansive North Campus, the band played its first public set. About six months earlier, a nightclub chain named The Mad Hatter took over an Athens spot named The Other Place. At considerable expense, and with no shortage of hype, its opening was celebrated under the headline “Disco Ballroom Opens In Athens,” which couldn’t seem further from anywhere Pylon would ever be.
After that first show, multiple party gigs followed. The band played some summer club shows, too, before heading, with immediate speed and a helping hand from The B-52's, to New York City. In September, Pylon would open for Talking Heads at Atlanta’s Agora Ballroom. Sometime that fall, it was decided the group needed an audio calling card, a demo tape, to help secure future gigs, although that had not yet been any problem at all.
Photo by Christy Bush
Chris Rasmussen, “Razz” to pretty much everyone, had kicked around the country as a Navy brat until finally landing in Atlanta for high school. He first visited Athens around 1972 while his sister attended the university. Already a longtime record fanatic, he rode to town with his buddy, Tony Paris, who would soon become a well-known regional rock critic and, later on, John Cale’s road manager. For now, though, it was two kids scoring records at Bowden’s Music Shop on Athens’ Lumpkin Street and music and novelty shop Underground Records, located in the basement of the Wrangler Steak House at 171 College Ave. The same building’s upstairs floors would eventually serve as the art studios and rehearsal space for Crowe, Bewley, and Lachowski, and later on, for Pylon proper. Razz began classes at UGA in 1974. It wasn’t too many years before he dropped out and took a succession of record store jobs in multiple towns.
He’d long had the audio bug, completely taken with experimental and practical concepts of recording. His first really nice pieces of equipment — a Revox A77 reel-to-reel tape machine and a Nakamichi 550 cassette recorder — were acquired while he was working in Ohio. He came back to Athens to work at Chapter Three Records. “Really, there was no scene at that time. There were no clubs for bands to play original music. There was an art school crowd that appreciated the odd music that was bubbling under the popular southern rock and disco of the time,” Razz says. The store was known as the place for multiple underground and overseas music publications, punk imports, and deep jazz catalogue titles. With the art school building only about a block away, it was an easy drop-in spot for between-class breaks and a great place to while away the time with like-minded folks.
Razz had already cut his teeth recording live gigs by relatively high profile artists and was good friends with Lachowski and Bewley, as well as Briscoe Hay’s then-husband and scene fixture, Jimmy Ellison.
“When I first heard Pylon play, it was like hearing a cross between Devo, Gang of Four, and The B-52’s … yet it was unique and totally their own sound and style,” he says. “So it was only natural that I asked to record them, or vice versa as I often played my live tapes in the store and they knew I had the capability.”
The resulting document would lie dormant for four decades. It’s arguably the most important piece in “Pylon Box,” due to its quality and rarity. Some songs would eventually wind up on official releases, but this tape displays how complete these compositions actually were, even at this stage. The track that would become the A-side of the band’s first release (“Cool” b/w “Dub,” DB Records, 1979) twists life into otherwise dead-on-arrival cliché beatnik/art critic language:
Pure form! Real gone! Like wild! Good vibes! Everything is cool!
It turns what could’ve been stillborn as mere punk rock mockery into a vibrant declaration. Though the band had already named itself Pylon after the industrial safety cones at the members’ weekend factory jobs, the songs on “Razz Tape” show a band with a focused interest in production, attentive wariness, safety, and other industrial concerns (e.g., “Precaution”, “Functionality”, “Efficiency”, and “Information”). The only thing that even approaches a traditional working man blues sentiment is the stand-up "Working Is No Problem," which, after a litany of combative internal monologues, ultimately declares that this, too, is fine as long as one “keeps [their] mind.”
This first group meeting, occurring in that cosmic space between coincidence and convergence, was an auspicious start for the group that is celebrated this month with a vinyl boxed set release (a CD version is forthcoming) courtesy of New West Records. Its title, both descriptive and economical, is simply ‘Pylon Box’ and it compiles the band’s recorded efforts between its their first, and most creatively robust period, of 1978-1983.
The DuPont textile plant was 5 1/2 miles from campus but even more removed than anything resembling regular college-age employment. Its student weekend employee program paid just about 50% over minimum wage. For two 8-hour shifts, one could earn (adjusted for inflation) about $226. Not a king’s ransom, but more than healthily compensatory for two days work and, considering one would have the rest of the week off, these were enviable positions. It did, however, require one to be hyper attentive and skillful to a degree that regular college part-time jobs didn’t. The entire work day was designed for maximum production metered with maximum safety. Briscoe Hay says, “A big sign was posted that had the number of days since the last accident and said something like, ‘At DuPont, safety is our number one priority’… We all wore steel-toed shoes provided by the company and safety glasses.” This is catalogued, nearly to an item, in Pylon’s “The Human Body”:
I have my safety glasses/ I have my safety shoes/ I'm putting in my earplugs/ Use caution in what you do.
At the same time, though, the song is a celebration of the miracle of the “useful tool” that is the human body machine:
I can walk/ I can run/ I can talk … I can lift/ I can drop/ I can sweep/ I can mop.
– from “Volume” first track on “Gyrate”
1980 was a tide-turning year in Athens. In January, Pylon played at the University’s Memorial Hall Ballroom with Athens band Method Actors (one half of which was the incredibly talented songwriter Vic Varney who booked many a tour gig for Pylon; also of note, this same bill would reform at the welcoming Tyrone’s O.C. on Halloween); opened for The B-52’s in New York’s Central Park; and, in November, released its debut album, “Gyrate” – recorded at Stone Mountain Studios — on DB Records. The label was run by Danny Beard, owner of Atlanta’s Wax’n’Facts record store. Beard had astounding success issuing The B-52’s “Rock Lobster” single, and he’d already released Pylon’s “Cool/Dub” single. Now, he wanted an album. It was time. While Pylon’s world was seemingly gaining steam and traction, the next generation of Athens music was already appearing in its rearview mirror. That April, R.E.M. played its now-legendary debut at a birthday party in the deconsecrated St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.
Because things presumably weren’t busy enough, in May 1980, Crowe, along with Paul Scales, moved his studio “club” across College Avenue into the upstairs lounge area (which had, oddly enough, previously operated as “Crow’s Nest”) above the Sub & Steak Sandwich Shop. On a shoestring budget, but with plenty of verve, the 40 Watt Club was born.
The band would begin touring in earnest to support “Gyrate” throughout 1981 and release two additional singles before its sophomore album.
Photo by Christy Bush
The Georgia House of Representatives issued a commendation in 1995 (HR 694) to the Protestant Radio and Television Center for, among other things, “Its production studios [being] available to any nonprofit group — religious, educational, cultural, and social service — having need for its facilities.” Among these facilities was a studio named Channel One; while Pylon and DB Records were not exactly nonprofit groups, they were certainly in need. Stone Mountain Studios had shuttered not long after “Gyrate” was finished. So Beard got them in, and they cut “Crazy” b/w “M-Train” (in record lingo, “b/w” means “backed with,” a way of designating a record’s A-side from its B-Side) and a new instrumental track named “Italian Movie Theme.”
“Crazy” b/w “M-Train” came out in 1981, and “Beep” b/w “Altitude” (recorded at Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s Drive-In Studio) was released in 1982. The decal of a jumping largemouth bass, Georgia’s state fish, on the first, may have been a humorous nod to both ambition and/or being ensnared. The second’s display of a woodpecker chomping two cigars seems more acutely work oriented. The image, or some variation of it, has been used for decades by racing part manufacturers with the best known version being the mascot known as “Mr. Horsepower” designed in the 1930s. Pylon had thus-far been relatively successful in balancing life, but there was increasing pressure for the band to adhere to the machinations of the rock’n’roll industry.
It was time for a new LP, too, and the work had begun during the same series of sessions that produced the “Beep” b/w “Altitude” single.
These studio moments were exceedingly slow-going, though, and dripped across multiple round-trips between Athens and Winston-Salem — a roundtrip drive of almost 600 miles. This exhausting process finally bore fruit and the resulting early-1983 album, “Chomp,” was both sonically and compositionally superior to “Gyrate.” The music had become simultaneously darker, even on certain tracks where the guitar lines seem to open up and exhale, and more polished. Further, whereas “Gyrate” opened with hopeful lyricism:
Volume is pleasant/ If you like the source/ There is no reason to be discouraged/ Don't be discouraged
“Chomp’s” start is a plea spun from exhaustion. Beginning with a decidedly post-punk scrape of a tune, “K,” Briscoe Hay cries out:
Dissatisfaction, what? … I'm tired of moving my jaw/ Gonna call my pa and ma …
The emotional rawness of both “Crazy” and “Yo-Yo” reveal a very different mindset from that of “Gyrate” and its clean admiration for the utopia of mechanical reproduction and strong bodies. Even the genuinely romantic “No Clocks”
Sometimes it's nice/ to stay in bed/ be a sleepy head/ just you and me
is a far cry from “Working is No Problem.”
In a 1981 story for The Red & Black, an Athens-based student newspaper, Bewley and Briscoe Hay were quoted as saying, “This isn’t entertainment,” and, “This is war,” respectively. A certain amount of that intensity was surely tongue in cheek, but by 1983, the band, who had long since accomplished its sole stated goals of playing New York and being written up in the New York Rocker, was feeling the battle was dragging on and becoming a real drag itself.
On April 24-25, 1983, Pylon opened for U2’s now-legendary War Tour. This was a truncated schedule from the one originally planned and agreed to largely out of a sense of duty. For two nights previous (April 22-23), Pylon had been in Athens playing the opening dates for 40 Watt Club’s new, and now third “official” location on Broad Street, necessitating a long and tiring drive to the first gig in Norfolk, Virginia. “From the moment we hit the stage, people were shouting, “Get off the stage,” and, “We want U2,” Briscoe Hay recalls. Crowe feels the entire thing was a little overblown, and no one could have expected to gain new fans opening for such a hot ticket. “The very best you could hope for would be the crowd not booing you off stage,” he says. “We settled for not having things thrown at us.”
This incident and the gradual accumulation of industry pressure pulled things into focus: this wasn’t what they wanted anymore. The band, conceived as a continuation of the party The B-52’s had begun, was nonplussed about adopting the industry’s prescriptiveness. Pylon made its decision. It would play one final show on Dec. 1, 1983 at The Mad Hatter, the disco born mere months ahead of them.
The band ran through a 20-song set, received thunderous approval, and then it was over.
Athens had changed a lot in the nearly five years since Briscoe Hay made that first step toward a microphone. Student journalists were regularly giving lengthy and thoughtful reviews to punk, new wave, and post-punk acts. The local band scene was overflowing with new groups and WUOG was at the forefront of taste-making college radio. Athens may still have been the new music capital of the world, but it was no longer America’s best kept secret. Bewley’s original aim of filling a void had been satisfied by an exponential factor.
Pylon’s legacy in all this was secured early on — and for all the poring over it, critical analysis, and perhaps, even historical revision, it’s probably best to just enjoy what they produced and not over think it all. As Crowe says, “It’s really not that complicated. We were just four kids entertaining ourselves.”
Gordon Lamb is a senior writer and critic for Athens, Georgia’s alternative weekly newspaper, Flagpole. His book Widespread Panic in the Streets of Athens, Georgia was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2018.
Christy Bush is a photographer based in Athens, Georgia. Her work has been featured in publications and exhibitions all over the world. More of her work can be seen on her website here.
