![]() ![]() Love Tractor was the first Athens band I heard on WUOG, the campus radio station. ![]() When I arrived to my dorm as a freshman I met so many people who turned out to be part of the Athens music scene: Mercyland bassist and future producer David Barbe was the first person I met. ![]() On the night of our crazy graduation party I was sitting in a car with a classmate and her boyfriend who was a freshman at UGA (foreshadowing Matthew McConaughy’s role in Dazed & Confused) smoking a joint and he popped in a cassette and said, “You should be aware of these guys…they are a band from Athens where you’re headed in three months and they’re getting popular.” Those guys turned out to be REM. Also there was a secondary reason of the fact that UGA had been named the #1 party college in America by Playboy Magazine which sounded good to me. The USA Network had a late night weekend show called Night Flight which went deep with artsy videos (Laurie Anderson) and concert films (John McLaughlin, Paco De Lucia, Larry Coryell’s Meeting of The Spirits) which really flipped my world.ĪD: Per your interest in attending school in Athens, was the (then) recent emergence of a burgeoning music scene a consideration?ĭave Schools: Honestly, the main reason I chose to attend UGA was that I could get early acceptance which meant that by Thanksgiving 1982 I knew where I was headed for college and could thus fuck off and chase girls for the rest of my senior year in high school. ![]() I quickly learned how to tell the difference. MTV of course was killing off classic rock acts while at the same time taking some pretty daring chances with weirdness from abroad both strange and wonderful as well as overhyped plastic acts with no redeeming features. Shockingly I owe a huge debt of gratitude to cable tv at the time. Needless to say I still have yet to buy the UFO live album. These albums opened an entirely different pandora’s box that went far astray from my previous diet of Beatles, Who, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Tim made a deal with me saying, “Why don’t you buy these two records instead and if you don’t like them you can bring them back and I’ll give you the UFO album for free.” The two albums were The Ramones’ Rocket To Russia and the infamous Stooges official bootleg Metallic KO. He changed my life when I approached the counter to buy a live album by the band UFO. Tim was one of the disinterested clerks with big opinions about music. Gary’s was the kind of place that sold LPs, had a stereo sales department in the back, and in the front had a long glass counter that showcased marijuana paraphernalia which was manned by a couple of stereotypically opinionated yet disinterested clerks. More important in my developing taste was a guy named Tim Bookman who worked at Gary’s Records and Tapes at Willow Lawn shopping center. I was turned on to the B-52s when the station ran an interview with Debbie Harry in which she extolled their virtues. I remember hearing Tom Petty, Blondie, Elvis Costello, and Steely Dan on the same station. There was XL-102, a less commercial station, that played a wide assortment of what was then already being called “classic rock” as well as newer music (now considered classic rock). What was your musical diet like at that time? Do you recall some touchstone artists that were informing your tastes and listening habits?ĭave Schools: As a native of Richmond VA my musical tastes were limited to what the local FM stations foisted upon me. Now in their 37th year as a working outfit, we connected with founding member and bassist Dave Schools from his home in northern California to discuss the evolution of the band, the early influence of Athens, GA, collaborations, their DIY approach, touring, mentors and beyond.Īquarium Drunkard: Following high school in Virginia you moved to Athens, GA in the early 80s to attend the university. And like the Dead, they did all this without bowing to the constraints of traditional album and tour cycles. Like the Allman Brothers before them, the band were keen to stretch out when performing live, incorporating all manner of voodoo into their ever-evolving sets.īy the mid-90s Panic found themselves commanding huge rooms, playing to a dedicated audience reminiscent of the kind of fervor historically associated with the Grateful Dead. Formed in Athens, GA in 1986, Panic notably eschewed contemporary musical fads, and instead pulled from the deep well of the region’s soul, blues, folk and rock traditions. Growing up in Atlanta in the 1990s, Widespread Panic were something akin to the home team, and a fiercely independent cottage industry at that. ![]()
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