As the B-52’s singer and keyboardist Kate Pierson tells it, guitarist Ricky Wilson introduced the riff for “Rock Lobster” by saying, “I’ve just written the stupidest guitar line you’ve ever heard.” Yet another bit of proof that in rock’n’roll, just because you’re being stupid doesn’t mean you aren’t a genius.
This quintet of mostly gay, party-loving, college-town dropouts—which included Wilson’s sister Cindy on percussion and vocals, vocalist Fred Schneider, and drummer Keith Strickland—had plenty of time in Athens, Georgia to put together weird party outfits and draw from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies during jam sessions. They absorbed the lean styles of punk and post-punk—a music of provocation, antagonism, anger—and subverted it with color, American postwar iconography, and a gleeful refusal to be anything but who they were. Drawing on the cinematic soundtracks of Morricone and Mancini and the experimentation of Yoko Ono and Captain Beefheart, their 1979 debut, The B-52’s, is a 39-minute transmission from the past, present, and future.
“Rock Lobster” and their 1989 hit “Love Shack” are widely what the B-52’s are known for. Those massive singles, along with the band’s retro-Atomic look, have defined them in the public eye. But they’re so much more than their own tagline, the “world’s best party band.” They’re a band that went almost immediately from playing house parties in Athens to being peers of Talking Heads and Blondie. John Lennon famously told Rolling Stone shortly before his death that “Rock Lobster” inspired his return to music because in it, he heard evidence that popular music had caught up with Ono.
In old interviews, the band says they’d only played a couple of ad-hoc house shows in Athens before trying their luck in Manhattan, driving up and back to play gigs for a few bucks and exposure. They were a live hit almost immediately, drawing fans to Max’s Kansas City and CBGB and getting the dourest post-punk scenesters to at least bob their heads along. Live videos and recordings from those first couple of years convey a wild energy propelled along with precise rhythms and an astounding amount of confidence. When the B-52’s showed up, it was a great party that could go way off the rails.
That was the theme of “Rock Lobster,” which they decided to release as a single to help book more shows and broaden their reach. Danny Beard, the owner of Atlanta’s Wax’n’Facts record store, created DB Records for the purpose and recorded and released the single in April 1978. It sold 20,000 copies and launched DB as a critical part of Georgia’s indie ecosystem that would release albums by Pylon, the Jody Grind, and Love Tractor. By June, they’d gotten their own story in The New York Times. They were irresistible interview subjects, this group of friendly and kind Southern people who told stories about their day jobs as waiters (Fred) and renting land on a farm to keep goats (Kate).
In 1979, they signed to Warner Brothers in the U.S. and Island in the UK, and went to the Bahamas to record their debut at Compass Point Studios with Chris Blackwell. Armed already with a monster single, the band consciously held back a few live hits for their second album, the more slickly produced Wild Planet in 1980. The B-52’s came out sounding raw and live because Blackwell wanted to accurately capture their electric sound in the rock clubs, which had won rabid fans with its danceability and maximal minimalism. It got them mentioned in the same breath as post-punk heavyweights Devo and Wire as art-punk on its release. That rawness worried the band at first, who found it “sterile,” Strickland said much later, but it served the songs well.
It was their performances that really turned fans rabid, and their look almost demanded they go on television immediately. A legendary performance on “Saturday Night Live” reached innumerable young Gen X musicians who were captivated by this outlandish dance band that was a perfect introduction to art rock for children: “Rock Lobster” could both get played on Dr. Demento and make young ears receptive to experimentation.
On opposite sides of the country, pre-adolescents Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain both watched the band play “Rock Lobster” and “Dance This Mess Around.” They would later refer to the B-52’s as formative music and style influences, and point to the debut as an example of a great album on a major label, since, in 1991, the ability of a major label to release a good record was actually a subject broached in interviews.
Major label or no, it’s still one of the most outright bizarre albums to sell over a million copies. From the opening Morse-code beeps of “Planet Claire,” the band’s interstellar obsession is foregrounded. Its “Peter Gunn” riff, Pierson’s keyboards, and wordless vocals make up the first two and a half minutes of the song before Schneider starts singing. It’s about their willingness to let tension build to the edges of discomfort, to startle a listener who might have thought this was going to be an instrumental only to start yelling at them about a planet where all the trees are red and no one ever dies or has a head. “52 Girls” follows that with as close to a straightforward punk song as anything they’d record with its frantic beat. Cindy Wilson goes from breathy seduction to howling menace within seconds in “Dance This Mess Around,” which then returns to a list format, this time dances instead of girls’ names.
Side A concludes with “Rock Lobster,” which remains the world’s unlikeliest novelty party song. It’s constructed like prog rock, sounds like the avant-garde, has surreal lyrics and one of pop’s most memorable guitar riffs. Several distinct sections make up the song’s nearly seven minutes. After that stupid guitar kicks things off, Pierson and Cindy Wilson chime in with “skee-do-be-dop” and Schneider starts telling the story of this beach party where someone finds a rock lobster. Don’t ask him why, but things are going to get weird because of that. At the point where the song might end if it were a straightforward tribute to beach movies and surf rock, a key change takes it to Yoko-land, where Schneider’s lyrics become more and more surreal and his calls are answered with guttural wails and the sounds made by marine life as processed by a malfunctioning See ’n Say. Those sounds were a conscious tribute to Ono, the ones that caught Lennon’s attention.
Second only to “Rock Lobster” in influence is the band’s intense paean to fandom-as-cannibalism and perhaps the first Riot Grrrl song ever sung, “Hero Worship.” “God give me his soul,” wails Cindy Wilson about her idol, who she intends to devour. Wilson croons and screams her way through this beautifully subversive anthem. The lyrics, far darker than anything else on the record, were written by friend of the band Robert Waldrop who would later pen the words for Cosmic Thing’s inspirational “Roam.” That’s a pretty and touching song, but “Hero Worship” is a raw and primal vocal performance on par with “Gloria” or “Rid of Me.”
To say that one particular singing performance stands out on this album is to really say something. The band’s vocals alone would have created an inimitable audio signature with the acidity of Schneider’s irritated nasal deadpan speech surrounded by the sweetness of Pierson and Cindy Wilson’s earthy belting and unearthly harmonies. But in addition to three frontpeople, the B-52’s were blessed with a guitarist of singular talent. Ricky Wilson’s practice of removing his guitar’s middle strings and using two strings for the low notes and two for the high continues to fascinate and influence guitarists who puzzle over his tunings in YouTube videos and on message boards.
I was 11 years old when I first heard Wilson, after a friend said to me, “You like weird stuff, you should listen to this tape my big sister likes.” She played me “Quiche Lorraine” off of Wild Planet and my life was ruined instantly. I immediately bought every record of theirs I could find over at the local Camelot. At the time, Bouncing off the Satellites was filling up cutout bins and it seemed like they were a band of the past, as this was a couple of years before “Love Shack” and Cosmic Thing served as both comeback releases and the extra security of their place in the canon. My first concert was one of their medium-venue tour dates for that album and I stood there at the front of the stage hypnotized by Pierson’s fringed dress, hair up in a home-dyed beehive that would require an emergency visit to the hair salon the next day for un-teasing, memorizing the sequence of the set list. That show cemented my conviction that bands with both boys and girls in them were always superior to bands that only had boys in them.
Finding out that the other world this album is transmitting from is actually accessible on this earth is key to the joy radiating from it, especially for the young misfit listener who realizes that planet is not in another galaxy but in a sweaty, dancing crowd. It feels like they took to heart the overt message of disco, which said that there’s a place for everyone at this party, and joined it with punk’s lack of care for the straight world’s opinion. That musical and ideological pairing created songs that could light up a dance floor and stir up a pit. It’s the most wonderful thing, the ability to be arty and dancey and have killer riffs. Their peers in Pylon managed to do the same thing. Imagine being Danny Beard, and having your label’s first two singles be “Rock Lobster” and “Cool”!
No one has ever felt not-cool-enough for the B-52’s. That is part of their dance music legacy, possibly: Where underground music was about not being like everybody else, about purposefully staying outside of mainstream society, disco was about welcoming everyone to the party. It’s also part of their queer legacy. The band’s legendary heartbreak was the loss of Ricky Wilson in 1985; suffering from AIDS-related illnesses, Wilson concealed his diagnosis from his friends and family and his death was a shock. His was one of the first AIDS deaths in music at a time when the disease was highly stigmatized and poorly understood and was sometimes reported as being the result of “lymph cancer.”
Until the early 1990s, the B-52’s talked more about their vegetarianism than their sexual orientation. With four queer members out of the founding five, they chose to present themselves as if it were a foregone conclusion, so normal or obvious that it wasn’t worth mentioning. While the conversation around outness has developed since then, their matter-of-factness was a beacon for young and questioning queer people at the time. Writer Clifford Chase used the album as a frame for his struggles with acknowledging his own sexuality in his essay “Am I Getting Warmer?” He found the lack of overt explanation made him feel safe: “In ’There’s a Moon in the Sky,’ Fred assured me that if I felt like a misfit, there were, in fact, ’thousands of others like you! Others like you!’ and since he didn’t specify what those others were, I didn’t have to be afraid.”
With the exception of perhaps the Fall, there’s not another post-punk band that can claim such a consistently positive track record in terms of who they’ve inspired. Steve Albini and Madonna claim them as an influence. “Hero Worship” is all over Sleater-Kinney, who also forego bass guitar and have complementary vocalists, and who recorded a song with Fred Schneider for a 2003 Hedwig and the Angry Inch tribute record and covered “Rock Lobster” (with Fred Armisen) in their live shows.
As both cutting-edge innovators and authors of unkillable party hits, their career resembles a smaller-scale version of those of other artists who’ve been held in both high artistic and commercial esteem, and yet their trashy and flashy visual branding and biggest hits have contributed to a less integrated place in the canon where they’ll forever be the beehive-wearing, cowbell-banging, “TIN ROOF! RUSTED,” “Flintstones”-soundtracking screamers of their biggest hits.
The band has said that their retro wardrobe was a simple matter of cheap access to old clothes and a desire to put together fun and attention-getting party outfits. It’s hardly the worst fate to be known for an iconic look and a couple of huge hit singles, but it’s a shame if the two are seen as a distraction from the greatness of their early output. The fuck-it, let’s-have-fun attitude that drew Fred Schneider to base his early stage look—an undershirt, pencil-thin mustache, and polyester slacks—on a conceptual “hangover” costume, or that got Kate and Cindy to wear fake fur purses as wigs, is part of the same approach that made for such unique music and the ability to synthesize experimentation with pop without judging either to be superior or more or less necessary. Just because you’re dressed like the court jester doesn’t mean you’re not royalty.
