As King’s comments indicate, integration in urban Georgia was fairly successful—at least compared to the much rockier experiences of adjoining states. By the time of the 2010 Census, DeKalb County, which included Kathleen’s former home of South DeKalb, had become the second most affluent majority-black county in the United States. The path to that outcome was rocky and generated the collateral damage of many self-uprooted white families, but the outcome was one that most of the white flight kids supported.
It is the first of many ironies in our story that the politically incorrect phenomenon of white flight played a part in the birth of one of the most liberal rock bands in history: the O’Briens’ flight to what Kathleen’s parents perceived as the more hospitable environs of Druid Hills High School led directly to her first meeting with a towering, stick-thin record store clerk named Peter Buck, who was at that time working two doors down from the restaurant where Kathleen waitressed in the evenings. Buck was—and still is—loud, gregarious, opinionated, and, according to at least one of his friends, “kind of obnoxious.” As such, his character is trying mightily to insert itself into our narrative at this point and dominate the proceedings. But let’s keep him in the wings a bit longer. Suffice to say for now that Kathleen was exposed to Buck’s personality and forceful opinions on music during her many visits to browse the latest releases at his store in Emory Village. These chance encounters created the first strands of a tangled web of relationships that would ultimately beget R.E.M.
Another important strand came in the form of Kathleen’s friendship with Paul Butchart, who, like Buck, was tall, opinionated (though a bit more reserved in his delivery), and fiercely loyal. Paul worked with Kathleen’s brother at a steakhouse and shared with Kathleen interests in the German language (they had first met at German camp one summer) and, of course, music. Paul, too, would become a pivotal player in the genesis of R.E.M.
By the late 1970s, Kathleen was listening to music that, as she says, “pretty much no one else had heard of at Druid Hills.” This included such now-mainstream artists as Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, and Blondie, all considered very much “alternative” at the time. What’s more, she says, “I already had a reputation as being weird because I read weird poetry and I dressed strangely.”
Frictions with her mom prompted Kathleen to leave the family home and live on her own at age 18, giving her that crucial taste of independence (and lack of adult supervision) before she moved into Reed Hall the following fall. No sooner had she arrived in that charmingly dilapidated building than she became involved in a seemingly nonstop party in the girls’ subbasement. The rotating cast of characters in this bacchanal included several Kathys (Russo, Fain, and another that Kathleen simply remembers as “Kat”), Sandi Phipps, Linda Hopper, and a Patti Smith–emulating interloper from the fourth floor named Carol Levy. In Party Out of Bounds, Rodger Lyle Brown (Phipps’s boyfriend at the time, and a frequenter of these “subwastement” parties) describes their activities thusly:
The girls were rowdy. They knocked out ceiling panels just to see the dust fly. They broke windows to hear the glass shatter. […] Mark Cline, who would form the band Love Tractor, lived on the fourth floor of Reed, and when he came down to the subbasement he and the girls pasted pornography on the walls and sat smoking cigarettes, carving genitalia into Barbie dolls.
Where were the dorm authorities, you may be wondering? Well, the subbasement was apparently too small to warrant its own dedicated RA (Resident Assistant), so the girls who lived there fell under the jurisdiction of the already overworked main-basement RA, who never came down because, Kathleen says, “everybody was so afraid of us.”
It was perhaps inevitable that Bill Berry would get drawn into this crowd. (Hard partying, sexually provocative young women with a taste for cool and edgy music? What’s not to love?) But his engagement with the subbasement scene was initially shy and tentative. For that first month or so after Kathleen saw him, the two would pass each other only occasionally on the Reed quad or in the mail room. Bill was on the exact opposite side of the building, his fourth-floor room facing out over the parking lot. And despite the wildness she displayed when in her own environment, Kathleen was too shy—or too cautious—to venture up to the men’s wing on her own. But she did begin to piece together Bill’s backstory from what she gleaned through the grapevine.
She learned that Bill was a drummer, though he maintained a strangely ambivalent attitude toward playing music, or at least toward the idea of a performing career. “I’d like to say that playing the drums and being a rock ’n’ roll drummer were big dreams I had for as long as I can remember,” he told an interviewer years later. “But they weren’t. I never considered the possibilities of being a musician. Back then I thought that was what others did.” Despite this reticence, he did exhibit a simple joy at playing for its own sake, spurred, no doubt, by the enthusiasm of his best friend and frequent musical partner, Mike Mills.
The story of how Bill Berry and Mike Mills became best friends and bandmates is one of the most oft-told tales in all of R.E.M. lore. It has a neat-and-tidy fairy-tale quality to it, though it lacks any corroborating sources. If it’s true, it is something that could only happen to kids.
The story goes like this: In high school, Bill Berry was a self-described “juvenile delinquent,” heavily into alcohol, pot, and general malfeasance. Mills is on record saying that Berry ran with a “rough crowd” in Macon and was “on the wrong side of the law” (Marlon Brando and his Wild One gang spring to mind). Mills, who at the time resembled—there’s really no other way to put this—an endearing rodent in glasses, was a straight-A student and all-around overachiever. R.E.M. biographer Johnny Black lays it on perhaps a bit thick in describing the young Mills (a future hellraiser par excellence) as a “clean-living, hard-working lad,” and the young Berry (a future teetotaling recluse) as a “wayward youth,” but it does appear that the teenaged Mills and Berry were opposites in several ways and that some low-level hostility may have existed between them because of this.
Along came music to smooth over their differences. Sometime early on in high school, Berry got invited to take part in an afternoon jam session with a friend’s fledgling band. He duly arrived at the designated house and began setting up his drum kit. In walked Mills, his supposed nemesis, who had been recruited to play bass. (Berry has stated that he would have left at that point if he hadn’t already set up his gear.) They began playing, and sometime during that afternoon Berry’s musical instincts overrode his thuggish instincts and he came to realize that he’d stumbled into something pretty special—not this nascent band, per se, which would go on to play under the names Shadowfax and, later, the Back Door Band—but this effortless groove he had going with Mills. They were in the pocket, as the saying goes.
And just like that, they became best friends forever. Or something along those lines.
Mike Mills did present himself to the world as a nerd, that much is true. The California native wore thick glasses, styled his hair in a manner that resembled a muddy toupee, had the pallor of someone who spent a lot of time indoors, and was generally out of step with his peers sartorially. Compounding this uncool appearance was the fact that he played tuba and sousaphone in the school band.
But beneath the contrasts in Mills’s and Berry’s exteriors lay some notable similarities. For one thing, both could play a variety of instruments. In addition to the aforementioned horns—and bass, of course—Mills was proficient on piano and guitar and had a solid grasp of music theory. Berry, too, could navigate the piano, guitar, and ukulele, though his approach to music was more intuitive and less schooled than that of his new friend. Both young men came from households in which music was appreciated. Mills’s father, Fred, had been an operatic tenor and instilled in his son a love of melody from an early age. Bill Berry’s passion for music had been sparked by an older sibling. “I was five or six when my older brother bought Meet the Beatles and listened to it incessantly,” he told reporter Erin Rossiter in 2007. “Well, I met the Beatles all right, and it was a magical revelation.” Both listened to a wide variety of musical genres and paid