Berry and Mills, like Kathleen O’Brien, Paul Butchart, and others in their future peer group, were affected by the wave of desegregation policies that had begun in the 1960s and escalated sharply with the Supreme Court’s 1969 order that all US public school districts desegregate “at once.” The court had offered no practical instructions for achieving this aim, which threw open the door to all manner of well-meaning (but not always successful) social experiments. One of these was busing, which involved transporting kids to schools outside their own (typically segregated) neighborhoods in order to create a more even racial mix. In the South this meant that some black students found themselves bussed great distances in order to attend school with white students, while some white students found themselves getting bussed in the opposite direction. Both Mike and Bill ended up attending a high school that was 80 percent black. For the most part they navigated these circumstances about as well as teenagers could be expected to, though Bill did run afoul of some of the black male students over his perceived interest in a black girl. “(She and I) would sit around the lunch room discussing things,” he said. “But it wasn’t long before she suddenly stopped paying attention to me. The day after she wouldn’t even talk to me, six black guys jumped me and beat me up.”
This episode underscores the complexity and ever-shifting nature of race relations in the South in the 1970s. Forcibly putting kids of different backgrounds together for their daily schooling didn’t automatically erase the deep-seated tendencies toward tribalism and self-segregation that many white and black students had inherited from their parents. And it would not prevent some of them from continuing to self-segregate into the future. And yet, around the same time that Bill Berry and Kathleen O’Brien’s brother (in Decatur) found themselves the unwitting victims of racially motivated violence, and countless black students continued to receive the same, or worse, treatment from their white peers, younger students like T. Kyle King began making their way through grade school blissfully unaware of the remarkableness of their newly desegregated classrooms. Bill Berry himself harbored no discernible racial prejudice (as is probably clear from the behavior that got him into his predicament) and the beating seems to have done nothing to instill any such feelings in him. If anything, the incident may have reinforced his distaste for segregation.
Bill and Mike continued to hone their groove as members of Shadowfax—the band that had emerged from their fateful jam session.(1) After a few lineup changes, the group would eventually mutate into the Back Door Band. Their musical style was solidly mainstream rock ’n’ roll, or what is now referred to as “classic rock”: they played covers of songs by Bachman Turner Overdrive, Foreigner, the Doobie Brothers, and the ubiquitous Allman Brothers. The Back Door Band introduced more straight blues into that mix, along with some original compositions in the vein of the artists listed above. In subsequent years—in the wake of the punk and postpunk revolutions—Berry and Mills would feel compelled to distance themselves from their musical endeavors in Macon, but in truth both men continued to harbor a fondness for this style of straightforward, foot-stomping rock ’n’ roll.
Regionally, the Back Door Band was quite successful. They played Atlanta’s Great Southeast Music Hall, no mean feat for a group of high school students. Yet any dreams of further glory the other members might have harbored were squashed when Mike and Bill quit the band on graduating high school in 1976. In It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M. Companion, Marcus Gray characterizes Mills and Berry’s decision as the result of the pair being “heartily sick of the Capricorn roster’s domination of the local scene with the likes of Marshall Tucker and the Allman Brothers, and bored with a public that discouraged anything straying too far beyond the Doobies and Lynyrd Skynyrd.” Whether this is supposition on Gray’s part or actually derives from interviews with Berry and Mills, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a retroactive attempt to impose rarefied tastes on two teenagers who probably didn’t possess them at the time. The two friends would not be exposed to the more challenging music of punk and various underground ancillaries until the following year, so it seems a stretch to imagine these “good old boys” attempting to push their high school band in directions they were not yet aware of.
The real reason the duo briefly abandoned their musical calling seems to have been more prosaic: the band was doing well, but not well enough. High school was over and so were the eighteen years of free room and board that came with living under your parents’ roof. It was time to go out and get real jobs. The two moved into an apartment together and proceeded to do just that.
From our current vantage point, with the vaunted Athens music scene still going strong alongside a thriving hip-hop community in Atlanta that has produced artists such as Outkast, Ludacris, Arrested Development, and Cee Lo Green, it’s easy to forget that Macon was unquestionably the music hub in Georgia in the 1970s. The establishment of Capricorn Records by Macon natives Phil and Alan Walden in 1969 was crucial in this, but so was the fact that the Allman Brothers Band, the label’s enormously successful group, were a local act. The Capricorn roster also included such disparate artists as Wet Willie, the Marshall Tucker Band, Dobie Gray, and Kitty Wells. It surely did not go unnoticed by Berry and Mills that the Walden brothers had chosen to establish their thriving music empire right in their sleepy Southern hometown, rather than decamping for Nashville, New York, or Los Angeles. Had Bill and Mike truly wished to become professional musicians in 1976, they were already geographically well positioned to do so.
Yet Berry continued to believe that the life of a musician did not constitute a legitimate career. He did, however, harbor an interest in the business side of music. (It’s unclear what Mills’s career ambitions were at this point; we only know that the type A, overachieving impulse that had so distinguished him in high school seemed to have evaporated upon graduation. He took a job at Sears.) Bill was the recipient of an unbelievable stroke of luck: he landed a job with Paragon, the booking arm of Capricorn Records. “Get this,” he later told Rodger Lyle Brown, “[the Back Door Band’s] guitarist’s girlfriend’s brother had this . . . great job at Paragon, but he couldn’t keep it since he was going to become a cop, so he said to me, ‘You want the job?’ And I said, ‘Fuck!’”
The work was a combination of menial paperwork-oriented tasks during the day and the opportunity to chauffeur big-time rock stars at night. “I would have paid to do it,” he told Brown. “Here’s this 18-year-old kid who got double-time to go spend the night out with rock stars.”
Although he didn’t realize it at the time, Berry’s career received a further boost with the arrival of the London-based agent Ian Copeland in 1977. Copeland had been brought in at the behest of Paragon head Alex Hodges to introduce a new, more modern musical sensibility into the organization. The timing could not have been better for the once and future musical duo of Berry and Mills. Ian Copeland and his brothers Stewart and Miles were on the verge of becoming serious players in the music industry: Stewart would soon be enjoying international success as the drummer for the Police, and Miles was putting together an independent record label he would name I.R.S.
We can say with some degree of certainty that when Bill Berry arrived at the Atlanta airport in his chauffeur cap to escort the new agent back to Macon, he had never met anyone quite like Ian Copeland. For one thing, while Berry had halfheartedly aspired to the role of juvenile delinquent in high school, Copeland had been a full-on renegade in his day. The fact that his father, Miles Copeland II, had been an active CIA field officer involved in engineering coups d’état in Egypt and Iran (among other places) seems to have inspired some spectacular acts of defiance on Ian’s part. In his teens, Ian had: 1) fallen in with a biker gang in Lebanon (where Copeland Sr. was stationed for a time); 2) become a serial car thief (a perilous vocation in an Arab country); 3) run away from home, crossing several countries in the process; 4) dropped out of school and volunteered