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Medium when the storm hit, because I lost nearly all of my negatives and slides, most of my drawings, and several of my journals as well. The photos I do have have for the most part been reproduced here from slides taken of prints.
Most of my prints were one-of-a- kind.I mention this because normally I write these memoirs with hundreds of my own photos at my disposal to jar my memory. Hugo had taken most of my images and many of my notes as well. Fortunately, when I opened my culinary bookstore in the late 80s, I had sent most of my negatives of photos of the B-52s to them for their archives.
I had taken some of the first photos of the band. Even when I was living in Athens in the late 70s when the band was first performing, I would see my photos on t-shirts and posters here and there. I always wondered how someone had gotten them. But I never cared.
We were all so excited about some music that we could dance to while laughing – without disco banality – that we were always thrilled with theirs – and anyone’s, for that matter – success. I was visiting Bill Foy in Atlanta in 1976, and he had a tape that Fred Schneide r had given him of some songs that he, Keith Strickland, Kate Pierson, and Cindy and Ricky Wilson had just recorded. I knew Ke ith and Ricky and Fred pretty well at that point.
I ha d first met Ke ith in Athens at a Bruce Hampton concert at Memorial Hall on Halloween in 1970, my senior year at the University of Georgia. He was an impossibly pretty boy, and he was wearing a purplish wig that stuck out from his head like the hair on those l ittle troll dolls from the 60s, thus predating Darryl Hannah’s look in. He and Maureen McLaughlin and I pretty much took over the dance floor that night. Back in Athens for graduate school, in 1974 I had lived in a big half-timbered Tudor style mansion with David Thompson (in the photo, below) and John Hoard, Maureen (who later managed the band for awhile), Bob Tallini, and Keith Spikes (who was the first person I ever heard use the term “B-52” to mean a big hairdo).
We called the house “The Crystal Palace.” I cooked supper instead of paying rent. We had a huge vegetable garden out back. Keith (Strickland) found this old photobooth shot of him and Kelly Bugden and me, circa ’74. The dance parties that summer were amazing. At one, in Ellen Bargeron and “Dazzling Deb’s” apartment, the wooden floor bounced up and down at least a foot in each direction as we danced to Bowie’s “Suffragette City.” At another, everyone was asked to bring blue food, which George Carlin had wondered why there was none of on.
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