The Factory

The chapter focuses on the career and lives of the B-52’s. It opens with Hale’s recollections of meeting Jeremy Ayers of the B-52’s. Ayers, like other suburban and small-town kids who lived in the university town, modeled an essential bohemian act—he made his life into art. Cross-dressing and drag were an important part of the “scene” in both Athens and New York, where many members of the “scene” had connections. Athens was a place, like New York or San Francisco, that drew “small-town eccentrics,” and it started to reflect their sensibilities and interests. By the mid-1980s, what was happening in Athens proved that people did not have to move to the big city to live an alternative life. The B-52’s started finding success in New York—playing to and with their audiences’ expectations about southerners. With their lyrics, performances, and music videos, the band also managed to buck the growing conservatism that was shutting down the seventies’ sexual revolution.