Live Concert Series, Pt 8

Gardening at Hobo’s

Seeing R.E.M before they were famous

Reuben Salsa issued a challenge yesterday to write about a time when you saw a band live before they had made it big. His story about Chumbawamba can be found below.

I had never heard of that band until I saw them late one New Year’s Eve, and so didn’t understand how good they were before Tubthumping. Sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know.

As a call to arms, though, I now plan to take you back, way back in time, to the mighty year 1982, at a place called Hobo’s, a venue formerly ensconced on the University of Tennessee’s campus strip. Hobo’s looked semi-inviting from its exterior, that is, if you can appreciate holes-in-the-wall dressed up to lure college students inside for games of darts and pool and who’s taking whom home. I feel like a bouncer stood at the door, which to me, signifies a place I badly want to enter.

My friend Les had alerted me to R.E.M a few months earlier, insisting that I buy their first record, an EP called Chronic Town. The Athens scene was burgeoning then, as groups like Pylon, Love Tractor, The B-52’s, and god knows who else emerged to confront and comfort us. I played the hell out of Chronic Town, too, though like most listeners, I couldn’t quite understand what lead singer Michael Stipe was saying. And when I could make out the words, I realized that imagism was alive and well in New Rock/New Wave.

Seriously, go read up on Eliot and Pound and Stevens and tell me you completely get what they’re about or after.

Campus strips truly are unusual places. At UT, everything colored itself orange, and almost everything named itself the Vol something or other. Outliers like the deli Sam and Andy’s, sporting an enormous cow on its roof, almost proved that diversity placed itself squarely in our middle.

Hobo’s stationed itself a block away from that deli, and lived right next door to a bar called The Long Branch, a place I glared into on occasion but decided not to enter, since it sported no bouncer, but plenty of other things that might get rubberized. Upon entering Hobo’s you’d pass down a long hallway, emerging into a space about the size of someone’s finished basement. At one end stood the bar; at the other, a stage of sorts (“Carnival of Sorts”).

And so on an early spring night, Les and I wandered on in to hear a band we thought might be famous one day.

I mean, it was hard to tell, because popular bands came and went like the quarter system on campus. Consider that a couple of years before, everyone thought the Beatles’ knockoff band, The Knack, had hit such great heights with “My Sharona.” Does anyone remember this group today? Should we?

Les insisted that this would be a special night in the annals of Les and Terry’s understanding of the rock world. And he was right, though maybe not in the way he thought. Maybe I’m wrong, but we arrived early because we were certain that Hobo’s would be packed, which would have meant 150 of us sardined into the hall.

Were we really so surprised, though, when it was the two of us and perhaps 28 other guys, many of them likely misstepping in there instead of or from The Long Branch?

We nursed our Buds as we waited. One thing I’ll always admire about such artists is their showmanship when the stage is set and no one much cares or stands close to see them. About 9:00, R.E.M took the stage, and sixty minutes later, all of us stumbled back out into the night again.

The set list included everything from Chronic Town, and several tunes from the upcoming Murmur. I’ll never know why “Boxcars” is the alternate title of “Carnival of Sorts,” and most of me doesn’t care. Out of the 30 of us in attendance, 26 were in love by show’s end, and I don’t necessarily mean with the band itself, but with Stipe, who already felt legendary.

We tried to drink as much and as fast as we could to keep up with the guy. I never understood exactly what the term “Whirling Dervish” meant until I saw Stipe moving all over the stage, his lips, when the action froze, snarling, and looking, as Les said, just like Presley’s lips. I wasn’t sure of anything as I watched this guy move and sing like he possessed and had passed star-status some years back. Les, however, understood what was happening that night — what would happen in the years to come, when R.E.M. would be so discovered and so popular that we quit keeping up. But I tell you, it was a great run, and if you ask me my favorite R.E.M. record, I still might pick those first two, though Reckoning and Fables of the Reconstruction follow closely.

I’ve always wondered how much the band got paid that night, and what they thought of Knoxville’s answer to Athens’ The 40-Watt Club. I’ve also wondered why so many people avoided Hobo’s, especially on this night. Didn’t they know? Didn’t they wonder?

A couple of years later, I met another guy who had been there that night with a friend of his. This guy said he had never seen anything like Stipe, either, and that some night later, he and his friend had to dig up something for his parents out on the farm they owned.

“We were digging and singing ‘Gardening at Night,’” he said, “when all of a sudden, my friend hit a hidden gas line.”

In the aftermath of the explosion, the friend of my friend was killed instantly. And in that way of a place with 30,000 students being smaller than you’d think, the guy who died and I were once interested in the same woman. I hope she treated him better than she did me.

But all that would come later; on this night Les and I felt joined to something. We had “been there when,” as they say, and so we walked on down the Strip, trying to make sure we didn’t lose this night. I feel safe in saying that we never have.

I saw the band twice more. Once, in Atlanta’s Fox Theater. Before the show that afternoon, my wife and I, and the friends accompanying us wandered into Wax ‘N Facts in Little Five Points, and there, browsing through the vinyl was Michael Stipe. He smiled at us, like he was embarrassed a bit, knowing what we all knew was coming that night. I was close enough to see how ridged his skin was, but really, I was no closer than I had been that night at Hobo’s.

A year or so after that, my wife and I drove to Clemson (more orange, wouldn’t you know, and no Green in sight) to see R.E.M. for what I didn’t know then would be the final time. A huge arena show, something lost and something gained. A band on top of their world (10,000 Maniacs opened), we sat high up and to the side. I remember little else except Stipe wore a scarf tied to the back of his hair. And “It’s the End of the World” seemed to capture a certain mood for me. Sure, I felt fine enough, but in the end, it was just another rock show.

I don’t know what happened to Hobo’s after I moved away, or what it is now. I’d love to know how many of the 30+, including the band, remember that night. But since I never will know, I offer this, a song to remember:

Thanks again Reuben, and to all those who have joined The Riff, under the able stewardship of Noah Levy. What say you, Frank Mastropolo, Steven Hale, Rob Janicke, Harry Male, Kathryn Dillon, Kevin Alexander, Mike Marolla, If Ever You’re Listening, MDSHall, Jeff Goodwin, and Jessica Lee McMillan?

To come: my daughter and I visit The Fillmore West. Until then, here’s a past glory: