We were wild girls and boys
The B-52's "Deadbeat Club" and its bittersweet blend of nostalgia and grief
“Deadbeat Club” begins with a joke:
“Huh? Get a job?”
“What for?”
“I’m trying to think.”
Kate Pierson, Cindy Wilson, and Keith Strickland time the vaudeville-via-Georgia bit superbly; sold with heavy-lidded irony, it’s essentially the song’s count off. But the humor’s a bit of misdirection, too, as “Deadbeat Club,” one of the great singles of its era, traffics in bittersweetness, nostalgia, and grief.
In the early 80’s, I’d loved the B-52’s’ “Rock Lobster,” “Planet Claire,” “Private Idaho,” key songs on the soundtrack of my heady early-teen years when New Wave was in ascension and new ideas were throwing elbows in my chest. I didn’t know that “Rock Lobster” was a re-recording, only that I dug it on the radio and loved the nutty band whenever I’d catch glimpses of them on TV or in magazines. They appeared to have been hatched, or dropped from outer space. They were quirky and fun, and along with Blondie, the Cars, and others, they pushed open the doors that I’d been shyly eyeing, inviting me to a party of jokers and misfits who dressed fabulously, sang nervy, hooky pop songs, and would dance all night long. (I wouldn’t know how hard they rocked onstage in this era until many years later; dig this smoking 1980 show at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey.)
Ten years later, I’d pretty much forgotten about them. Their commercial appeal dipped as the decade progressed, the angularities of New Wave traded for chic, suave New Romance, while the band’s grinning goofiness gave way to the Top 40 sheen of R&B and heartland rock. I’d stopped following their records, and if asked in, say, 1987 or ‘88, deep into my college radio DJ love affair of and obsession with local and national indie and alt music, I wouldn’t have been able to name the last B-52’s record, let alone name a single of theirs since “Party Out of Bounds.” I likely would’ve guessed that they’d broken up, and I wouldn’t have cared all that much; 1980 felt a long way away. This made the arrival of Cosmic Thing in 1989 all the more surprising. At once, the band was all over MTV, “Love Shack,” “Roam,” and “Deadbeat Club” sunnily scoring that summer and fall of with melody, style, and humor.
Since I first heard “Deadbeat Club,” the tune’s been on a low-intensity loop in my mind. The song sounds happy in its cheery C# major key, easy-to-sing-along-with melody, and Wilson and Pierson’s honeyed, inviting voices, but beneath the surface runs a poignant undertow. On October 12, 1985, the band’s original guitarist and founding member Ricky Wilson, Cindy’s older brother, died of complications related to AIDS, an illness that Ricky had kept from his bandmates (with the exception of Strickland). After his death, the band, numb with grief, retreated from promoting their 1986 album Bouncing Off the Satellites, and unofficially pressed pause on the band. The group had lost not only a member and a dear friend, but a highly unique and original player and songwriter. Strickland eventually moved from the drums to replace Wilson on guitar, and the band reconvened as a quartet in 1988, working with demos that Strickland had written.
I vaguely remember having heard of Wilson’s death through the pre-Internet music news grapevine. I’d recognized a certain bittersweetness in “Deadbeat Club,” but it was years years later that I came to appreciate the song’s fraught and unhappy context. In 2018, Pierson was asked by Ken Sharp at Rock Cellar if “Deadbeat Club” was about the band’s formative days in Athens, Georgia. “Yes, after Ricky [Wilson] passed in 1985, part of what happened was we thought, forget about radio play, let’s just do this to heal,” she answered. “It was just a healing process. It helped conjure Ricky’s spirit back into the mix and we felt that when we were jamming together.”
When we were playing together we realized how priceless it was that we still had each other and we had this great music and we could still do it. A lot of the Cosmic Thing album, I wouldn’t say it was nostalgic, but it just recalled life back in Athens. We were writing about our life back then when we just started and we were just hanging out.
“Deadbeat Club” emerged from one of those restorative jams. “Some of our songs, like ‘Love Shack,’ went through multiple jams and a couple of different changes,” Pierson remarked, “but ‘Deadbeat Club’ went through one jam and we took some parts out of that to make the song. Keith [Strickland] took over on guitar playing Ricky’s parts. It became more of a thing where Keith would write a track, sometimes he would just jam while we were singing but with a song like ‘Deadbeat Club’ I think he came in with some music already finished. I thought that sparked a more melodic line for ‘Deadbeat Club’.”
Over at Tunebat, a key and BPM database, “Deadbeat Club” skews happy, according to the advanced metrics, anyway. The song scores an 81 (out of 100) for “Energy” (or, “How intense and active the track is, based on general entropy, onset rate, timbre, perceived loudness, and dynamic range”) and a 71 for “Danceability” (“How appropriate the track is for dancing based on overall regularity, beat strength, rhythm stability, and tempo.” They sure know how to have fun at Tunebat!) The song scores a whopping 93 for “Happiness,” based on how “cheerful and positive the track is.” Had there been a metric for the band’s witty, thrift shop chic sartorial style, they surely would’ve scored a perfect 100.
Yeah, you can dance to the song, but the lyrics and the background against which they were written evoke something other—or anyway, more complicated—than simple “happiness.” The coffee buzz, the cheap beers at cheap joints, the parties crashed, moonlight skinny-dipping and dancing in the rain—the singer’s in a smiley mood remembering it all, but there’s loss, too, in regarding the shrinking percentage of one’s youth. Gone are those days when belonging to a club full of like-spirited deadbeats could be charming, redemptive, even. Those wild girls and boys walking down the street, out for a big time, were gonna find something, and what they found probably lost some of its currency later as adulthood came calling, as time passed and people came and went, some departing the bar, some departing for good.
The chorus, celebratory and jubilant, feels ghostly, too, even a bit haunted, the harmonies and Fred Schneider’s dry answer-lines echoing from the present to the past and back again. This is a way of saying that “Deadbeat Club” sounds to me the way memory feels. I see someone, as in a movie, turn and gaze through a rain-streaked window during the contemplative solo passage after the second verse—it’s as if the arrangement turns inward and dreamy—and the extension of the third verse, or maybe it’s a pre-chorus (“Anyway we can / We’re gonna find something…”) keeps the refrain at bay for just a few bars longer, the elasticity and stubbornness of memory.
The way Wilson and Pierson sing certain lines will always thrill me: We were really hummin’; We'll dance in the garden / in torn sheets in the rain; And the jukebox playing real loud “96 Tears” hit that shivering sweet spot where joy and loss meet, neither cancelling out the other in the recollection. Pierson told Sharp, “I think the way Ricky played guitar was self-propelling, it lent itself to more of a chanting way of singing and the way Keith supplied melodic instrumentation inspired a more melodic approach.” The song’s childlike melody evokes a kind of reverie, and I love to sing it out loud, or pick the melody out on a keyboard; it’s so easy, even I can do it, moving among the few keys, impossible not to smile as I do, yet hearing the tug of the innocent-turned-bruised past all the while. Item number 3,636 in the “Fun Songs About Sad Stuff” file.
And I love the outro: who’s wringing their hand and exclaiming “Oh no!” Worried parents? Annoyed townspeople? Or the club members themselves, loudly imitating the locals’ concerns in that snotty, self-celebratory way that kids do? It all works to my ears.
And I’ve got to admit to some nostalgia of my own. When “Deadbeat Club” was everywhere in early months of 1990—it reached number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was in high rotation on MTV—I’d too been let loose in Athens, though my town was in southeast Ohio, staggering in and out of cheap bars, hopping parties, dancing in the rain, soaking up my hangovers with coffee. And skinny-dipping with friends, too, at the pond at Galganooza, just north of town, on the property of the infamous poet and artist Aethelred Eldridge, a local spiritual leader who taught art at Ohio University. In retrospect, “Deadbeat Club” felt like a theme song of sorts for me and my crowd. As I get further from those magic days and nights in the Appalachia foothills, singing about the past in the present tense like Pierson and her friends, I’m working through my own bittersweetness.
It took two producers (Niles Rodgers and Don Was), a couple of studios (Skyline Studios in New York City, Dreamland Studios upstate), and no fewer than five engineers to record Cosmic Thing. That’s a lot of people turning a lot of knobs on a lot of boards, and the album sounds very much of its era. For “Deadbeat Club,” Sonny Emory’s drums were trapped raw in the wild at some point then lamentably filtered through Rodgers and his engineers’ sonic programming; synth handclaps keep synchronous time; Philippe Saisse’s keyboards glint through the slick, surface sheen. None of this dates the song too badly. The melody’s so pretty and evocative, and the sentiments in the lyrics complex enough, and timeless, that very little could be done to harm the poignant thing that arrived.
Watch the band perform “Deadbeat Club” live shortly after its release, below. The energy’s different. They could be road-tired, or distracted in other ways. What’s behind Cindy’s shut eyes? Anyway they can, they’re gonna find something.
Made this my first post of the week to read and started me off on a good footing, thanks Joe! I feel multiple connections here. For one thing, you note the song's universal melancholic feel, harking back to good times that can never come again, not least because some of the characters are no longer with us. That part is for everyone.
On an individual level, the year the album Cosmic Thing came out I published the first biography of their townmates' R.E.M., for which a couple of the B-52's granted me interview time, as they were such a key influence on the Athens, GA scene from which R.E.M. and others then followed. Indeed, the only book to come before mine is one called "Party out of Bounds" which covers the early days of both bands.
For some reason (English accent? God knows!) I was tapped by Warners to interview the B-52's for the EPK (remember those!) that accompanied the release of Cosmic Thing, spending the best part of a day at their video shoot for what was surely "Love Shack." You talk about Cindy's tired look on the live video of "Deadbeat Club" and you are right; it's probably fine to say all these years later that she got through about a whole bottle of red wine that afternoon: clearly losing her brother and continuing the band was painful and it behooves us to think about how we might have been in such a situation.
All round, I was happy that they had big hits with "Love Shack" and "Roam." All influential bands deserve a payday and not just the plaudits, and though I especially loved "Roam" I think you're right that "Deadbeat Club" gets closest to the spirit of the album and that bitter-sweet feeling that permeates it. I appreciate that you highlighted that song rather than its upbeat cousins. It's also worth referencing that they never successfully matched or followed Cosmic Thing, it was an incredible comeback which they rode into the sunset effectively.
Couple of sidenotes:
There is a counterpart in R.E.M.'s "Nightswimming," a song that often brings me to tears because of its own universality, which is the beauty of the best songwriting.
And I can edit this part out or leave it in, and I could figure it out for myself no doubt, but I love that you write about the musicality of a piece. Still, is it C major (as you note) or C# major as that weird algorithm you quoted refers to instead?
Thanks again Joe,
Tony
Kudos to them for working through their grief and making a comeback. Like you, Joe, I'd lost track of them until "Love Shack" exploded onto the scene.
It seems Kate was right to say "When we were playing together we realized how priceless it was that we still had each other and we had this great music and we could still do it." I was struck by that having read these stats about musician longevity earlier today -- https://www.statsignificant.com/p/how-long-does-music-stardom-last?publication_id=1213033&post_id=147418389&isFreemail=true&r=3jsiyo&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Well done to the B-52s (and for coming out of Athens, and to you for coming out of another Athens - it sounded like great fun in both places).