TRAVELOGUE: ATHENS
- Ken Eppstein
- Sep 23
- 14 min read
It's a little weird to me that after spending 54 years without going to the state of Georgia, other than transferring at the airport, that I've been there twice in the past year. A while back I went to Atlanta with my wife to visit her cousin Shelley who lives out thataways. This past week I was there for Kate's Birthday to see Camper Van Beethoven at the famous 40 Watt Club. Neither of us had ever been to Athens or had managed to see CVB back in the day, so it was an exciting trip.
The Trip:
Getting to Athens wasn't super easy. We flew down to Atlanta and then took a shuttle to Athens. The flight was just about an hour and the shuttle was like an hour and three quarters. (Athens isn't a long a major interstate.) Totaling it up including airport wait times it ends up being like a five hour trip each way. The shuttle service (Groome Transport) is pretty good and reliable. Hartsfield-Jackson though, is my least favorite airport, even including kludgy hubs like DFW and JFK.
The Town (At a Glance): The morning of our departure I happened to run into my neighbor Andy. He told me that he had been to Athens six times and loved it. He was a college radio DJ in the 80s and is into bands like R.E.M., the B52s, and Pylon, so those trips are a bit of a pilgrimage for him. Andy told me to be sure to hit Wuxtry/Bizarro Wuxtry (knew about them!) and Weaver Ds for some soul food. (new to me!) He was a little concerned about whether or not the downtown area had been over-developed. Honestly, we're all scarred here in Columbus by the "development" of the Ohio State campus.
I'm going to have to confess to being part of the problem. We stayed at an AirBNB on E. Broad Street: a nine story monstrosity of apartments/condos on top of a Target. (Again, scars of Columbus development, not unlike the Target and condo combo on N. High street replaced Bernies.) It was nicer than a hotel room and had a great view of the campus. Set up as a loft, there was a truly treacherous set of spiral stairs leading up to the bed and bath from the living room. The decor/staging pandered to two distinct groups: 75% UGA Bulldog, 25% music scene nostalgia.
All-in-all, though, it doesn't seem like there has been a lot this type of "progress." Most of the buildings look like original architecture to me. The mom and pop businesses out number the chains by a fairly significant degree. The places with a reputation for being cool, were indeed cool. (How often does that happen?)
The town feels similar to Ann Arbor in a lot of ways. A smallish town that is turned into a smallish city thanks to a big state U. Like Ann Arbor and Columbus, there is a predominance of football culture at most turns. Unlike it's midwestern parallels, Athens takes pride in it's fame as an indie music capitol and creative scene. There's a flyer you can pick up that has a map of all the "vintage" shops that includes everything from comics and record stores to music instrument shops to traditional antique malls. (Segueing nicely to...)
THE HAUL:
As always, Kate and I spent a lot of our trip shopping for records, comics, and... um... I guess you'd call them oddities?
Low Yo You Records: We got into Athens on a lazy Monday evening and decided to hit this record store that we saw while scouting ahead for the 40 Watt Club's location. (It's literally like three doors or so down.) It was a very nice store, skinny enough to force congeniality among its patrons who must politely pass through the narrow aisles. I did complain (jokingly!) to the clerk that all of the punk and garage stuff was down low where us old people with pit-induced infirmities have to stoop down. I creaked my way through it, though and came out with some real gems!
The Fleshtones: Soul Madrid: I've been looking for a copy of Soul Madrid for a long time. At this point my collection of Fleshtones records is mostly complete. It's mostly oddball imports like this that I'm lacking. I could probably on any given payday hit discogs and fill all the gaps... But y'know... I hunt my records in the wild, not at the zoo.
Various Artists: Swing for a Crime: This comp came out originally around the same time that sleazy instro comps like the Vegas Grind were popular. The lubricous jacket art, presumably lifted from a pulp novel or noir movie poster, definitely caught my eye. (I assume it's lifted, though possibly not. The album design is credited to "the Green Hornet.") Anyways, I've seen this record classified as things like surf or rockabilly. The sounds/style are definitely more TV/Movie jazz.
The Kwyet Kings: Cherrypie: If I wasn't already a fan of this band, I'd probably pass on a record with this jacket. The Norwegian garage rockers look like a failed 80s power pop band. Its a good record though. Weird that the label, Screaming Apple, went with this art. Normally they have either cool 60s inspired designs or cartoons on their releases.
David Johansen: King of Babylon: Some times a low-rent bad record cover is a draw for me. I was perplexed by how subpar and generic the cover art to this 12" EP was. Hypnotized by the mediocrity, once I picked it out of the crate, I couldn't put it back. "MUST... PURCHASE... THE KING..." It's honestly not a great record. The A-side is an extended cut of the title track: David Johansen's attempt at blending rap into his otherwise lounge-y persona of the time.
X-Men #156 and #208: As you know, I like record stores that have comics (and vice versa). Low Yo Yo had a couple rows of mostly X-Men and Spider-Man comics, all priced to move. #156 is a little beat up and was priced at $1, the copy of #208 was in pretty nice shape with just a little spine roll and light page discoloration and was $2. I thought it was really cool that they had these books and that they were available for "non-collectible" prices.
Wuxtry Records: Wuxtry is of course famous as one of the hubs of the Athens music scene. In the same way as late NYC stores like Midnight Records and Bleeker Bob's were hubs... They not only had the cool records, but they were also a source of employment for local musicians. Where the NYC stores had rockers like Lux Interior and Lenny Kaye behind the counter, Wuxtry had Peter Buck. (And others in each case.)
Anyways... Wuxtry is a nice store with a good selection. watch your feet because the floor has some steps up/down and they have an adorable low-to-the-ground store dog named Monster. We got there on a slow Tuesday morning. There was only one other customer, an gray-haired dude in glasses who kind of picked at different sections before making a cellphone call to someone stating that "I'm here but the town is kind of dead." Kate and I realized later that the guy was Dave Lowery, in early for the Camper show.
The Fire Dept: L'Oeuf d'Or: I've had this band's single "The Last One There" for a while and have always wondered what their LPs sounded like. As well as what their live shows were like, but let's stick to quandaries I can solve without a flux capacitor. Anyways, this Billy Childish produced effort is definitely a "Golden Egg." And yes, I had to have the title translated for me.
Peach Kelli Pop (Self Titled): Or maybe instead of "self titled" I list the title as "eponymous" given where I bought it. Har-dee-har-har. I've been on the look out for a copy of this LP ever since my friend Caitlin hosted a Christmas party where this disc was one of the white elephant gifts. I snagged it early on, but Eric Blair of Mummula stole it from me in the finals rounds of the exchange. (Eric ya did me wrong!)
Shonen Knife: Pretty Little Baka Guy + Live In Japan: Spied this beauty on a last spin through the store while Kate was making her final choices. Glad I went back! I love the album art here! It has a Lynda Barry-esque vibe. Good music too, of course!
Sir Bald Diddley And His Right Honourable Big Wigs: Get Ahead Get A Fez!: I took a quick spin through the 10" selection by the door. It's not my favorite format, but its always worth a dig. In this case I found two more UK garage rockers. I don't know much about Sir Bald Diddley, but I have a few of their records now including this one. They sounded great and always had funny themes to their records. I've wondered if that stopped them from getting more noticed: There is a not unnoteworthy portion of the 90s garage rock crowd that is completely humorless.
The Diaboliks: Itching For Action: A while back I sold my copy of the Diaboliks' full length LP. Someone gave me $25 or $30 for it, and honestly if they wanted it that much, they are probably (hopefully) enjoying it more than I ever did. That's not to say the Diaboliks don't have a cool factor. They do! They're named after a terrific Italian comics and movie franchise and play the punked-up 60s big beat as well as anyone. This record will stay mine until somebody offers me a dumb amount of money for it.
The Stephen Blickenstaff Fan Club Kit: I'm sliding this kit right in to the sleeve of my copy of Bad Music for Bad People that Stephen signed for me a SPX a few years back. I hope his cut of this packet is good!
Bizarro-Wuxtry: Talking about getting Stephen Blickenstaff to do the cover of Nix Comics Quarterly #9 with Wuxtry's owner Dan and the clerk (apologies...whose name I didn't catch!), naturally lead to them pointing me to their stairs sister comic store. It's manager, Devlin, had been delayed from opening on time due to family stuff, but they opened up early for me and Kate.
I don't visit comic shops as much as I used to on trips. Their is an unfortunate same-iness from store to store that is the result of years of having one single (read: predatory monopolistic) distro. There was just rarely anything I would see at a shop that I couldn't find at or order from the Laughing Ogre here in Columbus. Maybe that will change now that Diamond has gone belly up. In the mean time I need to be on the look out for places like Bizarro Wuxtry, where the stuff in the shop places a premium on weird and wonderful. Bizarro Wuxtry, in conjunction with the downstairs store, is what I was always shooting for with my brick and mortar attempts.
Legion of Superheroes #11: Okay, admittedly I'm going to start off with not-necessarily-weird but still wonderful things that I purchased. I've been buying copies of this run of Legion whenever I see them in buck bins, lately. This wasn't a buck, but I recently bought the follow-up issue and was dying to remember what had happened! FWIW: of all the "super-dude" comic writers and artists, I think that Keith Giffen had the greatest influence on me as a writer/artist.
Everything's Archie #5: Archies (The band) era Archie comics can be a crap shoot in terms of how much I feel they belong in my "rock 'n roll comics" collection. Often the cover will show records or the band playing, but the interior doesn't have a corresponding story. (This one does, lucky.) What sold me was Dilton in his hippie shirt being so cool he could lean on a cymbal while dissin' Reggie.
Mad House #65: Yep. Totally going to swipe this gag for my next Mug and Brush ad! (Also a score... Much band/rock related interiors, though I don't see this story. In fact, I haven't yet read most of the lit I purchased at Bizarro Wuxtry yet. The info paragraphs may get a little sparse from here on out!)
Millie The Model #191: I've got a soft spot for Millie. This is despite her being a just another Katy Keene riff, the tiresome feud with red-headed model Chili, the rampant sexism inherent to the stories, and the frequent fat shaming of her friend Daisy. Maybe because she had the best rock star guests.
Tim Lane: Mythologies & Apocrypha #1: I've been a fan of Tim Lane's psychedelic noir stuff since introduced to it by John Porcellino at SPACE way back in 2011 or 2012. Great music and movie themes! (Elvis in Outerspace!!! Not congruent with Lane's style, but it brings to mind the lines in Mojo Nixon's "Elvis Is Everywhere" about how aliens don't look like "Dr. Spock.")
Eddie Campbell: In The Days of the Ace Rock 'n' Roll Club: It's not often that my search for rock 'n roll comics is made easy by an author putting the words right there in the title... but I guess that's why Eddie Campbell is considered a genius! (He once bought me a cup of coffee, so I will always have effusive praise for the man.)
Steve Lafler: Jonk! A BugHouse Fable: I love Steve Lafler's BugHouse! Signed and numbered is cool, though I'll confess to being a little jealous of 400 being a limited run! I've only sold that many of the first four issues of Nix Comics quarterly and that's taken nearly 15 years!
New Horizine: A Zine About Roger Corman: It wasn't until I got home that I realized that this zine was hung together by Klon Waldrip... who I've had some nice on-line conversations with in the past. I used to sell his Power Profiles zines at the short lived Nix HQ shop. I look forward to digging in to this! (And sorry Klon, if I had thought twice I would've dropped you a line about being in your berg.)
Edward Gorey: the Osbick Bird: I've been reading the Gorey biography "Born To be Posthumous" and while its well written, the main effect its had on me is wanting to read more of Gorey's short books. So this was a great pick up!
Teen Love Stories #2: Holy Snot! I had no idea that Warren magazines put out a romance comic/magazine! I haven't read through it all yet, but I already see one thing I may adopt for Nix: They bribed people to send in letters! Framed as a contest, they gave $10 for the "best" letter and $3 for anything else that they printed. Also notable, it looks like the whole editorial crew were actually women, a rarity among major romance comics at the time.
Vintage and Antique Stores: We dug into the above mentioned map/brochure on Tuesday and Wednesday. Here's what I picked up!
Lexington Vintage: Located just a few minutes drive from where we we staying, Lexington Vintage had a fairly nice records room as one its vendors/stalls. Worth a pick-through the LPs if you're looking for some of the radio-hit basics. They also had the only selection of cheap 45s I saw in town: Maybe 600 or so all priced at a buck each. I picked up six that I plan on turning into Sketchbook Picture Sleeves, provided they're all players. Watch for those in the gallery!
Junk in the Trunk: Another antique mall with multiple vendors. My favorite was a booth that had a ton of UK edition Marvel Comics. My favorite was "The Titans" which is printed landscape. The individual pages (taken from US releases but printed in B&W) were presented doubled up on each page. I picked my favorite one, though I could easily have dropped a lot of money on these!
CULTURE, FOOD, AND ENTERTAINMENT:
Cine: Athens has a super cool small non-profit movie theater, Cine. The theater has two screens, featuring small independent artsy type stuff and curated assortment of mainstream type films. The lobby of the theater has a small concessions stand/bar that is reminiscent of how Studio 35 here in Columbus looked/felt/smelled back before its updates and renovations. We were in the mood to take it easy the first night we came in, so went to Cine to catch a showing of Spinal Tap II. (That was OK. About what I expected in terms of rehashing the old jokes. Valerie Franco, who I was previously unfamiliar with brought a nice breath of fresh air as drummer Didi Crockett.)
Georgia Museum of Art: I always check local museums when I'm traveling to new towns. Inevitably there is something cool that I wouldn't get to see here in Columbus. In this case, the Georgia Museum of Art, nestled into the center of UGA campus offered an exhibit about American women in the arts (from fine arts to performing arts to writing) who expatriated themselves to France in the early 1900s. The exhibit covered a lot of the reasons that leaving the US was appealing for both women and people of color. I can't help but wonder if we'll soon see another such exodus in the near future.
The National: Right next to Cine is a fancy pants restaurant. In a cool way, not overly fancy pants... Just fancy enough for a special birthday dinner for Kate. I'll be honest, the main draw was that it could accommodate our (usually) pescatarian diet and Kate's cousin's gluten free diet. I had some Grouper and Kate + Shelley had Salmon. Both entrees were excellent. The warm baguette that Kate and I shared was great. My one complaint, the cheese plate we ordered could have used some work: only two types of cheese! (a brie-like soft and a slice of a semi-hard Manchego) If you're gonna aspire to fancy pants, you should know that a cheese plate has at least three varieties: A soft, a hard, and an "other" like a blue.
Weaver Ds: I'm not as steeped in Athens/R.E.M. lore as my neighbor Andy. he told me that we needed to hit Weaver Ds, a soul food restaurant whose sign "Automatic For The People" inspired that band's album title. I broke with my fish-eating ways to have fried chicken... because it seemed like if I was ever going to do so, this was the place! (It was. Sorry my birdy friend, you were delicious.) Kate and Shelley were not had a harder time fitting the meal into their requirements, but made do. (The quote of the trip ended up being a perplexed "Now why would I put flour in my sweet potatoes!?" from the proprietor!)
Camper Van Beethoven/40 Watt Club: The main event of the trip! Camper Van Beethoven is in the middle of a reunion tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of their first album, Telephone Free Landslide Victory. I think that a lot of my regular readers know that I lifted the title of the song "Where The Hell Is Bill?" for an early Vicar story back in Nix Comics Quarterly #2. Probably not a lot of you know that I was first introduced to Camper Van Beethoven songs through covers of their songs by a college band at Simon's Rock named Thing Three. (Comprised of my pals Parker, Mike, and Shazod.) They played at the student union/snack bar, did a mix of originals and covers, and were probably my first introduction to the idea that someone I personally knew could do something like start a band. Or at least the first time it clicked in my brain. The CVB covers were mixed in with stuff I was more familiar with like the Who and Stones and were also part of my introduction to the notion that there could be cool not-so-famous bands. (What can I say, I was pretty square.)
As I said above, though, I never got to see Camper play in the 80s and neither had Kate. We were pretty excited! The first half of the show was an in-order playing of Telephone Free Landslide Victory. Lowery and crew joked about how it was a 22 minute album with 47 songs. Not quite, obviously, but there was plenty of time to play through a bunch of fan favorites as the second half of the set. "Good Guys and Bad Guys" and "Shut Us Down" are personal favorites, so I'm glad they made it on the playlist for the night. The set ended with "Pictures of Matchstick Men" (a hit on Billboard's modern rock charts when it came out) and their encore was a floor shaking rendition of "Interstellar Overdrive." Great covers of 60s psych gems, which when I think too hard on it was somewhat incongruous with the preceding hour or so of terrific originals... But hey... why think too hard on something that was pretty great.
The 40 Watt Club is of course really famous, though from what I understand, this was only the latest location of many. Regardless, it definitely falls into that "was supposed to be cool and actually was" category. Smallish, so you could be close to the stage. Easy access to two different bars. I was tempted to compared it to ol' Staches here in Columbus, but that's not quite right. It was a little bigger in general and the stage wasn't a postage stamp. There was no tabled seating (didn't need it, but Staches had that smattering of it). Still... The vibe was similar.
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