U Rock, U Roll

This is what you don't learn at stadium shows: In music, you'd better have a sense of humor.

Athens

All that remains of St. Mary's Episcopal Church is a red steeple, a chunky, orphaned monolith with vines crawling across its cupola. Three letters carved near the steeple's plywood-covered door explain why I was staring as if I'd found a Mayan pyramid. They read "R.E.M."

Back when those initials referred primarily to a stage of sleep, not to a collection of stadium-filling rock gods, the band practiced and played its first show -- a 1980 birthday party -- at the church. Its steeple is now a stop on the Athens Music History Walking Tour, produced by Flagpole, a free weekly paper.

The fact such a tour exists -- much less that it attracts visitors from Europe -- underscores the influence of a music scene that began its rise to international prominence in the early 1980s, when bands such as Pylon, Love Tractor and R.E.M. played house parties and small clubs. Wuxtry Records, a music-geek heaven downtown, also operates the Athens Music Museum, a room filled with memorabilia including concert handbills and rare releases from acts like the B-52's, the original Athens party band.

Mike Richmond, guitarist and vocalist of Love Tractor, couldn't quite put into words the magical atmosphere that has spawned so much creativity. Instead, he showed it, driving me though neighborhoods -- a Southern Gothic world of white-columned mansions and small-but-elegant porches -- where he and others lived, partied and played shows on staircase landings.

"Everyone lived in these houses and it was cheap, you know, it was just really out of the spotlight of the world," Richmond said. "It was kind of a paradise, the deep, sleepy South."

"Sleepy" no longer describes downtown Athens.

Legions of bars and restaurants populate its Victorian storefronts, tables spilling onto sidewalks. Mutually hostile tribes of khaki-clad University of Georgia frat boys and hipsters with unkempt hair and canvas Converse sneakers roam the streets. The latter's home turf, though, is the epicenter of the music scene: West Washington Street, which hosts venues like the 40 Watt Club -- Athens's best-known rock spot -- as well as the Pain and Wonder Tattoo shop, its windows edged in painted flames.

The sheer number of musical options on any given night is daunting. Flagpole publishes a music directory that lists nearly 550 local bands and solo artists and more than 30 music venues, the best of which are within walking distance of each other.

On a Thursday evening, I started out with an early show by the Box Devils, a trippy, psychedelic blues duo who played the intimate Flicker Theatre and Bar, another West Washington club where a lamp in the shape of an owl sits atop an upright piano and wall lamps cast gentle puddles of light.

Then I faced a choice: the fun, synthesizer-laden pop that Of Montreal was playing at the 40 Watt, where I could commandeer a ratty sofa? The reunited Pylon, playing at Nuci's Space, a music-resource center next to the R.E.M. steeple? Or the heavier sounds of Cinemechanica at the Caledonia Lounge, a bare box for indie rock?

In the end, I split time between Of Montreal and Cinemechanica, mostly because they were playing almost next door to each other. Both good shows, but I later learned that Michael Stipe and Mike Mills of R.E.M. -- who still live in Athens -- had been dancing to Pylon.