“I thought I was in a hippie cowboy town,” Michael Stipe says of his first months as an art student in Athens, Georgia. “I was an urban punk rocker, and Athens looked like beige and granola; it took me a while to find ‘my people. ’” But in 1979, after Stipe’s night shift at the local steakhouse, he says, he spotted “this incredible, almost cartoonish trio who looked like they had stepped out of the Weimar Republic,” at the only coffee shop still open. “I waved at them. They waved back.”
This trio—Jeremy Ayers, Davey Stevenson, and Dominique Amet—went on to become Limbo District, the most radical group in the Athens underground scene that would give the world the B-52s, Pylon, and, of course, R.E.M. But while those bands rose to global fame, Limbo District was forgotten. They lasted only two years and disbanded in disarray before releasing any music. For decades, the only evidence of their existence came from a few minutes of footage in the 1987 documentary Athens, GA: Inside/Out.
“They were one of the biggest bands in the world,” Stipe says. Now a new album of rediscovered live recordings illuminates a band whose combination of artistry, furious rhythms and punk sensibility provided an indelible inspiration for future stars of Athens.
Limbo Zone was run by Ayers, a native of Athens, the son of a religion and philosophy professor at the University of Georgia. “Jeremy Ayers inspired just about every musician in Athens,” adds Keith Strickland of the B-52s. “His parties in the early ’70s were like art events — the walls were covered in black plastic; the floors were covered in popcorn; Beefheart and Velvets records were playing. He opened doors to creative possibilities. He also made Jeremy and his boyfriend Chris [Coker] We were gay – so was Ricky [Wilson, future B-52s guitarist] and I, but we hadn’t gone out yet. It was inspiring to see Jeremy walking around Athens in tight corduroy pants and a little fur coat.”
I am happy that there is a renewed interest in the Limbo Zone and that some of their influence still exists.
Michael Stipe
Ayers liked to record himself reading poetry and playing percussion while Chris improvised on the flute. “It was a cacophony, and it was an introduction for Ricky and me to writing and recording,” Strickland says. “We just continued that method of writing songs.”
In 1972, Ayers fled to New York, joining Andy Warhol’s Factory studio, writing for Interview magazine under the name Sylva Thinn and befriending actors such as Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis. “Andy loved Jeremy,” Stipe says, “and Andy was hard to impress.” But within two years, Ayers was back.
“There was a sarcasm, a fierceness to that scene,” Strickland says. “Jeremy wanted a different life.”
Athens was certainly different: there were no clubs, no “real” music scene. Bands in Athens threw house parties to entertain their friends; careerism was not a possibility – but REM would certainly achieve global stardom. Even here, Ayers’ influence was key.
“Jeremy was a great friend and mentor,” Stipe says. “I owe the person I am, the public persona of Michael Stipe, to him. He taught me to dance, to laugh at myself, to dress. At the time, I thought he was the first love of my life — but it turned out I was in love with him,” Stipe laughs.
Ayers formed Limbo District in 1981, playing percussion. Her boyfriend, Stevenson — “a big, muscular, beautiful redhead who loved to discuss Schopenhauer,” says guitarist Kelly Crow, who later became a band member — played bass. Amet, who played organ, came from an upper-class French family and knew nothing about rock ‘n’ roll.
“At their first rehearsal, Jeremy asked him to sing Johnny B. Goode and he sang it as if it were opera,” Crow says. “Jeremy loved it: he was hoping for someone who wasn’t coming from nowhere. [typical] “Western music history.”
Amet, Stipe adds, was “Amy Winehouse-level exotic.” “She would light a match and use the ash as eyeliner, applied with a nine-penny nail.”
I had no friends in Athens. Those men became my saviors.
Margarita Bilbao
Crow remembers singer Craig Woodall as “a small, quiet guy who looked gay on the outside and didn’t expect anything to happen to him.”
“Craig had a very hard life,” adds guitarist Margarita Bilbão, an immigrant from Basque Spain whom they discovered after hearing his tirade against Athens on student radio. He had never played guitar before, but the band loved his attitude, and that was more important. “I had no friends in Athens,” Bilbão recalls. “Those guys were my saviors.”
Even among the post-punk rebels of early-’80s Athens, Stipe says, the wild, perverse cabaret of Limbo District was “radical.” “They were deliberately aggressive, like Einstürzende Neubauten or Psychic TV, but they had melodies and a sense of humor. They rewrote where punk could go next, drawing on vaudeville and Edith Sitwell. They made people feel uncomfortable in a fun way.” Strickland remembers the band as “a fascinating tapestry of pure imagination, a sexy, surreal, Fellini-esque quality.”
Athens loved Limbo District, but touring revealed them to be an acquired taste. “We’d clean the room,” Crow says. They recorded material with future R.E.M. producer Mitch Easter, but no one wanted to release it. Bilbão, distraught about his limited skills, fled to New Orleans, heartbroken. He was replaced by Tim Lacy, who was replaced by Crow in 1983. Around this time, Jim Herbert, a college professor, teamed up with photographer Marlys Lens Cox to make Carnival. The strikingly surreal, one-sided short imagines Limbo District as a “1920s existential traveling circus,” stopping by a lake and wrestling in the nude. Stipe tried to get MTV to air Carnival. “But that thing has asses and penises and boobs in it,” Crow says. “They were never going to play that.”
The band was already on borrowed time. Woodall fell into heroin addiction and spent the next few years homeless, struggling with alcoholism and mental health issues. Stevenson’s brother Gordon, from the New York “no wave” band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, was one of the first to contract AIDS; his death in 1982 broke Davey’s heart. He and Ayers broke up in 1983, and the band was over, and Stevenson moved to France to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. Amet, who had been arrested for shoplifting and was facing deportation, went with him.
“Dominique was in love with Davey from day one,” says Bilbão.
“Davey was everything to her,” Crow nods. “They lived together in an apartment where you could see the Eiffel Tower from the balcony.” Stevenson died of AIDS in the early ’90s. Amet later married, had a son, and died nearly 20 years ago. “None of us know more than that,” Crow sighs. “She always told me she wanted a child. She didn’t live past her 40s.”
Ayers, meanwhile, turned to painting and photography. “His paintings were quite beautiful—figurative and symbolic,” Strickland says. “After Ricky’s death, he did a beautiful portrait of Ricky from memory. Jeremy was always very open. When you talked to him, you felt seen; you were listened to and heard.”
Before fleeing Athens, Bilbão would visit Ayers: “When I felt crazy and everything seemed wrong. We would have a cup of tea in his garden, talk and be happy. His big garden made of bamboo was like an oasis of peace.” Ayers died there of a seizure on October 24, 2016. He was 68.
“It was tragic, but poetic,” Herbert says. “He died in that garden that he loved so much.”
In the years since Limbo District’s split, the B-52s and R.E.M. have achieved multiplatinum success and critical acclaim. But the avant-garde experimentalists who proved a major source of inspiration for both groups “have been lost to time as an entity,” Stipe says. Henry Owings, the unofficial historian of the Athens music scene, has rediscovered their legacy, releasing three EPs of unheard studio material and the live album Live Limbo on his Chunklet Industries label (with more to come); he’s currently playing Carnival shows around the world.
Crow was Limbo District’s archivist for years. “I moved all the studio recordings, live recordings, flyers and posters from house to house over the decades,” he says. “We always wanted to release our music, but we could never afford it. I was about to give up. Then Henry reached out to me. Henry cared. Our music is out now. I can drive my car and listen to Limbo District on the stereo.”
Stipe is “glad that there’s a resurgence of interest in Limbo Zone, that some of its influence still exists,” he says. For Bilbão, the memory of the people who made Limbo Zone what’s most important is. “The music was just an accessory — it was the people,” he says. “I think about Dominique, Davey, and Jeremy all the time. They were incredible. I’ve always held them in my heart.”
Live Limbo is out now via Chunklet Industries, with Carnival set to premiere in the UK later this month.