Early in Cool Town, Grace Elizabeth Hale’s intimately detailed book about the Athens, Georgia, music scene, the author describes growing up in 1970s suburban America. In those days, she says, America was a place wherein parents who’d been rewarded by the spoils of the post-war prosperity brought up their children in “a new version of the South created by desegregation, interstates, air conditioning, and airports” (2). Yet it was also a place that clung to old ideas about life and work and community, a place that was oblivious to nuances of race, gender and class, and the children of those people, knowingly or not, felt unconstrained by previous era’s values and beliefs. “We did not want to be rednecks or racists or conservative Christians or live in subdivisions or work as middle managers,” Hale writes. “We dreamed not of the Reagan-era Sunbelt but of a different world, a new, new, new South. And in the university’s libraries and archives and studios and galleries and concert halls and the town’s old buildings, we found resources to try and make that world a reality” (2).“The scene,” she adds, referring to the musical community that birthed bands like the B-52s, Pylon, and R.E.M., “was our answer to what we understood as the failures and limits of our America. And our participation in this collective creativity transformed us” (2).Hale’s words here perfectly capture the discomfort and ennui—as well as the wild and liberatory excitement—that underpinned that time, and not just for Southerners. For white middle- and upper-class college kids across America who sought to create a brave new art world outside of the mainstream, bohemian meccas like Athens were our own versions of Paris in the ’20s. It was indeed a transformative time, not just for Hale, but for myself and many of my friends. And yet, beyond our personal transformations, looking back at that time, one sometimes wonders: did it ever really matter, in the larger sense? Cool Town makes the case that indeed it did, that the music made in that town, at that time, transformed the world at large.The larger implications of those worlds have been chronicled elsewhere, in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and in the musical dominance of bands like Nirvana. For those looking to explore how that world came to be, Cool Town is a prequel of sorts, narrating just how that longing for independence and creative autonomy coalesced in one particular place, beginning with the B-52s and continuing with stories of other bands that came in their wake.It is a bit odd that the genesis of a subculture would thrive in that location. In the 1970s, Athens was small, conservative, and remote. It was nowhere near an interstate, an airport, or even Amtrak. Moreover, as Hale puts it, “[F]or self-consciously bohemian music fans and critics, especially in New York, ‘avant-garde’ and ‘Southern’ were mutually exclusive categories” (80). The reason it did, she says, was due in part to its proximity to a fairly lax art school at the University of Georgia, but also because an Athens native-turned Factory habitué, Jeremy Ayers or “Silva Thin,” returned to his hometown steeped in Andy Warhol’s aesthetic. She also gives full credit to the scene’s queer members, noting the unusual bravery of key actors, such as Keith Strickland and Ricky Wilson, coming out during high school regardless of risk. Thanks to their influence, Hale says, devastatingly, “[E]very place I’ve ever lived since has seemed…heteronormative by comparison” (292).All these factors, along with some other unknown magic, converged in Athens with the B-52s’ formation in 1977. Their sudden rise to fame on the dance floors of Manhattan could double as the story of yet another lost world where print media such as the Village Voice, college radio, and a couple of influential nightclubs could break a band. Of course, major labels were more open back then and competed with indie labels, such as DB Records and I.R.S., to cultivate what we now recognize as alternative rock.Cool Town takes on the unenviable task of explaining that era, using Athens as a lens to zero in on the larger milieu. To do so, Hale interviewed more than fifty people to get the inside scoop on what was a fairly insular scene. While that type of completism is admirably scholarly, it is also akin to listening to the reissue of an album by a band you once loved that includes every B-side, every radio broadcast, and every remix. Sometimes the book gets bogged down in the details over the location of the first Pylon show or how much R.E.M. earned from its first gig. But this is a fault of the form rather than the author. Because the book posits itself as “an argument,” it reads in parts like a prosopography of an ancient era, delving deep into weeds like the pedagogical underpinnings of UGA’s art school, internecine rivalries between bands, and the functionality of various galleries, restaurants, and venues. As I read, the discouraging words “you had to be there” occasionally slipped unbidden into my head.Cool Town is at its most exciting when it lays down the conditions that made the town arty in the first place. For example, Hale describes the exciting rise of the B-52s, whose surprising success helped Athens become something of a destination town for a particular type of arty, ambitious, young person to form bands and open venues. The book ends in 1991, but as early as 1981, when R.E.M. began recording, Athens had become romanticized and codified. According to Hale, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck had already disavowed the scene by telling the New York Rocker, “I think the whole Athens thing is blown up…it’s just a dumpy little town.’” (126). This sentiment gets repeated by various people throughout the book as the scene becomes more self-conscious. Rather than generate new bands, Athens soon became a place where people moved to start bands. Although that obviously created an extremely fertile and even financially viable atmosphere, it isn’t quite the same story that Hale promises in her book’s subtitle. Did Athens, “change American culture”? I don’t know, but after R.E.M., the artists who take over this story, such as the Squalls, the Bar-B-Q Killers, Mercyland, Patrik Keim, and Vic Chesnutt, had a lower profile and made less of an impact on alternative rock.But Cool Town isn’t only about bands, and Hale’s larger point is that bohemian scenes are not only rare and precious but also generative. Living in Athens helped people, if not to undo life under capitalism, at least to critique and maybe even assuage it. Hale notes that even non-musician scene participants went on to become artists, chefs, writers, filmmakers, graphic designers, organizers, nonprofit directors and academics. Still, any bohemian scene’s main engine is its music. As a result, one problem with this kind of book is that it is just so hard to capture in words the impact and charm of seeing unknown bands perform live. I remember loving Love Tractor and Guadalcanal Diary, but I can’t remember any of their songs. At one point, Hale describes early concert footage of Pylon performing “Danger” by observing that “[d]rum and voice hold the line as the bass rings out and a scattering of guitar notes compete with a clanging cymbal” (81). While this passage is no clunkier than most music writing, it does little to convey what made the band so beloved by its fans at the time.Sadly, thanks to COVID-19, we now live in an era when seeing live music in the ways described here will never happen again. These kinds of books may be the only way we will ever know what it was like. With Cool Town, Hale gets to tell us and remember it for herself: Late at night, after working until closing at the Downstairs or seeing a band there or at another club, I would head home on my old three-speed bike, cutting diagonally through bank and church parking lots and jumping the seams in the pavement that mapped old boundaries and foundations of building already gone. The wind would cool the sweat of dancing or mopping. The chrome fenders would rattle. The basket would squeak. And jarred by the motion, the rusty bell would let out a series of little dings. Even my bike made music then, a love song of course, the story of a young woman and a place where she learned to make history (277−78).