Pylon didn’t really want to be a rock band. When art-school classmates Michael Lachowski and Randy Bewley started banging on cheap instruments in their Athens, Georgia, apartment in the late 1970s, they were more into performance art than music. “We are not musicians, we do not like to ‘jam’ or even practice,” Lachowski wrote to his art professor at the University of Georgia. “We only want to perform—we only care about the product, not the process.” Adding fellow UGA alum Vanessa Briscoe Hay on vocals and drummer Curtis Crowe (their landlord and neighbor, who heard their noise from a floor above), they called themselves Pylon and stuck to their art attack. They had one explicit goal: play a single show in New York, get written up in New York Rocker, and then immediately break up.
The first two goals were achieved so quickly that Pylon delayed the final one. But they only lasted five years, releasing just a handful of singles and two albums before dissolving. Pylon Box, a new 4xLP collection of those recordings and previously unreleased material, shows that their influence has survived much longer. In an accompanying book, musicians from all over testify to the example they set, while a biographical essay by Pitchfork contributor Stephen Deusner details the local remifications of their legacy. Though the B-52’s put Athens on the map (their success in NYC made Pylon want to play there), it was Pylon who built the town’s music community, through parties, concerts, and their own still-surviving show space, the 40 Watt. “If the B-52’s proved that good, original, compelling music could be made in Athens,” writes Deusner, “then Pylon proved that the town could sustain a scene.”
That wouldn’t have happened if Pylon’s music wasn’t so original. “We’d never learned how to play music,” said Crowe. “That was the secret to whatever success we had—the fact that we never had any idea what we were not supposed to do.” Bewley developed his own guitar language by starting with an alternate tuning, simply because he didn’t know any standard ones. He and Lachowski took turns playing repetitive grooves and unfettered improvisations; as Grace Elizabeth Hale points out in her recent history of Athens, Cool Town, this “gave birth to a remarkable independence between the bass and the guitar parts.” That became a chemical reaction once Crowe added nimble drumming and Briscoe Hay provided yelps, growls, and chants, taking her cues from Yoko Ono and Patti Smith. It all added up to something raw but sharp, minimal but unrestrained, brainy but swinging—a sound that was hard to predict but easy to dance to.