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It's Alright, Pylon Is Here (Again)
The Story Behind The Reunion, And What The Future May Bring

On August 5, word spread like wildfire through town that the
legendary Athens band Pylon would play its first show since November 22,
1991. The cryptic message "10:30 at the corner of Hull and Hancock" was
passed on by mouth, phone, email and every other conceivable way. By
showtime, the unnamed reception rental space near the Manhattan was crawling
with old-time scenesters, indie music fans and the just plain curious, all
hoping to catch a glimpse of the band, widely cited as one of the major
forces of the New Wave movement.

Upon entrance, each patron was handed a small ticket that read "It's
alright, Pylon is here." Included was an email address for the Pylon mailing
list. Even though the temperature outside was unseasonably mild, inside the
club the heat inspired brisk business at the bar and the humidity rose
considerably.

The back corner of the room served as the floor-level performance area
and was set up with lights, one microphone, Michael Lachowski's familiar
bass, two of Randy Bewley's vintage Supro guitars, two amps and a set of
drums (borrowed from Bill Berry). Near the bathrooms, at the side of the
makeshift "stage," instead of the usual hangers-on that would normally
congregate at a Pylon show back in the day, an ever-growing crowd of
children gathered. Appearance of the Pylon progeny signaled that the event
was indeed about to begin.

At a little past 10:30 p.m., with no opening act and no introduction (as
if one were needed), Vanessa Hay, Randy Bewley, Michael Lachowski and Curtis
Crowe took their places. Bewley and Lachowski both donned matching white
cowboy hats at the exact same time. Crowe nervously tapped his bass drum
pedal and wiped sweat with a towel as the others readied for the show amid a
thundering ovation. Lachowski requested some beer for the band and Bewley
asked for a soda. Once those requests were filled, Pylon, formed in 1979 and
long thought to be permanently defunct, kicked off the show with "Recent
Title."

The crowd pushed in closer and onlookers that were turned away from
the door of the sold-out bash crowded around the windows to watch as the
band blazed to life again. People were packed so tightly that thoughts of
maneuvering to the bathroom were quickly forgotten. Hay tentatively glanced
at a notebook of lyrics on a music stand as she sang. By the third song,
"Working Is No Problem," Crowe, soaked in sweat, had shed his t-shirt and
Hay had abandoned reading the lyrics, alternately standing dead still with
her arms behind her back or dancing wildly, vividly recalling bursts of her
famously frantic flailing of the past. It was 1980 in 2004.

The first set ended soon with a raving reading of "Read A Book,"
dedicated by Hay to the first day of the Clarke County School year. At
intermission, people finally made their way to the bathrooms and the bar.

About 15 minutes later, set two began with "Driving School" and the
setlist read like the back of Pylon's Hits album. Every song was cheered and
fans eagerly sang along. And the hits just kept on coming. Later-period
material was ignored in favor of material that defined their earliest
concerts. The band played effortlessly and as rigidly functional as the
simple machines from their iconic screw, spring and nut graphics of the
'80s. Each played his or her part with reckless imperfection, making the
show as close to perfection as humanly possible. Mistakes and miscues were
cheered as reverently as the spot-on moments. Totally immersed in the
moment, each member operated in non-conformist lock-step with the other and
operated as one well-oiled unit rather than the four distinct personalities
that make up the group.

Highlights included "Beep," "Crazy," "Feast On My Heart," and an
absolutely incendiary version of "Stop It." "M-Train" was the only encore
necessary, with Hay offering the mic to the fans in the front for the
chorus.

Soaked with perspiration and besieged by well-wishers, Hay, Bewley,
Crowe and Lachowski greeted fans and friends after the show, signing
everything from a copy of the Athens, Ga.: Inside/Out DVD to the SOLD OUT
sign ripped from the door of the club.

Four days later, Hay, Bewley and Lachowski (Crowe's in Europe for the
next four months) gathered at Nuçi's Space, the sight of their pre-show
practices, for a long talk with Flagpole about the show and working together
again after a 13-year hiatus.

Flagpole: That show was an event that a lot of people thought would never
happen again.

Michael Lachowski: Same here. That's what I told people as recently as a
year ago. People kept asking, "When is Pylon gonna get together again?" and
"You guys need to have a reunion," and all this stuff. I'd say, "It's not
going to happen, just get over it." I could never seem to convince people
that is was a dead issue. And then things changed.

FP: What happened?

Vanessa Hay: Randy called.

Randy Bewley: I just decided that it was time to start hanging out with my
friends again. I kinda missed everybody a whole lot. I wanted to start
making music again and everyone was really up for it. I'd been thinking
about it and missing it. Then I saw a tape of Recent Title, the Pylon cover
band that played the 40 Watt a while back, and I got to see Pylon from
someone else's perspective.

FP: When did that call come in?

ML: What happened was, we talked about it in November. We had a band meeting
and everybody said okay. Where did we have that meeting?

VH: At my house.

ML: Then the holidays intervened. Then January came along and we went,
"Okay, well it's time to start getting this band thing going again." Then I
had to go to New York for the third week of January, and then by the time we
pulled it all together, it was February. We came down here to Nuçi's Space
and we had our first practice together. And that was the first time we'd
played together since November of ‘91.

FP: How did it go?

ML: It was super, super rough but hilarious. I was tickled to death; I
thought it was the funniest thing.

RB: I fell on the ground, laughing. It was so bad and so good.

FP: Randy, you were ready to make music again?

RB: I used to be a teacher and that got to be stressful. I wasn't really
doing anything but teaching, of course that's all encompassing, anyway. So I
quit. I just couldn't do it anymore. And after about a year I was like,
cured or something. I was back to being me and going, "Golly, I can have a
life, I can actually make new art. I can do music!" It's interesting how it
all flowed once I wasn't so engrossed in [my] career.

FP: So it was almost full circle, as the idea for the band was to make art
and music at the same time. And 25 years later, you had a reemergence.

RB: Exactly.

FP: A lot of weird coincidences were going on, it seems. Vanessa, when you
guys got together in February, it was exactly 25 years since you joined.

VH: Yeah, February ‘79 was when I went to the audition.

FP: That's a giant milestone.

ML: Oh, and that Recent Title show was three years ago, practically to the
day, as this show. It was like the day before classes started.

RB: [Makes eerie whistle, and all laugh.]

FP: Let's talk about the show itself. When did you decide to do it?

ML: Well, we only got four practices in, in February. Curtis works in the
film industry, and he agreed to be in Pylon on one condition. He said, "If I
get a job, I'm gone." We thought, "Well, that's gonna suck if he has to
leave." But for the entire previous year he'd only been gone for one film,
so we thought, "We can deal with it." So, we start practicing and, sure
enough, he got a job! Right after our fourth practice, he left in March and
didn't get back till the end of July. We started practicing again, just a
couple of weeks ago.

RB: We had two practices and then the third practice, Curtis dropped the
bomb.

ML: He told us last Tuesday, right when we had decided to accelerate our
rehearsal schedule to make a little faster progress, that he was about to be
gone for four months.

VH: So we got two more practices in and then played.

RB: If anyone told me, eight practices ago, "Guess what? In eight practices
from now, you're gonna be on stage," I'd be like, "Oh, God!"

VH: Or on the floor, in this case.

FP: Did word leak out too much?

VH: I thought it was gonna be a little party, like for our friends. I had no
clue it was gonna be this big deal. Then [my husband] Bob started saying
stuff like, "Don't tell too many people, there's gonna be a riot downtown."

ML: Our attitude was: "Okay, Curtis is about to leave. We can delay this
thing again until the holidays, then we're looking at January and then it
might be March or April or May, so we said, "We might as well go play." A
raw, rough practice in front of people. But that part never really was
communicated too successfully. When people just heard we were playing,
that's all they heard.

RB: We were all kinda bummed when Curtis gave us the news. We were sittin'
around mopin', like what's the point? Will this work? But at some point, we
just said, "Let's just play music" and when we did that, man, after that bad
news, the songs just really came together, like we had a mission and didn't
know it. We knew we should play.

VH: We had to!

ML: Yeah, because we don't know for sure what's gonna happen now that he's
taken off again. Now, we're not blaming him, he told us this at the start.

FP: How did it feel to be playing in front of people again?

RB: I was standing there thinking, "My God, there's people, right there. Its
going on!"

VH: There was an energy that felt like our early shows. That energy of where
we weren't quite really sure, sometimes. And I think that - I hate to use
the term fear factor, because it makes you think of that bad TV show - but
it maybe made us focus.

RB: Yeah, the tension. It was definitely like 1980, Tyrone's. That kind of
thing.

VH: Yeah, it was the same kind of energy with the crowd too. It was a very
good crowd.

ML: Every time I looked back, there were more and more people squished in.

VH: I loved it when they started jumping up and down. I was like, "I
remember doin' that!"

FP: Just like with the 40 Watt on Broad Street, you christened a new venue.

ML: One of the aspects of the energy of it was we just decided on Tuesday
night that we'd like to do it, and I thought it would be good to play that
space because no band had ever played there. So part of it was, "Let's try
to do something, let's try to do something really soon and let's do
something a little bit different."

That was conjuring up a lot of the original impulses and opportunities that
Pylon had because [in the late '70s and early '80s] there wasn't that
groundwork laid before you as to where you would go. Most people probably
would have thought that if we were to do a quick little show, we'd do it at
Caledonia or Nuçi's or something. But, to me, to be the first band to play
there, the place doesn't even really have a name yet, and people didn't
really know where we were talking about because there hadn't been any shows
there.

We just threw a curve by announcing the show. We asked if we could do it
there 48 hours before we did it. They couldn't believe we were serious.
Everything about it was like that. So it all contributed to that energy.

FP: And WUOG even went off the air?

ML: Yeah, the guys at 90.5 went off the air at 9:30 p.m., so they could come
over after playing nothing but Pylon till then. Crazy stuff. It was fun and
gratifying to us that it turned into something that had such a wild energy
associated with it.

FP: It quickly turned from a raw practice into an instantly legendary
performance.

ML: Pylon always made decisions based on kind of aesthetic stubbornness and
stuff. Like business decisions, good and bad decisions, taken together are
part of what we are. So I thought it was a really fitting way to "re-enter."

FP: So a poster wasn't even necessary with all the word of mouth.

VH: No, but I had a great idea on the way to work the Saturday morning after
the show. I said "I wish I had some posters, so I could put 'em up now." You
know, "Pylon, Thursday night,' and just have 'em magically appear in the
middle of the night on Friday, so people on Saturday would say "Why didn't I
see that poster before? I could have been there."

FP: But there was that little ticket thingy with the email address.

ML: A lot of people said they wish they'd known about the show. So one of
the best answers to that, instead of begging for forgiveness that you didn't
remember 200 people you were supposed to call, the simplest way to prevent
that from happening again is to get on our little email list [by sending a
message to hello@wearepylon.com]. Then you'll always know.

VH: I tried to call as many people as I could. I'll apologize to Craig
Woodall right here. I never could get him.

FP: How did you choose the set?

VH: We played all the ones that we knew.

RB: Those are the songs that were born 25 years ago and the ones we know the
best.

VH: We were joking that we were gonna draw numbers and if we drew your
number, you could say what song we were gonna play.

RB: Oh, that's so dangerous!

FP: The whole evening had a surreal feeling to it.

VH: Yeah, and what did it for me, when I felt that surreal feeling, was when
I saw the cell phones in the air. The last time we were together, people
weren't doin' that!

ML: You mean that replaces lighters now?

VH: No, they were calling their friends so they could hear us playing.

ML: Oh, I thought you meant that the little screens were lit up like
lighters.

RB: What do we sound like on a cell phone?

ML: Like a construction site? A very rhythmic construction site.

FP: When you started the show, very ironically and appropriately, with
"Recent Title," what did that moment feel like after being away from
performing for so long?

RB: It was like crankin' up a V-8 engine, for me. That song just took off.

ML: That was one of those throw-away songs, just to get the process of
having to execute one song out of the way without doing any harm, just to
make some noise. When you go 13 years without being in a band, to go and
suddenly be doing it again, well it's something that's imprinted fairly
deeply in our memory.

We've played hundreds of shows, but to me it's like that bridging, from that
moment that I didn't think would ever happen again, to all of the shows in
the past. There's only a few that really stand out and Thursday night will
definitely be one of them.

FP: Is being Pylon fun again?

VH: Oh yeah, it was a lot of fun.

RB: It was, it was way fun.

ML: I was, just like the crowd, getting the chance to see the show, too.
When I realized it was near the end, when Vanessa was singing that "Stop It"
thing, I was going, "Oh my God, this is just over the top for me." That
"Don't now rock and roll" stuff is so simple, but it just works.

VH: This isn't bragging, this is just a feeling that I had, and I just want
to share it. Not every time, but sometimes, I'd be up there and I'd feel
like, "Tonight I'm in the best band, maybe in the universe."