Thank you to Melissa S.


From NME issue 1/23/99
Courtney & Michael Stipe talk about the second Athens, GA show in 1991.




NME: When did you actually meet?


MS: "I remember Hole came through Athens, Georgia and played around the time of their first record..."


CL: "Yeah, and we didn't get invited to Peter Buck's house, which was always the sign. However, Michael did come to our show."


MS: "I was eating in a restaurant and these three people came up to me and introduced themselves. We started talking and they said, 'We're playing the 40 Watt Club tonight, come down if you want to' and I didn't think twice about it because they were really friendly people..."


CL: "And we looked cool!"


MS: "Yeah, they looked cool, the whole band, which is hard to do in Athens because everybody there looks cool. It's hard to stand out and have a different look and they look great. I proceeded then to get incredibly drunk...I don't know why, I don't know what was going on that night but I got really drunk and I stumbled down to the 40 Watt Club and there were about...I'm gonna do you a big favour here...there were about 15 people in the whole place and it's cavernous, huge. It's Tuesday night, y'know, students were studying, nobody had ever heard of this band before. And I stood there and I was completely blown away. And I think I told someone...I didn't reach you that night, did I? You were on the phone in the back room the whole time, chatting with Kurt."


CL: "So this is '91? This is the second time at the 40 Watt?"


MS: "Yeah. And I felt like I was watching The Cramps in '79. I had not seen a band like this in a long, long time. And then we were in Seattle making a record and Kris Novoselic and Shelley, his wife, threw a party and..."


CL: "...Me and Kurt came over."


MS: "You came really, really late and you had some flowers and his contact lenses were bothering him."


CL: "His contact lenses? Oh, I remember. He was trying to have brown eyes. He had this weird phase where he bought brown contact lenses because he didn't wanna be recognised, but they weren't working."


MS: "Anyway, that was the first time we really met although we didn't get to talk that much. We spent most of the time in the basement..."


CL: "...With the jukebox."