Athens Georgia welcomes REM fans 45 years after the start of the group: NPR

Rem 45 years old this Saturday, which is an ideal moment to make a trip to your hometown.

Let’s just say, you can get there from here. All you need is the good state of mind.

You don’t do it make a trip in Athens. You make a pilgrimage.

Now get into your car and point it to Athens, Georgia. You are ready for music driving Like “Driver 8.” The outside world is blurring you. The walls are built, Pierre by Pierre. Fields dividing one by one. Take a break when you need.

Before you know, you have reached your destination. It is a small simple parking lot, with an autonomous church bell tower.

“We are careful here on the site of the episcopal church of Saint Mary,” explains Paul Butchart, who tours people from all over the world, who come here for a reason. “It was here in 1980, that Rem played their first show.” It was a birthday party of his friend.

The church building has long disappeared, demolished to make way for condos, but the brick and stone bell tower remains, a monument where it all started.

But if you really want to come back to the beginning, to “Start the start” You are going to go to the discs of Wstry in downtown Athens. Not the main store, but the building the size of a box on the side.

This is the exact space where the employee of Wuxtry Peter Buck met a customer named Michael Stipe, who continued to come back to buy nice records. They have established a friendship and, like the real Athens fashion, formed a group. And in 1987, had their first great success with “the one I love”.

Nick Bonell works here today and, of course, plays in his own group, asymptomatic. He says that even if for 14 years that Rem has dissolved, fans continue to introduce themselves.

“All kinds of people come to this store by asking questions about history.”

Less than a mile is absent from the famous weaver restaurant. There is only one room, and while you enter, Dexter Weaver calls you: “What can I give you, doll, baby?”

Squash Panspage is on the menu with a multitude of other specialties from the South.

Outside the small green brick building, hang the panel with the restaurant’s slogan: automatic for people. Remé loved her so much, they named an album afterwards.

Weaver, a big and happy 70 -year -old man tells the story as “we were nominated for the album of the year”, as he was on the album. “I was! They got the title of me,” he laughs. “So it’s us.”.

Rem even took Weaver to New York for the Grammys. When he returned home, bags of mail of fans began to roll. Those who could not travel here to eat, ordered t-shirts.

Half a-one on the road to the Weaver restaurant may be the most emblematic remote landmark of all: the Murmur Trestle, an old wooden railway bridge immortalized in A gothic photo from southern in black and pure white on the rear cover of their 1983 album.

Today’s bridge is a reconstruction, but it looks very much like the old one. It extends over a small stream, in a lush green ravine. Bring your album cover and take a photo with it. Words sound in your ears. “”This is where we walked. This is where we swim. Take a photo here. Take a memory. “”

Happy birthday, Rem