Right on, William Carlos Williams

When my friend and senior in music journalism the illustrious Chad Radford suggested I, for my next piece, write on an Athens oddity called The Iron Horse, I was pretty underwhelmed at the idea. And this was only after he convinced me he wasn’t joking.

“So why do they try to find it?”

“To touch it.”

“And why is that?”
“It’s like an initiation thing.”
“…?”
“It was just this tradition. A right of passage for Athens musicians.”

So, not for any impressive reasons did I doubt the Iron Horse’s existence, but because I just didn’t grasp its significance beyond being pretty fucking weird. It allegedly resides relatively close to my current hometown of Athens, Georgia, and as disengaged as I’ve felt amidst the music scene lately in this reputed music town, I didn’t mind doing some homework to dig up a story on the subject.

So I thought about it. And I became a little starry-eyed with the idea of polishing a dust-gathered, local gem to gain some insight into the workings of the bands that put this town on the map. To go beyond the sweeping hashed-and-rehashed survey of, yes, Athens cradled the B-52’s, R.E.M, and Pylon, to instead, linger a little longer on the constituent bits and pieces of the music scene’s context. What a fucking righteous task! To readjust a highly documented perspective by means of a physical object in order to inch towards its significance and meaning. So, captivated, I eventually decided to take on the stallion. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said. Right on, man. I sighed as I adjusted my beret, ashed my cigarette.

… took a drag and started hacking out my guts. Once I started trying to find leads for the story the stars in my eyes began to seem more and more like dead fireflies on the windshield of a jalopy. What did come easily, however, were the fundamentals of the story.

And so it goes, in the fifties, some well-meaning art professor, unaware that his intentions existed in that unforgivable pocket of wrong place a la wrong time, and perhaps a little too faithful in the college-town’s appreciation of the arts, decided that just what Athens needed was an abstractionist rendition of Robert E. Lee astride upon a stallion. Not surprisingly, the statue became subject to controversy. This, as my friend Todd pointed out, was ironic since those who viewed this piece of modern art as outrageous ended up Jackson Pollocking it with their vandalism, even at one point, trying to set it on fire (it was iron, mind you). The horse was ultimately exiled to the outskirts of Oconee County, plopped into a relatively inaccessible although highly visible patch of field in Watkinsville off Highway 15 going south.

Somewhere along the line, Chad explained, this statue became a figure to the local music scene. The mission for Athens musicians: find this unmarked area where the horse resides and touch it, a task that wouldn’t have been as easy as it sounds to our modern, Google-pampered understanding of the world. The thing, the gesture, pregnant with symbolic significance, lost itself on me when Chad first introduced me to the topic.

“Hey, you’ve reached (___) ___-___. Leave a message.”
Beep.
“Hey, Chad. This is Helen. Just wanted to say you sent me on a wild goose chase. Most know about the horse, but they all give me this are-you-a-fucking-idiot look whenever I suggest its association to Athens bands from the 70s and 80s.”
And I already have half the article written. So thanks a lot, Man. But I didn’t say that.

Stay in the zone, Chief

The problem with finding leads for a task like this one is Athens’ high turnover of residents. Who to ask? I needed anyone who could give me a leg-up on my article, any substance at all, for that matter. There was this one guy. He knows everyone in Athens except, maybe, me. He writes for Flagpole. I kind of hate most of what he writes in Flagpole.

“Hey, Gordon, are you familiar with the Iron Horse? I heard that there used to be some sort of tradition where musicians would have to find it and touch it as a sort of initiation into the Athens music scene… does that ring a bell?”

“Hello Helen…It has no connection to the music scene here.”

Not a drop of doubt.

“It’s cool to drive by it and look at it, but I wouldn’t risk going onto the property anymore. It is private, after all.”

You silly little girl.

”I’ve never, ever heard of musicians ‘touching’ it or anything like that. I doubt sincerely that the bulk of Athens musicians even know about it.”

Note: From a writer, apostrophes are a remarkably subtle way to tell someone they have no idea what they’re talking about.

At this point, the frustration of failing to find leads was really getting to me, and Gordon’s harmless suggestion to steer clear of the horse/music scene connection I’d already started working on done did it, so to speak. What a know-it-all prick! I thought. Shortly after, in a fit of pissed-off Korean over-defensiveness, I went out and found that damned horse, dragging my pal Laura along to take a picture of me standing smugly with a sign reading “Hi Gordon” on it for my story (assuming I would have a story). Self-satisfied, I drove off, and after a couple hours, realized what a haughty little bitch I was being.

After all, the tradition is sort of a silly idea, and what I made out to be a smug attitude in his response mirrored my own initial reaction to the story. What I found most peculiar about the supposed tradition is its specificity towards musicians. I mean, it’s hard to ignore the frattastic semblance a task like that has, especially in such a notoriously Greek town. I’m sure that many a pursuit of the horse has been hazing-induced in the past.

Even Flagpole has forgotten the story behind that mysterious, metal steed. Its Guide to Athens issue of last year reads, “Yeah, we know: within a few hours of being here, you’ve already heard about the double-barreled cannon, you’ve heard about the Tree That Owns Itself, and if one more person tells you to drive out into the country just to see some damn Iron Horse in a corn field… but have you seen the giant sloth? We didn’t think so. Check it out.” And if the word-of-mouth concerning the significance of the horse is true… pretty blasphemous stuff, eh? Especially coming from Athens’ primary voice on local music and art. The past, though, isn’t always so easy to remember, and you can hardly criticize Flagpole’s confidant tone considering that its business relies on being, if not, seeming to be, the informed informer.

Bummed, I told Chad about Gordon’s response. He said to brush it off.

“Keep trying. Stay in the zone, chief.”

Thanks, sensei. Mind you, we were wasted.

“I’ll get some leads for you. Aaaand another shot,” and if that particular lead came as prompt and potent as that Maker’s did, by God, sho’ nuff’, I’d have me a story. The lead Chad promised was from Michael Lachowski, the bass player of Pylon, and that sort of first-hand insight would trump most any recollection I’d manage to dig up in this town, assuming Michael did have recollections of the horse.

“You already have more information than I do!” he responded in an email. Even so, his polite, non-dismissive reply boosted my morale. “I wish I could be of more use for you, but I think you’re on the right track. Keep on asking around…”

And if I ever doubted it, then shame on me, but Chad eventually pulled through. In an email he wrote, “The accounts that I have heard of bands recording at the horse are scattered and pretty disparate. I asked Melvin, who used to play with the Melted Men, and he just said that they used to go out into rural areas of Georgia to record songs. He remembered going to the horse at some point on one of those excursions. The song may or may not have ever materialized. Melvin is in his forties and has filtered a lot of drugs through his brain. When I prodded him for more information he couldn’t recall any details. Instead he went on to tangents about riding his bike out to random swimming holes and hanging out there for hours on end and playing music. He also talked about rednecks in big trucks trying to run him off of the road.”

Record Clerks and Desert Cadillacs

Browsing through records and admiring the yellowed clippings of old punk articles that dot the walls between crinkled posters at the Wuxtry in Decatur, I spot a clipping of the B-52’s. Looking over the counter, there stands three thirty-to-forty something year-old dudes blasting Led Zeppelin, doing their record-clerk thing. That is to say, exuding the fact that they’ve been here longer than you have and know more about everything music related than you’ll ever know. So despite being in Atlanta, I figured I’d test their chops.

“Oh yeah, that thing. Yeah, never heard it called ‘The Iron Horse.’ Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.”
“But do you know about any tradition involving it and local musicians?”
“Hmm. Don’t know. Mushrooms used to grow in that field, though.”
“Maybe that’s the association with musicians.”
“Maybe. Ask that other guy. He lived in Athens for like forty years or something.”
He turns to that other guy.
“Right, forty years,” who barely looks 35. “Yeah, I don’t know.”
“Okay, one second.”

The guy I’m talking to turns out to be Mark Methe, a guy who’s mentioned in the book Party out of Bounds, which Chad suggested I read as a beginning reference for this article. The guy he’s calling, I don’t catch his name but Mark points out, “Yeah, he’s in that book too.” Small world.

Again, I get the fundamentals of the story. What happened to it, how it got there.

“Have you ever heard of those Cadillacs in the middle of the desert?” the other clerk puts in.
“No. Wait, hold on.” I snag the pad of blue sticky notes lying on the counter and the permanent marker next to it and start jotting.
“Sorry, okay, keep going.”
“What are you writing an article or something?”
“Yeah…Is it okay if I do this?”
“Sure. See, there’re these huge sheets of metal—
“Man, have you ever heard of that Weird Granite? You know, out in Gainesville? The Weird Granite?” Mark interrupts. Actually turns out to be in Elberton.
“Weird what?”
“Gran-ite. The Weird Granite. It has every language known to man on it, covered in this really fascistic, Christian, right-wing rhetoric that says things like, ‘There may only be 5 million people on the earth,’ which, you know, would require killing the majority of humanity. Just some crazy shit.”
A customer chimes in, “Yeah the Stonehenge of Georgia. That shit’s rad.”

I put in my story of the Roof Shark I saw in Oxford, having passed it on my way to a Shellac show in London. Apparently, my English friends explained, some guy had it built into the roof of his house to acknowledge and pay homage to those who died from the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Right. The shark is built into the roof so that it looks as if it had been dropped from the sky, its tail, dorsal fin and body protruding out, towering above the surrounding houses. The legal controversy the shark kicked up harkens back to the Iron Horse’s controversy, except this sucker stayed. One of those glorious times when the man didn’t budge so The Man did instead. The shark, both majestic and silly in some ingeniously smart way, still serves its righteous although seemingly absurd purpose, an unexpectedly poignant emblem of post-modernity.

Before I know it, I’m engulfed in a Ripley’s episode, having forgotten what purpose I had in mind for picking these guys’ brains.

No Luck

So where’s the connection? Is there one? Party out of Bounds seemed to find it. Rodger Lyle Brown conjures up the image of the Iron Horse in the countryside with no striking relationship to the rest of the book outside of serving as a contextual image on which to lay the Athens-rock-scene focused story. It would have been more likely for Brown to go into detail about the Tree That Owns Itself if any old Athens oddity was what he needed to set his stage, or maybe even the double-headed cannon, but it’s the horse that he commits two whole pages to. A deliberate nod to a specific thing with no explicit reason why. Yet in my short search, I’ve found myself stumbling onto names in that book so often it’s kinda’ fishy.

Jim Herbert, too, seemed to find the connection (also in Party out of Bounds). The recently retired UGA art professor known for his naked parties, his films, and his importance to the Athens’s music scene of that time had the key, I was told. Todd Ploharski, who works at what used to be Athens’s best record store, Low Yo-Yo Stuff (which is now located in Doraville) was the one to bring Jim’s name to the table. After all, Jim, as Todd pointed out, was “the first person to acknowledge and document” the horse by way of film. The details of the film he couldn’t remember, however, and I never could find out myself. Having been responsible for teaching the likes of Michael Stipe and a bulk of other college-aged musicians, Jim ended up working extensively, artistically with R.E.M. as well as bands like Art in the Dark and the B-52’s. So there was another connection. Jim’s name and an idea of his whereabouts Todd had turned out to be enough information for me to pull some creepy internet-stalker moves and dig up Jim’s number. Left a voicemail, but no luck in contacting him.

That Damned Horse

…Have you ever heard that Aristocrats Joke? There’s a documentary on the thing, and to put it in a nutshell, it’s a legendary joke told between comedians pointed at utterly grossing out the listener with description that changes at the discretion (or, more appropriately, lack of discretion) of the joke teller, so that at the very edge of the joke before the final plunge into its punch line— the listener meanwhile stunned at the fistfuls of smut being pelted at them, wincing at the forthcoming shit & piss KO— the line comes, simple and plainly, fluttering like a down feather out of the barrel of a rifle: “The aristocrats.” And although many argue that the Aristocrats Joke isn’t really a joke because the weight of it relies more on the setup rather than the punch line, it’s interesting to observe why it’s so famous and loved by comedians, to compare it to the typical oral storytelling tradition, like the Iron Horse’s story, for example, which follows suit. And in a sense, that’s what jokes essentially are. Anecdotes. Stories.

Like the Aristocrats Joke, the Iron Horse’s story is both malleable and open-ended. And just as the Aristocrats Joke is loved and valued more by comedians than audiences due to its abrasive and unapologetically obscene nature, the horse has found its place nestled in the hearts of Athens’ musicians and artists alike, although it was once the subject of vehement public disdain; it was and still is an example of art for artists. The horse has become a symbol for the creative, avant-garde and publicly-reviled underdog. The fundamentals of the story of the Iron Horse, like the Aristocrats punch line, aren’t particularly riveting in and of themselves, but the symbolism the horse possesses, the journey of telling the joke, is what makes both important. It is the stories the horse induces that truly are captivating. I found this out first-hand.

In a sense, the idea is dated, and my initial inability to completely understand the point of the topic is the sign of the times. To put it one way, if the tradition of seeking the horse out is true, I can’t imagine local thrash band American Cheeseburger, the year 2008, piling into the van, digital cameras in hand, His Hero is Gone on the stereo, munching on soy-jerky and seeking out the statue. Punk rock idealism, like the romantic concept of symbolic meaning in a modernist and (depending on your philosophy/drug intake) post-modernist world, is fading. The days where in the underground music scene, it wasn’t just the music that mattered, but nearly as central, the politics, the sentiment and commitment to those sentiments, too, that mattered are notions that, although still present, have faded significantly.

But let’s not forget that out there, there’s this Iron Horse that sits in a cornfield that stands for something, that means something to a group of people you may have heard of, that is rich with something that may or may not be nearly smudged out in the telling and retelling of history, having floated to the bottom of the bucket as the grids in the sift of recollection get larger and larger with time on its way to eventually carrying only the largest and oddest-shaped rocks in the mix, while what used to catch lines the bottom as newer and newer layers of history begin to bury what’s yesterday with what will be yesterday… That there’s this horse that’s out there…