The story of Pylon is fascinating. To say that R.E.M. copied Pylon’s style would be unfair, but the unique sound of both bands was strikingly similar. Compare Pylon’s Gyrate (1980) with Chronic Town (1981) and Murmur (1983). Compare R.E.M.’s Reckoning (1984) with Chomp (1983). These cats were nourished by the same soil. Athens is a small town. A band becomes popular. Other bands spring up with a similar style and become more popular than the first. It happens all the time.
On the other hand, you have the story of Pylon’s offer to open up on a North American tour for a popular Irish band trying to make it big in the States called U-2. It would make more sense that U-2 would ask the B-52s instead, doesn’t it? From an aeronautically-named performance artists’ perspective? Maybe not. So intriguing that Pylon would have such close relations with two bands who went on to become among the most popular performers in the history of modern Rock.
In the above video, Michael explains how Pylon went on the tour for a few shows, but backed out because “it was the wrong crowd for us,” which is such an Athens thing to do. Athens people totally understand this. Athens is an incredibly diverse town with at least three of the most popular bands of all time in their respective genres (B-52s, pop/dance, R.E.M., rock, Widespread Panic, jam bands). Athens has a crowd for everyone, and everyone has a crowd for them. You don’t need to waste time being around the wrong crowd in Athens. As Vanessa says, when playing stopped being fun, they were out, which is also a totally Athens thing to do.
The grand entrance of the Sorceress in Stop It was one of the last scenes that I wrote. Every editor we interviewed seemed to love the sudden jolt of the story into the Sorceress’s netherworld. I thought I would need to clean up the transition in later drafts, but they all said no, it’s better this way. A real “blind-squirrel” moment for me as a writer.
My real career coach and the Sorceress couldn’t be more different in real life, except that she really is probably a Size Two on a fat day and does look like Samantha Stevens’s hot cousin Serena on Bewitched, which is nice. The dialogue with the Sorceress about my situation(s) and what to do about it were all phone consultations and text/e-mail exchanges in reality.
But how boring would it be to read about phone conversations and e-mail messages between me and my career coach? Or exposition about her advice to me? Or a soliloquy directed at the reader? Neither would do, and when I decided to fictionalize the memoir, the Sorceress came into being and solved all of those problems.
I had a bit of pushback on the title “Night of the Long Knives” because one of my pre-pub readers thought the phrase related to the Nazis and the Holocaust and might offend Jewish readers. I polled a group of Jewish friends of mine who said the term wasn’t offensive at all and didn’t relate to the Holocaust directly. Rather than re-tell the history here, click here if interested: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/roehm-purge.
Obviously my story bears no resemblance to the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany, nor the Nazi persecution of people with disabilities (https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program). Only a flying monkey could say otherwise.
The purge did set the stage for further abuses of power by the Nazis, however, which is what I was alluding to with the title. See, e.g., the definition of the idiom.
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