The B-52’s had called it quits in the wake of tragedy when they created happy pop classic Love Shack
It’s been 30 years since we headed down that Atlanta highway, looking for that looooove getaway. Kathy McCabe reveals the inside story on The B-52’s biggest hit, including its most misheard lyric.
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It’s the funky little shack where we’ve been huggin’ and a-kissin’, dancin’ and a-lovin’ for 30 years.
The 1989 smash hit Love Shack catapulted The B-52’s from the new wave fringes into the pop mainstream globally and would sit atop of the Australian singles charts for two months.
The band had enjoyed greater success in Australia than other countries post their debut hit Rock Lobster which peaked at No. 3 in 1980.
Love Shack, one of the happiest songs of the modern pop era, was born out of painful tragedy for the bee-hived, op-shop-styled American band.
Fred Schneider, Kate Pierson, Cindy Wilson and Keith Strickland had no plans to continue after the death of 32-year-old guitarist and songwriter Ricky Wilson in 1985 of AIDS-related illness.
“After Ricky died, we thought the band was finished because we couldn’t imagine continuing without him,” Strickland said. He was the only one Wilson had confided in about his diagnosis as he didn’t want his sister Cindy or others to worry about him.
The band members scattered for two years with Strickland moving out of Manhattan to a cabin by a pond near the fabled town of Woodstock in upstate New York.
He started writing music because he didn’t know what else to do and when he visited Pierson and Wilson in the city, he took a cassette of his recordings with him to share with them.
Those reunions opened the door to all four remaining members getting back into a room together.
“We would spend a lot of time just talking; some writing sessions, we talked more than we played music and we needed to do that, particularly Cindy because Ricky was her brother. We all had a lot to vent, or rather just express. We were rediscovering our friendship,” Strickland said.
Once the songs were bashed into shape, the band recorded six tracks for Cosmic Thing with revered producer and musician Nile Rodgers who had already worked with David Bowie, INXS, Madonna and Duran Duran in the previous years.
The album’s remaining four songs were produced by Don Was back in the picturesque surrounds of Dreamland Studios, housed in a converted church, in upstate New York.
The final song of those sessions would be Love Shack, a song the band members had abandoned as a unstructured jam session with just two words — the title — as lyrics.
Schneider had conjured the “love shack” as a homage to the cabin in Athens, Georgia where the band had penned Rock Lobster.
“When we played our demos for Don Was, Love Shack was still unfinished; we’d spent about a year writing for Cosmic Thing and it was one of the last songs we wrote,” Strickland recalled.
“The way we write, I come in with music and Fred, Kate and Cindy would improvise over it during our jam sessions and Love Shack was difficult to piece together, it was very long, it didn’t have a chorus.
“He heard this one part of it — the love shack is a little old place where we can get together” and we repeated that so it would become the chorus.”
They fleshed out the song and started recording it with now Cold Chisel drummer Charley Drayton playing in the studio.
During one of their rehearsals of the song before recording, Strickland suddenly stopped playing and Wilson continued singing, improvising the legendary signature exclamation “tin roof … rusted”. The band decided to keep it in during the recording, which was then also cut off during an electrical storm. They abandoned the session, went to dinner and then came back to finish another take where they had left off.
Commonly misheard as “Hennnnnn-ry, busted” and hypothesised to mean an unwanted pregnancy, Wilson has previously explained the line came from her imagining their old “love shack” in Athens with its rusted roof.
The song’s success was underpinned by the colourful video which was filmed at the Hudson Valley home and studio of ceramic artists Philip Maberry and Scott Walker who were friends of the band members.
It features a cameo from RuPaul who helped direct the Soul Train-inspired dance lines in the clip.
“We invited a lot of friends to come up to the house, which was already painted in all those fanciful colours, on a beautiful summer’s day,” Strickland said.
“What you see in the video is pretty much us hosting a party and having a beautiful day; we captured something magical there.
“Soul Train was a popular dance show in North America and RuPaul took over and directed the scenes with those Soul Train dance lines because the director didn’t understand the process of them.”
While Strickland stopped performing live with the band several years ago, Schneider, Pierson and Wilson continue to perform around the world and are continuing the 40th anniversary world tour they kicked off in Australia in 2017.
The Cosmic Thing 30th anniversary edition is out now.
Originally published as The B-52’s had called it quits in the wake of tragedy when they created happy pop classic Love Shack
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