Dirty Back Road: How the B-52’s Took a Detour from Athens to New York and Rewired the Sound of the ‘80s

The Twelve Inch 159 : Dirty Back Road (the B 52's)

What if the weirdest band in your record collection turned out to be one of the most influential?

Somewhere between punk’s sneer and disco’s shimmer, between the grit of CBGB and the gloss of Studio 54, a band from Athens, Georgia hopped in a beat-up station wagon, took it onto a (dirty back) road, and ended up rewriting the map of dance music. That band was the B-52’s. And the track? The delightfully groovy “Dirty Back Road.”