R.E.M.'s First Show — St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Athens, Georgia

On 5 April 1980, a band calling themselves Twisted Kites played a birthday party inside the deconsecrated St. Mary's Episcopal Church at 394 Oconee Street in Athens, Georgia. The band was R.E.M. — Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry — and this was their very first public performance. The church had been decommissioned and was in use as a rehearsal and gathering space for the circle of musicians and art students who formed Athens' nascent alternative scene. R.E.M. had been rehearsing there in the months before the show, and the party provided a ready-made audience of several hundred friends.

The connection to Athens was more than logistical. The city, home to the University of Georgia, had developed a fiercely original music scene by the late 1970s, and St. Mary's was one of the informal nodes around which that scene organised itself. The B-52's, Pylon, and other Athens bands had already attracted national attention before R.E.M. played their first note; the environment was one that treated experimentation as normal and the repurposed church as community property — part rehearsal space, part venue, part social club.

St. Mary's Episcopal Church was eventually demolished, and condominiums rose on the site. The only thing to survive was the original steeple, which was preserved and partially restored as a local landmark. It stands today at the Oconee Street address — a solitary remnant of the building where R.E.M. first played, and a quietly fitting monument to a band whose music has always been better at capturing the weight of things lost than the brightness of things found.