The real reason The B-52s wrote ‘Love Shack’: “Be sexy, be free”
“It’s one of those songs that sort of poured out of us when we jammed,” said The B-52s singer and keyboardist Kate Pierson. The fruit of jamming and collective grief, what became the band’s signature song has a different story for each of the band members.
Pierson was the owner of what was often believed to be the ‘real’ love shack: a small cabin where the band would go to make music and let loose. Tucked away outside of Athens, Goergia, the shack was very frugal, without plumbing or running water, but it served as a perfect refuge: “The idea of the ‘Love Shack’ was just kind of a club out in the, just like a shack out in the country, where anyone could go, inclusive you know, be sexy, be free,” Pierson told a documentary on Dutch Public Television in 2019.
“Dance, sweat, have fun together. If you’re not into that, then ‘Stay away, fools’,” said the band’s redhead. That song’s euphoria ended up capturing listeners for generations: “It had such a different groove than a lot of other B-52 songs, it was more funky, you know, it was really danceable…it was just different, so I knew it really stood out, and yet it still had our signature scent,” she told the Consequence podcast.
The infectious anthem was actually written at a time when the band was combating their grief for the premature death of founding member Ricky Wilson from AIDS in 1985. Cindy Wilson, the band’s vocalist and the late guitarist’s younger sister, spoke about the challenges of that time in a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone: “When Ricky passed, it was just a horrible time. It was like an atom bomb going off. I think Keith dealt with the shock by doing music every day. That was his way of getting over his depression.”
Guitarist Keith Strickland had indeed presented the project to the band’s surviving members, and two years later, the album Cosmic Thing was born. “It was all about nostalgia. It was looking back at the good times we used to have in Athens, so it was a wonderful, healing record,” said Wilson. “It turned out to be such a healing thing to get back together again. It felt like Ricky was in the room.”
Although Strickland’s perfectionism almost prevented the song from coming out, the band was excited for it to be on the album.
Despite the circumstances, the group’s ideas were flourishing. ‘Love Shack’ celebrated the B-52s’ years of making people dance, and the idea came from singer Fred Schneider, based on where the band themselves would dance: “There was a place outside of Athens called the Hawaiian Ha-Le. It was an African-American club that had a lot of good shows. It looked like a shack, you wouldn’t expect it to be what it was, and when you opened the door, it was a wild band playing,” he told Rolling Stone.
The club closed down, and Pierson’s hut burned down, but the Love Shack will always bring people together to dance. “Even the hardcore punks in leather jackets started dancing,” said Pierson to Consequence.
“We played it for REM who’d stopped into the studio, and they heard ‘Love Shack’ and they were like, that’s it!”
