Six Definitive Songs: The ultimate beginner’s guide to The B-52s
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Credit: Alamy
The two clubs that inspired The B-52s ‘Love Shack’
The B-52s are one of the finest cult bands of all time, ranking at the top of the pile alongside The Cramps, Devo, and The Replacements. Their brand of artful new wave is one of the most instantly recognisable in existence and is capable of getting anyone on their feet, including your grandmother.
Their “thrift shop aesthetic”, call and response vocals, keyboard-driven songs, Fred Schneider’s surreal sprechgesang, and de-tuned guitars all help create a sound that is unlike anything else. Over their long career, the band has delivered many highlights. ‘Rock Lobster’, ‘Planet Claire’, Party Out of Bounds’, ‘Private Idaho’, and ‘Roam’ are just a handful of their most cherished tracks.
Whilst many original fans of the band will argue that ‘Rock Lobster’ is their ultimate cut, others would posit that it is the 1989 hit ‘Love Shack’ that should take the top spot. It lifted the band out of their niche setting and gave them greater exposure than they’d ever had, opening their weird and wonderful world up to the masses. It’s a timeless classic about having a hedonistic good time in the titular building, coming complete with an earworm of a chorus and some uplifting brass for good measure.
Fans of the band and track have always wondered whether the ‘Love Shack’ is real, and it turns out it was. It was based on two locations, one of which the band was already connected to, as it was where they wrote 1978’s ‘Rock Lobster‘. The first was based on the club in the 1985 movie The Colour Purple, and the second was The Hawaiian Ha-Le, a club outside the band’s hometown in Athens, Georgia, where they hung out regularly.
Located off the Atlanta Highway, which is mentioned in the third line of the song, B-52s vocalist Kate Pierson even lived in the cabin in the 1970s, reflecting just how closely the band are connected to The Hawaiian Ha-Le. It was a favourite haunt of the band, and over the years, they have made clear that the crowd it attracted was brimming with a mix of hippies, scenesters, and students from the University of Georgia, who all contributed to it being a “funky little shack”.
While speaking to Songfacts in 2019, B-52s vocalist Cindy Wilson recalled: “When you’re jamming, everybody is conjuring up their own images. Sometimes we’re all singing at the same time and later you go back and you hear what you’re doing. I personally was thinking about this bar that was out in the country [the Hawaiian Ha-Le]. It was a really cool place – a run-down love shack kind of thing, but it was a disco. It was a really interesting place”.
One of the song’s main lines, “The love shack is a little old place where we can get together”, initially only appeared once. However, producer Don Was liked the hook and convinced the band to tweak the song so that they repeated it, and this proved to be a vital decision, helping it become such a crossover hit.
Was also helped the band to change their longstanding modus operandi for Cosmic Thing, the record that ‘Love Shack’ appeared on. They had often performed tracks live before they were recorded. However, the cuts on the album were recorded before they played them in public, helping them to refine their sound and tie up any loose ends.
“He really helped us structure that,” Pierson told The A/V Club in 2011. “It’s just such an iconic song that everybody just feels this joy. When we play it, everyone just lets their inner freak out”.
