Some Pre-Magnapop History

Tanzplagen

Tanzplagen
Strange Ways Records
EFA 11056-10
Released 1981

The lost Michael Stipe single

1) Treason

2) Meeting

Line Up- Michael Stipe, Lynda Stipe, David Pierce, William Lee Self

Live at the 40 Watt Club

3) Living By The Neck

4) Meeting

5) Peter Pan

Line Up- Michael Stipe, Lynda Stipe, David Pierce, William Lee Self, Linda Hopper, Neil McArthur

Oh-OK

Oh-OK
Wow Mini Album
DB Records - DB63
7" - 1982

1.) Lilting
2.) Brother
3.) Playtime
4.) Person

Line Up-

Linda Hopper (vocals, noises)

Lynda Stipe (bass, vocals)

David Pierce (drums)

Oh-OK
Furthermore What
DB Records - DB69
12" - 1983

1.) Such N Such
2.) Guru
3.) Choukoutien
4.) Straight
5.) Giddy Up
6.) Elaine's Song

Line Up-

Linda Hopper (vocals)

Lynda Stipe (bass, vocals)

David McNair (drums)

Matthew Sweet (guitars, vocals)

Various Artists
Squares Blot Out the Sun
DB Records - DB72
Recorded live in November, 1982
Released 1990

Track 11 - 'Random' by Oh-OK
A short live tune from their three piece show at 688 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Line Up-

Linda Hopper (vocals)

Lynda Stipe (bass, vocals)

David Pierce (drums)

Holiday

Holiday
Hello
Released 1987

1.) Change
2.) Ingrid
3.) Problem To Problem
4.) At The Movies
5.) John Buffalo

Line Up-

Linda Hopper (vocals)

Lynn Blakey (guitar, vocals)

Don Buccino (drums)

Mitch Parker (bass)

Homemade Sister

Homemade Sister
1.) Rip the Wreck
2.) Merry

Line Up-

Linda Hopper (vocals)

Ruthie Morris (guitar, vocals)

David McNair (drums)

Shannon Mulvaney (bass)

There are variations in the packaging of this single -- different color sleeves, stickers -- due to the band's decision to change their name from Homemade Sister to Swell.

Swell

The band was known as Swell only for a brief period of time before they became Magnapop and included these inserts with the Homade Sister single.

There are a few books floating around out there that document the history of the Athens music scene and Linda's involvement in it.

Here is an excerpt from It Crawled From the South: An R.E.M. Companion by Marcus Gray chronicling the name change from Swell to Magnapop and Linda's work with Michael:

"Michael (Stipe) resumed his working relationship with Linda Hopper, now resident in Athens, when he took her new band Swell into John Keane's in December 1990 to produce a five-track demo. He subsequently described the band's sound as 'kind of like Young Marble Giants backed by AC/DC.' Linda's band was one of the four Stipe protoges showcased at the July 1991 New York New Music Seminar. By this time, however, Swell had changed its name to Magnapop."

(The tracks from the Stipe session are: Favorite Writer, Chemical, Texas, Complicated, and Merry. Four were used on the self-titled album; The Stipe-produced Texas was never officially released.)

Here is another excerpt from Rodger Lyle Brown's Party Out Of Bounds, a pop history of the Athens music scene published by Penguin Books in August 1991, describing the Athens scene and Linda's early relationship with Michael:

"R.E.M. drove to Chapel Hill and pulled into Franklin Street, found Jefferson, and got directions to the club. That night they played at The Station. Michael ate a Quaalude, which was like speed to him, and that and a few beers and Pete's Rickenbacker kick and Mike and Bill's rhythms turned him into his special and amazing wind-curled liquid smoke. This band was from Athens, and they might have that fun sixties sound, but they were nothing like the loopy B-52's, nothing like the machine-tight Pylon. Playing their songs about girls and cars, R.E.M. was fast, sloppy, dude rock. Stipe whipped himself loose-jointed and throat-choking across the stage, off it, into the audience, on top of the bar.

While the band played, tearing out their set, the audience watched, curious, eyes a-bug, mouths agape, tongues a-hanging. There was definitely something about these guys. And while they played and the audience stared, a big car with a crushed driver's door and Georgia plates pulled up outside. Inside the car were Kathleen O'Brien, Linda Hopper, and Leslie Michel: R.E.M.'s first self-declared groupies, ready to rock.

'We went up there innocently enough,' Leslie Michel says. 'The band didn't know we were coming, and me and Hopper and Kathleen drove up in Kathleen's Satellite, which still had its bashed-in side from the Atlanta show, and we had to get in and out on the passengers' side. We rented this real cheesy room and had all this liquor and the only reason we could go was 'cause I put all the gas on my credit card. We rented this hotel room and it was like a real rock-n-roll sick thing. Nobody knew who we were and we had this huge party, tearing down the motel.'

'Anyway, Jefferson and David Healy were doing the door and they weren't going to let us in because they didn't know us, but we just walked past them and started dancing. We jumped up on the bar and we flipped everyone out because when the band saw us they all screamed and jumped, missed notes and everything, and all of us were dancing and got the whole place all whipped up.'

'The next day we went to an A-frame on a lake where Jefferson was running around in his underwear,' remembers Linda Hopper. 'Michael and I were looking at this book of pornography through the ages that Jefferson had, just watching him, saying, 'God, who is this guy in the black underwear?' We were there for a couple of days and slept at David Healy's girlfriend's apartment, and we went swimming and we would go in the pool and all of us were in T-shirts sticking to us. It was Jefferson's birthday party.'

'The fallout after the show,' Jefferson remembers, 'was that everybody who was in a band hated them because Peter only knew three chords. But a lot of people liked them because of their energy. The band stayed up all night and ended up in the pool at Healy's. We had a birthday party for me on Sunday. And on Monday they went to Raleigh and there was nobody there. Nobody was up front where the band was, they were back in the dark, watching. As soon as they started playing Healy and I went out and grabbed chairs and were dancing with chairs. By the end of the show the band was completely off-stage and the audience was onstage.'

After the shows Jefferson said to the band, 'You guys are great. You're the best band I've ever seen. You're like The Who or something.'

The next month, Jefferson and Healy got directions to R.E.M.'s studio in Athens and came down for a visit. It was summertime and the streets were empty. They didn't know how to get to the band's Jackson Street studio but they heard the sound of music and followed it to the source. They met up with the band. By the end of their first day in town they found themselves at a party at a house where Pylon's Michael Lachowski lived called Pylon Park. Yet another new Athens band was debuting. This one was called Love Tractor."

So there you have it...the history behind Magnapop. At least as much as I have been able to compile.