The B-52s – Give Me Back My Man (Live)

The Voice That Made An R.E.M. Bassist Stop Everything And Listen

What you’re watching from the US Festival on September 3, 1982 is Cindy Wilson at her most commanding — fronting the B-52s alone, no Fred Schneider, no Kate Pierson, just her voice filling a massive outdoor stage at Glen Helen Regional Park in San Bernardino while the California crowd went absolutely still. The US Festival was Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s attempt to build a “Super Bowl of Rock” — a $12 million gamble staged over Labor Day weekend with The Police headlining and the B-52s, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Oingo Boingo filling out a new wave bill that felt like a statement about exactly where music had moved. “Give Me Back My Man” had been released two years earlier, but on this stage, on that afternoon, it found one of its finest hours.

The single was released in the UK in July 1980 and featured on the band’s second album Wild Planet the following month, which peaked at number 18 on the Billboard 200 and went gold. It charted in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and the album gave the B-52s their commercial foothold after the breakout of their self-titled debut. Wild Planet was, in the words of Trouser Press, capable of “inspired moments” — and “Give Me Back My Man” was widely considered the most inspired of all of them.

The song was built, like almost everything the B-52s made, from collective chaos. Ricky Wilson and Keith Strickland would jam deep into the night — Ricky inventing guitar tunings that no one had tried, Keith locking in rhythms underneath him — while Fred, Kate, and Cindy improvised words and melodies over the top. Robert Waldrop, a close friend of the band, was in the room that night and contributed to what emerged. The finished song belonged to all five of them — and to Waldrop — but in the studio it was handed entirely to Cindy. It was one of the very few B-52s tracks where she carried every moment alone, and she delivered a vocal so raw, so wide in its emotional range, that Trouser Press reached for Patsy Cline to explain it. That was not a comparison the B-52s attracted very often.

The recording came out of an unusual living arrangement. After the success of their debut, the five members of the band pooled their money and bought a house together in upstate New York, where they wrote and recorded the Wild Planet material communally, sleeping under the same roof and writing in every spare hour. Producer Rhett Davies — who had previously worked with Roxy Music and Brian Eno — and engineer Steven Stanley shaped the sessions into something stranger and more layered than the debut. A processed, swooshing guitar builds at the start of each verse. Electronic popping sounds sit just beneath the surface of the mix. Keith Strickland’s drums carry an unnatural compression that gives the whole production an otherworldly pressure. Over the final minutes, Cindy’s voice is stacked in layers over itself, multiplying until it sounds like a small, unstoppable choir.

Wild Planet was the last B-52s album recorded with Ricky Wilson still fully healthy. By the time Bouncing Off the Satellites appeared in 1986, he was gone — dead at 32 from AIDS-related illness, his guitar work on the record his final studio contribution. Cindy, his younger sister, described losing him simply: “He was one of the strongest elements of the B-52s from the beginning.” The shadow he cast over everything that came after makes performances like this 1982 US Festival footage — Ricky right there on guitar, right behind his sister — feel quietly precious.

In 1991, when Mike Mills of R.E.M. was asked to name his favourite music, he chose “Give Me Back My Man” without hesitation. Mills and the B-52s shared Athens, Georgia as a hometown — R.E.M. had formed just a few years after the B-52s and the two bands had grown up in the same scene, playing the same venues, breathing the same creative air. That a songwriter of Mills’ calibre singled out this particular track, from this particular record, says something about what Cindy Wilson did with it that words almost can’t reach.

Tomorrow — February 28 — is Cindy Wilson’s birthday. She turns 68, still performing, still the owner of one of the most distinctive voices in American rock history. Watch this US Festival performance and you’ll understand exactly why a bassist from Athens never forgot it. She carries the whole stage alone, and she makes it look like the easiest thing in the world.