One day this summer, Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson, two of the original members of the B-52’s, strolled into the Silverball Retro Arcade, a pinball parlor on the Asbury Park boardwalk. The band was playing a show that evening a few blocks away, at the Stone Pony Summer Stage. Fans wearing wigs and glittery underwear were already loitering on the boardwalk, taking pictures. Schneider, the band’s front man, who wore sunglasses and a jacket with a marijuana-leaf print, sighed theatrically. “Next thing you know, I’ll end up on someone’s Christmas card,” he said.
Schneider has a sly, deadpan drawl that is sometimes mistaken for Southern—he was born and raised on the Jersey Shore. “These are my old stomping grounds,” he said. He was greeted by Patty Barber, Silverball’s senior vice-president. They wandered over to the arcade’s wall of fame and found a photograph of Schneider staring, slack-jawed, at a pinball machine, beside framed pictures of Ivanka Trump and Wendy Williams in similar poses. “I used to come to Asbury Park in high school,” Schneider said. “My friend Ricky was a pinball repairman. He’s a hoot. When we were young, we’d play pinball and make movies at his house. I’d write the scripts and he’d shoot. We did one, like a sequel to ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ but in our version the dead end up biting my sister. Mostly our movies were about pie fights, though.”
Nearby, Pierson, one of the band’s singer-songwriters, was working the flippers on a machine called Scared Stiff, whose back box flashed a grinning pinup girl. (A placard nearby read “The factory installed a family version of the game with a cover for the large breasts.”) Pierson’s hair was the color of a maraschino cherry. She’s a local, too, from Bergen County. In 1976, she and Schneider were living in Athens, Georgia, and they fell in with the musicians Cindy Wilson, Ricky Wilson, and Keith Strickland. “We shared a big, flaming volcano drink at a Hunan Chinese restaurant, then we jammed that night, and the B-52’s were basically born,” Pierson said.
The B-52’s became known for their tacky, punky iconography—interstellar girlfriends, atomic beehives, dyed-green poodles—which Dave Grohl has credited as a major influence, and which John Lennon said inspired him to return to songwriting. Where had all this stuff come from? “We share a lot,” Pierson said. “We both love slapstick, we both love crawling eyeballs, slime, dolls, Bergman.” They traded touchstones: Soupy Sales, “The Blob,” “Attack of the Crab Monsters.” Pierson’s machine squawked: Game over. “Oh, what was that big, flying monster called?” she said.
“Rodan!,” Schneider said, referring to “Rodan! The Flying Monster!,” a Japanese film from 1956.
“Bad sci-fi, New Jersey, particularly sicko stuff from the old TV days—all that was a perfect storm,” Pierson said.
The pair had hoped to meet up at the arcade with Wilson, who had a new album out, called “Realms.” (“It’s heavy on trip-hop and more than a little disco!” Wilson said.) But she was nursing a sore back and decided instead to meet them at the show. “I’ll tell you what, though, the pre-show adrenaline rush is one hell of a drug,” she reported later, by phone. Of the band’s early influences, she said, “Sometimes I watch that old stuff and think, God, that’s as ancient as the pyramids.”
Like many boomer bands, the B-52’s have found a second act in Las Vegas. They’ve had a residency at the Venetian this past year, part of what Pierson has called their “Cher-well tour,” a farewell tour that never ends. “Everyone’s there,” Schneider said. “It’s a flea circus. Carrot Top’s got the silliest show—it’s fabulous. We’re gonna milk the gig. Though we’ve all got our own plans.” Schneider has been doing a regular online newscast for the Weekly World News, the former supermarket tabloid. Wearing a faux-snakeskin sports coat and shades, he reports such bulletins as “Happy news from Bat Boy and his wife, Batsy. Their son, Batrick, is flying off to college!”
“And we’re all collaborating with chimps now!” Pierson said. “We went down to the Save the Chimps sanctuary, in Florida, and just did this whole thing where they had the chimps do our old album artwork, so that we could bring it all down to Miami and auction it off.”
Did they worry that the chimps’ re-creations would be better than the originals? Pierson and Schneider pretended to faint. “I think that would be the most beautiful thing that could happen,” Pierson said. ♦
