The connection goes like this: The camera tracks Jonah Levin (Simon) and his band - wearily slogging through a comeback tour of bars and clubs - going back-stage He's looking a little dazed and as he passes the headliners Ricky and Cindy Wilson, Keith Strickland, Kate Pierson ,and Fred Schneider, they eagerly take the stage to crowd chants of "B-52's-B-52's-B-52's-B-52's-B-52's-B-52's-B-52's ..." and dive headfirst into the anthem of the day, "Rock Lobster." Jonah hangs back a bit and watches them in a moment both emblematic and transcendent. His look says it all: Who are these creatures rising from unpartied discontent bopping towards Bethlehem their 15 minutes of fame to be celebrated?

"Hey, all you B-52's fans," Fred says leaning into the condenser mike of my recorder, "Warner Bros. still has the complete footage of that - and it was a LIVE set and it was GREAT! So... write your con-grhess-ma-ha-an!"

Sitting around a publicists conference table-on a gorgeous Friday afternoon while NYC shuts down from fear of the LA riot spreading - may not be the best way to participate in the collapse of the empire, but Rome didn't fall in a day, either. And Fred, Kate and Keith have Good Stuff (Reprise) - a strong album of sweet songs, crazy rock, and galvanic dance tracks to promote, and I've waited a decade to write this story. So, as the cliche goes, Life (like hype, riots, bodily functions, etc.) must go on.

Only there's no hype here. To give you a contemporary analogy of how the B 52's legend rose to prominence at the end of punk and crashed the new-wave attitude in a frenzy of Lawrence Welk champagne bubbles, thrift-store clothes, and recycled junk-culture movies (nuke monsters, UFOs; beach bunnies and surfers; etc.), let's use Nirvana. Everybody knows that those "Smells Like Teen Spirit" anarchists woodshedded in a small backwater burg, polished a sound, and the single took them to number one. Well, back in the day, I remember seeing posters around the Warner Bros. office that read: "THANK GOD FOR THE B-52'S (for real). Now, was it the beehives or the preemptive strike that bombed the mobs on the dancefloors? Your call.

Athens, GA is now more famous for R.E.M. but they were just the second wave. One time, that little college town had all the dimensions of a behavioral sink - a concept of research psychologists wherein a sealed environment reconfigures according to supply-and-demand in population increments until it consumes itself to death. Only humans - especially bored kids in a rural backwater - have a greater sense of invention than Sprague-Dawley lab rats, and when it comes to making use of their habitat they can be positively inspired. (Like a bit ot epater le bourgeosie with boys strolling the main drag in drag, everyone hanging out late nights ODing on caffeine, streaking, "cre-a'tin'," etc.). And for the B-52's, their story is an open book - a songbook, that is. As Keith says: "It was just that everybody was coming of age and out on their own and exploring a lot of things with innocence and energy..."

Is that what "Deadbeat Club" was like?

FRED: It wasn't any kind of formal club or anything. It was jus' gettin' together an' makin' your own fuhn... It was real cre-a-tive.

KATE: And there was a lot of poetry - not in any pretentious way - just reciting your own.

Like "Quiche Lorraine?" Substantially the same as the Wild Planet version?

KEITH: Yep. Musically, but not so much -

FRED: - lyrically.

KEITH: Fred and I used to get together when I lived in this basement, and we'd turn on the tape recorder and make sounds -

Was that when you still played guitar, before going to drums?

KEITH: I was sort of a guitarist. I'd just pick up any instrument and play, try to make a sound out of it.

FRED: Or put a fan on it.

KEITH: [Laughs] Kind of a drone sound. That's actually how we did the beginning of "Planet Claire." I'd just tune it down to an E-chord - down real low where the strings are kind of loose too, where the wind blows through them. But we were always doing things like that.

FRED: Off the top of your head. Create things, 'cause there's nothing else to do. It was the sort of place where you'd finish washing dishes and run to your gig.

KATE: The main thing was spontaneity. We'd just make our own party and it would roll along with us wherever we went. And another thing was, [gleefully] crash in on other people's parties [laughs]!

I get that impression from "Party Out Of Bounds."

FRED: There wasn't much to do except bar the doors. But we usually got in. Sometimes we raised a ruckus. Sometimes they wanted us to come back.

KATE: One time some friends of mine had a party, and we got out of hand a bit. Brought a garden hose inside... And we streaked at that party! It was at the height of the streaking era.

KEITH: We were obnoxious, I have to admit.

FRED: We were young and obnoxious.

It all came together on Valentine's Day, 1977. "That's the day." drawls Fred. "The LOVE day!" emphasizes Kate. "It came from the heart," sighs heartthrob Keith, "and it still does." That was when they debuted at an Athens house party - and orgy of "fuhn" very similar to their hit "Love Shack" video.

Says Fred: "It sort of gives you an idea of the atmosphere we'd try to generate. Like "Hey! You wanna get down and have some fuhn? C'mon over! [Chuckling laugh] Or we'll come over there an' do it."

As Kate explains, their whole life-process (and songwriting) is in "The Jam." "Someday we'd really love to put out a basement tape of just jams - with some editing, because it can go on for miles and miles. Basically, we'd just like to capture the energy of the jam in the song."

They were still jamming when they hit big. That was when "Rock Lobster" and "52 Girls" ruled parties as surely as Motown once did (and often still does) - the perfect zaniness to go along with your Rezillos and X-Ray Spex records. More than "Girls Just Want To Have Fun," girls wanted to dress up and shriek along with Kate and Cindy... and were a lot happier if their boyfriends would outrageously camp along with Fred's vocal leer. The jams of those soup-and-salad days were fertile enough to produce the bulk of the songs for the first two albums. And it was shortly after that when they all decided to move up to New York and rent a house in...

FRED/KATE: M-A-H-O-P-A-C! [NJ]

KATE: I wouldn't suggest a hippie commune for a band.

KEITH: That was after a 10-month tour.

FRED: And we had no money, too, so the best thing was to move into one area.

KEITH: Plus, the neighborhood was just the most unfriendly place I'd ever lived in.

FRED: [On a chuckle] The partying stopped. We were too busy workin'.

That was when the pressure to follow up their hit albums began to take a toll. Mesopotamia, a six-song EP, came out in 1982 to generally unfavorable reviews. With little of the whimsy and band-trademark Ricky-reverb, and pumped up on lots of David Byrne-produced funk, it had lots of heat, but no passion and blood. For a band that made its rep off a looseness equivalent to several colors of day-glo jello flying out of an uncapped blender, this was the first rime of ice on their rhyme.

KEITH: Looking back now on Mesopotamia, I feel like we could've continued and it would've been all find. The music was taking a new direction, and we were getting pressure from our management to try something new and different. So we thought: "Let's just do it." For me, I like Mesopotamia, but I think we could've spent more time developing that direction. We ran into it too quick, and we were also kind of burnt out from touring, and we all lived in the same house together, and were trying to write music, so there was no escape from just... ourselves.

KATE: The spark of fun was just...

FRED: It was goooone.

And when they built a studio in their garage, as Fred says, "Th' sue-in' began." Trouble with their neighbors escalated to the point where he put speakers in the windows and assaulted them with Yoko Ono's "Why" at full volume. "Plus, it was good to hear it that loud." "So we moved back to the city and got our own places," adds Keith resignedly.

As the first band to play the Mudd Club, they were an essential part of the early '80's party downtown. "It's hard to describe now," Fred ventures wistfully, "because there isn't a scene like that."

That scene led Fred to do his one-off Shake Society album, with its minor B's type hit "Monster" (and a wild B-movie video, guest-starring the late artist Keith Haring). It was later, when going to work on Whammy!, that the band first became aware of Ricky's illness. Keith was his closest friend, and it is his belief that Ricky had no idea he was HIV-positive before the real symptoms set in. "There was no test for it at the time," he points out.

Did he know he was dying when he did the album?

KEITH: Yes. Well, you know, it was what he loved, and he wanted to do it as long as he possibly could.

KATE: When Ricky died, we weren't really saying anything about it because of his family, initially.

KEITH: Also, you have to remember, Ricky died in the same month in '85 as Rock Hudson. The change of attitude in people's minds has been really enormous since then. Ricky feared how people would treat him if they knew more than death itself. I feel I can say that because we talked about it. Everybody needs to take responsibility to let others know that we support you, we're here for you, we have compassion.

With 1986's Bouncing Off the Satellites, the members tightened ranks, moving Keith up to guitar, and produced a terrific album that still hearkened back to their golden period. "Wig," in particular, stood out as an homage to their cheesy tradition, with canine-stimulating high notes from the gals to put it in aria airs. But few could have foreseen the massive success of 1990's Cosmic Thing. Spawning four hit videos, this game them their first #1-Billboard-certified multiplatinum smasheroo. In the age of MTV, it seemed, the world was ready to come back to the wet bar and stick paper umbrellas in their highballs.

With Good Stuff (produced alternatively, again, by Cosmic's Nile Rodgers and Don Was), they knew from the very beginning that Cindy wasn't interested in any more parties... for a while. Suffice it to say that she's still a B-girl, even as she is now committed to spending more time with her family and painting.

FRED: Well, no-buddy writes songs like we do.

KATE: 'Cept us.

FRED: Yeah, somebody's gotta say these things, an' we've taken it upon ourselves.

What they have to say is in songs of a curiously mature vision - what they describe to me as "stretching out." A phenomenon that - considering the shrinking core of the group - shows a fearlessness in accepting fresh inputs without the apprehension of any dilution. As Fred succinctly puts it, "Y'know, we don't just wanna do 'Love Shack, Part Two' or 'Rock Lobster, Part Two."

"Bad Influence" - I can't help but get this Jefferson Airplane Volunteers sense.

KATE: Heh-heh-heh - I luuuv that album.

KEITH: I think on this album, we just pinned down some of the things we really wanted to say, just in case we never had a chance again to say it. And I think "Bad Influence" sort of sums it up, in that way.

FRED: We've gotten more political in the sense that we're more overt. We don't want to sound preachy, but it's great if you can have a song that has a strong message. And that, and "Tell It Like It T-I-Is" -

KEITH: What's that line? "Honest pleasure now forsaken..."

KATE/FRED: "...Drastic measures to be taken, can't accept your indifference..."

KEITH: "... call it bad influence!" That sums it up. I mean, honest pleasures - there's all this pressure that we can't enjoy our lives. It's our birthright.

FRED: And now, with the black community exploding the way it is, they're saying: "We've had enough and we're not gonna take it." Some things have to be addressed - we can't keep goin' backward."

Is "Tell It" a reality check for the no-more-lies generation?

KATE: Everybody's fed up - had it up to... there.

FRED: As you can tell by yesterday and today. "You got to tell it like it T-I-Is," as La Wanda [black comedienne and Aunt Esther on Sanford & Son] says.

With "Dreamland" there's a near-mystical embrace of "the friends who've gone on before us," evoking Ricky's memory.

FRED: Yeah, it's meant to. That an' everybody you love and want to see again.

KATE: It's a definite reference to - I mean, there're so many people now who have AIDS. We have a lot of friends who are ill and who've died, and I can't think of anything like it - except in a war or something.

They are even carrying on their commitment to favorite causes by listing them on the longbox (for stores that insist on them; elsewhere it will be jewel cases only). Some might think their recent benefit for Jerry Brown signals an even more staunch position. (Of course doing the gig with Kim Basinger - a sister Athens refugee and schoolmate of Keith's - filling in for Cindy certainly caters to the lust-inspired males among their fandom.)

No, the "fuhn" is not gone, by any means. "Hot Pants Explosion" is a paean to pure, un-adult-erated sleaze.

Do you still find it hard to be lewd, crude and horny?

FRED: No.

KATE: [Laughing] We don't have any trouble bein' lewd and crude!

KEITH: Well, I'm horny.

But that's what people expect of you [to Fred].

FRED: Yeah! [Dirty chuckle] That come - hah! - hither voice!

KATE: We've been thinking about hot pants for a while. And there's also a little story in there about people workin' in this awful factory an' they bust out on a summer night... and then, to the degree of absurdity when you imagine the army, the WAVEs, and the WACs all wearing hot pants -

FRED: Some people might find that unpatriotic. But why not? We're all-American.

Which as Dana Carvey's President Bush might have it, is their "vision thing" - their way of getting involved and getting down is the same as going to the party, on a socio-political level. Crash parties, crash race relations, crash indifference...

KATE: Right! It's like a line from "Cosmic Thing" - "Don't let it rest/On the president's desk/Rock the house!"

FRED: We're a six-legged celebration of life.

KATE: I still - to this day - keep thinking: "The party's gonna kick in, it's not doin' too well now but..." And find I'm usually among the last -

KEITH: - I'm always the last one to leave...

KATE: Oh no - I'm the last one!

FRED: I'm by the champagne bottle... No! Don't say that. Say I'm registering voters!

KATE: By the champagne bottle.