When you first meet Vic Varney, he can seem a little intimidating. Maybe it’s the eye patch. But give him a few minutes and you’ll discover he’s one of those unforgettable Southern characters who can spin a story better than most. And Vic has stories.
As the frontman of The Method Actors, one of the first bands to erupt from the early-80s Athens, Georgia, creative hotbed that produced The B-52s, Pylon, and R.E.M., Varney helped shape a sound that rippled far beyond the college town’s borders. The duo, just Varney and drummer David Gamble, created a noise so big and angular that it still feels startlingly fresh today. Songs like “Do The Method” would have absolutely killed during the rock revival of the early 2000s. Seriously. Drop it into a playlist with The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’, The Hives’ ‘Hate To Say I Told You So’, maybe The Vines’ ‘Get Free’. You would probably never have guessed the song was written in 1980.
Varney and Gamble were ahead of their time; too ahead, maybe. They weren’t stars in their heyday, but they weren’t without successes. Born in Athens’ late-70s creative playground, the band quickly leapt to New York and then across the Atlantic, where the UK embraced them. NME crowned their first release “Single of the Week,” and John Peel invited them to record a session at Abbey Road, surefire signs of a band that looked like it was really going places.
That moment never quite arrived.
Perhaps that was because they were just too uncompromising. The night before their first UK tour, an A&R representative from Columbia Records saw them at a show at Danceteria and invited Vic for breakfast the following morning at the Waldorf. After a few pleasantries, the rep asked whether The Method Actors would consider adding a bass player, something Columbia felt was necessary for their “professional quality standards.”
Vic recalls, “Okay, this is the most telling and naked thing you’ll ever know about me, positively or negatively. I immediately said ‘out of the question.’”
The rest of the meal was polite and chilly. The Method Actors never made it to Columbia Records.
Looking back, Vic is remarkably clear-eyed. “I see all the ingredients that we had that resisted the possibility of ever getting beyond a certain level of success. And a lack of the ingredients that would ensure something like a larger success. The songs were very eccentric. They were not modelled for pop success.”
“I don’t think I could ever write popular songs,” he adds. “Most songs that really make it click into some kind of cliché on one level or another… Don’t get me wrong, if you toil in the vineyards of cliché, you can still make great songs. That’s just never been where I’ve worked.”
Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau called it semi-popular music. He wrote, “Semipopular music is music that is appreciated–I use the term advisedly–for having all the earmarks of popular music except one: popularity.” Vic thinks the Method Actors fit into this category.
“I mean, listen to ‘Do The Method’ in particular – it’s is the yawpiest barbaric yawp cry of youth I can think of … it’s this big splat of a song.”
Varney’s entry into Athens in 1975 was accidental–after going through a couple colleges and a stint traveling in Europe, he and a girlfriend moved there because they figured there were two people there who would take them in. They figured correctly. After a year at the University of Georgia, he quit school again and moved to Atlanta for a year, where he took a dreary day job. One cold morning, while waiting for the bus, he spotted a friend from Athens walking by with a blissed-out grin.
“I said, ‘What are you so happy about?’ And he said, ‘Saturday night, I was at Gray Lippett’s house on Prince Avenue, and I saw this band play for the first time. They’re called The B-52s. It’s just the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in Athens.’”
Vic pauses when he tells this story. “I swear to God, I decided that second: I’m moving back to Athens. It was less than a second when the light bulb went off.”
Within weeks, he was back in town. He saw The B-52s’ second-ever gig and fell in love instantly.
“I moved to Athens in 1975 and hadn’t yet taken up guitar. And in 1979, I’m in a band [the Tone-Tones, also featuring Gamble on drums] opening for The Police. How the fuck does that happen? I had a real charmed life until I didn’t.”
Varney is, by his own calculation, one of only five people–alongside all the original members of Pylon—to have played in all six iterations of Athens’ famed 40 Watt Club. Yet he didn’t necessarily feel tethered to the town. The Method Actors were arguably more popular in New York and unquestionably more successful in the UK than in their hometown.
Despite the band’s double LP, Little Figures, receiving rave reviews, David Gamble left the band shortly after its release, and by 1983, having toured extensively in a four-piece iteration, the band was no more. (Gamble died in 2021.)
In 2010, long after the band had called it quits, they were “rediscovered” with the release of This Is Still It, a compilation that Pitchfork praised with an 8.3 rating, noting the tracks “still sound as thrilling as they did 30 years ago.” And it was in the liner notes to the retrospective where guitarist Peter Buck of REM wrote that not only was Varney an influence on his own guitar playing but that the band was “a kind of secret history of the Athens scene.”
Most agreed with the BBC’s Mike Diver, writing, “If the seal of approval courtesy of Buck wasn’t reason sufficient enough to lend This Is Still It an ear, then let this writer echo the guitarist’s sentiments…hearing these songs today, the excitement, the fever, it’s all still in there.”
* * * * *
In 2005, Varney moved to New York, teaching for ten years at Columbia, NYU and The New School. He returned to Athens about a decade ago–he fell in love and planned to marry, imagining a third act. The marriage never happened, but songwriting, with which he had always been fully engaged, came to play an even larger role in his life.
He believes he’s creating “some of the best music of my life” and Vic still embodies that blend of influence and under-the-radar brilliance.
Today, he lives on a tree-lined street in a house set back just enough to feel hidden—a perfect songwriter’s refuge, complete with its well used old-school Southern porch. It’s here that he spent the past decade writing Rain, a record he considers the strongest of his career.
Co-Producer Jason NeSmith agrees. “The record plays like a movie,” he says, “a series of scenes written and re-written until they feel natural, almost improvised. There’s no filler. Every track is engaging. Taken as a whole, the album’s observations on life, wistful and witty, cast a mood listeners will want to revisit over and over.”
And yet Rain has been sitting in limbo, waiting for a label or a home. When Varney talks about this record, you can hear his passion for the project and the work he is doing today. And, even though the songs sit in his memory waiting for an audience, Vic keeps writing new material and moving forward.
“I can’t not write songs,” he says simply.
He later tells me that “ever since Rain gave me the final steam to plough on through to its finish, that seems to have had kind of a multiplier effect on writing. I haven’t been on a tear like this since London 1980!” He smiles and throws in, “if you want to have a large, thrilling, deep, constantly frustrating, pretty wonderful life lived mostly in one room: become a songwriter.”
That creative streak means he’s already moved on and has a new record ready: Little Movies. It’s another chapter in a career defined not by commercial formulas but by stubborn, brilliant individuality. However, Vic thinks this new material might be a little more accessible.
“There’s a huge sea change between Rain and what I’m working on now in regard to this one thing, which is making music that is more inclusive, that invites other sensibilities in. That may sound like a long way of saying it’s is not entirely me, a shorthand for saying I’m compromising. But in fact I feel less compromised now than ever. Just more invested in songs whose feelings are easier to grasp, to relate to. There’s also a political content that wasn’t there before. But, you know, I think a lot of people right now feel like they’re in a place they’ve never been before.”
After a pause he says, “It would be kinda nice to have my best work come out while I’m still around.”
Nearly fifty years after helping ignite the Athens music scene, Vic Varney is still making noise. Still ahead of his time. Still telling unforgettable stories.
Interview and photograph by Mike Hipple
Mike also asked Vic to let Joyzine have his My Life In 10 Songs selection:
Vic: These are not my ten favorite songs, in most cases not even my favorite song by those listed here. In fact, a few of these artists are not among my Ten Favorite musicians, and to be honest I’m not much into that sort of hierarchy of achievement most Americans seem to be obsessed with (Oscars, Tonys, Grammies; Sexiest Man Since Lunch; Top Ten Fascist Dictators of All Time…). Just ten songs I want to be in a list, for maybe ten different reasons.
Thelonious Monk: Crepuscule with Nellie.
The most rain song I can think of. Our record console–one of those classic 60s marvels of wasted space–was in the dining room in front of a large window. When I was in high school on rainy days I would play it five minutes before my ride arrived. Not a typical Monk song in that it doesn’t (much) swing, it still captures something only he can do: a very particular kind of grace and mystery and beauty. Full of rain.
Loretta Lynn: Blue Kentucky Girl
If songwriting is about singing–which I wish I had realized in exactly those words 50 years ago–this is as good an example as you can find. Pure as a mountain stream when mountain streams were pure. An absolutely perfect distillation of feeling.
The Beatles: I Want to Hold Your Hand
Certainly not their best work, but the first one I heard and still rings a bell. Bobby Henning’s older brother Bill was driving us down Nigh Drive when it came on the radio. We pulled over to the side of the street–really. Needless to say, it was like nothing I (and a few million others) had ever heard before, so stop right there to consider: nothing had more fully cracked the code of how to compress a midrange in a way that sounded like it was going to LEAP out of a car radio and blow you out of the front seat. Forty years later, I had a class over for an end of semester party (international students, mostly Korean and Japanese) and played it on my 1960 Magnavox portable. Not only had none of them heard it before, I doubt if any had ever heard an actual record. By the fourth bar they were dances their butts off.
Dylan: Sign on the Window
His most undercelebrated song, which I kinda like because that joins me with a small elite who think it’s one of his best. A great little unendingly mysterious movie. And, I fear, really prescient. Just listen.
The B52s: Roam
The band that ruined my life. Best dance song by a white band I can think of. Wonderful to be at a wedding party in Luxembourg and fucking finally people get up and pretend they can dance because they can’t not, me all the while thinking, Yeah, and THESE ARE MY PEOPLE.
Joni Mitchell: River
Blue has (a very) few equals. Every song on it is a marvel, and the sum knocks the total out of the park. This one…Jesus, hard to listen to without tears of joy. Greatest Christmas song ever. Upon recent consideration, convinced me to finally print lyrics. If you need to reconsider white people, start here.
Nick Drake: Time Has Told Me
I’m one of three people I know who followed him while he was still alive. (Melinda Pfalzgraf and Peter Buck are the other two). Many will try–thank god–all will fail: there will never be another. The closest thing to if Keats could play guitar like the devil and sing like an angel. O, you, Nick Drake, the neverending English autumn.
Joao Gilberto: The Waters of March (Aguas de Marco)
My favorite Jobim song, which is a pretty high (Dylan-high) bar. Accompanied by only a hi-hat and his unreplicatably simple guitar. Miles Davis said he could sing the phone book and sound great–and so much greater when he sang this. If you missed Bossa Nova, you’ve still got something wonderful to live for, that rare music that will always sound modern. Recorded in 1973 but the very essence of the decade that preceded it, the Greatest Time in the History of the World. Fantastic example of a “not-about” song.
Queens of the Stone Age: Misfit Love
The only song I really know by this band. Find the one on YouTube, Live on the Henry Rollins Show. I couldn’t arrange a song like this in a million years–neither could the Gang of Four, whom I would guess is where this comes from. Always dazzles as much as it confounds: how is this possible?
Billie Holiday: Pennies From Heaven
My favorite singer, one of my favorite Americans, the very definition of everything J. D. Vance and that ilk aren’t. Impossible to find a favorite, hard to even settle on a Top Twenty, but one that captures the meaning of charismatic singing. In the hands of anyone else, another clever blithe song in a musical. In hers, the distillation of why America would be just another wannabe Euro knockoff without Black people. Interesting exercise: listen to this back to back with late live version of Strange Fruit recorded a few months before she passed. Talk about range.
Huge thanks to Mike Hipple for approaching us with the idea and to the legendary Vic Varney for agreeing to the interview and My Life In 10 Songs.
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