From PRX.

I'm Kurt Anderson, and this is the Studio 360 podcast.

I'm Jocelyn Gonzalez from Studio 360.

We're back with another edition of This Woman's Work, a series of stories from Classic Album Sundays and Studio 360. Classic Album Sundays is a program of community listening events

founded by Colleen Cosmo Murphy, where fans listen to essential albums uninterrupted on state-of-the-art sound systems.

For this woman's work, we're highlighting classic albums by female musicians,

women who continue to influence the world of pop culture and inspire others.

This time we're looking at a band who seems to have landed here from some groovy planet. Four decades ago, the B-52s arrived on the Athens-Georgia party scene,

with killer guitar riffs, their silly but eerie lyrics, and their sky-high beehive wigs.

The two women in the band, Cindy Wilson and Kate Pearson, created some of the group's more surreal and beautiful vocal

moments, while also co-writing the songs and playing keyboard, guitar, and percussion.

In this episode of This Woman's Work, we'll look back on the B-52's first album, which was

released this month in 1979. Here's Colleen.

Whenever I'm asked, what was your favorite gig?

One that still springs to mind is a concert in December, 1984,

at an old theater called EM Loz in Worcester, Massachusetts.

2,000 oddballs, including myself,

were singing at the top of our lungs and dancing, footloose, and fancy free, and an imitation of the band themselves, dressed from head to toe in our finest vintage gear.

And when the bass line kicked in on this, their opening song that evening, and the memorable opener of their debut album from five years before,

we all screamed in unison.

The B-52's concert that I attended 35 years ago had a liberated and joyous atmosphere,

and inclusively populated moon in the sky orbiting around the hilariously self-confessed, tacky little dance band from Athens, Georgia.

...