In July 1985, the B-52’s started recording Bouncing Off the Satellites, which is the only B-52’s album I ever listen to because it’s the only one that matters to me.
While making the record that summer, Ricky Wilson, the band’s founding guitarist, was dying of AIDS. Wilson only told one his bandmates he was ill; he’d been friends with multi-instrumentalist Keith Strickland since their teens, when they’d come out to one another as gay. The story goes that they kept the news from the other band members, including singer Cindy Wilson, Ricky’s sister, so as to not burden anyone.
Bouncing Off the Satellites wasn’t released until the fall of 1986, by which point, Wilson had died. The band, by then scattered into grief-stricken seclusion, did almost nothing to promote the record.
I don’t suppose it’s the one most fans reach for first, but my underlying understanding of that time, of what many were trying to live through, makes it feel poignant and timeless. For me, the album’s songs throb with longing for an inaccessible dance floor, an intimacy just out of reach; a looming, inescapable loss. The record is ploddingly funky and vaguely morose, and it is the soundtrack of more than one season of separation and profoundly confusing anguish.
Wilson died on October 12, 1985, just 10 days after Rock Hudson. That haunting month, some folks who had ignored the AIDS pandemic for the previous four years finally started paying attention.
Thirty-five years later, we’re deep in the midst of another plague around which swirls bewilderment, denial, bargaining, and despair—stages of grief, as one smart friend likes to remind me.
After his death, the band didn’t reconvene for nearly three years. What was there to do but spend time trying to accept? Ricky Wilson was 32.