It's hard to imagine now how profoundly R.E.M. shook the indie world in the early-to-mid 80s. After Murmur it seemed that college students all over the US instantly formed hundreds of bands with thin, trebly guitars and vocals mumbled and slurred to the point where one couldn't make out how precious the lyrics were. Many of them found their way into a recording studio with either Don Dixon or Mitch Easter. Bands like One Plus Two, the Connells, Turning Curious, Blue TV, Kilkenny Cats, and Dreams So Real all made pleasant but generally insubstantial contributions to the racks of well-intentioned indie stores, and I should know because I bought all of them. Unfortunately the proliferation of this very derivative style caused some fine bands who had one or two things in common with Stipe and friends to be tarred with the R.E.M.-alike brush by lazy fanzine writers.

Since they were form the South, occasionally made use of Rickenbacker guitars, and worked with Mitch Easter, The Windbreakers were often dismissed as one of these imitators. This was absolute blasphemy. The Windbreakers were a fine southern pop band in the tradition of Big Star and the dB's with two great songwriters: Bobby Sutliff, whose swoony melodies and aching upper register recalled Chris Bell, and his partner Tim Lee, who played a world-weary everyman character not too far from Peter Holsapple at his most conversational. After a half-baked 7" EP in a fairly standard new-wave/skinny tie pop vein they lost a couple of band members and made their first great record in 1983, a 12", 6-song EP called "Any Monkey With a Typewriter." Many others were to follow; solo LPs and Windbreakers LPs, and even solo LPs made as the Windbreakers. (1987's A Different Sort is the work of Tim Lee without Mr. Sutliff.) Run, the album from whence we get "Visa Cards..." is perhaps their best. This track gives you some idea of the glorious range of psychedelic guitar sounds they could conjure up; their heartbreak came in bright colors.

Bobby Sutliff is scheduled to have a new album this year on Not Lame; tracks I've heard suggest that it might be the most winsome collection of his career, with a gorgeous version of the Carter Family's "The Storms Are On the Ocean" providing a highlight.