Something remarkable happened in a very unremarkable fashion 30 years ago tonight. A young woman named Kathleen O’Brien threw herself a birthday party. From all reports, she wanted it to rival any party that Athens, Ga., had ever seen. She arranged for some bands to play, including one which featured her two roommates at the converted church where the party would take place.

She convinced those two guys to join up with two other guys she knew. The party would mark their first show together. No one knew if they would ever play together again since Athens had a fluid and dynamic music scene at the time. Their first song was, according to all accounts, “I Can’t Control Myself.” All recollections of the evening describe a typical wild, college party with nothing special of note.

Except that the band which played that night (captured in the only known photos from the party on the right from photographer and R.E.M. friend Sandra Lee Phipps) without a name soon chose the moniker R.E.M. and started playing other shows in Athens. Within a couple of years, they had opened for The Police and The Clash and started receiving positive reviews from their early recordings. They toured constantly and started a run of successful album releases in 1983 with “Murmur,” hailed by Rolling Stone as the best album of that year. This came when “Thriller” burned up the charts and popular MTV-driven acts such as Madonna and Men at Work held much of the public consciousness. One of those albums – “Life’s Rich Pageant” in 1986 – included the original song “Just a Touch,” which was part of their set in that first-ever performance.

Thirty years later, the band, now a “three-legged dog” since drummer Bill Berry’s 1997 departure, is hard at work on another studio album while all sorts of events are scheduled for Athens to commemorate the anniversary. These events all carry the caveat that R.E.M. is not scheduled to appear, but I have a funny feeling at least one of them will find a way to show up at the tribute concert scheduled for tonight and join in the fun. [edit – They did not]

After all, that’s how this whole thing got started, just a chance to have fun with friends in Athens. Thank God for Kathleen O’Brien. I will never forget her birthday.

There are a treasure trove of R.E.M. links I can share, but here are just a few:

An interesting recollection of their first studio experience

The real story behind “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville”

The earliest-known live recording of the band – May 1980; download the whole thing as a zip file or just listen to some songs