Setlist: Pump, Mesopotamia, Private Idaho, Give Me Back My Man, Funplex, Strobe Light, Quiche Lorraine, 52 Girls, Roam, Party Out of Bounds, Love in the Year 3000, Hot Corner(?), Love Shack Encore: Planet Claire, Rock Lobster

I've been avoiding seeing The B-52s live for years.

I first heard The B-52's sometime around 1988. I was 16, and I spent a lot of time feeling like I was a step behind. Along with a lot of short-lived 1970s and early 1980s groups, my friends and I were discovering a lot of bands that had recently called it quits (Black Flag, Dead Kennedys and so on). At the time, it seemed The B-52's were another one of those. In 1986, B's guitarist Ricky Wilson died of AIDS. The group finished the album they were recording, Bouncing off the Satellites and went their separate ways, presumably for good.

Outside of the first two tracks, "Summer of Love" and "The Girl from Ipanema Goes to Greenland," I've never much cared for the Bouncing album. It always seemed to have a weird vibe. I'm not sure if it's because of Wilson's illness, the fact that it's so heavily sequenced or maybe some sort of weirdness following Fred Schneider's solo debut. Oddly, Fred doesn't appear on the record until the fourth song and the whole album has this stifling sound. What sounded futuristic on 1983's Whammy just sounded mechanical here. It was a sad end to what had been a great band.

In late 1989, out of nowhere a new B-52's video appeared on MTV's 120 Minutes. The song was "Channel Z," an uptempo number about environmental damage. Although more serious than most of their songs, it sounded a lot more like the band who made those first couple records than the one who made Bouncing off the Satellites. The Cosmic Thing album came out soon after and I picked it up. It was everything Bouncing wasn't: peppy, fun, full of life and just flat out good. Drummer Keith Strickland spent the time off learning to play guitar in Ricky Wilson's style and the album featured more guitar than anything they'd done since 1980's Wild Planet. It was incredibly exciting.

The band quickly went out on tour, with a stop not far from my hometown on February 4, 1990. Specifically, it was 30 miles away at Ithaca College. Far enough away for me to have to find a way there as I didn't have a car, but close enough that I might actually find one. A couple of weeks before the show, I was offered a spare ticket and a ride. The fourth person in a group that included one of my friends was unable to go.

The day of the show was a cold winter one. The ride was in a soft-top Jeep and was 30 miles of freezing. The only available parking lot was on the other side of campus from the gym, and was a decent walk up a lot of snowy stairs. We arrived late, during the opening act, Love Tractor. None of us thought much of them, but we only saw half of the set.

After a short break, The B-52's were on stage, the four remaining founders with bassist Sara Lee (who also played on the album) and drummer Zach Alford. The set was heavy with tracks from Cosmic Thing along with several tracks from earlier albums including the expected "Rock Lobster" and "Planet Claire" but also lesser known tracks like "Mesopotamia." The middle of the show featured a segment where Fred Schneider left the stage, leaving Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson to sing a couple of tracks not featuring Fred, the not-yet (or was it just) released Cosmic Thing single "Roam" and Bouncing off the Satellites lead track, "Summer of Love." The show was amazing, and the whole thing, particularly the performance of "Summer of Love" seemed like a triumph. The group had come back from the loss of a crucial member as good as ever. And some 500 shows later, that one still ranks as one of the best I ever saw.

After the Cosmic Thing tour, Cindy Wilson took a leave of absence from the band and they released Good Stuff and generally had a lower profile. Wilson returned to the band a few years later for touring and a few new tracks on a greatest hits release, but I never went to see them again. I was afraid the shows would never live up to the show I saw just before my eighteenth birthday. I assumed any show would be a disappointment. So, I didn't go to see the tour for Time Machine, or the hits tours in the mid-2000s. I skipped the South Florida show on the recent tour for their first album in 15 years, Funplex in 2008.

But this year when I saw them on the SunFest lineup, I decided to break with this tradition and go to see the B-52s again, just over 20 years after I saw them for the first time. The Funplex track "Pump" opened a set that would end up drawing heavily from their second album, Wild Planet, itself 30 years old this year. Over the course of the set, the B's would play fully half the album, about which I was thrilled. I've long considered this album both underrated and every bit as good as their self-titled debut.

After "Pump," they went straight into older material. I was momentarily puzzled when a glockenspiel was brought on stage, until I heard the familiar opening of "Give Me Back My Man." The album version is my favorite vocal performance on a B-52s record. Cindy Wilson's lost a little off the top of her range, but the song was still stunning. Other highlights were Fred Schneider's over-the-top performances of "Strobe Light" and "Quiche Lorraine," the Fred-less mini-set of "52 Girls" and "Roam" and all of the songs from Funplex. The band is obviously enjoying playing the new songs. "Roam" was every bit as amazing as the first time I saw it. Kate and Cindy's harmonies are still as devastating as ever.

As the "Planet Claire/Rock Lobster" encore gave way to the SunFest-ending fireworks show, it seemed that the night was ending too soon. Thirty-two years in, The B-52s are still as fun and vital as when they first came out of Athens. I hope they come back soon. I have a lot of years of missed shows to make up.