Song of the Day 9/8: The B-52’s, “Deadbeat Club”

Some bands go on forever, the Rolling Stones being rock’s premier example. Others keep a name alive even after all the original members have departed. But most call it quits at some point. If they’re popular enough, they stage a farewell tour as a last hurrah.

That’s what the B-52s are doing. The ultimate ’80s party band hasn’t released much new music since its heyday, but it’s been touring every few years ever since — quite a run for a bunch of friends who started out just goofing around in Athens, Ga., playing house parties when that town’s music scene was beginning to explode.

Most rock bands aspire to coolness; the B-52’s preferred camp. Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson wore sky-high wigs and warbled in harmony while Fred Schneider spoke-sang dadaist lyrics, a style he developed reciting his poetry to electric guitar accompaniment. Ricky Wilson and Keith Strickland, who met as teenagers at the local head shop, handled the music, frequently based on Wilson’s open guitar tunings, which gave the tunes a bit of jangle. The songs weren’t composed so much as assembled from jam sessions.

They spent a decade as a dance-party favorite on the strength of their surprise hit “Rock Lobster” before breaking through to the masses with their 1989 album “Cosmic Thing,” which contained the hit singles “Love Shack” and “Roam,” both radio staples to this day. That LP was the band’s first without founding guitarist Wilson, who died of AIDS in 1985. Strickland switched from drums to guitar and wrote much of the music that became the album, though they continued to form songs by ad-libbing lyrics to jam sessions.

Strickland, who gave up touring a decade ago, said he particularly likes the tracking on the LP. This song is a good example — it comes just before “Love Shack,” and the songs’ matching beats make for a smooth segue. It’s a nostalgic look back at the band’s formative years, when their parents labeled them deadbeats, that generation’s term for slackers. It’s a relatively relaxed song for such a high-energy band, which might be why when it was released as a single, it only reached No. 30 on the Hot 100, after “Love Shack” and “Roam” each hit No. 3.