Athens rock band Five Eight gets its due in 'Weirdo' documentary

Athens, Ga., bloomed as a capital for musicians and artists with the rise of acts like the B-52s and R.E.M. in the 1970s and 1980s. And one of the products of that renaissance, by way of Binghamton, N.Y., is Five Eight.

Known for its punk rock edge and live shows that boiled into performance art, the band, helmed by singer and guitarist Mike Mantione with bassist Dan Horowitz and members including guitarist Sean Dunn and drummer Patrick Ferguson, is performing Valentine’s Day night in Atlanta after a screening of Weirdo, a documentary directed by Marc Pilvinsky and named after the band’s 1994 album.

We asked Mantione to take us back to where it all began.

"Well, the band started off with me and Dan playing in college together in Binghamton," Mantione recalls. "And then somehow we managed to have a truckload of our equipment wind up in Athens, Ga., at a house with the keyboard player for that band. He took the the gear and brought it to the house, unbeknownst to us, and then called me one night and said, 'Hey, Mike, I took all the gear and I actually found a house.' And I was like. 'You stole our gear? And it's in Athens?' And he's like, 'Yeah.' And I was like, 'But...' And he said, 'Well?' So I got mad, I hung up on him, you know, of course. And then a couple of days later, I called him back and I was like, 'How much is rent? Then he's like, 'Well, if Dan and you guys move down it will be $75 each.' I said, 'We'll be down in a week.' So we, we came down and that's how I got down to Athens."

The guys knew nothing about life in Georgia before they made the leap south.

"I watched a movie in Manhattan, called Athens, GA: Inside/Out and saw R.E.M.," Mantione said. "I saw Pylon, Love Tractor, all the great local Athens bands, the B-52s. And it seemed like a dream. So we were really excited. When me and Dan got there, we were like, 'Hey, where's the beach?' And they said, 'It's over at Sandy Creek Nature Park.' And I was like, 'No, I mean, the ocean.' They were like, 'It's about 4.5 hours away.' And it was like, we had neglected to look at a map. Both me and Dan thought Athens was by a beach."

In the early years, Five Eight built a following by playing live with sold-out shows at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, but the band's huge talent got muddled in the mid-1990s atmosphere of fickle record labels and radio's shift to grunge.

“I think we primarily just practiced to play live,” he said. “We never practiced to go into the recording studio. And we wrote primarily to exorcise demons. There was no thought given to genres of music, because I was such a Replacements fan at the time. I thought you would just ... you threw everything at the wall to see what stuck. And so there'd be like a country song that we'd be doing. And then we'd go to a fast kind of prog rock number, like an 11-minute long opus, you know, like "Behead Myself" with a jam, you know. And so we were all over the place musically, but it made for a really wild live show."

Mantione said music was therapeutic after a breakdown in college.

"I found that songwriting for me became a way of dealing with the trauma of the mental illness — and the trauma that happened to me that caused the mental illness to begin with," he said. "So the art of it and the visceral impact of the music and the lyrics and writing it and performing it became a vehicle for me to discharge whatever energy was in me from all of that. And, you know, bands like Hüsker Dü became a touchstone for me... and it became very healing for me. So it would not be untrue to say that it saved my life."

He also said his singing became a form of communication that set Five Eight apart from other bands.

"It's the experience that you're going to have coming to the club," he said. "It's going to be like nothing else you've ever experienced. You're going to step into that room and I'm going to meet you where you're at and you're going to know. I'm saying to you, because I am. And I'm going to need you to understand what I'm doing and I'm going to do anything to make sure you understand it. And we became very successful at that. It was very different than probably any other band that I had seen. Maybe a little bit like the way Jonathan Richman would create an atmosphere by really almost stepping away from what would be normal rock."

Five Eight won record deals but craved the live sound. Their first recording was a cassette of a live performance on college. They called it Passive Aggressive.

"That was the first thing we did," Mantione said. "And then we did another live record that was done in Scott Stuckey's basement, and it used Jeff Walls from Guadalcanal Diary [from Marietta, Ga.] — may he rest in peace, an amazing friend and just a great mentor. And he helped us, you know, get it, start to learn how to record. And then we went out to San Francisco and recorded with Norm Kerner in San Francisco. And that was frustrating because we were just noobs. We had no idea what we're doing, and we had no gear. So we really knew nothing about recording. And they were like, 'Just make a live record.'"

Caption

An undated 20th century photo of Five Eight at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Ga. From left: Mike Mantione, Dan Horowitz, Patrick Ferguson and Sean Dunn.

Credit: Jason Thrasher

The documentary came about in recent years after the band rereleased its Weirdo album and enlisted Marc Pilvinsky as filmmaker.

"We remastered and remixed Weirdo from the original 2-inch tapes, which David Barbe recorded at John Keane's studio," Mantione said. "And then here we were with David  at Chase Park Transduction Studio, right in Athens. David Barbe played with Bob Mould in Sugar and he also has recorded most every Drive-By Truckers record; he's just an incredible guy and a great friend. And so it was really great getting to revisit those Weirdo recordings. And Marc helped us make a short documentary about why we rerecorded Weirdo ... and then I asked Marc to take my archives and try and make a documentary about Five Eight.

"A filmmaker by the name of Lance Bangs had followed us around for years. And we just had boxes and boxes of videos. And so I just dropped off like, pretty much a station wagon full of stuff. And [Pilvinsky] was like, 'Okay, I think I could do that.'"

The documentary follows the band's career ups and chronicles an unforgettable high point: the first night Five Eight opened for their heroes R.E.M. at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in 2004 and the guys are pictured backstage giddy and ready to take on the world.

"It was me, Dan and Mike Rizzi [as] a three piece," Mantione said. "And when they asked to play with us, it was my dream when I came down to Athens to meet Michael and Bill and Peter and Mike, because, you know, I mean, they're our total heroes. Of course, Bill had left the band by then. When they called us, I was building my house and that was no lie. And our manager told us while I was on the roof, and I did break down and cry. I was like, 'What?' I couldn't believe it. I was like, why are they picking now to take us on?

"But we had a little hit on [Atlanta alternative rock radio station] 99X at the time, so it was super exciting. And for about a week we were rock stars, no question about it. And then we went back to our day jobs. And shortly after that, Rizzi left the band. And me and Dan, we didn't give up."

That was 20 years ago. After playing together off and on over the decades, Five Eight has new music to share for the first time since pre-pandemic days: There's the fiery new single "Take Me to the Skate Park," a timely ballad on the state of American society and politics called "It's Not the Fourth of July Anymore" and a new album, Help a Sinner, in the can and on the way.

Mantione said he's glad the band is back together, making music at a time when the world needs it most.

"I think this latest record that we've made kind of touches to that excitement that we felt with R.E.M., you know, where we're just like little kids," he said.  And when we got to the studio, the guys didn't really know the songs. I kind of threw them on them at the last second. So they had maybe a week or two to really know the songs. So I really got their first impressions of the music live on tape, and we recorded it on tape like we did Weirdo, on 2-inch tape. And there's just an energy and a fullness that it just sounds great. It sounds so good. And we're really excited about the new record. And it just happened to coincide with the documentary, which is like crazy serendipity for us."

Five Eight screens Weirdo and performs at the Garden Club at Wild Heaven West End in Atlanta on Friday, Feb. 14, 2025 at 8 p.m. Click here for tickets and info. Watch the trailer for Weirdo here, featuring top names from the Georgia music scene weighing in on Five Eight's legacy.