Ricky Wilson (32) – B52’s – was born on March 19, 1953, to Bobby Jack Wilson, a fireman and a veteran of the United States Army, and Linda J. Wilson (née Mairholtz) in Athens, Georgia. He was the older brother of Cindy Wilson. At an early age, Wilson developed an interest in music and learned how to play folk guitar from the PBS series Learning Folk Guitar. Upon entering Clarke Central High School, Wilson had upgraded to a Silvertone guitar and, to tape his music, purchased a two-track tape recorder with money earned from a summer job at the local landfill.
In mid-1969, Wilson met former Comer resident Keith Strickland at the local head shop The Looking Glass. The two shared common interests in music and Eastern mysticist culture and quickly became friends. collaborated in writing and performing music, loosely calling themselves Loon, and aspired to perform live.
From 1969 to 1971, Wilson and Strickland collaborated with high school friends Pete Love of Louisville and Athens native Owen Scott III in performing together as the four-member band Black Narcissus. Wilson quietly came out as gay to Strickland while the two were in their teens, becoming the first member of the band to do so.
Upon graduation from the University of Georgia in 1976, Wilson kept in touch with Strickland and they toured Europe, eventually returning and taking jobs at the Southeastern Stages bus station in Athens, Georgia where Strickland’s father was the manager.
The two joined the B-52s when they, Wilson’s sister Cindy, Kate Pierson, and Fred Schneider of local protest band the Sun-Donuts, formed the group in an impromptu musical practice session after sharing a tropical flaming volcano drink at a Chinese restaurant. They played their first concert in 1977 at a Valentine’s Day party for friends. The band’s quirky take on the new wave sound of their era was a combination of dance and surf music set apart by the unusual guitar tunings used by Wilson.
Wilson cited various children’s records, the Mamas & the Papas, and Esquire and the Voola as sources of inspiration in his musical career. Wilson also played the guitar on the song “Breakin’ In My Heart” on Tom Verlaine’s self-titled debut album.
Wilson often used only four or five strings on his blue Mosrite guitar and odd tunings to get a strange, spartan sound. “I just tune the strings till I hear something I like,” he once said.
When the B-52s played live, Ricky Wilson often seemed to exist happily in the background amidst the manic exuberance of lead singer Fred Schneider and the beehive hair and campy dance moves of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson. But his mix of downhome chicken scratch, angular post-punk, rockabilly, and surf rock on classics like “52 Girls,” “Strobe Light,” and “Private Idaho” made him one of the most inventive players of the New Wave era.
In 1983, during recording sessions for the band’s third studio album Whammy!, Wilson discovered he had contracted HIV. He confided his illness to Keith Strickland. In 1985, during recording for their album Bouncing Off the Satellites, Wilson’s illness became more severe; both Strickland and Pierson have stated that despite this, he kept his illness secret from the other members of the band. In an interview, Pierson stated that Wilson did so because he “did not want anyone to worry about him or fuss about him”.
On October 12, 1985, at the age of 32, Wilson died from complications related to AIDS following the recording of the band’s fourth studio album Bouncing Off the Satellites. According to Strickland, the album had been completed and mixed before Wilson’s death. With his death the indie-rock scene lost an unassuming radical.
Devastated, the band did little promotional work and did not tour to promote the album. Upon reforming in 1988, the band continued as a four-piece, with Strickland replicating Wilson’s riffs from their earlier material in live performances.
Rolling Stone Magazine named Wilson the 247th greatest guitarist of all time in 2023.
