San Francisco during the sixties was an exciting place to live: glaze-eyed beatniks,  
roaming streets that would later become the Mecca of hippie movement. And school was  
progressive, his class of eight-year-olds being treated one day to a performance by a  
sixties pop group called The Postman, which played the latest Beatles and Byrds hits.  
Peter didn't have to be told the titles of the songs: every last dime he could talk out of his  
parents was already being spent for buying records.  

When the Buck family moved to Indiana, the free concerts and street culture became a  
thing of the past, and by the time they finally settled in Roswell, Georgia in 1970, his  
parents might have expected Peter to have shaken off his infatuation with pop music.  
But their teenage son's tastes had only matured and hardened - he was reading the  
serious rock press and buying albums by The Kinks, The Move, and The Stones. By  
rights he should have then followed his peers into the hard rock that dominated the early  
seventies, but his love for pop music led him to gorge on the British glam rock of T.Rex,  
Slade, and Sweet.  

Two events during the artistically bleak mid-seventies helped him define his future. The  
first was discovering an old Velvet Underground record in a garage sale. Their sound  
was so simple and direct, so haunting and so timeless that it taught Peter Buck to value  
understated repetition more than overblown polyphony. The second was witnessing the  
New York Dolls in concert in the mid-seventies. The Dolls were the bastard offspring of  
glam rock, an overwhelmingly vile and aggressive group commercially shunned during  
their short tenure as major label artists. But their rawness convinced Buck that power  
needs not be born out of accomplishment.  

The seeds of making music were planted in his mind. But although Peter Buck  
understood the rudiments of the guitar, he was deterred from studying it properly by his  
younger brother Kenny, who was a classically trained prodigy whose skills made Peter's  
attempts look embarrassing. A cheap guitar of his own that he took apart to paint was  
left in disrepair, and on the occasions Peter and friends did get together to jam, but they  
never ventured beyond the twelve bar blues.  

Upon finishing high-school in 1975, Peter enrolled at Emory Univeristy in Atlanta and  
decided to leave home as well. His father gave him two parting shots of advice:'Don't get  
married before you're thirty, no matter what happens and don't get into showbiz, it will  
only break your heart.' The first of these his son kept to, the second would fall by the  
wayside, but only over a period of time. At the time, playing music was becoming an  
increasingly attractive proposition, and Peter purchased a decent guitar, but finding  
suitable partners was a highly impossible task.  

Peter's own musical taste buds were now absorbing the new underground rock from NY  
- the same place that gave birth to Velvet Underground and NY Dolls was beginning to  
spew out a whole generation of left-field talents. The first visible example was female  
punk-poet Patti Smith, whose 1975 debut 'Horses' sounded like nothing before. When  
she came to Atlanta on her first tour, Buck saw all her shows. The experience only  
served to further convince him that he was wasting time at university and after less than  
one full year of classes, he dropped out.  

Buck had harboured ambitions of being a music critic, but this too seemed distant and  
undetainable. The easiest way to earn something with music was to work in a record  
store and so he found himself behind the counter at Doo Dahs in Atlanta. There he was  
able to keep in touch with the ever changing world of music. Peter Buck's music tastes  
were considered eccentric, in Athens they were merely 'au courant'. 'Of course I  
worked in a hip record store,' he notes,'so within two weeks I had all kinds of friends.'  
Wuxtry had one shop at the University in the heart of the town, and one a 10 minute  
walk west on Baxter Street. Both were consistently full of students, artists and other  
young people with plenty of leisure time to soak up the newest music. Many of those  
customers were toying with the idea of forming bands themselves, and Peter joined  
them. Towards the end of his first year in Athens, Peter began to recognize among the  
new visitors to Wuxtry a qietly speaking teenager with good taste and two attractive  
females on his arms. Peter thought: 'God, this guy's got two great looking girlfriends. He  
must be pretty hip.' The girls were sisters, Lynda and Cyndy; the boy was their brother -  
Michael Stipe.