But with this meticulously reported microhistory, Hale, who once played in a band and ran an underground club in Athens, delivers more than a love song to the music. “Cool Town” also serves up a textured portrait of a generation caught between baby and tech booms, wriggling under the thumb of the mainstream — in the pre-internet days when “mainstream” was a discernible thing — and rummaging through thrift-store bins both literal and figurative in an effort to create something new.

I lived in Athens for a while in the 1990s, and spent a couple of years as editor of Flagpole, the city’s alternative weekly. Hale is dead-on in the details she relies on to evoke a scene that was in full swing in Athens when I arrived. She wisely emphasizes its L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly and female-empowering flavors: Gay people and women were driving creative forces in the biggest bands and some of the smallest, a reminder that Gen X indie culture was about more than wailing dudes from Seattle.

She is smart on the way Athens art and music were defined by the tension between the rejection and embrace of Southern culture, both aesthetically and politically. She has a keen eye for fashion too, recalling the influential thrift-store chic of Jeremy Ayers, an important scene catalyst: “Bits of lint and leaves seemed to spill out of his seams where a pegged pants-leg met a flapping brogan or a thin wrist poked out from a collage of sleeves.”

Hale also shows how cool Athens was not some miracle gourd that grew out of Southern soil, as it was sometimes portrayed in the music press, but an extension of both the university’s egalitarian, avant-garde art school and the New York art scene: Ayers, briefly a lover to R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and a B-52’s collaborator, had once been a Warhol superstar named “Silva Thin.”