CARRBORO - Betsy Harris sat on a cooler of Schlitz beer at the edge of the stage area at Reservoir, a dim, smoky dive bar attached to a carwash.

Harris had been photographing the hard-rock band Simeon for nearly an hour. A few minutes earlier, she bobbed her head and grinned as bass player Robbie Breitweiser finished the indistinguishable lyrics on "Bag Walking," a song he explained as an ode to male unmentionables hanging out of unzipped pants.

As Simeon broke into the next song, Harris fixed her lens on 24-year-old Rusty Sutton, bassist for garage-punks Rat Jackson. Sutton sang along with Breitweiser, headbanging and nursing a 24-ounce can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Revealing only that she's in her "fifties" and graduated from UNC in 1973, Harris is old enough to be the musicians' mother. Instead, she's their friend, recording their art for posterity. Harris is Chapel Hill's superfan, attending two or three shows a night, five to six nights a week. Since retiring in 2003 after 30 years in the human resources department at Chapel Hill Town Hall, Harris has snapped hundreds of thousands of photos, wearing out a dozen cameras.

"There's something about being an artist and laying it out there for people," she says. "To me, it's like having pure, clean water flowing from the tap, and if people aren't drinking, it's wasted."

Before she retired, Harris wasn't much of a music fan. She and her husband Henry, a records clerk for the Chapel Hill Police Department, had season tickets to PlayMakers theater and supported Tar Heel athletic teams.

"I had no idea that the younger generation was creating and writing so much original music," she says.

In 2004, a friend invited her to Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance in Chatham County. There, she heard local pop band The Never. She was hooked.

One Wednesday night in 2005, Harris went to hear The Never's Ari Picker play solo guitar at The Weathervane at A Southern Season. Picker was heading off to Boston's Berklee School of Music that fall, and "I knew I wouldn't have a chance to hear him that much longer," she says. When she told him she planned to duck out after his set to catch the band Boxbomb at the Cat's Cradle, he asked to join her. Betsy was elated to have the company.

"I had never been to a club as an adult," she said. "I had no idea what I was going to find. I had no idea if they'd let me in. I wasn't sure if they'd say, 'Oh no, you're over the age limit.'"

Betsy soon grew more comfortable in the local scene, with help from her camera. The Never's Jonny Tunnell convinced her to start a page for her pictures on MySpace, where most musicians promote their music.

"There were no adults on MySpace at that point. I think I ruined it," she says with a laugh. "The very first comment that anyone left was from Jonny. He made me feel welcome in a world where I felt very conspicuously different."

Four years later, musicians make sure she gets into their shows for free. When her camera broke, they took up a collection to fix it.

"Betsy stands for local music, so if she's at your show, it's a validation in a way," says Mimi McGlaughlin, bassist for The Pneurotics. "She's like the hub of the wheel. You feel it when she's not at your show."

Alex Wilkins, frontman for the band Tripp, echoed that sentiment at Jack Sprat Cafe, where Harris went to catch him host a Tuesday night open-mike.

"[She] makes not just the music scene by the whole town feel like a friendlier place," he said. "It's kind of a strange feeling when Betsy's not at a show."

At Jack Sprat, Harris heard a middle-aged man sing soulful a cappella, a hipster read high-brow nonfiction while a bartender picked an acoustic guitar and a dreadlocked twenty-something send everyone home with a cover of Semisonic's "Closing Time" while Wilkins and others sang along. Betsy had to know everyone's name, so she could introduce them to other musicians later.

"Their names are on the [sign-up] list," said Wilkins.

"I photographed that, but I wanted to make sure I had them right," she said.

It was nearly 2 a.m. Harris had two hours of photo processing still ahead of her.

jesse.deconto@nando.com or 932-8760

ONLINE

Visit Betsy Harris online at www.myspace.com/betsyssmile.

Her online name is Temples of Grey, referring to her gray hair. "I wanted to make sure that they knew that I knew that I was an old lady," she said.