Their finest worksongs
How R.E.M. conquered the world without ever selling out
THERE was no road map to show indie bands the way from obscurity to world domination when R.E.M. played their first gig to a few dozen fellow college students in a crumbling former church in Athens, Georgia at the start of the 1980s.
Particularly not for idiosyncratic, arty bands from south of the Mason-Dixon line.
But of all the hundreds of groups that emerged from the American ‘underground’ in the 1980s, it was R.E.M. that was always the one most likely to succed.
It took them a decade to get there, but through a combination of hard work, a willingness to play the music industry’s games (to an extent), some good luck, and most of all, an insane amount of originality and talent, the combination of Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe managed what none of their contemporaries was able to achieve. By the early-1990s, they were the biggest band in the world.
And they did it all on their own terms, without ever selling out and with their integrity intact.
After coming together in the college town of Athens, their first stroke of genius was their name, short for Rapid Eye Movement, which we experience when dreaming. Like U2 and INXS, the name R.E.M. stood out from a crowd of titles that were either pretentious — Flock of Seagulls, Orchestral Manoevres in the Dark — or began with the word The.
With a shared appreciation of garage rock, power pop and punk and never short of confidence in their own abilities, the combo quickly began writing their own songs and developing a distinctive sound that was both quirky and original, but also harked back to the great bands who had influenced them.
Early reviews drew comparisons to the Byrds — where other guitarists would play chords, Peter Buck played arpeggios and repeated note motifs on his Rickenbacker — but just as big an influence was the Velvet Underground and post-punk bands out of New York and London like Television and Wire. They also absorbed the left of centre sounds of fellow Athens bands Pylon and the B-52s.
Michael Stipe’s voice was an instrument in itself: one moment a husky burr, the next a southern twang or an unintelligible punk snarl, murmured words, high pitched yodelling and deep warbling, sometimes thin as a reed but always enhanced by the sweetness of Mike Mills’ harmony vocals.
Mills, who also played keyboards in addition to the bass, formed a tight rhythm section with Bill Berry’s inventive and criminally under-rated drumming.
Stipe was a reluctant front man, often shying away from the audience and deliberately shrouding his lyrics in ambiguity with unfinished sentences and words snatched from nowhere like a half-remembered dream or an out-of-focus photo. Titles like ‘9–9’, ‘Carnival of Sorts (Boxcar)’ or ‘Wolves, Lower’ were no help to understanding what the songs were about.
They adorned their album covers with strange art curated by Stipe, and their videos rarely if ever featured the band (for ‘Driver 8’, they sat in a corner of a screen, watching black and white footage of freight trains flickering on a cinema screen).
But there was a catchiness about their music that rapidly drew them an ever growing audience and by all reports they were sensational live.
After releasing their debut single, ‘Radio Free Europe’ in 1981, they signed with an indie label, I.R.S. and recorded an EP and two albums with fellow Southerner, Mitch Easter.
Each album R.E.M. recorded in the 1980s was a clear progression from its predecessor with a more expansive sound and increasing maturity and direction in Stipe’s lyrics.
By the time of their sixth LP, 1989’s Green, major labels were competing to get their signatures on a contract. They did a deal with Warner Brothers and the rest is history.
Meanwhile around the nation in small towns, new bands inspired by R.E.M. were springing up on a weekly basis on local indie labels, supported by a network of tiny college radio stations.
Their success paved the way Nirvana, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and a host of other ‘alternative’ bands to top the charts, sweeping away the dying embers of the era of Phil Collins, Guns & Roses and Dire Straits and make music exciting and dangerous again (at least for a short while).
For much of the ’80s, R.E.M. and the Replacements were joined at the hip, the two bands most likely to one day make it big time. They enjoyed a friendly rivalry, sometimes gigged together, and even played on each other’s records.
For a while — after they became the first of the pair to sign to a major label (Warner Brothers’ subsidiary Sire) in 1985 — it looked as though it would be the ‘Mats who finished first among equals.
But it was not to be. R.E.M. did their own major label deal in 1988, and this is when their paths diverged. Don’t Tell A Soul failed to be the massive hit the Replacements so desperately needed, cementing their status as American indie’s loveable losers.
But for R.E.M., Green was the beginning of an era that would see them grow in magnitude to the point where by 1993, with the release of Automatic For The People, they were indisputably the biggest band in the world, selling millions of records while still remaining critical darlings.
Despite their massive success, R.E.M. avoided the dreaded epitaph of “sell outs”, mainly because they got there on their own terms, with their dignity intact. The music always to come first, and even at their peak, R.E.M. was able to continue to make music that was interesting and challenging.
Key to their integrity was that they avoided the twin nexus of New York and LA and remained grounded in small town Athens. They didn’t carry on like egotistical rock stars or lead excessive lifestyles, and they made decisions in a fully democratic manner, including sharing all songwriting credits four ways.
The only blot on their record is that the remaining members continued for too long as a trio after Berry left for health reasons in 1998. That should have been the moment when they all decided to call it a day, but instead Stipe, Buck and Mills continued for another 13 years.
They released five albums as a three-piece, beginning with 1998’s Up, which all continued to chart but increasingly there was a sense of contractual obligation about them as the musical zeitgeist moved on into the new millenium.
The trio called it a day in 2011 with Collapse into Now, by which stage they had all entered their 50s.
In retrospect, R.E.M. probably should have ended when Berry left. They would have finished on a high rather than peter out as they did.
That blemish aside, R.E.M.’s legacy is well and truly intact. It cannot be long before their music undergoes a full blown revival and their genius as a band is revered anew.
Until then, here are just short of a dozen songs by the band when they were a four-piece to remind us just how good they were.
Radio Free Europe
R.E.M’.s debut single sounds so fresh, energetic and original today that one can only imagine the impact it had on its release in 1981. While clearly in the post-punk/new wave genre, ‘Radio Free Europe’ contained many of the elements that would define REM’s early career, particularly guitar arpeggios and the locked in rhythm section, combined with Michael Stipe’s obscure and often indecipherable lyrics — plus a killer chorus. The band originally recorded it as a single for the short-lived Hib-Tone label before re-recording a slightly slower version for their Murmur album almost two years later, both times with Mitch Easter producing. The Hib-Tone recording, which was on their Eponymous compilation, is the definitive one because it captures the raw spirit of the quartet in their earliest days as a band.
Talk About the Passion
After signing with I.R.S., R.E.M. went into the studio with Easter again (joined by Don Dixon) to record their first LP as a raw garage rock band determined to make a sophisticated record for the ages. They achieved that and some. Considered one of the greatest debuts of all time, Murmur has more than its fair share of weirdness but also moments of classic songwriting that hinted at the ambitious, expansive sound that R.E.M. would produce almost a decade later. ‘Talk About the Passion’, which appears on side one of the band’s debut, is an example of how Buck made the most of his limitations as a guitarist in R.E.M.’s early days. Buck was not a technically proficient guitarist or one prone to flashy solos, but what he lacked in chops he compensated for with a sense of melody, arrangement and composition derived from years as a rabid music fan and listener. In ‘Talk About the Passion’ he seems to pour everything he knows into the one song on his trademark Rickenbacker and a 12-string acoustic, as a perfect musical counterpoint to Stipe’s longing lyrics.
‘(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville’
From day one, R.E.M. shouldered a reputation for obscurity and deliberate artfulness, primarily because of the ambiguity of Stipe’s abstract lyrics, which was accentuated by his often mumbling delivery and a deliberate burying of his vocals in the mix. But there was nothing mysterious about the jaunty country rock of ‘(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville’, a simple and direct plea written by Mike Mills to a girlfriend not to return to their home town. Singing someone else’s song, Stipe’s vocal was at the forefront of the mix and the song marked a slight change of direction from the recycled jangle pop of most of R.E.M.’s second album, 1984’s Reckoning, which also contained classics ‘So. Central Rain’ and ‘Pretty Persuasion’.
Driver 8
It’s odd — but somewhat typical — that what many fans would consider REM’s most “southern” album was recorded thousands of kilometres away from home in London. Fables of the Reconstruction (alternatively known as Reconstruction of the Fables) evokes pastoral images of the South, the Civil War, small towns and oddball characters. On paper it sounded like a good idea to recruit British folk rock Joe Boyd as producer, but by all accounts it was a miserable one to make and almost caused the band to break up. But there is much to love in its grooves in songs like ‘Maps and Legends’, ‘Green Grow the Rushes’, ‘Old Man Kensey’, ‘Life and How to Live It’. Even ‘Can’t Get There From Here’ had its moments. With its simple lower strings riff and straight ahead tempo, ‘Driver 8’ is the most enduring track from the album. Ostensibly the story of a lonely train driver on an endless journey through the rural south, it’s the perfect soundtrack to a lazy spring day lying on the grass with the sun bearing down, staring up at a cloudless blue sky. The result is the quintessential song to close the first phase of R.E.M.’s career.
Cuyahoga
After the poor critical reception to Fables, R.E.M. stepped up their game on their next album, Lifes Rich Pageant (yes, the missing apostrophe is deliberate) and a different producer, Don Gehman, who until then had been best known for his work with John Cougar Mellencamp. The changes worked: there’s a strong argument to be made that REM never produced a better suite of songs than the opening four tracks of their fourth album: ‘Begin the Begin’, ‘These Days’, ‘Fall on Me’, and the plaintive, timeless ‘Cuahyoga’. Stipe has described the lyrics to Cuyahoga — which takes its name from a river near Cleveland, Ohio — as one of his favourites. A lament for the lost promises of the American Dream, it tells the story of a river poisoned by industrialisation and the ghosts of Native Americans who were driven off their land and written out of history. Musically, the song is underpinned by the rolling, poignant bass line of Mills — who composed most of the music — but uplifted by by its powerful, anthemic single word chorus.
It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
Document was another big step forward for R.E.M., uniting them for the first time with producer Scott Litt who would guide their destiny for their next six albums and also generating their first bona fide hit, the disturbing ‘The One I Love’. At the end of the first side was the explosive ‘It’s the End of the World…’, which not only has the best title of any R.E.M. song, but also the best opening line (‘That’s great, it starts with an earthquake’). Lyrically, the song is partly based on a dream of Stipe’s, partly on real events and thematically about multi-media overload (remember this was 1987: you ain’t seen nothing yet). Stipe’s rapid fire vocal delivery drew comparisons with Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, while musically, it is a raucous rave up, abandoning the delicate jangle that R.E.M. had almost become typecast for, and showcasing the intricate counter-harmonies of Stipe, Mills and Bill Berry
World Leader Pretend
If there were any concerns that signing to a major label would see REM suddenly become another AOR or MOR artist, we need not have feared. Working for a second time with Litt, R.E.M.’s Warner Brothers debut Green was an evolution from Document, bringing together throwaway power pop (‘Popsong ‘89’, ‘Stand’) with moments of introspective beauty (‘Hairshirt’, ‘You are the Everything’) with Buck’s new found interest in the mandolin at the forefront. There were also hints of darkness in the grungey ‘Turn You Inside Out’. But the centrepiece was ‘World Leader Pretend’, a mid-tempo, country-ish ballad built on the classic R.E.M. jangle augmented by gorgeous cello, pedal steel guitar and piano, and Mike Mills’ backing harmonies. It found Stipe ruminating on insecurity, introversion, fame and the responsibilities that come with being a figurehead before concluding he needs to raze the walls he has constructed around himself and embrace/accept his role. Tellingly it was the first R.E.M. song to have its lyrics printed on the album sleeve, such was the importance Stipe invested in its meaning.
Country Feedback
Out of Time is a strange album, a convergence of confidence and confusion, the sound of a band on the cusp of becoming the biggest in the world but not sure what to do next. It contains possibly R.E.M.’s best known song (‘Losing My Religion’), and it’s most derided (‘Shiny Happy People’), the odd ‘Radio Song’ with a rap by KRS-1, the dirge-like ‘Low’, pastoral folk of ‘Half a World Away’, and the sunny exuberance of ‘Near Wild Heaven’. Amid this melange is the fractured beauty of ‘Country Feedback’, which — as its title suggests — is a slow-burning country-ish lament where mournful pedal steel competes with waves of feedback from Peter Buck’s guitar. Containing one of Michael Stipe’s most anguished lyrics at times verging on stream of consciousness before the repeated refrain “it’s crazy what you could’ve had”, R.E.M. had come a long way from the new wave power pop of their early days.
Man on the Moon
Around the time of the release of Document back in 1987, Peter Buck had declared that it was R.E.M.’s ambition to produce a classic album for the ages that would comfortably sit on record shelves alongside The Beatles and the Beach Boys. With the release of Automatic For the People, they finally achieved that ambition, making something that was both epic and intimate at the same time and augmenting their simple songs with a variety of instrumentation and complex arrangements. Automatic… was unavoidable and omnipresent throughout 1992 and 1993, producing a string of hit singles including ‘Everybody Hurts’, which has had so much airplay over the years that it is almost unlistenable today. In an album full of dark songs and musings on mortality, ‘Man on the Moon’, provided welcome relief following the disturbing, Lynchesque ‘Star Me Kitten’. One of the last singles to be released, it was a wistful stroll through pop culture that namechecked Elvis and Andy Kaufman among others, with a chorus made to be sung by 20,000 voices at a stadium concert.
Let Me In
What do you do next when your last record was a baroque epic that became one of the biggest selling albums of all time? In the case of R.E.M., you make the exact opposite, a collection of fuzzy, messy garage rock. Monster possibly lost REM as many fans as Automatic for the People had gained them, but that was probably the point. It was a deliberate left turn by a band that was uncomfortable with how big it had become. Monster was also a reaction to the alternative music revolution that R.E.M. had helped pave the way for but left behind as it became a major label band, and particularly the grunge rock that came out of Seattle (although to these ears, it was too well produced, too crisp, and lacked the authenticity of those bands). It is probably best remembered for the big, dumb rockers like ‘Star 69’ and ‘Circus Envy’ but the definite highlight was ‘Let Me In’, a memorial to Kurt Cobain who had killed himself earlier in 1994. Consisting of little more than Stipe’s voice and Buck’s feedback laden guitar, with minimal percussion and an organ drone that kicks in halfway through, it was made more poignant by the subsequent revelation that Stipe had tried to help the Nirvana frontman before his suicide and the pair had discussed recording together in the future.
E-Bow The Letter
New Adventures in Hi-Fi, released in 1996, would be the last album to be made by the original four-piece line-up after Bill Berry had suffered a brain aneurysm during the band’s world tour to promote Monster. It was a patchy album that found R.E.M. attempting to reconcile the refined, majestic sound of Automatic for the People with the dirtier noise of Monster, while also casting around for a new direction forward. The result was somewhat inconsistent. It is perhaps most notable for the opening single, where Stipe shared the vocals with one of his greatest idols, Patti Smith. Her voice add a dimension of ethereality to the last great song of R.E.M.’s canon.
