(I wrote this myself, September 2011)
You see, it was the fall of 1983, and I was seventeen, and searching for something. It was only a few years earlier I’d gotten obsessed with music and hooked on rock radio, but I’d realized pretty quickly that the stuff that resonated most strongly with me tended to be British-invasion era of the Who/Stones/Yardbirds variety. Loud, punchy songs with strong melodies and hooks, and they rocked.
In 1983 there sure wasn’t much of that around. Your choices were the overly slick, empty “arena rock” of REO Speedwagon/Journey/Foreigner/etc etc, embarrassing heavy metal (insert name of any Top 40 or underground metal band of the era, as far as I’m concerned ), or lifeless, synthesizer-driven dance-pop from the UK (which people from my oh-so-square high school called “punk”).
Other than that, there was hardcore – which was fun but limited – a palette with only one or two colors, to these ears. And there was an interesting strain coming out of Ireland/Scotland/Australia of which U2 would be the prime example. I liked some of that. But it was missing something .
All of which meant my favorite music remained mostly British-invasion era of the Who/Stones/Yardbirds variety. Having given up on rock radio, I was driven into the arms of rock writers to try and discover sounds. And through them I was reveling in the “precursors of punk” – Patti Smith, The Stooges, The Velvets … all of whom I’d had to go out on the limb by risking my paltry allowance money to buy records based on reviews … and all of whom had rewarded me richly.
My big record that summer was 1969: The Velvet Underground Live. I probably listened to that (or at least a part of it) two to three times a day that summer. At one point I actually had resolved to stop listening to it for awhile so as not to let familiarity spoil it for me (I broke down, though). It was unlike any rock I’d ever heard. The songs were intelligent, moving, the guitar playing was gorgeous, and they rocked as hard as any band I’d ever heard, yet in a way that was, I think, accurately described by Billy Altman as “gracefully.” The music had a special quality, what Wayne Kramer called “sinister” and “blue-green” (also, I think, accurately).
My other big records of the time were Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 (which I’d discovered via rock writers, again) and Patti Smith’s Horses, which had similar musical qualities as the Velvets, and similar verbal qualities as Dylan.
All of this was fine music, and I was thrilled by those records. But there was one problem. All of this was the music of the past. Many of these artists were no longer active, having disbanded/retired. Others had moved on to other, and, to my ears, less interesting, territory. “What is happening now? That’s what I wanna know” asked Ian Hunter on Mott the Hoople’s live album (another recent discovery).
All of which brings me back to Videowest, and the fall of 1983, and the “Radio Free Europe” video.
Because as I watched the band wander in their strange, Southern gothic landscape, and song unfolded, I heard something … that “blue-green” sound … they sounded, not like The Velvets, really, but like someone who’d been listening to The Velvets, for sure.
Skip forward in time several months.
I’ve taken a part-time job at a used bookstore in a nearby college town, and down the street is a used record store (remember those?). Every Friday night I stop by to flip through the stacks of new (used) arrivals, and one night I come across the curious, snake-drawing cover of Reckoning, REM’s second album. Oh yeah, I remember these guys! So I bought it.
Reckoning confirmed my hopes, in that it was very Velvets-like, and, pretty good. I really liked Reckoning and kept coming back to it. The songs were good and punchy, and also mysterious and strange, with their half-comprehensible lyrics (what was he sorry for? And what did the rain have to do with it?) and the murky sound, it was puzzle fascinating enough in and of itself that there didn’t seem to be much need to solve it; just appreciate it.
Skip ahead again a few weeks. I’m still listening to Reckoning a lot and digging it. It’s not my favorite album, but definitely one that I like. I’m riding the bus, reading Tower Records house organ, Pulse, and come across a story on REM. Among their influences, they list The Velvets, and Patti Smith. So I was right! Vindicated! And perfect.
Skip a few years. It is the fall of 1986. I have just been to record store and purchased Steve Earle’s brand-new debut, Guitar Town (the beginning of a long journey together, me and Steve), and Life’s Rich Pageant. I am not, per se, a huge fan of REM. Not that I don’t like them, but they’ve been eclipsed by a flood or exciting new bands coming from the south and midwest in a torrent – The Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum, Green On Red, X (not midwestern, and older – but I’m just getting into them), Guadalcanal Diary, Jason and the Scorchers, The Pontiac Brothers, The Gun Club, The Lyres, The Minutemen, many others. In fact, aside from Reckoning, I’ve been a little let down by REM. The follow-up to Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, seemed far less engaging, the precursor, Murmur, despite being hailed as a classic, did not thrill me – it sounded under-produced, and dominated by a kind of art-folk sensibility that didn’t do it for me. It’s tougher songs sounded half-hearted. Still, I had read somewhere that the new one was the one where they were gonna cut loose and rock out, and that was something I wanted to hear.
I got it, too. Guitar Town is probably the better album, but I do like Pageant. The single, “Fall On Me” is gorgeous folk-rock; Rolling Stone compares the opener “Begin the Begin” to The Yardbirds – and there is a certain Yardbirds quality to “Begin’s” rumbling attack – minus the guitar heroics of course. “Flowers of Guatemala” makes the Velvets connection explicit with its “Heroin”-like guitar figure. Much of the rest of it is average – REM-by-the-numbers, so to speak, but every song had a good hook and at least some interesting quality. I like this album and it puts them back on my radar.
So we trucked up there to Oakland, knocking back rum-and-coke (two 7-11 Big Gulps and a bottle of Bacardi). The show was great. Guadalcanal Diary, a great live band (their records didn’t do them full justice) who I had seen just a few weeks earlier at local barn One Step Beyond, opened the show, struggling to deal with the Coliseum setting. REM seemed to have no such problem. Me, I found the show mesmerizing. Muted lighting, a simple set. Stipe whirled about the stage like a dervish, while Pete Buck seemed to float in the air behind him. They didn’t jam or improvise, but delivered the songs with conviction and sheer power. Even the lesser songs shone. They debut “The One I Love” in a slower, moodier arrangement than the one that makes their next album. The free-for-all encore mixed Little Willie John's “Fever” with Wire’s “Practice Makes Perfect.” In that moment they seemed to be taking in all of rock`n’roll, from its 50’s origins to the avant-garde of the late 70’s, making it all one. It was a great show.
Skip ahead again. It is 1987. I’m now working at another bookstore, one largely staffed by twenty-somethings (like myself), and almost all of us are into underground/indie music. And almost all of us listen to and like REM to greater or lesser degrees. We all debate the merits of the new album, Document, which, despite inspiring some mixed feelings at first, most of us decide is a good one. Yet we are troubled by the band’s rapidly-increasing popularity, which causes their show to sell out, leaving us fans (who’ve been with them far longer than all those college yuppies who are just discovering them, so we feel) in the cold. “They’re getting too big.” Says one.
Skip ahead. It is election day 1988. It is gray and rainy and humid, which fits my mood as I’ve just pulled the lever for Mike Dukakis, knowing full well that (a) he’s going to lose and (b) he deserves to. But I stop in Tower Records to take care of my real business for the day, which is to grab the new REM album, Green. This, at least, will lessen the remorse of seeing Bush get elected.
Still I do get to see them this time around. Robyn Hitchcock opens the show, supported by Pete Buck. The show is very professional and well-staged, and they deliver the songs with gusto, but somehow the magic isn’t there. And it doesn’t help when the close with a gawdawful version of The Velvets’ “Afterhours.”
Skip ahead. It is 1990. Much has changed in the world and in my life. The underground/indie scene I loved so much seems to be running dry at a rapid pace. Almost all of my favorite bands have broken up. D. Boon is dead (okay, he’d been dead for a bit by that time). Very little new music is happening that excites me. I’m watching 120 Minutes and being disgusted by how formulaic and repetitive the songs and the bands are becoming. They announce the premiere of a new song by REM. Good, I think to myself. This at least will be worthwhile.
“Losing My Religion.” I hate it. There have been REM songs I didn’t care for, but never one I flat-out loathed. It’s lugubrious, dull, and the video panders to the worst aspects of Michael Stipe’s sensitive-art-student persona. To this day, I utterly despise this song. I never do buy the album. It is the end of an era, and I feel it, devastatingly, even then.
Skip. It is 1992. I am working in an electronics store. MTV is on a lot, and the younger employees often crank the “alternative rock” station. REM’s new Automatic for the People is in heavy rotation. It’s supposed to be their best album ever. I hate it.
Skip. It is 1994. Still working there but now I have an office and an assistant. We have a boombox and I generally let him control it, because I’m a generous soul. He, too, listens to the “alternative rock” station. REM’s new Monster is in heavy rotation. It’s supposed to be a return to form.
I hate it.
Skip more. It is 2004. Crippled by the dot.com bust, I’m working part-time at a Barnes and Noble, in the music department, to help make ends meet. REM’s new Around the Sun is on the New Releases shelf. All I know is I saw a review in the paper that said it stank. Wow. Even the critics aren’t covering for them anymore. I stare at the cover. I am baffled. Once upon a time I was excited about this band. I once bought their albums instantly when they came out. I went to see them twice. One of those times was incredible. And yet these memories are so distant, I can’t touch them, can’t feel them. They seem not like a dream, but rather, someone else’s dream, second hand. Who wants yesterday’s papers?
Skip. It is 2006. I’ve been back on my feet for awhile now. I’ve gone through my whole record (yes I said record) collection and decided to purge them all, and created a list of those records which I wish to replace with CDs. I’m taking it down to the essentials. As draconian as I can be. Four REM’s make the list (Reckoning, Fables, Pageant, Document), with the likelihood that I will someday put together a compilation of tracks from Murmur and some of the others. I look at the list. Do I really want even those four? I mean, I never listen to REM. I take them off the list. Then I put them back on. I find all four quickly and cheaply, and acquire them. Each one gets a dutiful spin to make sure the CD is good. Then filed away. I keep asking myself if I really want them.
Skip.
It is August, 2011.
I’m big on building CD compilations these days. I’ve had a long-standing plan to build a compilation of indie/underground bands of the 80’s, mostly as a way to gather together good tracks/singles by bands that never made great albums but had one or two bright shining moments. I decide “Radio Free Europe” should definitely be on there. So I download both the original HibTone single and the Murmur album, to decide which one to use. And then I decide to it’s time to do that REM compilation, so I download Dead Letter Office and some rarities collections and some bootlegs.
As I’m doing all this I’m also reading a bunch of online articles about the band, and finally I cave and decide I should give the later albums one last chance, so I start sampling all of those and download the songs I found I genuinely like.
Okay I cheated a little on the post-Bill Berry ones – by then I was a bit burned out.
I end up with two comps – one basically being the best parts of Murmur, the Chronic Town EP, and some rarities. The other being the best of the later, post-IRS albums. I should note that this latter compilation shares not a single track with the official, Man in the Moon compilation from the same period.
And I find I like both of these compilations – a lot. Even though I think the Warner Bros-era songs lack much of the character of their early tracks, I still find the songs to be quite good judged on their own merits. Along with this, I found I wanted to listen to the four “chosen” albums again, and I have become re-acquainted with them, like old friends. Suddenly, REM is back in heavy rotation after nearly two-dozen years.
I do not feel sad. If you’ve read all of the above you know I think they shot most of their wad by the mid-80’s. None of their later, Warner Bros.-released albums contributed more than 3 tracks to that private compilation, and nothing from the post-Bill Berry-era made the cut. I’ve watched a few youtube vids of recent performances and, while they seemed adequate onstage still, I had no desire or plans to see them live again. Besides, they rarely played their oldest songs anymore and those are the ones I would have wanted to hear.
I feel, perhaps, a little bit wistful. I miss my 20’s sometimes. But really, it’s not even that. I simply find it bizarre and ironic that I should suddenly rediscover my feelings for the band just at the moment they decide to snuff it.
And what were those feelings, exactly? That too puzzles me, because in a way I’m not entirely sure. REM, for me, always slotted in somewhere odd. They were never my favorite band. I’m not sure I ever even thought of them as one of my favorites – even though I probably followed them and listened to them nearly as much as many whom I did consider favorites. I don’t think I ever considered Reckoning one of my favorite albums (though I did and do consider it my favorite REM album), even though I may well have listened to it more than many that I would rate as such. Perhaps there was something too modest about them to make me acknowledge their presence in the first rank.
Or maybe it was snobbery. Oddly (or perhaps, not so oddly), it seems that with every step forward in terms of success, sales, size of venue, audience, producer or record label, the band lopped off some portion of their fan base – people who felt they had either sold out or simply, grown to a proportion they no longer cared to support. In the indie/underground scene, they took on a certain aura of the un-hip.
Of course, for every fistful of fans they lost, they sold more and more records and more and more tickets, so I’m so sure they cried all the way to the bank.
For all that, there are a couple things worth noting.
First is that, for all they may have become un-hip, their impact on and influence on the underground/indie scene was huge. You can’t really tell that story (as if you could tell that story, really), without them. Michael Azerrad and Clinton Heylin both tried, justifying their partial exclusion on the grounds that IRS was distributed by a major (therefore they weren’t “indie”), or that they were a “pop” band (??); yet REM sits largely in both of their books, like a large roadblock, forcing the authors to detour around them and acknowledge them.
Secondly, it’s hard to really make accusations of “sell-out” really stick. Outside of the moves to a more clear, rock-oriented sound (a direction which seems inevitable, if one digs into their history – they always were a rock band, not an art/folk band as Murmur maniacs might have them), their 80’s records sound like nothing else that was going on in the Top 40 at the time. At the height of grunge they released the mostly acoustic, ballad-heavy Automatic. Only after that, moving into the mid-90’s and beyond, do they begin to sound like standard “alternative rock.” But one must recognize that they were one of the major (if not the major) architect of that very sound – folk-like melodies and hooks with strong backbeat, dominated by guitar but without solos, hot licks or flash musicianship, oblique lyrics, and stripped almost completely of blues and r&b roots. I’m not sure this has been a good thing for rock music, but nevertheless, it turns out, influential they surely were.
Beyond that, they seem to have, for the most part, conducted themselves with a fair amount of integrity. Though none of the later albums did much for me, I can’t say I found them truly awful; mostly just unmemorable. They seem to have steadfastly avoided getting stuck in a setlist made of the same older hits (unlike, say, The Who). And while rock writer Jim DeRogatis has hit them with a long list of wrongdoings (not doing shows in smaller venues, not calling it quits after Bill Berry left, manipulating the press to their advantage) they really do not seem to have treated their fans, themselves, or the world, with the kind of contempt or disregard many other acts have when they became chart-toppers.
And, without a doubt, they helped open the door for that long list of underground/indie bands – taking them out as opening acts, name-dropping them in interviews, playing on or even producing records for them. Even if several acts mentioned above might have eclipsed them in my personal top forty, I might not have heard those acts, or heard them as soon as I did, if it hadn’t been for the Athens boys.
Yesterday, the local paper called them “the greatest American rock band, ever.” This is manure.
But they were good, and they were influential. And at one time, they were a big part of the musical picture. A bigger part than I’d ever realized, I think now.
Lately, I’ve been doing something again that I hadn’t done in a long time – listening to albums a lot. Not just slapping a CD on to hear a few favorite tracks, but actually putting it on from start to finish, and listening to it for the sake of listening – not just as background music to some activity. Not only that, but I also find myself listening to particular albums over and over – maybe several times in a week. This was how I used to listen to albums, in my teens and twenties. But then, somewhere along the line, I stopped. I don’t know if I’ve just gotten back into connection with some long-lost part of myself, or I’m just going through mid-life crisis. But I like it.
Those REM albums have been getting a lot of listening. In some ways, my opinions have changed. I now find I think Fables is second only to Reckoning – one of their best. I like Murmur a lot more than I used to (the improved mix on the CD, with much punchier bass and drums, helps a lot). As to Pageant and Document, my opinion remains pretty much unchanged. Same for Green and its followers.
This very afternoon, as I was leaving an appointment, I suddenly realized that I was standing not three blocks away from the house where I lived in the mid-80’s – the very era in which REM was very much a part of the soundtrack of my life. I took a short walk, looking around at the neighborhood – how it had changed – how it hadn’t. I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t feel wistful. Again, merely strange. Wondering. What was I doing here, today, right now? Why was all of this happening at this moment? I don’t believe in coincidence, and I do believe the things that happen in our lives, large and small, are meaningful. Still I expect those meaningful things to relate to significant events – not the break-up of some rock band you haven’t even paid attention to for twenty-plus years. Has something come full circle? Or is something beginning again?
Or maybe it is a puzzle - fascinating enough in and of itself that there’s no need to solve it; just appreciate it.
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