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Contents 1 R.E.M.: Chronic Town 2 R.E.M.: Murmur 3 R.E.M.: Marquee, London 4 R.E.M. 5 American Paradise Regained: R.E.M.’s Reckoning 6 R.E.M.: Rock Reconstruction Getting There 7 R.E.M: Life's Rich Pageant 8 R.E.M.: Post-Yuppie Pop 9 R.E.M.: Automatic For The People 10 The New Adventures of R.E.M.

[edit] R.E.M.: Chronic Town

Robot A. Hull, Creem, January 1983

THIS EP IS SO ARCANE that I had to play it six times in a row to get a handle on it – and even now, I'm still not sure.

To say that R.E.M. calls Athens, Georgia, home doesn't really help much, for the band's music is quite dissimilar from the minimal dance rhythms which demark the styles of Athens' other better-known combos (Pylon, the B-52's, Oh OK). In fact, R.E.M. is probably more stylistically akin to such practitioners of the southern pop consciousness as, say, Alex Chilton, or the dB's.

What sets R.E.M. apart, however – even from other southem pop idealists – is their framework of dark Gothicism. A gargoyle bedecks the EP's cover and the record label, the initial clue that the band frolics in the mysterious. On ‘Wolves, Lower’, the record begins with a hollow shriek, with words eerily muttering the phrase, "wolves at the door." But the effect is hardly hair-raising or spine-tingling; the band has bigger, not cheaper ideas in mind. Instantly chiming guitars ring out, voices weave in melodic harmonies, and lovely passages, almost brief narratives, begin to emerge. Within a breath, the dark mood has developed into a brighter sound, a harmonious blend (no whimpering or sneering here) that falls somewhere above the Flamin' Groovies and just below the Byrds.

This is throwback artistry without actually being a flashback to the past. We have come to identify innocence with pop as if it springs from an eternal fountain of youth, but R.E.M. deflates that preconception by taking the full, gleeful sound of pop into the secret recesses of the mind. This is exactly what acid-rock tried to do (and at times, R.E.M. sounds invitingly psychedelic), but was sidetracked by musicianship and its own novelty. In short, the mystery of R.E.M's music is that it evokes the music of the late-'60s without any pretentions, mingling past and present to shape both into concurrent moments.

Just as R.E.M's pop refers to musical structures from another era, the overall presence of the band's sound glides down the aisle of all ages. Bill Berry's drums seem to pound out thoughts as Pete Buck's guitar work summons forth memory. Meanwhile, vocalist Michael Stipe offers proverbs and ancient wisdom, like "I could live a million years," whispering his words with a slight southern drawl.

Chronic Town's five songs seem like works of short fiction begging to be decoded. All have pleasant hooks, but the themes remain concealed. (My one complaint about this band is that Stipe should open his mouth more when he sings – the lyrics are obscure enough as it is.) I'm dying to know what ‘Gardening At Night’ is about, for example, but the message eludes me every time. ‘Carnival Of Sorts (Box Cars)’ seems to involve circular motion and leaving town on a train, but again, the general subject escapes me. ‘Stumble’ is the strangest of all; it carries you down a stretch of time with backwards tape loops, howls, and chants until you are bobbing your head in accord like an archaic stoned hippie.

Despite its eccentricity, R.E.M.'s record is undoubtedly the sleeper EP of the year. I will let the final words fall to writer Flannery O'Connor, a fellow Georgian eccentric who raised her own peacocks. Here, the concluding sentence of her story. "A Circle In The Fire" (a perfect title for the next R.E.M. record): "She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them."

[edit] R.E.M.: Murmur

John Morthland, Creem, July 1983

I KEEP HEARING about the rise of the new garage bands, who draw their inspiration from the original punks, those brash, anarchistic, one-hit bands so plentiful in the mid-sixties and now preserved on such anthologies as the pathbreaking Nuggets and the Pebbles series.

By now, I've also heard a fair number of such bands, and pardon me for saying so, but my ears hurt. They remind me of nothing so much as the neo-rockabilly bands that have proliferated in the last couple years before emerging as a potent commercial force via the Stray Cats – which is to say they all turn out to be little more than a haircut and a period costume.

Besides, the best of the garage bands has been around for a couple years now. R.E.M. hails from Athens, GA, though it has little in common with other Athens bands beyond a firm dance beat featuring a dub-like heavy bass. Though they've already released an indie single and an I.R.S. EP, Murmur is their debut album. Like their previous work, it's produced by Mitch Easter, the North Carolina pop alchemist who really does work out of a garage studio. Because there aren't quite enough strong songs, Murmur doesn't hold up all the way though. But it's still a gallant, often galvanizing, effort; R.E.M. outshines the competition because they use that garage sound only as a launching pad, and not as something to be slavishly emulated.

They're most often compared to the Byrds, and thanks to Peter Buck's ringing guitar on songs like ‘Talk About The Passion’, ‘Catapult’, or ‘Sitting Still’, along with Michael Stipes's lead vocals over soaring harmonies, it's easy to see why, But that's merely one influence, and a misleading one at that, because with no one source dominating, R.E.M. faintly recalls a host of mid-'60s L.A. bands from one-hit wonders like the Leaves to "underground" (i.e., album-only) faves like Kaleidiscope, David Lindley's first band. R.E.M. has so thoroughly transformed their influences that it sometimes leaves them on shaky ground, but the result sounds both familiar and wholly original.

The key work up there is "faintly," as faint as the radio signal they long for on their new version of ‘Radio Free Europe’, and Murmurs is an apt album title for a band that makes music (onstage as well as on record, so don't give Easter all the credit) this murky, and this druggy. I still have no idea what these songs are about, because neither me nor anyone else I know has ever been able to discern R.E.M.'s lyrics. But the fleeting images of ‘Talk About The Passion’ or ‘Perfect Circle’ are intriguing enough, and the music picks up the slack. Phrases jump out of ‘Pilgrimage’, too, but none suggest the song's title so faithfully as do the shifting tempos. ‘Moral Kiosk’ may or may not be about the difficulty of making tough decisions in such stultifying times ("It's so much more attractive inside the moral kiosk"), but the splayed rhythm guitar seconds that emotion. And when Stipes does attempt to make his words clear on ‘We Walk’, I'm so tranced out by Buck's rolling, repeating guitar fillups that I'm not paying attention to the lyrics anyhow. Buck's guitar solos are capable of breaking through the mix and soaring just like the ghostly background voices, and any band that can come up with melodies this rich knows a thing or two about pop music.

The EP may yet prove to be R.E.M.'s best medium, But when I listen to the other groups rooted in the mid-'60s, I hear none of the bursting-out that their models represented. Instead, I hear those unpredictable shrieks and yowls of freedom being reduced to conventions, to a set of rules that are to be followed and mastered. R.E.M. uses those same conventions to destroy the rules, or at least to get out past them, and that counts for plenty. Often enough, they succeed, and that counts for even more.

[edit] R.E.M.: Marquee, London

Barney Hoskyns, NME, November 1983

IF YE Smythes are anything to go by, rock's set-piece quartet of voice and guitar, bass and drums is making a decided comeback. Witnessing R.E.M.'s astonishing performance at the Marquee last week, it seemed to me about time too. There were more possibilities, more trails and extensions pushed out by this music than a dozen New Orders have conjured.

I initially saw this group, this Radical Electric Magic, 18 months ago in their own locale of Atlanta, Georgia, but I guess I was too drunk to take in just how much was being proposed, how many of rock's assumptions shaken down.

From a casual, idle exposure to their recorded works (the EP Chronic Town and this year's Murmur album), you would not be slandering R.E.M. by describing them as Byrdsy with a strong Undertone of '60s power pop. The form is deceptive: from a nexus of close, coarse chording – Mat Snow has already rooted them in a couple of Byrds blueprints — they spin a web of hooks and harmonies that so radically reshuffle the standard-issue blocks of rock you feel you're at the onset of a new musical dimension. Quite possibly you are.

Michael Stipe will set off a harmonic chain — picked up by bassist Mike Mills and rounded off by drummer Bill Berry — that moves with such flowing assurance it's like a single organic voice. These are figures whose shape and dynamic are things quite other than the small mercies rock has formerly yielded. I won't try and capture such a magnificient metamorphosis here; I'm still not certain it wasn't a dream.

I expect to find the curly-mopped, dressed-down, student-bespectacled Stipe irritating , but I find him superb and not a little mysterious. He does not sing words, he siphons them — liquidises language. The three other instruments (for Stipe's is no mortal "voice") are untreated and perfectly interwoven. Clowning country'n'western Weller Peter Buck is always doing more than shoving in the meat of a melody; whether slashing the ol' Rickenbacker like Townshend or being slashed by it like McGuinn, he shapes a different texture for each break and bridge, each twist and turn of these gyrating 'Perfect Circle's. Then all of a sudden Mills will be playing guitar on his bass; Berry's drums will be talking. There were moments in '9-9' when my heart stopped dead with wonder.

R.E.M. encored with the freeform solar jangle of 'Radio Free Europe'. Later, somewhere in Soho, I found myself dazed and reborn. This is the most vital American group of today.

[edit] R.E.M.

Blake Gumprecht, Alternative America, Winter 1983

FROM INGLORIOUS beginnings playing a birthday party, R.E.M.'s independent first single, 'Radio Free Europe', was Robert Palmer's choice as 10th best single of 1981 in the New York Times, and also wound up near the top of the Village Voice critics year-end poll.

IRS signed them last May, and a five-song, 12-inch EP, Chronic Town, followed. Now the band are working on their debut album. Blake Gumprecht spoke to lead singer Michael Stipe in a Kansas City kitchen on the band's most recent tour.

R.E.M. has probably achieved more success, more notoriety, based on one single than most any other American band in recent history. You've been together two years, started at a birthday party I guess. How did it come to now where you're signed to I.R.S., are major critical raves, and the rest of it?

It was a huge mistake on someone's part. I don't know...it seems like one or two of the right critics jumped on the single, and everyone else kind of followed suit. I know that all of them didn't like it. I think they just wanted to.

But how did it go from this band that had played just one birthday party?

The party was in a church that Peter and I lived in that was abandoned. It had a natural stage where, of course, the preacher used to stand. We invited a hundred people, and about 700 showed up. Among them was a guy who booked Tyrone's, which was the local club. The Brains, an Atlanta band, were playing there the next week, and they didn't have an opening band. So he figured he could get us real cheap.

Had you ever thought of it as being any kind of permanent band?

Oh no, not at all. Peter, the guitar player, was working at a record store in town that sells contraband records and promotional stuff, and I'd go in there and buy records. It turns out that I was buying all the records that he was saving for himself. We just kind of built up a rapport, cause it was obvious that we liked the same kind of music. He moved into the church, and they needed a roomate, so I moved in.

Had you known any of the other members?

No, I had never seen them before.

How did they come into all this?

We met them at a party. At the time, Peter and I were playing around with this guy on drums, and a guy who played bass and saxaphone at the same time, which is a pretty amazing feat. Then they came over and we played a few things, said let's write a few songs, and we'll see what happens. There was never any grand plan behind any of it.

Had any of you played much previously?

No. Peter had never played before. I had a band in St. Louis, just a bad punk band, Bad Habits. We played like twice in public. Our big claim to fame was opening up for Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe. Mike and Bill had both played in country club trios and marching bands, stuff like that, playing Glenn Miller's greatest hits or something. They've known each other for a long time. They're both from Macon. We were all rank amateurs, and still are to this day.

Did it help being from Athens?

Yeah, I'm afraid so, because of that band we all know and love and now live in New York, because they're very, very rich. By the time we had all moved there, those guys were already signed. They were already on their way out of town. Being from Athens helped because all the critics had this idea that Athens was lined with gold records, and that everybody down there walked around with funny hairdos. Of course it isn't like that at all. We are a lot different from most of the Athens bands. We don't have anything in common with them musically. We shop at the same supermarket, that's about it. We're about the only ones who went to New York on our own. Actually, there is another band, Limbo District, that went to New York on their own. They're very small. As of yet, they're still scaring away audiences everywhere they play. But they're probably the greatest band to come out of America since the Lovin' Spoonful. They're incredible. 'All Tomorrow's Parties' by the Velvet Underground – they're like that, exactly. Their appearance and their presence on stage is real similar to what you'd expect to find in a Berlin nightclub in 1934.

What were R.E.M. like in the beginning?

We were doing a few covers; we had written some songs of our own. I think we had three weeks of practice. We wrote, I guess, 10 or 12 songs in a week. Needless to say, they were pretty awful. We don't play them anymore. Seeing as how none of us had ever written a song before, it was quite an achievement. We were all so scared. Imagine four people who had never been in a band being thrown together. We were all so scared of what the other one would say, that everyone nodded their head in agreement to anything to came up. The earlier songs were incredibly fundamental, real simple, songs that you could write in five minutes. Most of them didn't have any words. I just got up and howled and hollered a lot.

Some of the ones now don't seem to have words.

That's true. I've got to write words for 'Radio Free Europe', because we re going to re-record that for the album. It still doesn't have a second or third verse. I think there are actually lyrics to every song on the EP.

A lot of them are mumbled. And with titles like 'Wolves, Lower', there are some ambiguities.

The story behind that was that I wanted a song with a comma in it.

Why was that?

I like punctuation. It's another way of saying "Lower Wolves".

But what is that all about? I have no idea.

Keep listening.

But a lot of the lyrics are pretty hard to understand.

We kind of all think of my voice as another instrument. I have trouble pronun... pronun... pronun... (laughter)

Enunciating?

Yeah. I don't like listening to a song and being able to pick out every single word. I think it can get real boring. A lot of bands I really love, half the fun is listening to them and trying to figure out what the hell they're saying. And if you can figure out what they're saying, if you can figure out what they mean by what they're saying...it's a lot more subjective.

With R.E.M., are they all words?

Yeah, but there are a lot of sounds, that probably aren't human.

You were saying that it's interesting to sit down and try to figure something out, but there are a lot of R.E.M. lyrics that I really doubt I'll ever figure out.

Well you should probably make up your own words then. That's how it's intended. I mean, I doubt very few people in the world can tell you all the words to, say, 'Tumbling Dice' by the Stones. It probably holds a lot more meaning to be able to make up your own words, and to make up your own meanings about what the words are saying.

One friend of mine said it was an "art school joke".

No, I don't think it's an art school joke at all. If anything, it might take us out of that pop genre and put us in another one, maybe by ourselves.

Have you ever thought of a lyric sheet?

Frankly, I think lyric sheets are ridiculous. Some horrible thing happened when the Beatles put out their white album.

I think that was the first record to ever have a lyric sheet. To take something like lyrics and remove them from a song is like taking someone's liver out of their body, putting it on a table, and asking it to work. You take it out of context and it really doesn't make any sense. To contradict that, we're probably going to have a lyric sheet to the album. But it could very easily be in braille.

Is R.E.M. trying to achieve more than just being a pop band?

I don't consider us a pop band. I never have.

What do you consider it?

It's not that we're so original. We're not doing anything new. I mean, everything's pretty much been done. But I can't really find a word that replaces it. The closest than any of us have come is "folk rock", and that's so undefineable in 1982 that it probably works. We're certainly more of a pop group than Pere Ubu, but in my camp Pere Ubu's an incredible pop band. We've changed musically a whole lot certainly from when we started playing. It seems like every time we go in and write a new song, we're changing, writing differently, and trying new things that we probably wouldn't even have thought of a year ago. It's not a conscious thing. We try real hard to write new material, because we get real tired of playing the same thing over and over. That's something we don't want to get stuck doing. To begin with, I can't think of myself doing this in five or ten years, but I would hate to think of myself five years from now singing a song that I had written six years ago. It wouldn't apply.

[edit] American Paradise Regained: R.E.M.’s Reckoning

Mat Snow, NME, 1984

WHEN I HEAR word ‘plangent’ I reach for my applause button. Which is why Reckoning and its predecessor, last year’s Murmur, confirm R.E.M. as one of the most beautifully exciting groups on the planet.

It would be naive to deny that enjoyment of these vinyl cathedrals is untouched by love of the tradition from which they spring – the soaring trajectory from The Beatles’ ‘Hard Day’s Night’, through The Searchers to America’s electric Dylan and reaching an apogee in West Coast laureates The Byrds. Jingle-jangle merchants have followed – ‘70s British pub-rock, the likes of Dwight Twilley, Orange Juice at times, and a whole new generation of 12-string choristers. But none have devoted themselves with such inspiration to the driving, towering purity to be found in the fullness of hat is demeaningly called space-folk guitar music. When I get to heaven, the angels will be playing not harps but Rickenbackers. And they will be playing songs by R.E.M.

Drugs don’t come into it: there’s no need for a head full of snow or funny pills to groove into the spirit of R.E.M. It’s to do with America, the journey west to the Promised Land with nothing but a shimmering horizon ahead and a blazing, deep blue sky above. And though R.E.M. address themselves particularly to America the country, they resonate beyond that to signify America the state of mind, a Garden of Eden before its loss of innocence, its fall from grace.

It seems no coincidence that R.E.M. hall from Georgia in the New South, the paradise to be regained after California was lost. Wheel me out frothing if you like, but R.E.M. sing wistfully of a Golden Age that never was. Though even the most part-time romantic wishes it had been and hopes, in some tiny moment of nirvana, it will come again.

To particulars. With Reckoning, R.E.M. have dispensed with the discreet strings and profusely interlocking layers of instrumentation and vocal harmonies that characterized Murmur and returned to the terser sound of the first EP Chronic Town which was displayed live earlier this year with such breathtaking brilliance. But Spartan it isn’t. No modern axe-hero, yet Peter Buck shows why he is perhaps today’s greatest rock guitarist: both economically precise and rich in timbre and immaculate in timing and dynamics, his guitar sings.

Also at the top end of the mix, Michael Stipe on vox emerges a little further from his shell of Murmur gnomic utterance and occasional fragments of chorus keening with bright eyed rapture. Yet so much more in conveyed in the interplay of aching, troubled voice, soaring harmonies and ringing guitars than in literal pronouncement, however assiduously Dylanologist you may be in its unpicking.

Special mention goes to ‘Time After Time’, which demonstrates the God-given truth that there are few more noble expressions of the soul than really well-played raga-rock. And those kohl-eyed transsexuals out there who regard this last remark as a load of neo-hippy garbage had better check out ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ by their beloved Velvets.

Exceptional in its lyrical clarity is ‘Don’t Go Back To Rockville’, a song of love, home and the new poverty ironically set to a golden delicious country tune.

So full circle. The Byrds’ best albums – Fifth Dimension and Younger Than Yesterday – were of their era yet still exhilarate today, R.E.M.’s two LPs are more consistently brilliant still, and, by picking up where McGuinn and co, left off, R.E.M. somehow transcend period fetishism to make music similarly in tune with the times. In short, another classic.

[edit] R.E.M.: Rock Reconstruction Getting There

Bill Holdship, Creem, September 1985

FABLES OF YEARS spent on the road. Decadent tales of groupies and drugs and arrogance and misspent lives near the top. You won't find any of that here, although a friend of the band's claims a magazine once approached him to write this type of expose on the members of R.E.M., a rock band so nearly perfect in integrity and beliefs that it's sometimes difficult for cynics to believe that anything this refreshing could possibly be "real."

R.E.M.'s rise has been one of the more classic (and classier) rock stories of the 1980s. In the grand tradition of the '60s garage bands, R.E.M. formed five years ago in Athens, Georgia to just have fun, as well as an artistic outlet. "We weren't thinking about making records or even playing in a club," says singer Michael Stipe. "It just kind of happened. It's just really been an interesting series of mistakes."

Stipe met guitarist Peter Buck at a local record store where the latter was employed, and where the pair discovered they shared a mutual admiration for '70s punk (Patti Smith, Television, etc.), as well as musical predecessors like the New York Dolls and Velvet Underground. They eventually moved into an old converted church together, met ace rhythm team Mike Mills and Bill Berry at a party, and R.E.M. was born. Initially playing parties, they graduated to local clubs, turned into a "good band, kind of," according to Buck – and suddenly realized that "maybe we could do this full-time." With still no game plan in mind, they released an independent 45, got a solid reputation, went on the road – sometimes playing for as little as $40 a night (Buck has many classic "road" stories, including the night some bikers asked the band to play their club party, as a frightened Michael climbed, a fence to escape) – got signed by I.R.S., released an EP and two stunningly beautiful LPs to much critical acclaim, and won a fanatical following, both here and in England where the press has recently been crediting them with spearheading the American "grassroots" rock renaissance. With their third LP, Fables Of The Reconstruction, recently released, it appears that R.E.M. may be at the brink of what an I.R.S. spokesperson terms "mall credibility as opposed to just street credibility." Nonetheless, both Stipe and Buck say the exact same words – "I'm as famous and successful now as I ever want to be" – and both are somewhat bewildered by certain aspects of the fame that has suddenly been thrust upon them.

Prior to having their lives "profoundly affected" at the same time by LPs like Marquee Moon and Horses, Stipe's Midwestern high school crowd all listened to heavy metal ("I tried very hard to fit into that, but it didn't work too well...didn't really listen to much music until I found out about the New York CBGB's thing. It was like the first time you went into the ocean and got knocked down by a wave."), while Buck was busy, perhaps unconsciously, becoming a rock historian, absorbing everything from the Beach Boys, Raspberries and Wizzard to Gram Parsons, Astral Weeks and Fairport Convention. But aside from the punk thing, the pair shared another musical connection in that ‘Moon River’ (which they occasionally cover onstage) is the first song both remember liking as children. Stipe says he thought the song was "about Huckleberry Hound," but both recall that, even though they had no idea what the lyrics meant, it still affected them emotionally. "Even as a little boy, it made me kind of want to cry or be by myself for awhile," says Stipe. "I think it's a really special kind of song that can do that."

Which is a fairly apt description of R.E.M.'s own music. More often that not, it's impossible to understand what Stipe's lyrics mean on a literal level, but the various images merged with the band's instrumental interplay have an uncanny knack of producing strong feelings in the listener – ranging from bittersweet melancholy to excitement to, yes, even dread at times. In line with the ‘Moon River’ connection, it seems that R.E.M. often pick up on childhood images, cliches and reference points, merging them into a dreamy stream-of-consciousness format with music that's evocative of the past, yet manages to descend into a reference point of its own. Perfect examples of this device are ‘Radio Free Europe’, which is based on the old '60s TV commercial that featured the Drifters' ‘On Broadway’, and ‘7 Chinese Brothers’, based on a familiar fairy tale that featured, among other things, a character who could swallow an entire sea.

"At one point when the band started, Michael and I were discussing what we wanted to do with the lyrics," says Buck. "We decided that we ought to take all these cliches and mutate them. Take fairy tales, old blues phrasings, cliches like "easy come, easy go" – and just twist them so they were evocative but skewed and more resonant. '7 Chinese Brothers' was a result of that, and there's a similar thing on the new album. 'Green Grow The Rushes' is an Irish folk song lyric. Well, some of it is. Most of it's Michael, but then the chorus is this old Irish song he heard some drunk guy singing on a Sunday in New York or something like that."

Because their fans take them so seriously, R.E.M. is often perceived as this serious, mystical "art" band. Nothing is further from the truth, as should be evident to anyone who's seen their live shows – during which encores sometimes evolve into musical zaniness, and cover tunes might include anything from ‘Rave On’ and ‘California Dreamin'’ to ‘Smokin' In The Boys Room’ or a marathon version of Donovan's ‘Atlantis’.

"To us, the lyrical obscurities and stuff have a whole lot more to do with 'Louie Louie' than they do with any book of French poetry or anything like that," says Buck. "We're a rock 'n' roll band. It's just that ideally we'd remake rock 'n' roll in our own image, and that's the idea. Rock 'n' roll is supposed to be fun. You're supposed to be moved, it's supposed to change your life, but you're also supposed to laugh. I don't want to be one of those people who go 'No, I'm an artist.' It is silly, you know? You gotta revel in that part of it as well, and not take yourself too seriously."

Some of this "fun" side will eventually be heard on ‘Burn In Hell’, the band's heavy metal anthem (featuring the soon-to-be-classic lines: "Women got skirts/ Men got pants/If you've got the picnic/I've got the ants"), which didn't make it onto the album but will probably be the "B" side of a forthcoming single. Other potential "B" sides include ‘Band Wagon’ (which may be about the meaninglesss rock 'n' roll political flagwaving and sloganeering Buck so passionately hates), ‘When I Was Young’, ‘Hyena’ and a cover of Pylon's ‘Crazy’.

One claim made by many long disenchanted with the music scene is that R.E.M. have managed to bring a certain degree of "magic" back to rock 'n' roll. Peter Buck recently contributed some guitar parts to a forthcoming Fleshtones LP, recorded live in Paris. He's now backstage at a New York club where Fleshtones guitarist Keith Streng is introducing him to members of Kristi Rose & The Midnight Walkers, a new "country punk" band that includes ex-Television bassist Fred Smith. (Prior to this, Streng and Buck sat in a hotel room discussing rock 'n' roll as "blood & guts," "a way of life" and other terms that would seem almost comical today if their enthusiasm wasn't so obviously heartfelt.) Kristi Rose's drummer asks Buck to autograph a flyer for his brother who's "one of those fanatic rock 'n' roll collectors. He's totally into the '50s and '60s, stuff like Elvis, Jerry Lee and Dylan – but he thinks the only people today who match up are Bruce Springsteen and REM."

Not bad for a rock band that counts Andy Williams (or was it Jerry Butler?) as one of its musical influences.

"I moved to Athens from Illinois where I went to high school. It was a very outgoing, flamboyant, loud school, and I hated everything about it. I was very, kind of, afraid of a lot of things. When I moved to Athens, I just wanted to be alone, so I spent about a year by myself. I didn't have any friends, and I didn't talk to anyone. I just sat around reading or listening to music. I guess Peter was really the first person I met and got to know, and from there, the band came. That year alone, I think I really matured about five years in that time. It's a long time to go without talking to people, and it really put a lot of things into perspective for me. I became much more of a quiet person after that. Much less bombastic, which is good."

Michael Stipe is definitely a bit strange, but the shyness and eccentricity both come across as endearing traits. In his Salvation Army apparel and new short haircut (with a bald spot shaven on top), he's reminiscent of the trendy art student roaming any college town – the major difference here being a genuine artistic sensibility on display. Not arrogance, but a gentle spirit that often seems almost childlike (i.e., he's constantly asking what certain words mean) in its innocence.

He says photography is his first love. He recently had a photo taken of himself recreating the famous Diane Arbus shot of a child holding a toy hand grenade in Central Park. He designed all three R.E.M. album covers (and is still fuming about the shoddy reproduction on Reckoning). He loves nature and is extremely romantic about America's past. He would eventually like to be a carpenter and raise snapping turtles back in Georgia (he points out a hidden turtle on the new LP cover, though I'll be damned if I can locate it now). He says he recently had a bizarre dream in which his forearm became a universe. He admires Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits and Henry Mancini (naturally). He's recently been listening to Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman (though he hasn't "the vaguest understanding of that kind of music"), and sometimes listens to more than one tape at the same time. He says that "making connection" with other people through R.E.M.'s music is very important to him. He likes carrot juice. He thinks that a cappella music will make a big comeback, and is currently working on an a cappella record with friends in Athens. And he says that "I just play the song out of my mouth as I hear it. If I were trying to enunciate or slur it more, it would probably be false. I just sing it the way I think it should be sung.

"As far as the band is concerned, and especially this record, it seems to have this very cyclical sort of sound to it. There's a lot of motion, it's kind of endless, and it just swirls around and around. There's been that on the other records as well, and I think that's something we've sort of nurtured from the beginning. But this one seems even more cyclical than the others.

"There's this whole process you have to go through in the studio, using it as a tool, and it's combined with this really deep, heartfelt, emotional desire to get across what it is you've created. I use that term 'creative' in its most base form. I'm not making any kind of claim to greatness or anything like that. I mean, you could create mudpies and that would be great, too. But I think we really took quite a few chances on this record, some of the more obvious things being a string section and horns. I went into the studio knowing I wanted to have at least 16 different voices on the record, and there's one song in particular that's got at least four different ones on it.

"My ideal music is the kind where I can be reading a book or washing the dishes, and have this music playing in the background like wallpaper. And the best thing is that you can suddenly tune out what you're doing, listen to part of the music, and it'll come out at you and be very clear. With R.E.M., it's kind of like you can focus on one part or you can focus on another, and you can get all these different ideas or interpretations of what's going on in the song. I like that. I kind of like the idea that people have to involve themselves in our music, even if it's on a wallpaper level."

Peter Buck is R.E.M.'s rock 'n' roller, meaning he loves the concept as opposed to adhering to any type of cliched lifestyle. From his "Future Farmers of America" jacket, dangling earring, Lou Reed button, green toy monkey (someone threw it onstage) hanging from his belt, and excessive energy which mainly reveals itself through constantly twitching knees, a stranger could probably surmise he doesn't work for IBM. He's extremely positive, courteous, and an all-round nice person. He goes out of his way to meet fans. He could probably write a book on the best record stores and junk or regional food emporiums in all 50 states. He thinks that most of the music he recently heard in England "sounds just like Air Supply." He says that Elliot Mazer and Van Dyke Parks, among others, were considered to produce the new LP; Joe Boyd (Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, Barrett's Pink Floyd) was basically picked out of a hat, though he wanted someone familiar with guitars and liked the way the producer described his work in an interview. He gave his demo copy of the new LP to his mom. He's learning to play the banjo (‘Wendell Gee’, with sheet music in front of him, was his first venture). And he and his band have the audacity to wear their street clothes onstage in 1985. Some people say that R.E.M., in the most non-derogatory sense, may be the last "hippie" band.

"Even though they couldn't be more wrong as far as what I conceive as a hippie band, I can see that completely," he says. "If you divide it into hippie or young businessmen, then we're definitely on the hippie side. Most rock 'n' rollers today...take these heavy metal bands who are supposed to be real badasses. They're really young businessmen. We're not like that. We're the quintessential fuck-ups, and in that respect, we're gonna be like the Grateful Dead. We're just gonna muddle along, though none of us will probably get arrested for freebasing.

"So much today has nothing to do with what rock 'n' roll is all about. It's flash, image and no substance. I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis had an image, but he was also a great singer and piano player. Dylan had a great image, but he certainly carried that image along with a string of great records. Whereas now, it's all image and that's what's marketed.

"We could've made this record a sure-fire AOR hit, and it would've cut the heart out of it. The whole idea was to get real tough live tapes. Some of my favorite songs on it have like two or three big kinds of mistakes. Not terrible, though, and the tape kind of held together as a whole, so we said, 'To hell with the mistakes. I can live with it.' So we sell less records. I think we make better records. And the end, I can't think of anyone who's made really good records over a space of five or six years that hasn't reached the right audience, unless they've self-destructed."

How about the new "psychedelic revival," which Fables Of The Reconstruction will undoubtedly get lumped into? "There are a couple of songs that are kind of '80s psychedelic, but it's not the paisley underground thing. It's more the way Nick Cave is psychedelic – kind of the wild glump. I never really think of anything in terms of 'psychedelic,' so whenever someone says that, I start laughing. I think of Nehru jackets and stuff. It's different, though, so it might be psychedelic in the sense that the song structures are mutated. We've never been real traditional as far as song structure goes, and this is even less traditional than the other ones. The thing I always liked about psychedelia wasn't the flower power, but the idea that you could do anything with a pop song and make it valid, without being arty or pretentious about it. I mean, some of my favorite psychedelic songs are like Tommy James & The Shondells."

How about R.E.M.'s political vision? "We say things and we do benefits that we feel are consistent with the band. I don't think it comes across in the lyrics, except maybe a little bit in things like 'Moral Kiosk' or 'Little America'. But I think whatever comes across politically is intrinsic in the way we live our lives. As a reflection of our lives, the political things are going to be in there, but we're not telling anyone how to live their lives. I don't like sloganeering, especially when it gets to something like the Clash who don't know what they're talking about. They're fucking boneheads. People think that's revolutionary and it's garbage. If somebody really wanted to change society with their music, they'd put together this hot heavy metal band like Van Halen, have three LPs of 'party, party,' and on the fourth one hit them with 'the party we have isn't enough.' Because it's bullshit to preach to the converted. I mean, you get all these college kids in combat pants going, 'Hey, man, the Clash really turned me onto Communism, man.' Have they read Marx? I haven't. It's just senseless sloganeering that could be taken for any side. Hitler said some of the same stuff the Clash do.

"I'd like to think that people who like us don't like Reagan or agree with his policies, but that's not really the case. When we were announcing onstage last tour that everyone should register to vote and see if we can get him out of office, we'd get probably two-thirds cheers and one-third boos. You try to talk to people about it, but they don't really understand.

"But in the end, when you think about it, there's horrible things all over the world. There's starvation and stuff. But, really, one of the main problems is people just won't go out of their way to be nice. They won't help jumpstart some guy's car when it's raining. Or they're just very rude to one another."

Michael says the "Reconstruction" part of the new LP's title came from a phone conversation he had with his father. Peter says it's "just an Uncle Remus fable type thing" – and both prefer to remain obtuse about the title's meaning. It suggests numerous interpretations, but, in many ways, R.E.M. are perhaps trying to reconstruct something that's long seemed dead and buried, even if it is in their own image. The jury's still out, but many of the LP's images suggest a "sea of possibilities" (in the words of one of their heroes), as well as the obstacles that stand in the way ("You can't do this – I said 'I can' "). In other words, sometimes it does seem like you can't get there from here, even though we've been there before and should still know the way.

"We get letters from kids," says Peter, "and it's like 'I'm the only kid in Pork Butt, Idaho who listens to your music.' We write back 'Keep the faith – because we've all been there too."

"It's a really weird time that we're living in," says Michael. "It's kind of scary. I'm not sure that I like it too much."

Maybe it'll get better, I suggest.

"Is there a word that applies to the future, like an anachronism?" I can't think of one off the top of my head. "How about 'courage'? That's a good one."

[edit] R.E.M: Life's Rich Pageant

Edwin Pouncey, Sounds, 16 August 1986

NOW WHERE did this panther spring from? Seems like only a minute ago I was hacking my way through a jungle of ugly pop fever when suddenly, this animal's on my back, slashing and tearing, panting hot on the back of my neck. For one glorious moment, passion is back in fashion, and being torn apart never felt so good.

All the tricks that REM have learned are weaved into this latest tapestry (due for UK release in September). A dream state that alternates between '60s Byrdsian electric folk and '80s garage rock, prickly with switchblades. REM make music sound simple, as though it pumps up out of the ground like crude oil, a gushing torrent of ideas that seemingly spouts forever. They drilled a hole in the right piece of dirt and struck black gold, making them, if not commercially, then at least artistically wealthy young men.

The crow for copy means that only the surface of this latest record can be scratched. With time, though, the depths can be fully explored, the treasure mined and stored with the rest of the booty that BerryBuckMillsStipe have showered on their faithful following thrice already.

This time, the edge is rougher and louder. Previous producer Joe Boyd's delicate grandeur has been partly replaced by Don Gehman's rootsier echo, cavernous, complex and compelling. Michael Stipe's lyrical imagery is as mysterious and magical as ever, ghostly fragments of prose set to equally haunting playing. Whatever's being suggested in a song like 'Cuyahoga', for example, certainly takes a long time to fade from the memory and it's probably the most immediate highlight on Life's Rich Pageant.

Buck's knowledge and practise of his country's many and diverse musical forms, coupled with Stipe's fondness for strange, folklore, gives REM the edge over their more contemporary rivals who flounder Into the swamplands of nostalgia and are lucky to be seen again.

REM have trodden more wisely by cutting their own path through terrain that still enthralls them. If your spirit of adventure is up to it, then you are strongly advised to tag along and bring your imagination with you. Now, more than ever, you're going to need it.

[edit] R.E.M.: Post-Yuppie Pop

Jon Savage, The Observer, 21 May 1989

"I could turn you inside out! But I choose not to!" R.E.M.’s singer Michael Stipe, back arched, is bellowing into a megaphone. Five songs into their concert at the Onondoga War Memorial Hall in Syracuse, an upstate New York college town, R.E.M. are into their stride. The Memorial Hall, built in 1951 and running to seed, is filled with over 8,000 bodies and this mixed audience of students, rock fans and teens attracted by R.E.M.’s current hit single is going gently berserk amid purple and orange light.

Syracuse is the twenty-ninth American date out of R.E.M.’s eight-month 1989 world tour. The night before, they played to 17,000 people (85 per cent capacity) in New York’s Madison Square Garden; the next day, they go to Toronto. Their current single, ‘Stand’, is at number six. Their first album for Warners, Green, is in the top 20; released last November, it has sold over a million copies. The week of the concert, R.E.M. are dubbed ‘America’s hippest band’ on the cover of that bastion of American rock values, Rolling Stone. It seems like business as usual.

Except that singer Michael Stipe is wearing make-up and a dress. It’s a nice dress: a knee-length affair in red tartan. It covers the trousers of a baggy, dark brown 1950s suit and is covered by the suit jacket, which is held together with a safety pin. It is not the standard attire of a serious American rock group. R.E.M. are generally upbeat and often didactic, but ‘I Could Turn You Inside Out’ is designed as an all-out assault on the senses. The transformation that is the hallmark of any powerful pop event is beginning to take place. R.E.M. use surrealist backdrops throughout their performance: here, the screen is filled by murky film of fish shoals moving with a hypnotic slowness. The lyric examines the power of the performer, whether a pop star, "a preacher or a TV anchorman", to manipulate a mass audience. Within this context, the dress has a particular significance: it marks R.E.M.’s passing from their cult rock-band status to the blurred, warping world of pop stardom.

The week of the concert, a big item in the US news is a rally in Washington attended by 300,000 people protesting against possible anti-abortion legislation. "Causes are fashionable now," says a friend in the centre of magazine Manhattan: R.E.M. are well placed to catch this post-Yuppie mood: they espouse green and specific issue politics. They are idealistic and forward-looking to a degree that might seem naïve.

"I’m over-simplifying," says Michael Stipe, "but I think as a motivating force for change pop culture is still at the forefront. Events like the Amnesty tour brought a lot of attention. Pop culture is still the one way in which someone who is without power can attain it and bring about a change."

Aged between 29 and 32, R.E.M. represent the coming to power of a particular musical generation in America. As much as the Beastie Boys, they are the final products of English punk, which has taken ten years to filter into the American mainstream. Like their nearest English equivalent the Smiths, they mark industry and public acceptance of the 1980s independent label sector. They are also a product of a new force in the American music industry, college radio, the success of which has made a dent in the programming policy of the notoriously conservative American radio networks.

"It’s been a gradual build-up all the time," says Stipe. The group, named after the rapid eye movement of the first, deep sleep, was formed by four college drop-outs in Athens, Georgia, in 1980. All had lived in the South for some while: only Stipe had lived outside America, in Germany. If bassist Mike Mills, guitarist Peter Buck and drummer Bill Berry appear straightforward and friendly, Stipe is the changeling of the group, hinting on occasions at the twisted dandyism of other Southern exports like Capote and Wolfe.

" 'Think global, act local' is one of our catch-phrases," says the spry Mills. A town of about 70,000 inhabitants, Athens remains important to the group: they all live there and are involved with local politics. The way Buck tells it, the town offered a sheltering bohemia: "It has all the parochial small-town behaviour, but then you’ve got all the college kids who roar through. It's got the best art school in Georgia, maybe one of the better ones in the South."

Like countless others, R.E.M. were inspired by the punk style and attitude that spread from New York and London in the mid-to-late 1970s. "I heard Patti Smith and Television when I was 15," says Stipe. "I’d found something that was dirty and exciting and sexy and smart. I realized that I was an outsider and I felt separated from most people. This music made the separation worse but it gave me an ace in the hole because I had something they didn’t have."

"I was the manager of a rare and used record store in Athens," adds Buck, "so I used to play records I hadn’t heard all day long. In Georgia you were so far away from everything that the Sex Pistols were just the same as Ultravox. For two years, 1977 and 1978, we’d buy everything that came out. Punk filtered down to us; it meant that you didn’t have to follow the rules."

R.E.M. began playing in an Athens bar called Tyrone’s — "a good mixture of preppies and hippies," says Berry — and soon began an extended period of playing any possible venue, from top 40 bars to gay bars. After their first single, they were picked by Miles Copeland’s IRS Records for the first of seven albums, Murmur. Marrying the utopian jangle of the 1960s Byrds with the new forms of song construction illuminated by punk, R.E.M. soon emerged as the best of an often mundane pack of new American rock bands.

"We’ve played with each other so long that we can intuit chord changes," says Peter Buck, and this musical closeness has been an R.E.M. hallmark: songwriting credits are equally split between all four. "The neat thing about us is our harmonies," says Mills. "We have three people who can not only sing but make up their own ideas about what to sing, instead of building a song on 1-3-5 harmonies." The group have also been marked by Stipe’s buried vocals and cryptic, allusive lyrics. "In Television’s songs, I never knew what they were singing about half the time," Stipe says. "But it doesn’t matter because it sounds great. Some songs are written in one stroke but others are prepared for months and months. I have these notebooks: I’ll pick a topic and run through the notes and say: 'This applies and this applies.' The moment of inspiration is extemporaneous but it’s all been prepared before."

This approach resulted in a sequence of songs that defines a new America. Albums like Life’s Rich Pageant and the remarkable Fables of the Reconstruction captured the sense of space and possibility that lies within America, allied to a strong sense of loss and dreams betrayed. "There’s a lack of history here which would be the American version of Catholic guilt," Stipe says. "I think that’s a big flaw in the American dream. You’re not taught about the annihilation of the entire culture of the Indians whose land this was."

Boosted by constant touring, superior material and college radio support, R.E.M. finally broke through to the US mass market with 1987’s top 10 single, ‘The One I Love’. During the 16-month lay-off that ended with the start of this tour, the group signed to Warner Brothers Records for several million dollars. The group’s belief in the mass market inevitably required mass distribution. Says Stipe, "IRS’s distribution had gone as far as it could and it was time to move on to someone who could get the records out world-wide."

"Touring is a great pressure," he adds, and at Syracuse fatigue is beginning to set in. The normally good-humoured Berry runs out of the photo session, while the night before Buck had broken a toe in a fit of frustration. All are coming to terms with the alienation of the mainstream music industry while attempting to retain their ideals and closeness.

Outside the hall in Syracuse, a strong wind blows gusts of snow through streets that to a European seem empty even when peopled. What R.E.M. offer their audience inside is a sense of community: their performance is a careful balance between raw feeling and downtown rigour, between outright didacticism and the dream state implied by their name. Their reward is a crossover appeal to intellectuals, rock fans and regular high-school students.

Perhaps what they react to is the transformation implicit in Michael Stipe’s and androgynous performance. As he dances, dervish-like, in the flicker of a strobe, or throws his head back and roars like a preacher, he dramatizes R.E.M.’s triumph at finding their own power. Unlike other groups, who use this power to dazzle, R.E.M. deliberately seek to draw the audience in, to offer a positive approach. "Hope is important," says Stipe. "It’s an intrinsic human emotion, to think there is some kind of light at the end of the tunnel."

[edit] R.E.M.: Automatic For The People

Phil Sutcliffe, Q, November 1992

MILLIONS HAVE BEEN waiting on the new R.E.M. album, and almost none of them is barmy.

It could have been reverence mortis time, but Automatic For The People turns out to be both aptly unfathomable and just the job. The contradictory elements of the band's rock'n'roll cravings and the singer's ruminative tendencies sit together like completely different things in a pod.

Other than on 'Ignoreland', a stonkalong satire of Reagan/Bush America, it's folk they start from. Acoustic guitars lead the way into 'Drive' (the first single), 'Monty Got A Raw Deal' and several others. Hard on their heels come Michael Stipe's vocals, high and sharp-edged with that severe absence of emoting long associated with a finger in the ear – though there are exceptions such as 'Try Not To Breathe' where Stipe goes into character as an old man wrestling with the imminence of death.

But the subliminal message throughout, seemingly, is that the singer is always in control; a distance is maintained. It's crucial to the R.E.M. effect because, at the same time, the band are eager to throw a cheery arm round the listener's shoulder – rock on in with cleverly pointed touches on guitar, organ or a subtly assembled backing vocal from Mike Mills. The strings are impressive too, whether melancholy ('Everybody Hurts') or jouncing ELOishly ('The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight'). Astonishingly, several of the arrangements were by John Paul Jones, eking out his pension post-Mission production and Led Zeppelin.

So a lively form of bliss is readily available from the sounds of Automatic For The People. The words are the best and the worst of it: licensed to be bloody difficult, if not incomprehensible. All interpretations of 'Drive' or 'Man In The Moon' (elegiac?) or 'Star Me Kitten' (sexy?) should own up to being long shots. 'The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight' is a brainteaser involving a phone and, uh, if the coiled cord is the snake... it still doesn't make obvious sense. At least half the album must be filed under skull-scratchers.

Nonetheless, its character does emerge eventually. In fact, it's about Life. Without embarrassment and via sundry dark metaphors, it enquires "What's it all about, if anything?". While 'Try Not To Breathe' dramatises a moment of personal torment, 'Find The River' goes for the huge-size screen, adroitly diverting classic images of river, sea and flowers to eco-philosophical purposes ("We're closer now than light years to go," Stipe pronounces, glumly). 'Sweetness Follows' piles on the misery by flaunting soured, unconvincing consolation for common grief, the loss of parents, brothers, sisters.

Yet, if this all seems entirely too much, there's also 'Nightswimming' and 'Everybody Hurts'. Both do a slowdance with death, then pull off the aesthetic pirouette necessary to turn it all around. As the nightswimmer, Stipe sloughs off despond in unsocialworkerly fashion with scalp-prickling music and the mysterious clarity of lines like "September's coming soon/Pining for the moon/And what if there were two/Side by side in orbit around the Ferris sun".

In 'Everybody Hurts' he sings a counterpart to the Kate Bush role in Peter Gabriel's 'Don't Give Up' – "You feel like you're lost/No, no, you're not alone". Big emotions, big ideas, and you believe them too, without feeling a fool.

For properly beloved entertainers, R.E.M. can give a person quite a going over.

[edit] The New Adventures of R.E.M.

Tony Fletcher, Omnibus Books, 2002

An extract from Remarks Remade: The Story of R.E.M. by Tony Fletcher, first published by Omnibus Press in 1989 and in three subsequent editions, the most recent in 2002. (408pp, currently available in softback at £9.95)

Tony Fletcher’s 1989 biography of the enigmatic quartet from Athens, Georgia, benefited not only from Tony’s long association with the band but also by the co-operation of the band itself. However, R.E.M. – being R.E.M. – were disinclined to reveal this at the time and Tony was thus obliged to keep this under his hat. All such restrictions were lifted for the new edition, published earlier this year, which is over twice as long and takes the R.E.M. story right up to Reveal and beyond.

In this extract we pick up R.E.M. towards the end of 1996 after the release of New Adventures In Hi-Fi. Promotion for the album is low key, just selected interviews, and sales suffer as a result. But any disappointment the band may feel is overshadowed by a far greater upheaval in waiting: the imminent departure of drummer Bill Berry...

FOLLOWING THE RELEASE of New Adventures In Hi-Fi, the R.E.M. members returned to their own worlds. Bill Berry holed up on his farm in Watkinsville where, he explained, "I’ve worked out a lot of problems on my tractor." Mike Mills flew round Europe for some New Adventures In Hi-Fi listening parties, sung ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at the start of an Atlanta Braves game (no small honour), continued perfecting his golf game with his well-heeled Republican friends, and showed up at the occasional gig in Athens.

Michael Stipe stumped for Bill Clinton, who was easily re-elected in November ‘96 against last-of-the-World-War-II candidates Bob Dole. (It was further confirmation of R.E.M. as the establishment now that they were backing the incumbents rather than the challengers.) He sung with Patti Smith and Natalie Merchant at a Tibetan benefit at New York’s prestigious Carnegie Hall. And, undeterred by the failure of Desolation Angels, he put his film producer’s cap back on, and under the auspices of his new company, Single Cell Pictures, set about getting Velvet Goldmine into production. The Todd Haynes script was a continuation of the glam rock obsession that had fuelled Monster, an unapologetically ambitious reworking of the relationship between a fictionalised David Bowie and Iggy Pop with particular focus on the concepts of personal and artistic reinvention, and (bi)sexual experimentation - in other words, a perfect cinematic project for Stipe.

Part of Michael’s task as Executive Producer was finding the right musicians to play both on and off-screen roles, and he flew to London in the new year of 1997 to check out glam revivalists Placebo, among others. It seems somewhat surprising that Stipe would so enthusiastically take on a job that is a constant round of phone calls, pitches, faxes, letters, e-mails and face-to-face meetings; one can imagine Stipe preferring to act, direct, or merely photograph - anything that allows him to concentrate on making the art, as opposed to conducting the business.

But this was clearly no dilettantish diversion; Stipe pursued the project with blind dedication, and Velvet Goldmine finally went into production with financing from Miramax among others. Jonathan Rhys Meyers would play Bowie as the fictional Brian Slade; Ewan McGregor, looking much like Kurt Cobain, would play Iggy as the fictional Curt Wild. The musical cast would only further blur lines between fact and fiction, past and present. Under Stipe’s encouragement, two different all-star house bands were assembled. The Venus In Furs featured Thom Yorke from Radiohead, and Andy McKay from Roxy Music; the Wylde Rats included, among other American post punk notables, Don Fleming and Thurston Moore, who had performed similarly in the Back Beat Band.*

Peter Buck was undertaking a similarly pivotal role in Seattle. Having played with Scott McCaughey in The Minus 5, and brought McCaughey into R.E.M.’s touring band, he was also playing regularly with The Screaming Trees’ drummer Barrett Martin. When Martin formed an instrumental act Tuatara with Luna’s bass player Justin Harwood, Buck quickly volunteered his services. "First day together I wrote two songs," he remembers. "So I was in the band." Tuatara’s début album, Breaking The Ethers, was recorded in late 1996 and released through Sony in 97; it would confound expectations by incorporating Asian and African influences into an ambient ethic. Buck also found both time and enthusiasm to help co-write an album for Seattle-based American Music Club vocalist Mark Eitzel; when it came time to record, the Tuatara collective was brought in as backing band.

This was all to character; Buck hated to sit still. And it was equally Peter Buck’s nature to announce his main band’s future intentions; by doing so, he set the group public goals that all four of them then had reason to meet. "I like to lead from behind," he explains. "It’s like, ‘Here’s a bunch of demos, this is where I’m going,’ as opposed to saying, ‘This is what I’m gonna do, what do you think?’ I’m always the one who has the first ideas, that’s my job." Upon Out Of Time’s release he’d stated that he wanted to make a chamber record, something more overtly orchestral, and the result had been, suitably enough, Automatic For The People. On release of that album, he announced enthusiasm for a trashy rock'n'roll record with a full-blown tour, and Monster had followed in due course. During the promotion for Monster, he advertised the intent to record new songs on the road, which Michael Stipe has claimed caught him by surprise; still, New Adventures In Hi-Fi came about, and out, more or less as planned.

In August 1996, conducting interviews for the latest R.E.M. album, he was already on to the next one, implying the others would come out to his house in Hawaii, write a new crop of songs, engage in their own activities for a few months, then return to the studio and maybe head back onto the road. He reasoned that by recording constantly, the band never had to lose time second-guessing its creativity, or worrying about the peaks and valleys of record sales. He admitted to an obsession with working "while I still have the time"; he would turn forty that December.

The other R.E.M. members, still in their mid-thirties yet often left breathless by the oldest member’s relentless musical ambitions, agreed to his timing, thankful as always that someone else was willing to set the agenda. The four of them reconvened at Peter’s house on the island of Maui, in Hawaii, in late March.

Buck, as usual, brought the most ideas to the table. He had set up a simple studio in the attic of his Seattle home, and filled it with first-generation beat boxes, analogue synths and primitive keyboards like the Mellotron, the Baldwin Discover, the Kitten and the Univox. Unable any longer to pop down to the West Clayton Street rehearsal room in Athens and jam with Bill and Mike, he would use the drum machines for rhythmic backing. By the time he’d added other instrumentation, often with Scott McCaughey by his side and frequently using his new-old electronic gear, it sounded less like R.E.M. than anything he’d ever written. And he liked it.

So, it seemed, did the others. In Hawaii, Peter, Mike and Michael spent most of each afternoon and evening recording on to a four-track tape deck in Peter Buck’s living room, trying out the drum machines, vintage synths and effects units with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of unattended kids in a toy store. Michael Stipe saw in the electronic-ambient sparseness of the demos the opportunity to follow his favourite R.E.M. songs like 'Country Feedback’, ‘E-bow The Letter’, ‘New Test Leper' and 'Undertow'. "There were places that I went to in those songs, whether it was the loose, thematic style of writing or the subject matter, that I wanted to take off from to make this record," he explained a year later.

It was soon obvious that the fuzzy arena rock that had dominated their last two albums would remain in the past; the new songs returned to R.E.M.’s love of pure melody and immediacy, while the instrumentation suggested they would be anything but conventional. A little like Elton John as performed by Suicide, as Peter put it.

Bill Berry was physically present for the Hawaii sessions, but in other ways, he was entirely absent. If this sounded like Jefferson Holt a couple of years earlier, the comparison was apt. Berry had taken the legal fall-out with Jefferson particularly badly. "It was hard for all of us," said Peter Buck, "but it was soul destroying for him. He was just shaking." Buck had felt a lack of interest from Berry during the final stages of New Adventures In Hi-Fi, but then the band was used to his cutting out early. On the first tour of Japan, back in ‘84, Bill had earned the nickname ‘I Go Now’ for his tendency to excuse himself prematurely. Since settling on his farm, his hours had moved even further forward; in direct contrast to the typical rock drummer, Bill was rising at dawn and setting off for bed at dusk.

Berry came to Hawaii with the additional pressures of a divorce upon him, and a total unwillingness to tour again. "I found myself wandering out to the beach and looking at the waves and stuff while the other guys were inside working away," he said a few months late. "I put some things on tape, but my heart wasn’t in it."

"We noticed," said Michael Stipe of Bill’s emotional distance. "He just wasn’t as involved. And maybe personally we were trying to gloss over that. Like maybe he was just having a bad week or something."

"I knew something was going on," says Buck. "I didn’t know what. I always tried talking to Bill, like maybe you want to see a therapist or a marriage counselor, but he didn’t want to do that kind of stuff." As with Jefferson, the friendships - foibles and all - were so deeply ingrained that there was an unwillingness to sit down and confront any personality problems.

The Hawaii sessions finished in April and the band went their separate ways for a few months. Mike Mills engaged in writing a movie soundtrack, though his compositions for the film A Cool Dry Place never saw release. He and Stipe graced the stage at an outdoor Tibetan Freedom Concert in New York City at the start of June, playing a few New Adventures songs acoustically before sharing vocal duties on some covers with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and The Beastie Boys’ Mike D. In the process, they volunteered the whole band’s services for a similar but bigger event next year.

Peter Buck took his floating Seattle line-up on the road throughout the month of May. The Magnificent Seven versus The United States was an old-fashioned revue in which different permutations of the entourage (Tuatara, The Minus 5, Mark Eitzel and Peter Buck) performed brief sets during an all-night show that lasted a good two hours. The seven musicians were Buck, McCaughey, Martin, Eitzel, Harwood, Skerik Walton (of Critter’s Buggin’ and Tuatara) and Dan Pearson (of American Music Club). As with an R.E.M. tour, the last date for the Magnificent Seven tour was in Atlanta, and the other three members all came out to watch, Mike and Michael duly stepped up for some R.E.M. songs and cover versions for the encores; Bill Berry left before he could be called upon.

R.E.M. SETTLED ON Pat McCarthy to replace Scott Litt. The genial, 30-year-old Irishman had worked on a couple of New Adventures In Hi-Fi sessions at Scott Litt’s studio in Los Angeles - what he calls mere "fixing and mixing" - and had just come off engineering Madonna’s latest, Ray Of Light, and mixing k.d. lang’s Drag. Michael Stipe was particular taken by his mixes for Patti Smith’s Gone Again album, Peter Buck by his production on Joe Henry’s Trampoline and Luna’s Pup Tent. Such were his impeccable credentials that he was hired over the phone.

McCarthy flew into Athens that first week of October. Peter Buck came down from Seattle with both Scott McCaughey and Barrett Martin; including the additional all-rounder musicians was intended to encourage further experimentation with the instrumentation. In conversations with Pat McCarthy, there had been much talk about stripping down the drum sound, about using beat boxes, maracas and such like rather than a conventional drum kit. It turned out to be prescient thinking.

The Seattle trio booked into their hotel late on Sunday night, October 5. Mike Mills called Peter there and then to let him know that, "I just want you to walk in to rehearsal tomorrow to be prepared. Bill’s going to tell you something and you’re not going to want to hear it." Mills and Berry having been friends since high school, the bass player had been given advance warning by the drummer as to his intent.

Curiously, neither Peter Buck nor Michael Stipe expected the worst. "This is the best job on earth and you make a ton of money doing it," reasoned Peter. You’d have to be not right in the head to quit.

But that’s exactly what Bill wanted to do. He gathered the other three together in private and told them that his heart was no longer in it, that he wanted out of R.E.M.. He was going to quit the band. To their pained and dumbfounded expressions, he added if his departure meant they would break up, he’d stay - but only for their sakes.

"I'd be lying if I said my brain surgery two or three years ago didn't have a little to do with it," Bill told hometown newspaper the Athenaeum’s Rich Copley three weeks later. "I think that while I'm physically in good shape - my brain works fine - just going through that process of being really that sick and coming out of it and lying in a hospital bed for three weeks made me kind of look at things a little differently and shift priorities. It's not a tangible thing. Why would I want to quit? Why would anyone be wild enough to do something like this? I don't know. It's just what I feel in my heart."

The others begged him to reconsider. R.E.M. had been together for almost 18 years without a line-up change: of all the major rock bands since The Beatles, only U2 could claim a longer unbroken relationship. They would therefore bend over backwards to accommodate his issues. "I was saying, ‘Well God Bill, if you don't want to travel, make the records in your barn,’" says Peter Buck. "‘You don't come to the mixing anyway. You don't want to tour, well, do we have plans to tour?’ [Actually, they did.] But for him, it just weighed on him. Every bit of it. He dreaded doing demos, he dreaded doing a record, he dreaded travelling, and he would think about it for the six months previous. One interview and he would worry about it for a month. We could see all that happening, and my feeling was that he would just say, ‘I don't want to do these things anymore.’ Theoretically for him, he could have done the whole record in Athens, three weeks of taping, gone home and not thought about it again for a year and a half. Basically he just didn’t want to think about it."

Bill remained adamant that he wanted to leave. Not that he had any plans other than tending his farm. His divorce from Mari was being finalised at almost exactly the same time; it was as if he wanted to start his life all over again. Yet he reiterated his willingness to keep going if the band were going to break up over it.

This put the other three in a quandary. They’d frequently stated that if one member went, it would no longer be R.E.M. - so if they let him go and continued the band, they’d be called on their hypocrisy by both the media and the fans. Then again, they’d also stated they’d only keep going for as long as it was fun. For Bill, it had stopped being fun. Yet for the other three, R.E.M. was as enjoyable now as it ever had been. They didn’t want to stop. They had the best record contract in the world, they had a fan base of five million worldwide, they’d just come off what they considered one of their finest albums, and they’d regained their critical respect after an intensely difficult two years. They also had forty new songs that they didn’t want to abandon. Particularly as these songs circumvented the conventional rock line-up.

"I was already geared up," Peter Buck told Rich Copley. "It's one of those weird coincidences in life that I've been getting into using drum machines and building loops and samplers and stuff, and I have a little sampler in my house and then all of a sudden we don't have a drummer so I'm kind of semi-prepared. It's also really weird, but I was kind of liking the spareness and the sparseness, and I was talking to Michael about how we could possibly break down the idea of the band as a four-piece and Bill could play guitar and bass and keyboards. Maybe Bill could play lead guitar and I'll play maracas." Buck, clearly, was not one for ending the band.

Over at John Keane’s studio, Keane, McCaughey, McCarthy and Martin remained in the dark as to what was occurring. "Bill just wasn’t there," recalls McCaughey, "and nobody was saying anything about it." The other three R.E.M. members were still desperately hoping to change Bill’s mind. "But after talking to him for three weeks," said Michael Stipe at the end of October, "I know that he doesn’t want to stay and we have to respect that." The band decided to continue without him.

"It made me the happiest guy in the world," said Bill. "Because I didn’t want to be the schmuck who broke R.E.M. up."

ONCE THE DECISION had been accepted, the group had to figure how to break the news. As a partner, Bertis Downs had been privy to all but the first discussion. The others over at John Keane’s were notified now too, in person by Bill, after which the sessions were abruptly cancelled, with barely a demo for a song ‘Falls To Climb’ completed. It was now only a matter of days - perhaps hours - before word spread round Athens, and with it, the world. The group had learned from its experience the previous summer with Jefferson’s firing and the new deal with Warner Brothers how important it was to control publicity, and they didn’t want people to think the band was disintegrating. On October 30, Warner Brothers issued a press release, announcing Bill’s departure in the softest terms possible, stressing the word ‘amicable’. It was just the kind of announcement that usually hid bitter acrimony, and so, to their credit, the four members of the band gathered together at their office that same day, invited local press to visit them and presented a united, if disappointed, front to the world.

"It’s incredibly sad," Michael Stipe told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "I won’t pretend that it’s not. It’s going to be really weird for us to be a three-piece. But I’d much rather be a three-piece and deal with the change than have Bill stay in the band and be unhappy."

To home town paper the Athenaeum, he elaborated on the importance of honesty and friendship. "There are too many bands in this world that are going through the motions. It's very courageous for him to say, ‘You know, it's not really in my heart, I don't want to do this anymore.’ We've never been about faking it. The reason we're calling people together to see the four of us here at this table is that we have nothing to hide."

Mike Mills had eight years of friendship in Macon to add to the seventeen years in R.E.M., and that enabled a more positive attitude. "I have to look for some perspective on it," he said, "and when I do I say, well he's not dead, he's still around, and that sort of shrinks this particular situation to a very small size. At the end of the day we still have the band, we still have Bill, just the two things are not conjoined. That's fine."

"We are still the best of friends and we still love each other a great deal and respect each other a great deal and that, as far as I'm concerned is what R.E.M. is," Michael Stipe told Addicted To Noise’s Gil Kaufman. "The music is almost a by-product. I know that sounds really stupid, but our friendship is what makes R.E.M. - R.E.M. We could not make the music that we wanted if we did not really mean it. Three of us still really mean it."

Bill Berry repeated his own uncertain mantra: that he wanted out but couldn’t really explain why. "I think I’m just ready to not be a pop star anymore," he told the Athenaeum. "It’s been great, it’s been a wild ride but I’m ready to get off." He said he would stay in the neighborhood, tending his farm. "My friends are here. And the thing is I'm going to feel distanced enough from R.E.M. after this anyway. I don't want to leave. I want to have at least that connection, so I can run over to Michael's house and pet his dog if I want to. There's no reason to leave."

The last words Bill Berry spoke - or typed - as a member of R.E.M., were at the end of an MTV/AOL online chat with their fans, on October 31 1997.

"Let this whole thing go. Leave these guys alone so they can continue to make great music."

ON FACE VALUE that might have seemed easy enough. The drummer, legend has it, is usually the most dispensable member. Bill’s loss of interest after the Monster tour hadn’t stopped Hi-Fi being a critical success; besides, the new songs barely called for a drum kit, and there were two more all-round musicians on board already. If he was ever going to quit, this was probably the perfect moment.

And yet R.E.M. had been a band for almost eighteen years. They’d been friends for just as long. It was no coincidence that U2 and R.E.M., the two groups with the permanent line-ups, were the two most consistently successful acts of their generation; bands were not called bands for nothing. So while you could take away the drummer, and possibly even remove the drums themselves, taking away the cornerstone of a long-standing creative relationship was another issue entirely.

Bill’s contributions, after all, had been on so much more than mere percussion. In those early days, he’d supplied the group with their leadership. When the other three might have settled for popularity in Athens, Bill was the one who booked gigs further afield. When the others may have contented themselves with part-time income, it was Bill who provoked their ambition by threatening to leave for Love Tractor. R.E.M. were always too good to have failed outright, but without Bill’s contacts with Ian Copeland - and his willingness to work them for all they were worth - it would have been that much more of an uphill struggle.

Over the years, he’d proven himself an able musician, coming off the drums after the Green tour to play guitar and bass. Along the way, he’d laid the foundations for some of R.E.M.’s best songs, including ‘Everybody Hurts’ and ‘Man On The Moon’. He shared Peter Buck’s enthusiasm for getting things done quickly and moving along, rather than worrying about the finer points of detail. And he had the group’s keenest ear for pop music, which showed both in his songwriting and in his demand that recordings be kept concise. "If I wrote something that was seven or eight minutes long," says Buck, "he’d just throw his sticks up in the air after five and a half minutes." The fact that the songs were so long on New Adventures In Hi-Fi possibly confirms Buck’s claim that Berry had lost interest before the mixing of that album.

Yet none of this accounts for his spiritual contribution - his presence as the band’s soul. Bill Berry had a down-to-earth nature that was a pleasure for everyone who came across it and a sense of humor that was a delight for anyone who shared it; he rooted the group in so many more ways that just playing the drums. If it’s true that one reason for R.E.M.’s lasting popularity was because, like The Beatles, they had such different, complementary personalities, then R.E.M. had just lost its Ringo.

The others knew as much. Considering how eloquently they spoke during the interviews around his departure, it’s a surprise that Michael Stipe allowed the following comment to make it to the official press release. "Are we still R.E.M.? I guess a three-legged dog is still a dog. It just has to learn how to run differently."