Book World: Making sense of R.E.M., from mumblers to megastars
R.E.M. never had a chance to be a secret. Though some of the band’s earliest fans would later bemoan its globe-straddling success, in the way of all connoisseurs who get to an eventually popular thing first, the band was always big relative to its station. Within weeks of its now fabled first performance in 1980 at a friend’s birthday party in an old, deconsecrated church in Athens, Georgia, the quartet was drawing larger-than-average crowds at some of the music-rich college town’s hippest venues. By the end of 1981, the New York Times had listed “Radio Free Europe” as one of the year’s best songs, when that single was all the group had released. And in 1983, Rolling Stone – hardly the pulse of the counterculture by that time – was honoring “Murmur,” the band’s first full-length effort, as the best album of the year, beating out such fringe releases as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and the Police’s “Synchronicity.”
In his new biography, “The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.,” Peter Ames Carlin writes vividly and in close detail about the group’s formation and early days. When they headlined a club in June 1980, two months after the church performance, “the place filled up with people nobody had ever seen at an Athens art-rock band show. Jocks, preppies, guys in T-shirts branded with the Greek characters from fraternity row. All of them dancing and cheering and pumping their fists.” Which is to say that the band was both/and from the very beginning. They were both obfuscating and melodic, both arty and crowd-pleasing. They weren’t for everyone (cool), but they were for many (less cool). Arguments about where they fell on the cool spectrum became a long-running hobby for music fans.
Carlin offers efficient biographical sketches of each band member, seeded throughout the book to break up the linear story of the group’s arc. At 7 years old in the late 1960s, future singer Michael Stipe was smitten by the Monkees and “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies. A decade later, he was enraptured by Patti Smith and her first album, “Horses,” but pop still pulsed as deep in his blood as art. Guitarist Peter Buck, who also loved the Monkees, was a young record-store rat who took a part-time job behind a counter, paid in vinyl, even after the band had established itself. Buck was self-taught on his instrument and initially lacked confidence, though his oft-described “jangly” work (which undersells it) became the band’s defining noise. Bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry were skillful, trained musicians and a locked-in rhythm section from the start.
Stipe’s dad was an officer in the U.S. Army, “a near caricature of a military man,” Carlin writes, who tended to look “as though he’d just stepped out of a helicopter.” Both Buck’s and Mills’s fathers were in the Marines. Normally, military family backgrounds in a rock band, especially an “alternative” one, would be notable in a purely ironic, combative way. And it may have been extra fodder for antiwar anthems like the band’s “Orange Crush,” but for R.E.M., it also prefigures their unusual politeness and discipline.
Any biography of a band has two basic elements: people and music. R.E.M. provides a challenge on both fronts.
As people, or at least as a collective of creative people, they were boring in an almost studied way – not just compared with a touring soap opera like Fleetwood Mac, but with nearly any average group of rockers. They were famously democratic. Credit for every song went to Berry-Buck-Mills-Stipe, just like that, in alphabetical order, no matter who did the bulk of the work on a given number. That made shrewd business (and friendship) sense, but it also accurately represented the sturdy four-legged table that was the band. Stipe wrote almost all the lyrics, but only after the others gave him tracks for inspiration, and by all accounts, Berry, Buck and Mills played a roughly equal role in imagining and composing the music.
Carlin quotes Mitch Easter, a guitarist turned producer who worked on the band’s earliest records. “I remember all of them being really confident in a really jolly way,” Easter said. “They didn’t have a hierarchy in the band, and they had fantastic respect for each other, which is remarkable. They were also quite young, and a lot of young people aren’t that nice. Their egos get in the way. But these guys were emotionally mature.” So to a rock biographer hoping to propel a story with drama, good luck. The hairiest moment in the band’s history was a medical emergency, when drummer Berry suffered a brain aneurysm onstage in Switzerland in 1995, very luckily 2 miles away from a hospital that was home to some of the world’s leading neurosurgeons.
As for the music: Carlin, whose previous books include biographies of Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon, is a pro at gathering and unspooling the facts, but if any act transcends the facts, it’s R.E.M. Carlin, despite an irksome habit of juxtaposing lyrics to real-life events, clearly loves the songs and is smart about not just the most popular of them. That said, R.E.M.’s music produces mysterious effects, and explicating it can often be a fool’s errand.
The early albums especially frustrated attempts at sense-making. There are plenty of other bands where you can’t really tell what they’re saying – or what it means, if you do make it out – but few have so consciously made “come again?” as key to their identity as R.E.M. in the first half of the 1980s. “Michael wanted to make sure you couldn’t understand the lyrics,” one early producer told Carlin. “It was part of the sound, what they wanted.”
The songs on “Murmur” might have been inscrutable, but inscrutable doesn’t necessarily mean sloppy. From the first, R.E.M. was tight – in terms of both their sound and their vision. And Stipe’s voice had a richly emotional timbre that could make even nonsense sound moving. Years later, when he was being (a bit) more direct, crooning lines like “This could be the saddest dusk I’ve ever seen” and “It’s crazy what you could have had,” the increased legibility and sentimental prodding were winning new fans faster than they alienated older ones.
Berry left the group in 1997, two years after his near-death experience, making the table pretty wobbly. He had had an unusually large influence on the band’s sound and its strategies. He was the one who, according to Carlin’s account, tired of the road after the “Green” tour in 1989 and felt the band should focus on perfecting songs and records for a while instead. “If taking a break from touring meant settling for smaller sales, that was fine,” Carlin writes, with tongue nearly piercing through his cheek. As things actually played out, the ensuing albums, “Out of Time” (1991) and “Automatic for the People” (1992), took the band from stardom to superstardom without having to play for crowds, its rise fueled by “Losing My Religion,” “Everybody Hurts” and other inescapable hits. And Berry was the one who insisted the band then get back to more loudly rocking on the album “Monster” (1994) before embarking on a globe-trotting tour to support it.
Did the band stick around too long? Maybe, if you care about preserving nearly perfect track records. No album after the founding drummer departed is as coherent or vital as the band’s high standard, and most of the best tracks on those records, starting with “Up,” in 1998, are reminiscent of work that came before, when the band was long acclaimed for blazing new ground with each release. But they never embarrassed themselves, and when they called it quits, in 2011, the decision seemed as principled and agreeable as what came before – a commonly arrived-at refusal to continue on a path that they’d always lit by their collective creative light.
There’s no point trying to make any of this seem impersonal. R.E.M. has meant as much to me, for more years, as any artist in any medium. To release eight albums in nine years, from “Murmur” through “Automatic,” of such variety and consistent quality, is an achievement that isn’t properly celebrated. Perhaps because they eventually became so huge, so omnipresent, R.E.M. has become unexpectedly underrated. They don’t show up as often as they should in conversations about the greatest-ever American rock bands, and for all the critical adulation of their first decade, only “Murmur” tends to be given its proper place when outlets such as Pitchfork and Rolling Stone make lists honoring the 1980s. They’re widely credited with popularizing the alternative music scene, and they certainly inspired scores of musicians, but besides some dollops of that “jangle,” no one else has ever really sounded like them.
There are other books about the band, including one from 2013 by the British writer Tony Fletcher. None of its members spoke to Carlin for this volume, though he writes in the acknowledgments that Berry-Buck-Mills-Stipe “never stood in my way and all found ways to be kind from afar.” (It’s doubtful anyway, given their long history of eschewing self-exposure, that their participation would have significantly changed things.) This longtime fan didn’t learn much new from “The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.,” but it gets across all the fundamentals, with both affection and discernment. And if a fierce admirer thinks the band deserves a literary account that matches its own achievement, it’s hardly Carlin’s fault that music doesn’t easily lend itself to such triumphs on the page.