20 Years of R.E.M. Fandom – Part 1
This story of R.E.M. begins in 1988. Sure, the band had formed in Athens, GA more than eight years earlier. Absolutely, by 1988 they had already helped to usher in the age of college rock, built a large fan base through years of near-constant touring, and even had a Top 40 hit with “The One I Love.†But in my grade-school years in Northeast Philadelphia, I missed all of that. So this story has to begin when R.E.M. left its independent label and signed with Warner Brothers Records.
If they hadn’t “sold out,†I never could have bought in. And what a shame that would have been.
One winter morning, school was canceled because we were supposed to get snow. The snow never really came, so my mother took us out bowling instead. Car rides usually involved a protracted sequence of negotiations, because I usually wanted to listen to the Top 40 station and my mother’s tastes were more to the soft-rock side of the spectrum. She was willing to humor me on many occasions, and this was one of them. As we were driving, a somewhat goofy song started playing. It was catchy, and I thought it was a little absurd that the singer was telling me to stand in the place that I was. But I liked absurd things, so the song stuck in the corner of my mind. But that didn’t quite do it.
Some time later, I came upon a Time magazine review of the album with that song on it, an album called Green. The review led off with the fact that the last song on the album had no title, and the reviewer imagined that this could make for a somewhat difficult situation when fans would want to request the song at concerts. The phrase, “Hey, play “ stuck in my head, and I was once again impressed by the quirkiness of this band. I brought up this fact a year later when I saw a friend had the cassette, but that still didn’t do it for me.
In early 1991, I had carved out a little workspace in the family laundry room, with a desk, a computer, and a radio. I was still listening to Top 40 stations, although format changes meant that I wouldn’t necessarily stick with one for any length of time. One night the DJ announced a new song by R.E.M. and played “Losing My Religion.†That first time, even that didn’t do it for me. It took another few months, of hearing the song on the radio and hearing Green and Out of Time when I hung out with my friends. I got more and more into the music, and I finally borrowed both albums and brought them home.
My mother heard one of them – I’m not sure which – and commented that this was a point where her taste and mine diverged sharply. I don’t think she knew how right she was. This was my entry into a new world of music, music that combined melodies with layers of instruments and often-earnest lyrics to create a mood that could surround me and lift me up; a world that featured people that didn’t fit in everywhere but fit in somewhere and were OK with that. It was the perfect world and the perfect music for a teenage me, and R.E.M. was always at the front of it.
Out of Time was their breakthrough of breakthrough albums. “Losing My Religion†was everywhere, and pretty soon we couldn’t get away from “Shiny Happy People.†(It was the only R.E.M. song the DJ would play at my high school’s dances. Continued efforts to get “Radio Song†or something else were a shining example of the triumph of hope over experience.) I found myself liking Mike Mills, the guy with the glasses – audience identification at its finest! – and being intrigued that he sang lead vocals on two songs. I loved the way that album began, with “Radio Song†– the song carries so much of R.E.M. inside it with its quiet, acoustic start before the drums and guitars kick in and KRS-One adds a little more volume. But it’s “Half a World Away†that sums up that album for me. I love the harpsichord, I love the way Michael Stipe sings it . . . there’s a weariness and longing in that song that is so powerful.
I’m not a philosopher of aesthetics, but of course I’ve studied John Dewey’s aesthetic theory, which says that art is something that leads us to a heightened kind of experience. Art makes us more aware of ourselves and our world and the art itself. It makes the moments that we are experiencing and thinking about it feel like their own special event, set aside from the more mundane parts of our everyday life. “Half a World Away†was and is a work of art that can still move me, 20 years later.
Green had its share of such experiences as well. I immediately liked the power and energy of “Pop Song 89†and “Get Up.†That untitled song became a favorite, with its call to “hold him (her) and keep him (her) strong.†It felt like a call to community, and a nice way to close an album. The later songs on the album tended to be murkier, with melodies that weren’t quite as clear. I didn’t appreciate a lot of these songs right away, so I didn’t listen to Green quit as much as Out of Time. But as I get older, “You Are the Everything†has become one of my favorites, and I understand how the more jarring nature of “The Wrong Child†fits the story that Stipe is telling.
During the rest of 1991 and 1992 I started trying to learn more about this band. I read as many articles and interviews as I could find. I started listening to the older albums. I watched whatever documentaries and live appearances I could. (I had to rely on friends for a lot of that. I still didn’t have cable in 1991, so I needed to go to a friend’s house to see the MTV Unplugged performance, which helped turn “Fall on Me†into one of my favorite songs.) It was the first time I ever learned the names of every member of a band and started to get a sense of their individual personalities. The more I learned, the more I liked. The big question became, what would they do next?
As my senior year started, a new R.E.M. single started hitting the radio. By this time Philadelphia had a dedicated commercial alternative radio station, and that’s where I parked the dial any time I had control. “Drive†was definitely a moody song, somber and sparse at points. The strings were intriguing; I liked the song but I didn’t love it. But I was definitely eager for the new album. In those days, when “going online†to me meant dialing into a local bulletin board system rather than connecting to the Internet, I couldn’t get a firm fix on the release date, so the first time I listened to Automatic for the People I was in the newspaper office at school, listening to someone else’s tape on my Walkman.
Talk about having an experience.
“Drive†gave way to “Try Not to Breathe,†and Stipe sang of a good life near its end. As he sang of needing “something to fly,†the strings and vocal harmonies gave him just that. Before the mood could get too heavy, he was singing about Nescafe and doing a riff on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight†with “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite,†which I still love as a goofy song in the spirit of “Stand.†A friend of mine and I argued about the refrain for months. Track after track, it was awesome.
And then the end of the album. Peter Buck told Rolling Stone that they almost ended the album with “Man on the Moon,†but decided to add two more songs. Thank heavens they did. “Nightswimming†is as close to a perfect song as I think that I will ever hear. Every year, as summer turns to fall, I find myself looking at the sky and singing to myself:
September is coming soon
I’m pining for the moon
And what if there were two,
Side by side in orbit around the fairest sun?
One night, as three of my friends and I were hanging out in my basement, we realized we had all stopped talking . . . because “Nightswimming†was playing.
The song that follows, “Find the River,†is almost as beautiful, and a perfect ending to an album. At key moments in my life, when I’ve faced anxiety about the end of one stage and the beginning of another, I find myself drawn back to the song, as Mike Mills’ piano and Peter Buck’s guitar remind me that “all of this is coming your way.â€
Automatic for the People is the soundtrack of my senior year of high school, and it came with me to Fordham. Over the years of high school, I had become far more comfortable in my own skin, figuring out how to be different when that was true to who I was, but not to be a caricature of myself either. Music wasn’t the only reason that happened, but it sure didn’t hurt. And R.E.M. wasn’t the only music that mattered, but it was sure a big chunk. I made new friends in college; some of them liked the band and some of them didn’t. Many of them tolerated what must have felt like overexposure. And through all of it, there was a simple irony that I don’t think I consciously considered, but deep down I think I know how weird, and how unusual, it was.
The Top 40 stations were playing R.E.M. all of the time. The “alternative†was the mainstream. I had jumped aboard a bandwagon with a bunch of other iconoclasts, and plenty of others were along for the ride.
The feeling built and reached its height in 1994. Once again a first single hit the radio, and unlike “Drive,†“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?†was anything but subtle. It looked like the band had kept Peter Buck’s promise to put the dulcimers away and make a rock and roll record. This time I made sure I had the release date nailed down and took the subway downtown to pick up Monster on Day 1. The irony is, this album didn’t grab me nearly as much as the others. The songs I liked, I liked a lot. I like the energy in “Star 69†and “Bang and Blame,†and “Strange Currencies†is a nifty reworking of “Everybody Hurts.†But some of the songs, like “You,†didn’t have as much life. I wasn’t one of the fans clamoring for a return to the rock period of Document and Green, so the direction the band took with this album wasn’t quite up my alley.
However, this album did feature something the previous two had not: a tour. I was determined not to miss this, even though Ticketmaster in New York made you jump through some hoops to get tickets. First you had to line up in order to get a bracelet with a number on it, and then a few days later you would line up in the order of your bracelet numbers to actually buy your tickets. I wound up with four seats in the first level of Madison Square Garden behind the stage. Not the best and not the worst, but after Bill Berry had an aneurysm on the European leg of the tour, I was happy to be at the show at all. After 16 years, I don’t remember the entire show, but two songs in particular stand out. The band put a ton of energy into “Me in Honey†from Out of Time, and elevated that to one of my favorite tracks. And the solemn performance of “Let Me In†from Monster was simply a masterpiece.
R.E.M. released several singles from Monster, and when my junior year started I saw them frequently on MTV. (For the first time, I lived somewhere that had cable.) But the album wasn’t getting the same kind of love that previous efforts had. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a lot of record stores still had a lot of copies of that disc on their shelves. I wasn’t too worried. Every album couldn’t be my favorite, and there would be another coming soon enough.
As September 1996 came, I knew my life was changing dramatically. I started my senior year of college, and starting dating the woman I’m married to today. Another lead single played on a car radio, and it didn’t do much for me. “E-bow the Letter†was a little too dark, a little too atmospheric, and a little too slow for my liking. There didn’t seem to be a huge amount of enthusiasm building up for this album, but I certainly wasn’t going to miss out on it. Number one, it was new R.E.M. Number two, I had heard a couple of other tracks besides “E-bow†thanks to public radio and Road Movie, the concert film of the Monster tour. Number three, the album came out on a Tuesday and we needed to fill space in that week’s newspaper, so I had promised to review it for the paper we would put to bed that Wednesday night. (OK, Thursday morning.)
So Pattie and I went downtown for dinner that release day, and on the way back to campus we swung by a record store to pick up New Adventures in Hi-Fi. I brought it back to the newspaper office and started listening while I wrote my review of Road Movie. (Yeah, they had to work real hard to get me to write about R.E.M. in those days. 2300 words into this essay, I’m sure you’re shocked.) The first two songs were OK, but the third, “New Test Leper,†was just what I was looking for. The keyboards and strings carried me along as I typed, and as the album unfolded I thought it was a more comfortable, more R.E.M.-like version of the sound from Monster. I remember being in my room as the fall breeze moved through and “Leave†blared from my speakers. Once again, a turning point was coming, but along with the anxiety I could feel the urgency and the energy for a new beginning.
There are a ton of great songs on New Adventures. “Be Mine†sounds like it should be a romantic ballad, and I can remember at least once listening to it while Pattie and I were hanging out and thinking how lucky I was to be in this relationship. But Stipe also managed to write it in a way that carries an edge, more subtle than the one in “The One I Love†but there nonetheless. Mills’ backup vocals are one of the things that carry a strong sense of longing in “Bittersweet Me,†a song that I love but is out of favor with many other fans. And at the album’s end is “Electrolite,†a farewell to the 20th century that closes with the line “I’m out of here.â€
The band didn’t tour – and who could blame them after everything that had gone wrong on the last tour – and the album didn’t sell. I had already noticed other bands receding from their early-90s heights, and now it looked like it was happening to R.E.M. What we didn’t know in 1996 was that for one member of the band, “Electroliteâ€â€™s final words were true.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.