R.E.M., 1980-2011
Hard as it is to remember just what it felt like, kids in the early 1980s had few options. Because only about 1 in 4 of your friends had cable and most of the actual entertainment options on the cable stations still amounted to old movies and canceled sit-coms, you watched the same shows every night, and music was roughly the same. If you listened to rock, all of your friends were listening to the same radio station, and if you wanted to hear an entire album, you either had to buy it (I know this sounds like a “I walked 10 miles to school in the snow every day” story, but bear with me) or you had to wait until Sunday night when the local rock station played entire albums with commercial and announcement breaks between vinyl sides.
MTV in 1981 did a lot to open things up, especially for Midwestern high school students, but in Tulsa the guy who did more to open our ears to music than anyone or anything else was a guy named Mel Myers who was programming KMOD at the time, and Myers was important because he was damned sneaky. KMOD was a mainstream rock station playing metric tons of ’60s and ’70s music and a whole lot of the hard rock of that time — Rush, Triumph and all the “faceless bands” of the time like REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, Styx and Journey. But in between all that, Myers was sneaking in the Plimsouls, the Payolas, occasional pre-”Remain in Light” Talking Heads like “Take Me To the River,” and even Missing Persons’ “Words.”
But the real game changer was when KMOD played R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe,” because listening to this single was like having a piece of space technology fall out of the sky in the desert and not knowing what to do with it. It did not sound like any rock music I had heard, mainly because my frames of reference were still sized for Polaroids at the time. You couldn’t sing along to it much except for the chorus, and even then you didn’t know what it meant.
“Decide yourself if radio’s gonna stay. Reason: it could polish up the gray.”
There’s not much consensus on whether the first word is “decide,” “besides” or “resign,” but what Michael Stipe was mumbling about was the very thing that “Radio Free Europe” was doing at that moment. It was polishing up the gray.
For those of us who were not privy to Television (the band) or Pylon or the Feelies or the SST bands coming out of California, R.E.M. was redefining what it meant to be a rock star. They looked like the kids in your classroom and there was nothing about them that suggested rock star heroics. Peter Buck wasn’t really playing anything that sounded like a conventional guitar solo back then, and playing a Rickenbacker was something that hadn’t really been in mainstream vogue since the Byrds. This was seismic, because most of us were educated on the 1970s model of rock music which dictated that the people on stage were nothing like you, and a guitar was to be brandished like the hammer of Thor.
They were the smart kids in class — nerds in the most affectionate sense. Their words were as impenetrable as the kudzu on the cover of “Murmur,” and when you could make out a few syllables, they seemed to be about a South that you didn’t really hear about much outside of Flannery O’Connor, especially on the extraordinary “Fables of the Reconstruction/Reconstruction of the Fables.” That was the first album I bought that took me about a dozen listens to finally crack the sonic code, to truly appreciate what was being done. I mean, I labored over it, because Peter Buck’s opening guitar notes on “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” didn’t sound right to my ears for multiple listens. But their palette was opening up around this time, and Stipe was starting to sound out recognizable sentences and complete, non-oblique thoughts.
The cult of R.E.M. grew throughout the 1980s, but it blew wide open on the last album they did for I.R.S., 1987′s “Document,” when they achieved an honest-to-God hit with “The One I Love,” a perfectly constructed radio song that, at the time, we couldn’t believe was actually being accepted without reservations in the pop culture at-large. I lived in Japan at the time, and friends would send me tapes of MTV that included “The One I Love” in rotation next to Whitesnake and Debbie Gibson. When R.E.M. signed to Warner Bros. for 1988′s “Green,” the basic rules of modern rock vs. the mainstream seemed as if they were being entirely upended.
R.E.M. was the canary in the coalmine for the 1990s alt-rock revolution, proving you could sell out basketball arenas in the late-1980s without wearing a stitch of spandex. In Spring 1991, R.E.M. experienced its biggest hit with “Losing My Religion” from “Out of Time,” which was sort of the last shot of the original 1980s modern rock guard before Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Pearl Jam’s “Ten” reset the scales. Both bands considered R.E.M. their sort of spiritual guide, showing the way for indie bands with platinum potential, and for the balance of the grunge period, R.E.M. was a megastar band alongside those groups, due in large part to the success of the band’s critical high-water mark, 1992′s “Automatic for the People.” The AV Club referred to “Automatic” as R.E.M.’s “Pet Sounds,” and that’s entirely appropriate. It was an album with a tonal through-line like none they had ever established on any previous album, and the songs were of a quality, from the writing to the performance to the arrangements by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, that constitutes a stone-cold classic.
Most R.E.M. fans acknowledge that the band’s output fell off after the departure of drummer Bill Berry, after which Stipe, Buck and Mike Mills carried on with drummers such as Joey Waronker and Bill Rieflin. I would argue that “Automatic” was the last indispensable R.E.M. album. “Monster” and “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” had high points but neither was as perfectly wrought as “Automatic for the People.” Berry was an important component of the band’s sound, but from 1998′s “Up” onward, the group rarely sounded like it had something important to play, sing or write.
But R.E.M., who announced their breakup on Sept. 21, put out eight classic albums between 1981 and 1992. The Rolling Stones haven’t put out an indispensable album in 30 years, but that doesn’t change how I feel about their accomplishments in their first two decades.
I don’t mourn R.E.M.’s loss. They did more than enough. For me, for you, and for them.
– Lang
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The breakup of R.E.M., of course, can mean only one thing: The band’s original four members will gather in 2013 at Sanford Stadium in Athens, Ga. — the band’s hometown and springboard to stardom — to kickoff an international, multi-media, super-colossal, mega-tour.
http://7spiderrico.blogspot.com/2011/09/rem-quits-super-colossal-reunion-tour.html