Also by Peter Ames Carlin

  Sonic Boom: The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. Records, from Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac to Madonna to Prince

  Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon

  Bruce

  Paul McCartney: A Life

  Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson

  Copyright © 2024 by Peter Ames Carlin

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  Cover design by Oliver Munday

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Carlin, Peter Ames, author.

  Title: The name of this band is R.E.M. : a biography / Peter Ames Carlin.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2023058685 (print) | LCCN 2023058686 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385546942 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385546973 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: R.E.M. (Musical group) | Rock musicians—United States—Biography. | LCGFT: Biographies.

  Classification: LCC ML421.R22 C37 2024 (print) | LCC ML421.R22 (ebook) | DDC 782.42166092/2 [B]—dc23/eng/20231220

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2023058685

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2023058686

  Ebook ISBN 9780385546973

  ep_prh_7.0a_148678951_c0_r0

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction: The Things They Wouldn’t Do

  Part I

  The Music of Dissent

  1. Super Fucking Famous

  2. Birdland

  3. Bad Habits

  4. An Oasis for Artists and Misfits

  5. Dance This Mess Around

  6. Let’s Make a Band

  7. Don’t Rock ’n’ Roll, No!

  8. A Party in the Church

  Part II

  “We’re Still Laughing. It’s a Real Shock.”

  9. Picture James Brown Fronting the Dave Clark Five

  10. We Weren’t Really Close in a Lot of Ways

  11. Hey, He Really Knows His Shit!

  12. A Certain Amount of Chaos

  13. Sit and Try for the Big Kill

  14. Lots of Impressive First-Time Songs

  15. Wolves Out the Door

  16. Chronic Town, Poster Torn

  17. Murmuring

  18. R.E.M. Submits

  19. A Collective Fist

  Part III

  This One Goes Out

  20. Here We Are

  21. My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord

  22. Shadowfax

  23. So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star

  24. Gravity Pulling Me Around

  25. A Magic Kingdom, Open-Armed

  26. What If We Give It Away?

  27. Life’s Rich Demand

  28. Things We Never Thought Would Happen Have Happened

  29. Conquest

  Part IV

  The Monster

  30. Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi

  31. Are You Ready to Rock ’n’ Roll?

  32. The Fever

  33. A Breath, This Song

  34. Near Wild Heaven

  35. Shiny Happy

  36. The Most Improbably Successful Group in Music Today

  37. These Are Days

  38. Does Everyone Still Want to Do This?

  39. Enter the Monster

  40. Did Someone Put a Curse on Us?

  Part V

  The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. and This Is What We Do

  41. How the West Was Won…

  42. …And Where It Got Us

  43. I’m Outta Here

  44. Airportmen

  45. The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.

  46. The Murmurers

  47. This Is Going to Be Loud

  48. It Was What It Was

  49. Let’s All Get On with It

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  _148678951_

  For Claire, extremely much.

  Introduction

  The Things They Wouldn’t Do

  Even from the start you would know them by the things they wouldn’t do.

  The refusals began before they got together, when Peter Buck, a rock ’n’ roll obsessive who loved playing guitar, resolved never to join a band. Guys in bands were assholes, he said, and he wanted no part of it. When they were teenagers, drummer Bill Berry nearly walked out of a jam session because he had taken an instant dislike to his schoolmate Mike Mills, who he just discovered was about to play bass with him. Young Mike and Bill wound up becoming best friends anyway, which helped Bill talk singer Michael Stipe out of his initial refusal to make music with Mike, who was falling-down drunk when they first met. When the quartet came together in the college town of Athens, Georgia, in the winter of 1980, they at first refused to perform at the birthday party where they made their famous debut. Soon they would be known by their name, R.E.M., and by the other things they wouldn’t do.

  They also established themselves as a uniquely artful band, impressive enough to win bookings in Athens clubs that spring. Those led to gigs in other college towns, in Atlanta, and then all over the Southeast. It took only two years for the band to get signed by the prominent independent label I.R.S. Records, becoming recording artists with a new litany of options and opportunities they could rebuff.

  It was a key part of R.E.M.’s identity and their philosophy of music, art, and life. The things people wanted them to do or expected them to do or insisted they do, that they would have no part of. None. Not happening. Nope. Not that they weren’t capable of changing their minds, because they were. But on their own time, in their own way, when they were ready. Which is why they allowed themselves to be talked into opening for the Police at New York’s Shea Stadium in August 1983. It wasn’t something they felt comfortable doing, and they didn’t enjoy it one bit, they said. But it did lead to their getting a shot on a national television show that fall.

  Peter Buck and Mike Mills appeared on the local New York talk show Live at Five the day before the Shea concert and bumped into staffers from NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman, a talk show that taped in the studio across the hall. The staffers turned out to be R.E.M. fans and asked if the band might be interested in coming on their program. “We said yes, as long as we didn’t have to lip-synch and all that,” Peter told a writer from Athens Night Life a few months later. “So we gave them the names of the people to call.”[1] The official request came through their record company a few weeks later.

  The musicians were thrilled. In the fall of 1983 their band had been together for just three years. Their first full-length album, Murmur, had been out for only a few months. They were spending the vast majority of their time on the road in a used Dodge Tradesman van, hauling from one rock ’n’ roll club to another. Late Night was not just the hippest talk show on network television; it was also a conduit to millions of young, music-loving viewers. For R.E.M., a post-punk quartet from a tiny college town in northeast Georgia, it was an enormous opportunity. It was also a surprising time for their lead singer to decide that he didn’t want to answer any questions from Late Night’s popular host, David Letterman.

  As they became full-fledged recording artists, the band focused on the new array of expectations they couldn’t tolerate. They wouldn’t write songs with traditional structures, or craft lyrics that could be parsed for literal meaning. Assuming you could pick out what was being said, which you probably couldn’t, because R.E.M. wouldn’t mix the vocals above the instruments, and also wouldn’t include a lyric sheet with their records. They wouldn’t work with a producer who wanted to make their songs more radio-friendly. When the time came to promote their records on the road, the band refused to tour as an opener for most of the successful bands that offered them a shot at their larger audiences. They made occasional exceptions, as when they spent a week playing short sets in arenas and stadiums on the Police’s 1983 tour. But they’d disliked the experience so intensely that they vowed never to do it again. Other acts
asked; the executives at I.R.S., who understood the promotional possibilities, keened for a yes. R.E.M. held firm: no, no, and no.

  When they started making promotional videos for their records, Michael Stipe wouldn’t lip-synch his vocals for the camera, though that was the standard practice in virtually all popular videos. When the former art student turned singer started overseeing the production of their music videos, he refused to make clips that resembled anything else being aired on MTV, opting instead to make avant-garde art films, often abstract to the point of formlessness, all but guaranteeing they would never be broadcast. A refusal of another sort, but a refusal just the same.

  * * *

  —

  David Letterman was a music fan who enjoyed chatting on the air with the artists he brought onto his show. Ordinarily a band’s singer serves as the front man in interviews as well as onstage, so the Late Night staff assumed the host would address his questions to R.E.M.’s singer. But then Michael resolved that he didn’t want to speak on the show. The singer was feeling shy; he didn’t have anything to say that wasn’t in his lyrics. The Late Night producers found this surprising, but told that the band’s guitarist would be happy to step in, they said Okay, fine. When their song was over, Peter could join Letterman at the desk where he sat for the bulk of the show. But wait, because Peter didn’t want to sit down all on his own. Couldn’t bassist Mike Mills come with him? Well, no, because Letterman hated trying to interview two people at once. It made him nervous, not knowing where to look. The show’s staffers worked out a compromise: when the time came to chat, Letterman would walk over to where the band was set up and ask his questions there. Peter said that would be acceptable.

  * * *

  —

  They had their reasons for being so stubborn. Rock music, like the rest of the culture, was in an ebb tide in the early 1980s. Synthetic sounds, corrupt ideals, a catalog of gestures and poses designed to signal rebellion while actually enforcing the rigid conformity brought to bear by the various industrial, political, and social authorities. R.E.M. wanted nothing to do with any of it. They were too smart, too confident, too in love with what they did to want to change it in order to get ahead. That’s what their litany of refusals signaled, anyway, and for the people who got it, who knew why saying no to the prevailing culture was so important, it mattered.

  * * *

  —

  The day of the Letterman show, the members of R.E.M. were incredibly nervous. Once they did their run-through for the cameras, they went back to the dressing room and felt the pressure of the moment slap them in the face. They were going to be on national television! For a band from a small town with only one album and one EP on an indie label and a sum total of zero hit songs to their credit, it was a big leap. An audience in the millions. They had some friends in their dressing room, and a couple of cases of beer, so they cracked those open and started drinking, figuring that would calm them down. At one point the door swung open and David Letterman peered in, wanting to say hi and figure out what they could talk about when he came over to chat on the show. He was friendly and welcoming, which settled them down a little. But when Bill got up to find the men’s room and saw the super-glamorous Italian actress Sophia Loren sitting by herself in a dressing room smoking a cigarette, he felt his heart leap into his mouth. When she looked back at him, he recalled a few months later, “I just lost it. I almost threw up on the spot.”[2]

  * * *

  —

  During the taping a couple of hours later, Letterman looked into the camera and started talking about the band from the tiny town of Athens, Georgia. He hoisted a copy of their new album, Murmur. The Los Angeles Times had just named it one of the five best records of the year, he told his audience. “We’re happy to have them making their national television debut with us tonight,” he continued. “Please welcome R.E.M.” The crowd whooped excitedly, and the band launched into “Radio Free Europe,” the closest thing they had to a hit song. Like the musicians, the song was lean, fast, and ardent. Four whacks on the drum and then the instrumentalists came in at full throttle, Peter bouncing like a jack-in-the-box as he strummed and picked at his black-and-white Rickenbacker and Mike flailing at his bass. Both musicians in constant motion while Michael stood nearly still, hands on the microphone, face shielded by a curtain of chestnut curls, as if the prospect of having his voice and image beamed into millions of television sets across the United States made him want to disappear.

  * * *

  —

  You didn’t have to be on television to want to vanish from sight in 1983. For a lot of young people in the United States, the early 1980s was as dispiriting as it got, not just for the toothless rock ’n’ roll and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous–style fetishization of wealth that spread across the culture, but also for what it all signified. President Ronald Reagan led a government that was actively shredding the social safety net, that scapegoated the disadvantaged and the different, that ignored the spread of AIDS, except to the extent it could justify treating gay people as a scourge. If you were poor or gay or even just different—arty, offbeat, angry, beset by visions of what should be, even given the allure of what was—you felt awfully alone. The music on the radio didn’t speak to you. You had to look for special outposts where people like you could speak freely in your native tongue. If you were lucky, you’d live somewhere close to a college or a community that supported a fringe radio station. Some cities had specialty record stores, or there might be bookstores, a coffeehouse, a bar with a cool jukebox and a clientele who didn’t want to watch sports or thump you for looking a particular way.

  For television viewers, Late Night with David Letterman offered one kind of respite. A nightly dose of elevator races, monkey cams, and freak show characters like the dwarfish, four-eyed oldster Larry “Bud” Melman, whose inability to function on camera provided ironic commentary on the slick celebrity suck jobs taking place on literally every other talk show. And maybe Late Night was just a different kind of media bullshit, but Letterman, a gap-toothed midwestern comedian in his mid-thirties, couldn’t resist making acidic asides or just glancing to the camera with a little smile to make sure you knew he knew how ridiculous it all was. It’s all bullshit, was the subtext. But at least we know it, so let’s have some fun while the network is still letting us play with their toys.

  * * *

  —

  When the first song ended, Letterman stepped over and shook Michael’s hand, then cut to a commercial. When the break ended, Michael had vanished and Letterman addressed his questions to Peter. To start, the guitarist denied that R.E.M., a well-known acronym for rapid eye movement, was in this case an acronym for rapid eye movement. “It can mean anything you want it to mean,” he said. Next, Letterman asked about the Athens music scene; it was full of new bands, wasn’t it? Peter nodded and rattled off a short list of their friends’ bands, Pylon, Love Tractor, the Method Actors, and explained why so much music was coming out of that one small town: “There’s a lack of anything else to do.” Letterman turned to Mike to converse about how Murmur retailed for two dollars less than most albums. “Why don’t they make ’em all cheaper?” the host wondered, and the bassist rubbed his thumb against his index and middle fingers, the international sign for cash on the barrelhead. “Money talks, folks,” Letterman said dryly.

  They got to play a second song. This would have been extraordinary enough for an unknown band on a national talk show, but what made it even more so was that the song they chose to perform wasn’t from their new album, or even from the EP they’d released the previous year. It was a new song—so new, in fact, that when Letterman asked about the title Mike said, “It doesn’t have one; it’s too new,” and Letterman chuckled. “Too new to be named. All right.” The host stepped away and they went right into it, thudding drums leading into a midtempo ballad. Michael stepped back to the microphone, hair draped over his face, avoiding the camera’s unblinking eye as he started to sing. Did you never call? I waited for your call. As in the previous song, his lyrics were all images and allusions, phrases that implied more than they actually said. Something about storms and disconnection, floods and fallen wires. The music sparkled and jangled, the bass pushing through the guitar, asserting a countermelody that fell away just as the next verse began, the instrumentalists in perfect synchrony while the singer continued the fretful tale they would eventually name “So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry).” These rivers of suggestion are driving me away, he sang through his hair.