* * *

  —

  Other fans found ways to help, and became friends, too. When the photographer Terry Allen saw Peter or Mike lugging an amp up a deserted street at 2 a.m., he’d pull over, toss the thing into the back seat, and drive the tired musician home. Sandra-Lee Phipps and Carol Levy took band photographs, and Patton Biddle and Woody Nuss, who engineered sound at Tyrone’s and the other clubs in town, could be called upon to procure and run PA systems when needed for parties and other venues that didn’t have their own equipment. Kathleen O’Brien, who was now Bill’s girlfriend, helped work the phones to land shows, which was particularly handy, since the drummer had the most interest, and experience, in the business end of the music industry. He’d paid attention and asked questions during his months as Paragon Booking Agency’s office boy back in Macon and made friends among the agents and other staffers.

  Don Braxley, who worked as an agent, remembered Bill as a nice high school kid who liked to have his buddy Mike come and hang out during slow afternoons in the office. Bill had called Braxley to get the Wuoggerz an opening slot with the Police when they played Athens in 1979, and he called on him again when R.E.M. started picking up steam during the summer of 1980. This time, Bill told him, he wanted to come down to Macon and meet with him in person. Bill brought Mike with him, and they had big news. They had formed a real band in Athens, with original songs, and things were really starting to happen for them. “He said they were going to be big, and he wanted me to help.”[3]

  Braxley was happy to listen and help however he could. As he told Bill, he wasn’t in a position to sign R.E.M. as a client; they’d have to go speak with Ian Copeland, the former Paragon booker who had moved to New York to work more closely with his brother Miles, the founder and president of the independent record label I.R.S. But Braxley did spend a couple of hours with the boys, digging into his address book to give them the names and telephone numbers of dozens of clubs, universities, and other venues in the Southeast, along with the names of the promoters, bookers, and managers who booked the talent. He offered a few tips on which venues would let them play original music, rather than Top 40 or hard rock covers, and how starting with small places in out-of-the-way towns could lead to bigger and better venues and towns, especially if they played well and made a point of connecting with the people who came to see them. Playing music was fun, but they needed to approach it like work. A job, which required dedication and focus. Was this something they were all prepared to do?

  Bill certainly was. Mike, too. Peter…it was all anyone could do to pry the guitar out of his hands, so obviously. Michael was nearly as engaged in his art classes, he actually enjoyed going to school most days. But put a microphone in front of him, a band behind, and an audience at his feet and he came alive in a completely different way. His professors saw it too: Judy McWillie, whose color theory class included Pylon’s Vanessa Briscoe and Love Tractor’s Mark Cline and Armistead Wellford, among other Athens art-band members, realized it the first time she and her colleague Bill Marriott took up Michael’s invitation to see his new band perform.

  It was the May 15 set opening for the Brains, just six weeks since R.E.M.’s first show in the church. McWillie, whose research included a detailed study of the art and culture of evangelical faiths in the Deep South, was struck immediately by the passion of Michael’s performance onstage. “He’d be singing and holding the microphone, standing there. But then at a certain point, if it was a fast song, he’d like snap and go into this dance,” she says. “The only thing I’d seen before like that happens at tent revivals, when someone falls out into a trance. So when he did that, and he did moves like I’d never seen before, it was kind of this sideways shake thing. My God, you talk about incredible. My colleague and I looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, my God, these people are real good. They’re going to go somewhere.’ ”[4]

  * * *

  —

  They didn’t have to use their new list of contacts to get the band’s first out-of-state bookings that summer. The three North Carolina dates, back-to-back weekend shows at the Station nightclub, in Carrboro, and a Monday evening appearance at the Pier in nearby Raleigh, were originally set to feature Pylon, but the band backed out in order to prepare for the recording sessions for the Gyrate album. The Method Actors had gotten the first call to fill in, but they couldn’t make the trip and referred the promoter to another new, largely unheard-of Athens band. When the phone rang at the apartment Bill shared with O’Brien, the drummer checked his calendar and saw that the proffered dates fit perfectly between the two Gang of Four openers in Atlanta and a headlining set at Tyrone’s on July 22. They took the shows happily, packed their gear into the beat-up van they had just bought, and set out on the five-hour drive up I-85.

  When they arrived they met the promoter, a twenty-seven-year-old record store manager who had recently started making some extra money by putting on shows in local clubs. His name was Jefferson Holt, the son of two attorneys. His mom, Bertha, was an influential Democratic state legislator with bracingly progressive social politics. Jefferson was tall and rail thin, with steel-rimmed glasses and the same combination of intelligence, rock ’n’ roll passion, and good-time spirit the R.E.M. guys brought with them from Athens. They all hit it off immediately, and when the band stepped onstage at the Station and launched into their set, he was thrilled by what he heard. “The show was incredible,” he said a few years later. “The greatest thing I’d ever seen in my life. They had so much fun, and they didn’t seem to care about anything…It was what I would have imagined seeing from the Who before they signed a record contract…A certain amount of chaos.”[5]

  * * *

  —

  The fun continued after the Friday night show, when Holt joined the band for their post-show celebration at their hotel, and took them into Saturday, which they spent listening to records and goofing around with their new friend until that night’s show. They had Sunday off and partied their way to the Monday evening appearance in Raleigh, which ended with Stipe inviting the entire crowd, about two dozen people in a town where the band was unknown, onto the stage to sing while the band (minus Bill, tethered to his drums) cheered them on from the dance floor.

  The band headed back to Athens for the next evening’s set at Tyrone’s, but the buzz from the weekend, what he’d heard the band play onstage and the fun they’d had hanging around between shows, stayed with Holt. He was smart and ambitious; working at a record store by day and promoting the occasional club show wasn’t nearly enough to occupy him, particularly in the sleepy corner of North Carolina where he lived. He kept in touch with his new friends and brought them back to the Station for another pair of dates in September. That made them even closer, and eventually Holt and Bill hatched a plan. Holt would quit his job, pack his things, and move to Athens, where he could spend his days working in a record store and his evenings serving as R.E.M.’s roadie or road manager, whatever they wanted to call him.

  Holt rolled into town in October and turned his hand to doing whatever the band needed done. He drove the van, he carried equipment, he collected money from the club owners and doled it out to the guys at the end of the evening. When it turned out the band wasn’t making enough money at their shows to pay him a proper salary, they came up with another arrangement. Holt would be their manager, taking responsibility for everything they had to do that wasn’t musical. For this they’d pay him an equal share of everything they earned, meaning that from here on out R.E.M. would be a quintet: Mike Mills, Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, and one equal, nonperforming member, Jefferson Holt.

  13

  Sit and Try for the Big Kill

  Peter and Michael had scratched out a few original songs when they were first playing together, and Bill and Mike came in with a few tunes from their own experiments, all unperformed except for Bill’s song “Narrator,” which was a regular part of R.E.M.’s early sets, though it was almost unbelievably silly: sung in the voice of a guy who dreams of doing the voice-overs for Jacques Cousteau’s TV specials about the magical world under the surface of the ocean. It all leads to a climactic punch line: the aspiring narrator can’t swim. A ridiculous subject for a song, but, performed in double time, with Bill’s drums going full tilt, Peter’s guitar drenched in surf twang, Mike’s bass rocketing to and fro, and Michael doing his best Elvis impression, it didn’t sound completely out of place caroming around Tyrone’s or the 40 Watt.

  Once they started playing more shows, the four band members started banging out originals at a faster pace, and by the end of the spring of 1980 they were premiering new songs almost every time they performed. Most were musically spare: basic chords snapped together into simple constructions that leaned hard on repetition and hurtling momentum. The lyrics also betray the adolescent perspective of their authors, who were still in their early twenties and not shy about expressing the casual misogyny prone to young and sexually inexperienced men. “Baby I” was a kiss-off to a faithless lover, albeit with regrets (Baby, I blew it when I never learned how to dance). “All the Right Friends” dismissed another paramour, this one a social climber who sucks up to all the wrong people. In “Scheherazade” the titular character is just another fast-talking, two-timing girl: She’ll tell you stories, you can bet / You know the girl, she’s telling lies. So many wicked women, so much deceit. Other songs cast a gimlet eye toward society and politics. “Dangerous Times” bemoaned shallow times that offered nothing to care or die for. “Chappaquiddick” made caustic sport of Senator Ted Kennedy’s alcohol-drenched car accident in the summer of 1969 that resulted in the death of former Robert F. Kennedy campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, while “Body Count” tore into heedless young Americans who assumed their comfortable lives would never be interrupted by war. And they won’t let you wear your khakis / And your Izods anymore, Stipe sang before chanting the name of the war his father had fought just ten years earlier: Body count…Vietnam.

  “Mystery to Me,” “A Girl Like You,” “A Different Girl,” and “Mediocrity” presented variations on the same theme, all performed to a driving, danceable beat, with a throbbing bass and abrupt guitar riffs. Nothing memorable, let alone distinctive. But they were learning and doing it quickly. As the bookings for summer stacked up in June, the growing confidence radiated into the band’s songwriting. Where the earlier songs were flinty and one-dimensional, there appeared new songs that explored real and often complex feelings. The first came almost entirely from Mike, responding to the prospect of spending the summer apart from Ingrid Schorr, a friend of Michael’s who had recently become Mike’s girlfriend. Unfortunately, they’d discovered each other just before her departure for her family’s home in suburban Maryland. Feeling bereft at the prospect of a summer without her, Mike sat down with his guitar and poured his heart into a straightforward lament sung to a catchy folk-country melody: “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville.”

  * * *

  —

  The foursome’s group compositions took on even greater sophistication. Not long after Mike unveiled “Rockville,” they worked together to come up with “Gardening at Night,” which felt like an even bigger breakthrough: An archetype for a song on which all four members’ unique strengths wove together into an entirely original kind of tune. Starting with a taut two-note guitar riff from Peter, the song blossomed almost instantly. They added Mike’s bass and Bill’s drums to a set of ringing open chords, which descended chromatically toward a quick drum break that kicked off a verse built around a slightly different descending pattern. Here Michael stepped up, singing urgently about money tossed on the floor, feelings that weren’t quite real, and a yard so desolate there’s only a fence and a glaring, blinding sun.

  It must be time for penitence / gardening at night is never where.

  The words came rattling out, an indistinct blur. Images, characters, and thoughts linked only by the urgency of Michael’s delivery. Neighbors intrude, early sleepers who call a prayer line for guidance, for which they pay dearly. An older sister wags a censorious finger, but she’s hiding her own sins, and there’s nothing about this scene that isn’t topsy-turvy, upside-down, day-for-night, leading to that same thought about penitence and the futility of growing crops beneath the moonlight: Gardening at night, it’s never where.

  Gardening at night is never…where, exactly? Michael doesn’t complete the thought, but it doesn’t matter, because everything else speaks so clearly: Peter arpeggiates the chords so they chime like bells; Mike’s super-fluid bass fills in the open space beneath the guitar; and Bill keeps his drumming fast and economical, pushing the rhythm without intruding on the feeling in Michael’s voice, which communicates so much more than the words of his tale could convey on their own.

  “Sitting Still” starts with a different but equally tuneful descending chord pattern, then settles into an easier groove, Peter’s guitar alternating between strums and arpeggios while Mike’s bass thrums against the drums and Michael pieces syllables and phrases into a mosaic of words:

  Up to par and Katie bars

  The kitchen signs but not me in

  Words on top of words. Again the narrative is murky, nearly abstract, but the feeling of the song comes through loud and clear, in the warmth in Michael’s voice, in the tuneful jangle of Peter’s guitar, which dandles notes above the foundational thrum and snap of the rhythm section, then most movingly in the chorus, a bloom of guitars and backing voices over which a single phrase circles. I-I-I can hear, I-I-I can hear, I-I-I…can hear. And as the four members of R.E.M. were fast discovering, it was in that space, in the blur between obscurity and tenderness, that the heart of the band resided.

  * * *

  —

  By early 1981 R.E.M.’s performances consisted almost entirely of original songs, including a growing array of the newer, more imaginative compositions. “Shaking Through,” “Ages of You,” “Windout,” and “Get on Their Way” all premiered in or around January 1981, as did another new high-water mark, “Radio Free Europe.” Skittering and upbeat, the song was a showcase for Michael’s growing skill not just as a lyricist but also a writer of melodies that were as memorable as they were unexpected. The vocal line in “Radio Free Europe,” strung across chords provided by Peter, Bill, and Mike, follows the texture of the song, skipping quickly around the simple changes in the verse. Then, as the guitar shifts to an unresolved suspended chord, it stays on one note for several beats, like a dancer hanging in midair. It’s the transformative moment in the song, the point where a simple three-chord rock tune becomes something else entirely, and Michael’s ability to isolate and amplify the emotion in the music stopped his bandmates in their tracks.

  “I’ll never forget the time…I heard the melody Michael put over it,” Mike said to reporters from a British fanzine a few years later, capturing his surprise in confused yelps: “Where? How? Why? When?” Michael’s lyrics, which tangled a media critique into stray thoughts about immigration and, it seems, nationalism, flowed as easily and enigmatically as his other newer compositions, and the song was an instant crowd favorite when they introduced it at Tyrone’s at the end of January.

  Eager to move beyond the narrow circuit they’d been traversing between Athens, Atlanta, and the college towns of North Carolina, the band decided to take their best songs into a recording studio and make a promotional tape to use as a calling card for bookings. They made their first try in early February, reserving six hours of time in a small studio near Atlanta. For a bargain rate of $15 an hour, the basement space even included the services of producer/studio owner Joe Perry (not the Aerosmith guitarist). They banged out eight of their best songs (“Radio Free Europe,” “Sitting Still,” “Gardening at Night,” “Mystery to Me,” “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville,” “Shaking Through,” “Narrator,” and a neo-surf-rock instrumental they titled “White Tornado”) but the recording they emerged with sounded so flat, and the mix so dead, that they decided to trash it.

  In search of a good but inexpensive studio to work in, Holt spoke to Peter Holsapple, a friend from North Carolina who was one of the founders of the indie power-pop band the dB’s. Holsapple connected him with Mitch Easter, a Winston-Salem musician who had just built a recording studio in his parents’ garage. Easter, who still played guitar in his own bands, wasn’t certain how much energy he wanted to dedicate to recording other bands, but when R.E.M. came to play at the Pier nightclub in early April and dropped by Easter’s house to spend an evening getting acquainted, he began to sense where his future lay. “I realized this is what I like doing…meeting rock people I like and playing records.”[1]

  The band returned about ten days later and set up in the Easter family’s garage (which Easter dubbed Drive-In Studio) to take another stab at recording. This time they limited themselves to three songs: “Radio Free Europe,” “Sitting Still,” and “White Tornado.” Easter was impressed with the year-old band from Athens, and not just by the quality of their songs and the professionalism they brought to the sessions but also with how distinctive their personalities were, and how easily they melded into a unit. “Peter was totally a central-casting record store guy,” Easter says. “He knew everything that existed and could tell you what was on the B-side, in a really digs-it kind of way. Michael wanted to talk about these little pieces of copper he was melting glaze on—he really was an art student and was very creative.”