* * *

  —

  On May 9, 1981, R.E.M. drove to Princeton, New Jersey, to play Princeton University’s annual Beaux Arts Ball, a seemingly traditional college social that took a turn for the bizarre thanks to the year’s theme, Lust in Space. As Peter recalled, the affair was a large-scale preppie bacchanal, thronged by drunken Ivy Leaguers dressed as intergalactic sex creatures, complete with extraterrestrial dildos hand-fashioned from aluminum foil. The booking had come through an art student named David Healey, who had first seen the band while visiting his girlfriend in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Like Jefferson Holt and Bertis Downs, Healey was inspired not just to meet and befriend the band but also to do whatever he could to help them. He got them the Beaux Arts gig, then made sure they had someplace to stay when they were in town.

  It was a big weekend for Healey, an art major whose thesis project was about to open as an exhibit at a university gallery. His musician friends not only were happy to see the show, they also agreed to provide music at the party. When they came to New York a little later, Healey had his parents put the band up in the family’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Talking to Holt about the band’s recording prospects, Healey had an idea: he could get some money together and help them start their own record company. They already had a single out, so they could take the next step: record four or six of their best new songs and release an EP. Healey would co-own the company with the band, and because he was done with school and could go anywhere, he’d move down to Athens to be close enough to really be a part of it. They all liked the sound of that, so Healey borrowed $2,000 from his dad, convinced some friends to pony up a few grand more, then packed up his stuff and drove to Georgia. The new company, they all agreed, would be called Dasht Hopes.

  * * *

  —

  Given the momentum created by the “Radio Free Europe” single and a handful of newer, arguably even stronger songs, Holt and Healey decided the time had come for R.E.M. to go back into the recording studio. The band drove to Winston-Salem at the start of October and spent a weekend working with Easter in his Drive-In Studio, emerging with finished or close-to-finished recordings of “Gardening at Night,” “Ages of You,” and a new take on the instrumental “White Tornado,” along with the newer songs “1,000,000,” “Stumble,” “Shaking Through,” and, most intriguingly, “Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars),” a dark fantasia describing a circus traveling by train, the animals, carnies, and performing freaks bound by a secret stigma, the train wheels spinning into reaping wheels. Don’t get caught, Michael warns, again. The sessions, Peter told the magazine Trouser Press in 1983, were heavily experimental, with extensive use of overdubs and looped, often backward sounds.[1] “We were looking for a claustrophobic effect, like you’re struggling into a world where you don’t know what’s going on and you have to figure it out by using clues,” he said to the same magazine a year later. “It was a learning experience.”[2]

  The band took a brief break in the middle of the month, then headed back to New York to play a few dates, including a lackluster set delivered to a scattering of under-enthusiastic observers at Zappa’s, a grungy rock club in the Marine Park section of outer Brooklyn. But a free show at Tribeca’s Mudd Club a few nights later went much better. Kurt Munkacsi saw the band and was struck immediately by what he heard. “I thought they were fantastic,” he says. “They were very well formed, completely together, and they had a distinct sound.”

  Munkacsi, who worked regularly with the modern classical composer Philip Glass, had also produced sessions for the Waitresses (including their breakthrough single “I Know What Boys Like”) and the North Carolina–bred alt-pop band the dB’s. He ventured out to see the band from Athens at the behest of his friend Jim Fouratt, a club booker who was also hoping to launch a music production company. Munkacsi, who had particularly close contacts at RCA Records, was friendly with Fouratt and quite happy to get involved with his recording schemes, particularly with a band as intriguing as the foursome from Georgia. “They really knew what they were doing. From a craft point of view, their songs were really well constructed. With other bands you didn’t know where the songs started and stopped, but these guys were a tight unit, with a real defined sound.”[3] Munkacsi recommended the band to his colleagues at RCA, and they agreed to fund a studio audition. Fouratt contacted Holt, who set aside a couple of days during the band’s next visit to New York at the end of January.

  * * *

  —

  The band’s intentions for RCA were unclear. They were already working on the EP they planned to release themselves and had their long-term sights set most intently on Miles Copeland’s I.R.S. Records, whose catalog of punkish and new wave bands felt like much better company for R.E.M. No matter: they were excited to meet Munkacsi in person when he came to see their performance at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, on January 30. And when they went to RCA’s studios on East Twenty-Fourth Street the next morning, the musicians were eager to work in a real professional studio and to see how RCA’s executives would respond to their music. The four musicians and their manager arrived on time and cheerfully set up their gear in Studio C, the largest of the company’s rooms, according to Munkacsi’s instructions.

  Getting to work, the band was exceptionally prepared and easy to deal with, Munkacsi recalls. The goal of the session was to capture the band’s sound as it existed, rather than expand on it with an intricate weave of overdubs and orchestration. The four musicians were upbeat and engaged in the process and were quite respectful of the producer and the other staff engaged in the session. “Sometimes you get a hostility from bands, but they were very friendly,” Munkacsi says. “They knew what they wanted, and when it was right or wrong.”[4] They ran through seven songs, including the new tunes they’d been recording with Mitch Easter in North Carolina, all of which they’d been performing in clubs and were quite comfortable playing. They captured all the basic tracks on the first day, then spent the next day overdubbing Michael’s vocals and a few piano parts by Mike. One of Munkacsi’s most vivid memories of the sessions is his exchange with Michael about the best way to record his singing. “Michael wanted to make sure you couldn’t understand the lyrics,” he says. Munkacsi, who had produced Philip Glass operas with lyrics that were largely made up of numbers, was not fazed. “It was part of the sound, what they wanted.”[5]

  When it was over, Munkacsi took the band and their manager out to dinner at a comfortable Japanese restaurant and was tickled by how thrilled they were to be treated to a meal by the munificence of a large record company. He was also struck by the evident affection they had for one another. “When you hear about bands, you hear about arguments and people throwing things, having fights. But they were respectful of each other; everything was discussed, no infighting. And nobody threw a tantrum.”

  Munkacsi delivered the tapes to RCA’s executives, who gave the music a quick listen and came back a day or two later with an offer. But RCA was a big company, and not especially eager to make a long-term commitment to an untried band from a small college town nobody had ever heard of. So the company’s offer was about as limited as it could be: they’d put out a four-song EP, see how it did, and then, maybe, make a more substantive offer. It was something, just not nearly enough.

  * * *

  —

  In Atlanta, R.E.M. had piqued Mark Williams’s interest the first time they came to perform at the 688 Club. The college DJ at Georgia State University, moonlighting as the club’s disc jockey, bonded with Michael Stipe after soundcheck one afternoon when he spun an obscure British industrial noise record, one of the offbeat things he played to set the mood before they opened the doors for the evening. “He came up to me and said, ‘Wow, Throbbing Gristle!’ We had the same taste in music.”[6] He and the singer were pals after that, and Peter was even easier to talk to, flipping through the records in his booth, asking about his work at the college station and the bands coming through the club. They were all the same age, more or less, all listening to the same records, following the same bands.

  Williams also got to know Holt and Downs when they came to the club for shows and tracked the Athens band’s swift ascent from unknown opener to reliable headliner. When Jonny Hibbert brought a copy of “Radio Free Europe” to the Georgia State radio station offices, Williams made a point of playing it on the air. The phones usually started blinking when it came on—listeners wanting to know who that was, where they could find it. He was only twenty, a college kid with a backpack full of books and classwork that needed doing. But Williams wanted to do something for his friends in the band. And he could.

  Williams had come to the attention of the publicists at A&M Records and scored another job as a campus representative for the label. His favorite releases always came from I.R.S. Records, whose music A&M distributed, and he’d connected with the company’s vice president Jay Boberg, a busy but approachable twenty-three-year-old who had been an A&M college rep at UCLA just a couple of years earlier. When Williams got a copy of R.E.M.’s three-song demo tape in 1981, he forwarded it to Boberg. “Something’s happening here,” he wrote in his note. Boberg listened and was intrigued, but, as he recalls, nobody else at the company shared his enthusiasm. “They weren’t willing to hear what seemed so obvious to me, because it wasn’t punk,” he says. “I’d play it and people would go, ‘Whuuuuut?’ But there were melodies and hooks all over it, and it was so original, and I loved it.”[7]

  It was a new kind of post-punk, alternative music that straddled obscurity and directness, dissent and delicacy, unapologetic and unashamed pure pop. Boberg knew he was hearing something special, but he also had a lot going on, and it was hard to find a moment to push forward on a band nobody else at the office cared about. But Boberg was I.R.S.’s founding vice president, and because founder and president Miles Copeland couldn’t afford to pay him much, he had a stake in the company. And, along with that, authority to pursue nearly anyone who interested him.

  Early in 1982, Boberg got in touch with Jefferson Holt and asked him to send the band’s itinerary for the next month or two. Boberg’s girlfriend was in graduate school at Tulane University, and when he saw that the band had a date in New Orleans in mid-March, he scheduled a trip. Holt had also sent over a tape of the new songs they’d been working on with Mitch Easter, and it only deepened the young executive’s enthusiasm. When he walked into the Beat Exchange, a small, grungy club, on the evening of March 12, Boberg was nearly certain he was going to try to sign R.E.M.

  For the band it started as a dud of an evening. The club was cramped and smelled like a dumpster, which might have been why it was so deserted on a Friday night. Boberg remembers an audience of maybe half a dozen people, plus a hazy-eyed soundman who seemed to be nodding off during the set. No matter: once the band started playing, he was transfixed. “I was familiar with the songs already. But onstage they had this energy, this interplay. Michael was in his own world, but Mike and Pete had this chemistry. And Michael was so interesting to watch. Sometimes he’d sing with his back to the audience, which sounds like the wrong thing to do, but it created this sense of mystery and, in a weird way, a greater connection with the audience. Michael created intimacy through mystery, and this kind of coyish sort of thing.”[8]

  After the set Boberg went to the dressing room and introduced himself. Hi, I’m Jay from I.R.S. Michael, perched on a countertop, his body folded into itself like origami, cringed. They were afraid he’d be there; it was such a sucky night…Boberg waved him off. He knew the mix was shitty, but he’d loved what he’d heard anyway. Did they want to meet for lunch and talk more the next day? The musicians glanced at one another, brows cocked. Yes, of course they did. They met at an oyster loaf restaurant the next day and Boberg set to charming them, asking how they saw their future, what they wanted to do with their music, what kind of records they wanted to make. They’d already been hoping to sign with I.R.S., but Boberg gave them the sales talk anyway, about how the company really was about the music, and how they’d be able to make the records they wanted to make and do things exactly as they wanted to. “We basically agreed they’d sign.”[9]

  Boberg’s enthusiasm, and a deal built on a commitment for several albums, instantly blew RCA’s more tentative offer out of contention. It also spelled a quick end to their relationship with Jonny Hibbert and his Hib-Tone Records. And then there was David Healey and Dasht Hopes.

  * * *

  —

  From the first time he heard it, at a show in North Carolina that fall, “Wolves, Lower” spun David Healey’s head around. This was a few weeks after the October sessions in North Carolina and the new song struck him immediately: You guys gotta record that! Sure, they replied. Pony up the dough and we’ll do it. Healey, eager to add another solid track to the first EP they’d been planning to issue on their Dasht Hopes label, found the money, and in late January 1982, on their way to the New York visit that included the RCA audition, they stopped in Winston-Salem for another two days of work at Drive-In Studio. They finished an early, fast version of “Wolves” and “Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)” and took a first stab at “Catapult” before continuing north for the studio sessions and dates around New York City, plus others in Washington, D.C., and Boston. They were racking up the miles in their van, and after one show the thing ground to a halt. In search of the $200 it would take to get back on the road, they called Healey to hit him up for the dough. But Healey was tapped out, or that’s how Peter recalled it to the writer Rodger Lyle Brown. “We got back home and fired him.”[10]

  Dasht Hopes indeed. But Healey had problems beyond his unwillingness to part with the money they needed for the van. A talented artist with a charismatic personality, he was also prone to fits of darkness that he fended off, and perhaps made worse, with alcohol and other drugs. But while his musician friends entertained many of the same appetites, they had a level of discipline and an emotional foundation Healey lacked. “David had incredible magnetism, but also a big self-destruct button,” says his brother Bill, a psychiatrist.[11] The relationship was strained before the other record companies entered their lives, and once they appeared, Healey was not just superfluous but troublesome. The broken van symbolized a relationship that had already stopped working.

  * * *

  —

  Presumably, the band repaid Healey for his investment. But they were going to have to work a much more intricate deal to settle accounts with Jonny Hibbert, the former musician who had founded Hib-Tone Records to issue their first single. They hadn’t liked the mix of “Radio Free Europe” he had come up with (though they subsequently used it on a compilation released in 1988), and Hibbert says Jefferson Holt did everything he could to alienate the musicians from him, complaining bitterly, and inaccurately, Hibbert says, that he wasn’t promoting the record. His exclusive right to the recordings, he recalls, was only six months. But he owned the metal masters and, most significantly, the publishing rights to “Radio Free Europe” and its B-side, “Sitting Still,” outright. As the band’s legal adviser, Bertis Downs had cautioned them against selling off their publishing, and made no secret of his dismay when they agreed to give Hibbert the rights to their first two songs. And now that they were going to be recording for I.R.S., an indie big enough to launch million-selling records, they were determined to get the songs back. Downs approached Hibbert offering to buy back all their rights for $1,000 per song, but Hibbert wanted to negotiate a better deal. As much as $10,000, according to Peter,[12] who said Hibbert threatened to sell the rights to another song publisher who had offered him that much for the songs.

  This was not a price R.E.M. was willing to pay. And Hibbert, who was working his way through law school as a stagehand at Atlanta’s Omni Coliseum, says he began to realize how displeased they were when he was wheeling amplifiers through a tunnel after a concert and was approached by Andy Slater. A recent Emory University graduate who had known Peter during his college days, Slater was just starting a career that would take him from contributing stories to Rolling Stone to becoming, in 2001, president of Capitol Records, and the two men already knew each other. “I said, ‘Hey, Andy!’ ” Hibbert recalls. “And he waved me over and gets this mobster voice, really serious, and said, ‘I hear the boys are making you an offer for all of the stuff.’ I’m quoting him word for word. What he said was ‘Give them what they want or else your name will be mud.’ ”[13]

  The threat, however veiled it might have been, wasn’t necessary. Hibbert needed cash a lot more than he wanted to hold out for a bigger payoff. What he wound up with, he says, was a little more than their original $2,000 offer. “I promised Bertis I wouldn’t go into this part. But my back was up against the wall. I had debts out of the original deal, and my stress knob was already at eleven. I just didn’t have what it takes to tell them to go to hell. Look, I’m really proud of the guys I knew. The fresh, eager, focused, and urgent band. I loved that urgency. But I would really not be representing myself fairly if I were to say that the treatment, or lack thereof, of me by the band didn’t carry a little bit of pain.”[14]

  Wolves out the door…Down there they’re rounding a posse to ride.

  16

  Chronic Town, Poster Torn

  Jay Boberg came back from New Orleans certain that R.E.M. was going to be the next act signed to I.R.S. Records. Technically he needed Miles Copeland’s sign-off to make it so, but he already knew that his boss would back him, particularly given his brother Ian Copeland’s enthusiasm and the fact that Ian had already signed the foursome to his FBI booking agency. Everyone else at the company, Boberg recalls, greeted the band with something closer to a collective shrug. They’d hand the tape back to Boberg and kind of nod. There wasn’t anything wrong with it; it wasn’t like this band was hurting anyone. But that was the problem. The punk scene, the whole post-hippie, outside-the-mainstream zeitgeist of the early ’80s, wanted music to hurt. Or at least be troublesome to somebody.