“People didn’t get it at first,” Boberg says. “They weren’t a punk band. It’s nothing like listening to the Sex Pistols or the Cramps. There’s full-on melodies and hooks everywhere, words you don’t understand you can still sing along to.”[1] Boberg had been listening to the songs for months, not quite connecting with them at first but always intrigued enough to put the tape back in the machine, hit play, and hear the whirling guitar, the leaping bass and loping drums, the odd vocabulary and shadowy inflections of the singer. The thing they made was both elusive and magnetic. He didn’t get it, certainly not at first, but the intelligence of it kept drawing him back. That and all those melodies. Now he’d seen what the band could do onstage, even with a crappy mix and a small, ambivalent crowd, he was convinced.

  I.R.S. didn’t have the money to give out significant advances, but as Holt and Downs made clear during their talks, R.E.M. was happy to take a small per-album guarantee if they could control how their records sounded and looked. Presentation was particularly important to Michael, given his grounding in visual art. But they were all determined to keep a tight hand on their music—which songs they’d record, how those recordings would be produced, mixed, and mastered. That, Boberg says, was the standing agreement the label had with all its artists. “We were very into [giving artists] creative control. We believed we signed artists who had a vision, and we were there to maximize it, not change it,” he says.[2]

  The artist-centric record company model had been perfected in the rock era by Warner Bros. Records in the late 1960s, led by company chairman Mo Ostin, who along with fellow executive Joe Smith anticipated the generational shift from clean-cut pop idols like Frankie Avalon to shaggy countercultural oracles such as Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead. Allowing the artists near-complete authority over their music not only respected their artistry but was also a canny commercial strategy, given the artists’ superior grasp on what would appeal to their audience: a youthful, rambunctious throng just growing into adulthood, with adult-size spending power. It was paradoxical, to say the least. Respecting the anti-commercial whims of the artists and using the power of the record company’s corporate financing to promote the artists’ revolutionary ideals led to enormous sales and astounding profits for the corporation. A decade later, Miles Copeland’s I.R.S. Records adapted the strategy for the next generation of music fans, replacing Hendrix and the Dead with Gary Numan and the Buzzcocks. They had pop acts too, such as the all-women Go-Go’s, but even their sunny, radio-friendly singles came with an alternative spin, given their ability to make vintage pop tropes sound so fresh and cool: the musical equivalent of thrift store shopping. For R.E.M., a young band whose outsider vision was in no way opposed to appealing to a large-scale audience, it was a perfect fit.

  * * *

  —

  Downs called in an experienced music industry attorney to help work through the finer points of the deal, then the entire band went to New York for a formal signing ceremony at I.R.S.’s East Coast offices in May. They dropped by Mitch Easter’s studio in Winston-Salem in early June to make some small adjustments to “Wolves, Lower” and “Gardening at Night,” then played shows around their usual Southeast haunts for the next two months before relocating to Los Angeles for a month. It was a busy few weeks for the band, Boberg recalls, full of photo sessions, a video shoot, and interviews with music writers. It also gave them a chance to connect with the staff of their new record company. “We spent a ton of time together,” Boberg says. “I think we went to see a lot of other bands, and I know I went to record stores with Peter. And they got to meet the rest of the staff, which was about five people then.”[3]

  * * *

  —

  The video they shot was for “Wolves, Lower.” The I.R.S. publicity staff set up the shoot for August 31, after the soundcheck for their set opening for the Minneapolis new wave band the Suburbs at the Club Lingerie, in Hollywood. If they were bemused by the task of performing for the camera, video outtakes from the shoot also reveal a giggling excitement at being the focus of so much industrial showbiz machination. Directed to sit together near their instruments, they come scampering like puppies, flopping together and then breaking spontaneously into the “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees” from the TV show theme song. Just a year into MTV’s existence, the form was still in its infancy, and the clip, a basic performance video shot on the stage, hews closely to the accepted format, the band miming to the recorded track, with occasional cuts to Michael leaping in slow motion.

  The “Wolves, Lower” video, the last lip-synching performance Michael would submit to for nearly a decade, didn’t get much of an airing on MTV or anywhere else, but the band’s opening set that night earned a rave in the Los Angeles Times, whose critic described the quartet as “disheveled choir boys” who kept the audience dancing even as they tried to figure out what to make of them. Were they more like the Byrds or the Psychedelic Furs? Herman’s Hermits or U2? The comparisons didn’t matter, he concluded. “The clean Rickenbacker guitar sound and the pretty vocal harmonies were compelling and strong…Playing with crisp dynamic force, R.E.M. delivered a power-pop set that was clean and light, but never lightweight.”[4]

  * * *

  —

  To get a foothold on the West Coast, the band steered their van around California, opening shows for the Suburbs, Romeo Void, the Untouchables, and, for a single show in Portland, Oregon, Gang of Four. Most went well enough, but the group was more concerned with the release of Chronic Town on August 24, 1982.

  The accolades won by “Radio Free Europe” a year earlier had been encouraging, but the momentary enthusiasm of a couple of critics didn’t guarantee anything, other than a more painful landing if the fuller vision on the EP didn’t get the same kind of attention. Certainly Jay Boberg would see to it that I.R.S.’s publicity and promotions staffs would do everything they could. But all the band could do for their record was what they always did: get back in the van, drive to the next show, unload and set up the gear, play as well as they could, pack up their stuff, get back in the van, and do it all over again. They finished their California dates in mid-September, then played their way back across the Southwest, veered north to pick up shows in Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, and Illinois, then headed east to Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island before heading south and arriving back in Georgia in mid-October.

  * * *

  —

  As the band moved eastward, Chronic Town landed in radio stations and on journalists’ desks. It was an instant smash on the college airwaves, staying in the College Media Journal (CMJ)’s top five for three solid months. It sold briskly for a debut EP, moving more than twenty thousand copies in the first couple of months, and close to fifty thousand by the end of the year. The reviews were, if anything, more generous than the notices received by “Radio Free Europe.” Though it received faint praise in Robert Christgau’s Village Voice column (“For R.E.M…. hooks and a certain rough emotionality are part of the form, signifying only themselves, and that’s not why I like rock ’n’ roll”),[5] the UK’s influential New Musical Express liked it just fine, calling Chronic Town “five songs that spring to life full of immediacy and action and healthy impatience. Songs that won’t be denied.”[6] Creem also came in impressed, describing the band’s sound as something like a throwback to the music of the 1960s, but only in its imagination and inventiveness: “We have come to identify innocence with pop as if it springs from an eternal fountain of youth, but R.E.M. deflates that preconception by taking the full, gleeful sound of pop into the secret recesses of the mind.”[7] Musician said there was only one thing wrong with the record: “You end up wishing for a larger dose.”[8]

  Peter’s old Emory University classmate Andy Slater managed to land a short feature on the band in Rolling Stone, which mostly consisted of Michael and Peter explaining how different their band was from the B-52’s, Pylon, and all the other acts from Athens. “Basically, we’re just four pretty vague people,” Peter said, explaining the obscurities in the Chronic Town songs. “We’re definitely not writing in one specific tradition.”[9] Or maybe they were just moving too quickly to come into focus. With or without Christgau’s approval, Chronic Town was named the number two EP of 1982 in The Village Voice’s year-end critics’ poll and ranked number forty-one in CMJ’s year-end chart. They were already on their way, boxcars rattling down the track, picking up speed.

  17

  Murmuring

  Everywhere they went in 1982 and 1983, R.E.M. played their new material, most often turning in sets that were dominated by songs their audiences wouldn’t have heard before. The crowds, drawn heavily if not entirely from the ranks of the students on the campuses they were either on or within a few blocks of, absorbed it happily, delighted to be hearing the new music just as the musicians were discovering it for themselves. To go to an R.E.M. show, or any show by one of the emerging art bands from Athens or any of the other alternative music scenes developing around the country, was a statement of purpose, or at least of membership. You were part of something new, something outside the ordinary, something that had nothing to do with conservative, mainstream society, politics, or, especially, the boomer-defined rock ’n’ roll that had dominated the radio dial and the sales charts for more than a decade. When the normies went to a concert they flocked to a sports arena to see celebrities perform stock versions of well-worn hits. These other music shows were where the weird people could gather, the ones who didn’t fit into the accepted categories of Reaganauts or retro-hippies. The freaks and the fags, the kids with sideways haircuts and oblique sexual interests. All of them pulled together by the off-kilter sound they heard, coming together to recognize one another and become a community.

  And R.E.M. was part of it, too. After the shows, all four musicians made a point of quickly toweling off the sweat and throwing back a beer before going back out to meet the people who had stuck around to greet them. They’d shake hands, talk about the songs they’d played or other bands they knew or liked. And if someone invited them to a party, as often happened, they usually went. Of course they did: they were strangers in town, they didn’t have anywhere else to go. Also, they were almost certainly hungry. They were still living on next to nothing from day to day, and chances were there’d be food, always a draw for fast-moving, underpaid musicians.

  And their fans felt like their friends, even if they’d just met. They were all the same age, more or less, and all interested in the same kinds of books and politics and music. The house parties they went to on the road felt almost exactly like the ones they went to back home in Athens. Jason Ringenberg, whose band Jason & the Scorchers often shared bills with R.E.M., had plenty of opportunities to see his fellow musicians both on- and offstage, and was always impressed by how conscientiously they treated the people they met. “They had a philosophy as a band, that when they went to parties they represented R.E.M. and they needed to honor that,” he says. “They were as crazy and wild as anyone, but they did it with a sense of class. They never got stupid drunk or stupid high; they were always kind of in control of themselves. And they were kind to people. That impressed me a lot.”[1]

  * * *

  —

  Riding high from the better-than-expected sales and critical reception for Chronic Town, the members of R.E.M. were both cheered and dismayed when I.R.S. Records vice president Jay Boberg came to them with a big idea. His enthusiasm was delightful, but his inspiration, to pair the young band with an up-and-coming new wave producer named Stephen Hague, was worrisome. Hague was a keyboard player whose productions for Jules and the Polar Bears and for Gleaming Spires, a splinter group featuring members of Sparks, burbled and sizzled with synthesizers. Not that there was anything unartful or wrong with that, per se, but everything about Hague’s ways, means, and sonic palette ran against the grain of R.E.M.’s guitar-bass-and-drums sound. They were, to put it mildly, leery.

  Boberg, by contrast, was thinking synergy: an unexpected combination that just might be crazy enough to work. Give it a chance, he said. They could do a test session with one song and see how it came out. “I don’t think he wants to push you into synths,” he said, reassuringly. How bad could it be? Forty years later, Boberg answers his own question: “It was a fucking disaster.”[2]

  The song they chose for the session was “Catapult.” Premiered just after the start of 1982, the song was a crowd favorite that they had played at nearly every show that year. The song’s hurtling pace and soaring one-word chorus contrasts a tender vision of children at a sleepover, cuddled together in front of a glowing screen as the hour grows late (It’s nine o’clock, don’t try to turn it off) with something unseen drawing closer. The children are anxious, determined not to be overlooked. Did we miss anything? Did we miss anything? Michael repeats, chanting over the thumping drums and clanging guitar. But that catapult may hurl you somewhere you weren’t expecting or desiring.

  Sometimes talented, well-meaning people have different aesthetics and different ways of going about their work. The test session for “Catapult” was held in an Atlanta studio in December 1982. It started badly when Hague directed Bill to keep his time straight by drumming to a computerized click track. R.E.M. was neither accustomed to nor aspiring to this level of mechanistic perfection for “Catapult,” nor any other song in their catalog. The musicians had developed parts, and a musical rapport, on the tune many months before they launched into their first studio take. But Hague kept hearing something amiss. He interrupted the band again and again, pointing out flaws in their rhythm, unappealing textures in Peter’s guitar, bits where the bass notes created bad harmonics with the vocal melody. It went on like that for hours, Hague inserting himself into the spontaneous chemistry that existed between the four of them.

  And even after they nailed down what struck him as a suitable performance, Hague took the tapes with him back to Boston and did the unthinkable, overdubbing jingly keyboards and shiny synth lines into the choruses, adding echo to Stipe’s vocals, and basically dragging the quirky rock band from Athens into line with the sort of new wavy pop you could already hear coming out of the radio. Which might have been the savvy commercial move for a largely unheard-of band coming out of some rural Georgia backwater, but R.E.M. was having none of it, and once he heard Hague’s mix, neither was Boberg. “I was dead wrong,” he says.[3] “I’m learning. I make mistakes. And that really taught me that [R.E.M.’s] artistic impulses about what they should and shouldn’t do were dead-on.”[*]

  * * *

  —

  The recording sessions for R.E.M.’s first full album came in short bursts. Two days here, three days there, through February, bracketed by shows back in Athens and in various college towns in North Carolina. When they were in Athens, resting up between the days of performing or recording in the cheap student-caliber apartments they still called home, they got together every day at 5 p.m. If they weren’t working out a new song, they’d rehearse for the next show, or work through songs that hadn’t sounded right at the last one. The work was focused and painstaking, each musical passage set right through deliberate, focused effort. They weren’t marathon sessions, usually no more than ninety minutes at a stretch, but they were consistent and disciplined and almost always began on time, no matter what else was going on. The commitment to the band, and to the music they were capable of making together, took precedence over everything else.

  * * *

  —

  Given the authority to choose their producer, the musicians went back to Mitch Easter, though they opted to move the setting from his parents’ garage to Reflection Sound Studios, a professional outfit located in Charlotte, North Carolina. To help run the larger console, Easter tapped his friend Don Dixon to coproduce, and the pair’s comfort with each other, and the band’s comfort with them, helped nurture the songs’ purposefully mismatched parts.

  * * *

  —

  Your luck a two-headed cow.

  “Pilgrimage” paces, frets, scolds, and cries out. It examines the legacy of the South, the promise and the poison, and speaks its name. Pilgrimage. The tours offered by the women of Mississippi’s Natchez Garden Club, of the remnants of the antebellum South. The plantations, the mansions, the glories and fortunes built on the backs of the enslaved. Some of the older homes around Athens, the grander ones, still had slave quarters in the back of their property. You could see the remnants of human bondage around you. How it was woven into the fabric of daily life. How it warped the hearts and minds of everyone it touched. The garden club ladies speak of religion. They speak of glory. They avert their eyes from the brutality. Rest assured this will not last, Michael proclaims icily. But the yearning for the past goes on, and so the music picks up again, ringing and true, the three voices linked into a round of melody, harmony, and countermelody, as if that might bring the twisted empire crashing down for good this time.

  Take a turn, take our fortune.