* * *

  —

  One after another, the new songs dove into the deepest end of existence—the biggest quandaries, the most hideous injustices, the most disturbing images. Murder. Cruelty. Corruption. Innocence torn asunder. “Talk About the Passion” invokes the death of Christ in an elliptical portrait of hunger and society’s casual acceptance of suffering. “Laughing” draws in the tale of Laocoön, who attempted to warn the soldiers of Troy about the warriors hiding within the Trojan Horse, only to be killed, along with his two sons, by serpents sent by the gods. Even “We Walk,” whose cheery music skips along in a seemingly lighthearted gambol, comes with an eerie undertow as Michael’s climb up the stairs of one of Athens’s creaky old apartment buildings pauses to recall the painting of French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat as he was discovered after being assassinated in the bath. The darkness comes in glimpses, a word here, a phrase there, not quite hidden between the buoyant rhythm, the tuneful chime of Peter’s guitar and the cheering harmonies of Mike and Bill.

  * * *

  —

  As a lyricist and a singer, Michael hides in plain sight. He takes shelter between the instruments, careful to keep his vocals mixed alongside, not above, the guitar, bass, and drums. He atomizes his thoughts, breaking sentences into fragments, sticking them into apparently random order. He is, almost defiantly, at odds with himself, commanding the spotlight and then turning away. He grabs the microphone, tests its power, and then swallows his words. “9-9” begins in a hail of rock ’n’ roll glory, a pulsing bass, speedy drums, whirling guitar, a recitation that climaxes with a prayer: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…except he’s muttering it all so far beneath the music that you can barely hear him speak, let alone decipher what he’s saying. The music hurtles and snarls, drums cracking, guitar stuttering and snapping, while Michael shouts about pointers, twisting tongues, conversation fear. The song collapses, and a beat later “Shaking Through” kicks in, its layered acoustic guitars and piano as lilting and welcoming as a folk-song sing-along: Could it be that one small voice / Doesn’t count in the room? The song echoes, if not quite expands upon, “Sitting Still,” the “Radio Free Europe” B-side that was re-recorded for the album, with its recurring assurances—I can hear you—and the concluding question, Can you hear me? People can hear everything, but are they truly listening to anything?

  * * *

  —

  They called the album Murmur. In search of a cover image that captured the dark southern comedy of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, the group settled on a photograph made by their friend Sandi Phipps of a wintry field grown over with kudzu, the profligate weed whose tendrils spread so rapidly as to all but grow before your eyes. Phipps found the field near Athens, which was also where she discovered the railroad trestle decorating the back cover. Phipps made the portraits of the four band members, too, capturing them individually, bundled against a chill that has taken any traces of warmth from their expressions. Mike scowls at the lens. Peter, in a leather overcoat, white shirt, and tie, presents only a profile. Bill, a bolo tie peeking past his overcoat, looks puzzled and a little sad. Michael, behind bookish spectacles and wrapped in a poet’s scarf, purses his kewpie lips and peers moodily at the floor.

  Released on April 12, 1983, Murmur was an instant smash on college radio. It didn’t rate much airplay on mainstream radio, and the exceedingly elliptical video they made for a freshly re-recorded “Radio Free Europe,” most of which followed the band members meandering through Howard Finster’s sculpture garden, guaranteed MTV would never air it at a time when anyone beyond a tiny segment of its audience would see it. Even so, the album rose to number thirty-six on the Billboard chart, selling around 150,000 copies by the end of the year.[4] The single of the new “Radio Free Europe” only made it to number seventy-eight on Billboard’s Hot 100; a disappointment for the I.R.S. staffers accustomed to seeing the catchier songs by the Go-Go’s pull their albums into the top ten. But the reviews were, if anything, even better than they had been for Chronic Town.

  In Rolling Stone, Steve Pond gave the album four stars. “An original sound placed in the service of songs that matter,” he wrote. “It reveals a depth and cohesiveness to R.E.M. that [Chronic Town] could only suggest.”[5] Writing in The Village Voice, Robert Christgau traded the faint praise he gave to the band’s debut EP with something closer to an all-out rave: “They aren’t a pop band or even an art-pop band—they’re an art band, nothing less or more, and a damn smart one.”[6] In England, the New Musical Express’s Richard Grabel also uncorked high praise: “Their overall mood is mystical, revelatory, gentle and open,” he wrote. “R.E.M. have a claim to being one of the most evocative pop practitioners around.”[7]

  Skip Notes

  * Which isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with Stephen Hague or the music he makes. Hague went on to produce or contribute to cool records by artists as diverse as Public Image Ltd, Robbie Robertson, and Tom Jones. He just wasn’t attuned to R.E.M. circa 1983.

  18

  R.E.M. Submits

  The opening of Rock on TV, a local cable program seen in Chicago, describes the state of pop music circa the summer of 1983 in quick cuts and teaser narration, through the eyes of people who aren’t entirely unhip. Flash cuts of some unrecognizable band onstage, then the Tubes, then one of the guys from Devo, then Paul McCartney sporting one of his less elegant ’80s hairstyles. Now here’s a glimpse at the crowd at the vast Us Festival, a split second of Kiss, then the Residents, that San Francisco band that wore big eyeball costumes. The singer from Spandau Ballet, then the witty Bay Area rocker Greg Kihn makes a funny face into the camera, and that leads into the previews of tonight’s feature stories. First, we hear, it’s the razor-sharp sounds of the new Canadian hitmaker Bryan Adams, glimpsed in the video for “Cuts Like a Knife,” in which he and his band rock out at the bottom of a swimming pool. Next, the announcer promises, David Bowie falls in love! Or at least he smooches with the woman in the latest cinematic video from his smash Let’s Dance album. And finally, here are newcomers R.E.M., who, it’s said, leave it up to our imagination.

  A few features play out, including the piece with Adams, who sits backstage with a towel draped around his neck, a confident smile tugging at his lips as he lays out what it takes to make it in the rock ’n’ roll business. “You gotta want it,” he declares. “If you don’t want it, then, psssshhhht, don’t bother, man. Ya gotta do it ’cause you love it.”

  Adams is saying something about legitimacy in rock ’n’ roll, about the importance of work and desire, even for bands that are willing to occasionally simulate performances at the bottoms of swimming pools. When it’s their turn, the members of R.E.M. work just as hard to establish something about themselves. It begins with Peter being interviewed on camera, saying that the name R.E.M. doesn’t mean what most people think it means, but that doesn’t bother them. “ ‘Rhinoceroses, elephants, and mooses’ is okay with us, too,” he says. This is funny, and also plays against type, since so much about the band’s public identity is so very serious.

  “Wolves, Lower” plays again. Those spinning guitar notes, the restless bass and skittery drums, the elliptical words and that deep, nearly sinister voice. The show’s cohost, Norm Winters, starts his narration. “Ever wake up from a vivid dream to find that the details have vanished and only the feeling remains? R.E.M. re-creates that feeling with music so effortlessly primal it seems to spin straight from the subconscious. You’ve heard of dance music? Well, this is dream music. Tunes that make you quiver and shudder.”

  That’s pretty smart, actually, and no wonder. Winters is also a disc jockey and the program director for Chicago’s WXRT-FM, one of the most influential progressive radio stations in the country. He’s got an ear for interesting, left-of-center music, and a canny sense of what it takes to sell it to a broad listenership. He plays a snippet of the “Wolves, Lower” video, the band miming their performance, including the cool part where Michael spins and jumps in slo-mo as Winters recounts the popular beef about R.E.M. being purposefully obscure, with lyrics and even a name geared specifically to mystify. But then comes a fuller version of Peter’s line about rhinoceroses, elephants, and mooses, and Michael and Bill admitting that they take fans’ incorrect guesses of what the lyrics are and sing those instead. “Sometimes their words are better than ours,” Michael says.

  The scene changes to the band’s hotel room, where the musicians are tending to their laundry, including an I.R.S. Records T-shirt on which the camera lingers. “As you can see, R.E.M. are real down-to-earth guys,” Winters continues. “Their current road tour is no rock-star chauffeured-limousine affair; they pack their own bags and wash their own socks.” This narrative thread plays over carefully staged shots of the band in repose, kicking back on the bed, flipping channels on the hotel room TV, as Winters celebrates the band’s rejection of all the glitzy rock ’n’ roll trappings. Particularly the traditional videos, he says, “that sell music with clichéd images of breaking glass and gorgeous girls.”

  Mike steps up to declare that rock ’n’ roll should focus on “honest emotions. Whatever your feelings are, played through your music.” This sets up a peek at the new video for “Radio Free Europe,” which trades the aforementioned beautiful women and breaking glass for the southern folk artist Howard Finster and some deeply inscrutable action sequences involving the band members’ acquisition of a portentous-seeming box from an eerie, looming Jefferson Holt and the presentation of said box to Finster, who opens it to find a doll that tumbles end-over-end down an angled board. The I.R.S. Records team edited in a few glimpses of the band onstage, but that didn’t keep the whole thing from landing somewhere miles away from anything resembling an MTV playlist. Which might have been the point of the entire project.

  * * *

  —

  By the spring of 1983 the band’s touring operation, which had launched three years earlier with all the musicians and gear crammed into Bill’s old family station wagon, had expanded along with their professional prospects. The lightly battered 1975 Dodge B300 van they bought in 1981 was decommissioned, traded for a more spacious beige Dodge, customized with four captain’s chairs in the back and a separate compartment for the band’s instruments and stage amplifiers. Now traveling with their own sound mixer, lighting operator, and guitar tech, they rented a second van for the crew, which Bill sometimes rode in so he could pal around with his high school friend Gevin Lindsay, a guitarist who had signed on to help care for Peter’s instruments.

  The year’s intensive road work began at the end of March, two weeks before the release of Murmur, when they launched a month of opening for the English Beat, focusing mostly on college dates in the Southeast and then the upper Midwest and the Northeast. That left them in New York at the end of April, just after the release of Murmur, from which point they set out on their own, playing clubs on their way down through Virginia and North Carolina and back to Georgia, then back out to venues all across the nation as the new record found its way into stores, magazine review columns, and a few radio playlists.

  Peter Jesperson, the Minneapolis record store manager who also cofounded the indie label Twin/Tone Records and both produced and managed the Replacements, its most popular act, had become friends with his band’s compatriots from Athens, and when they asked him to serve as a fill-in road manager that spring, he signed on eagerly. The powerful but notoriously chaotic Replacements were gaining momentum, and giving Jesperson a working sabbatical within the smooth-running R.E.M. operation struck everyone in the Minnesota rockers’ camp as a good move. Immediately, Jesperson was impressed by how professional the Georgia musicians were. “For one thing, they didn’t light my shoes on fire when I was sleeping,” he says.[1] On the road with the Replacements, Jesperson not only had to do all the driving and navigating, he also had to make regular stops to buy new atlases, since the band members thought it was funny to tear out the maps leading to their next destination. In R.E.M.’s van, both Jefferson Holt and Bill liked to help with the driving, and any one of them could be called on to take up the map and point the way to the next show. And there was always a next show.

  * * *

  —

  From the Ritz in New York to St. Paul, Minnesota, to open a festival-style show for the Suburbs, with the Replacements, the Phones, and Mitch Easter’s band Let’s Active filling the daylong bill. Then came club shows in Milwaukee, Madison, and Chicago, with Let’s Active and the dB’s opening. Bloomington, Lincoln, Kansas City, then an opening slot for the English Beat and Bow Wow Wow at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, outside Denver. Then came an ill-advised show at the Sheppard Air Force Base, in Wichita Falls, Texas, where the heavy-metal-loving airmen responded to the collegiate band’s elliptical art rock with a hail of empty cups and cries of Die, faggot! They pulled out some of their old covers, “Route 66” and “Secret Agent Man,” etc., in an attempt to appease the crowd, but it didn’t work, and knowing the base MPs were there to keep the soldiers from physically attacking them, Peter and Michael couldn’t resist boogying up against each other, rubbing asses and making kissy-faces that caused the drunk, hyper-macho throng to roar with rage. “In the end they booed so loud we came back and did an encore,” Peter told Musician in 1984.[2]

  Onward. Dallas, Austin, Lubbock, then the long haul to San Diego and up the coast to Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, then south again for a solid week of one-nighters starting at the Showcase Theatre at the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park, in Valencia, near Los Angeles. Costa Mesa, seventy-five miles down the coast, came the next night. Then they doubled back to central Los Angeles the night after that. They jumped back into the van after that show to drive 350 miles north to Santa Cruz for the next performance. Then came three more nights in a row: Berkeley, Palo Alto, and San Francisco. It went on like that, week after week, month after month. Some nights they drew three hundred people, other nights it’d be closer to thirty. Occasionally they slept in cheap motels. More often they found a friendly local to let them crash on a sofa or a living room floor, or else slept in their seats in the van as they motored to the next town, the next club, the next show. “I don’t think I touched a bed in two months sometimes,” Peter told journalist Tony Fletcher. “We’d play, go to a party, drink, steal food from the fridge and then at around four in the morning, we’d go, ‘OK, time to go on to the next town.’ We’d drive into the next town, and arrive there at noon, park behind the club and sleep until five.”[3] They’d rouse themselves in time for the soundcheck, maybe wander off to find something for dinner, then get back to the club to prepare for the show.

  * * *

  —

  Murmur sold steadily, if unspectacularly, through the summer, and the mounting critical buzz, amplified by the machinations of I.R.S. Records’ publicity crew, elevated R.E.M. into the sights of magazine and newspaper editors and bookers for TV news shows. After all those years of reading about other musicians, Peter knew how to use the media to build a band’s image. To expand upon their music and frame themselves not just as artists but as rock ’n’ roll missionaries, opponents of the prevailing culture.

  Speaking to a reporter from the ABC affiliate in Los Angeles in 1983, he girded the band’s anti-professional credentials. “None of us are really experienced musicians,” he said. “I never played guitar, never played in another band. So we learned to play as a four-person unit.”[4] This is, at best, only partially accurate. But the deeper point, a staunch opposition to the sleek commercial rock ’n’ roll that dominated the mainstream, came through even more clearly in an appearance Peter and Mike made on an afternoon television show aimed at Atlanta high schoolers. “The rock ’n’ roll business has more or less been changed into a series of gestures and conventions you have to do in order to have a hit, and by and large that’s garbage,”[5] Peter told the kids. Speaking to another reporter from Georgia after a club show in Scotia, New York, Peter laughed off the thought that his band had a reputation they had to live up to. “We live down to it if possible,” he retorted. “We don’t feel like we have to live up to that whole rock star image of going onstage and, ya know, like U2, being dramatic or melodramatic or whatever. We get up and play and mess around and sometimes we’re bad and sometimes we’re good, and it should be fun for us before anything else. We certainly don’t want to become too professional. Most bands die because of their professionalism.”[6]

  * * *

  —

  Early in the summer, Ian Copeland, who was booking them through his agency, FBI, in New York, called Jefferson Holt with an offer. The Police, who had ascended to new heights with their album Synchronicity and its chain of hit singles, including the number one “Every Breath You Take,” were mounting an enormous tour of the United States that summer, playing the biggest venues possible in every city. In August they had dates set up at New York’s Shea Stadium, which the Beatles had played at the height of Beatlemania in 1965, and the even bigger JFK Stadium, in Philadelphia. They needed an opening act for those shows, and also for a few relatively smaller engagements in basketball arenas, so the engagement would amount to seven shows spread over ten days, during which R.E.M. could play for something like a quarter million people, the vast majority of whom would be hearing them for the first time. A huge opportunity for any band, let alone one that was still performing in clubs they didn’t always fill. The only problem was that they didn’t want to do it.

  A couple of years earlier, they’d been thrilled to open for Gang of Four, and they did weeks on end with the English Beat, mostly in the same sorts of clubs and small halls they had eventually worked their way to headlining. But the prospect of opening for enormous crowds, particularly in arena-size venues, left them cold. What was the point of playing to a big crowd if none of the people wanted to hear you in the first place? They liked being close to their audience, to see them eye to eye and present themselves as people, not untouchable stars you would need binoculars to see. So they had turned down an offer to tour with Squeeze, and they had turned down a proposal to tour with U2. The offer from the Police, however, was a different matter. Everyone at the record company, particularly Jay Boberg, wanted them to get the exposure of playing for the Police’s audience. Holt noted how much money was at stake—$10,000 a show for the stadiums, which was exactly five times what they were accustomed to getting for club shows. They’d get a little less for the arenas, but still significantly more than what they usually earned for a night’s work. So. What to do. They thought it over.