* * *

  —

  Michael Edward Mills was born on December 17, 1958, near the military base where his father, Franklin, was stationed with the U.S. Marines in Orange County, California. A helicopter pilot, Frank mustered out of the military in 1960 and moved back to his hometown of Atlanta, where he worked as a salesman for an insurance company. Another boy, Mitchell, joined the family in 1962. Frank switched to heavy equipment sales, and when he took a new position in Macon in the late 1960s the family relocated to the smaller city eighty miles to the southeast. Frank was a good salesman and became successful enough to open his own heavy equipment sales company, also getting into the road-grading business for a while, but his heart resided elsewhere.[2]

  A natural singer graced with a rich and powerful voice, Frank was a classically trained tenor who sang with the Naval Aviation Choir during his days in the Marines, and in an elite vocal quartet drawn from the larger group that performed at Miss America and Miss Universe beauty pageants and, on one stunning occasion, to an audience of millions on the nationally broadcast Ed Sullivan Show.[3] Married in 1956 to the former Adora Wood, Frank built a life with a woman whose musical ability and training rivaled his. A trained singer herself, Adora taught classical guitar and recorder, played the piano, and sang in various choirs alongside her husband and on her own.

  Frank Mills had a big voice and a body to match, broad shoulders and a prominent chest, and his personality was just as large. He had red hair and freckles, chain-smoked cigarettes and sipped cocktails when he was with his friends, and laughed heartily when something amused him, which was often. Living in Atlanta during the 1960s, Frank sang with the Atlanta Choral Guild, and when a job took him to Macon at the end of the decade, he and Adora joined the First Presbyterian Church and connected with its choral director, Susan McDuffie, who soon made Frank her principal tenor.[4]

  McDuffie and her husband, Bill, had kids near Mike’s and Mitch’s ages, and the families grew close. Bobby McDuffie, who was Mike’s contemporary, was entranced by his friend’s father. Already a budding violinist who would soon leave home to attend a high school conservatory in New York, the younger McDuffie spent hours listening to Frank Mills’s voice. “He was a powerful musical force when I was twelve or thirteen,” Robert McDuffie says today. “I’d listen to my cassettes over and over again—his performance of Saint-Saëns’s ‘Christmas Oratorio,’ ‘My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord,’ also Handel’s ‘Messiah’ and Brahms’s ‘German Requiem.’ He belted, but beautifully. He phrased things so naturally in his solos. He was very powerful, very passionate, and so appealing.”[5]

  * * *

  —

  Given smart, supportive parents, Mike excelled in grade school and drank in the music his parents played on the radio and the family hi-fi. He studied piano and music theory during grade school and also took up the guitar, teaching himself with some guidance from Adora. He shared his parents’ enthusiasm for choral singing and performed alongside Bobby McDuffie in their church’s youth and handbell choirs. For a long time he was content to listen to his parents’ music, pushing his toys across the floor to the sound of symphonies, operatic arias, and other classical works, along with a few lighter albums Frank liked, particularly the vocal jazz-pop of the Four Freshmen. But when Adora noticed her older son paying attention to pop music not long after the family moved to Macon, in 1970, she bought him a special gift: three recent hit singles. “Come Together,” the swampy leadoff track from the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, Harry Nilsson’s cover of Fred Neil’s bittersweet “Everybody’s Talkin’,” known as the theme song to the movie Midnight Cowboy, and Vanity Fare’s sunny hit “Hitchin’ a Ride.” It was a quick overview of the modern pop scene, and it piqued the boy’s interest. Mike started exploring the pop radio dial, and when he got himself to a record store, he came home with a broader variety, everything from Seals & Crofts’ easy listening to the harder pop of Three Dog Night to the latest by the reigning hard rock behemoths Led Zeppelin.

  By the time he got to high school, Mike’s consciousness was saturated with music—listening to it, talking about it, playing it. He played sousaphone in the high school marching band, then combined his mastery of the bass clef with his knowledge of the guitar in order to take up the electric bass. Mike practiced in the basement for hours at a time, his amplifier cranked loud enough to send cans and plates rattling off their shelves in the pantry upstairs. Neither the volume nor Mike’s deepening interest in rock ’n’ roll music disturbed his parents. Their musical preferences might have run more toward classical and the pop music of their own youth, but they loved that both of their boys—Mitchell studied trombone, piano, and guitar—were so deeply engaged with their own music. And when Mike invited friends over to play in the family’s basement and the beat made the windows rattle in their frames, Frank and Adora would just shake their heads and smile. At least they knew where the boys were. And weren’t they getting pretty good?

  Mike had no problem keeping up his grades. His near-perfect SAT scores the fall of his senior year won him a place in the National Honor Society. He was the co-valedictorian of the senior class of 1976 and managed to look only somewhat queasy when posing with his cohonoree as they held up an appropriately thick book for the photograph in the Northeast High yearbook, the Valhalla. Mike’s white-collar future seemed set: he had the essentials for a career in business, in law, maybe as a teacher or even a college professor. But he didn’t want any of that. Which he made clear in the senior portrait that appears in the same yearbook. In which he poses next to the real focus of his time, attention, and fascination: his Fender Jazz electric bass.

  22

  Shadowfax

  Mike shared Bill’s same sinking feeling when he hefted his bass into that basement jam session and saw that heavy-browed kid glowering from behind the drums. “Bill showed up and I was like, Oh no, no, no, I can’t do it!” Mike recalled to Debi Atkinson in 1984.[1] The drummer had moved to a different high school by then, but that brow was hard to forget, and the contemptuous glare that came from beneath it was even more memorable. “He was kind of rowdy, obnoxious, and mean,” Mike said.[2] They were in his family’s house; he could have ordered his junior high antagonist out the door. But Mike’s nature was too gentle for that, so he took a breath, tuned up his bass, and waited for the music to start. When the others were ready, the drummer slapped his sticks together, hit the downbeat, and the bassist jumped in. In an instant they locked in together.

  One song after another, the common repertoire for Macon rockers in those days—southern boogie classics, mostly, with some favorites by the Rolling Stones and others. They all knew their parts, and the guitar player who had brought them together, David Wilson, could play the leads with a quick-fingered assurance that kept them all on their toes. Mike kept his eyes on Bill, and they notched in together so easily he started to relax. The looks between them lost their chill, moved through neutral to a kind of warmth…a nod, then a smile or two. When the jamming ended, Bill looked over his cymbals and caught the bassist’s eye. “Look, this is ridiculous,” he said. It was as close to an apology as an adolescent boy could get, and Mike was quick to take the olive branch. “We ended up getting on really well,” Mike told Atkinson. “We both grew up.”[3]

  And that was that, a largely unspoken end to their largely unspoken feud. “We’ve been best friends ever since,” Bill said later.[4]

  * * *

  —

  The jam session went so well, they decided to form a band. The leader was the lead guitar player, a long-haired sixteen-year-old named David Wilson, who was so proficient with a slide that he could play Duane Allman’s parts with ease. The lead singer and rhythm guitarist was Alan Ingley, whose clean-cut look and squared-away persona set him apart from the others. “He wasn’t like us,” Wilson says. “He was real serious about baseball. An athlete who happened to play guitar and had a beautiful voice. He wasn’t trying to be a rebel like us.” The band moved their gear into the Mills family’s basement and started practicing, building a repertoire of songs that leaned into the jam-heavy rock that dominated the airwaves and turntables throughout the South in the mid-1970s. The influence was particularly strong in Macon, which served as the headquarters for Capricorn Records, the independent company that put out records by the Allman Brothers Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, Wet Willie, and a legion of other southern rockers. The Allmans had moved to Macon when they signed with Capricorn in the late 1960s, and the band’s commercial success, along with their unrivaled place as the best and most beloved of the southern boogie bands, made them a defining presence among music fans in the city.

  Capricorn Records, its owner Phil Walden, and particularly the Allmans were so present in town they seemed to be everywhere, listening for music and getting involved with anyone who was making it. One afternoon in the early 1970s, Ingley was playing guitar with a bassist friend on the friend’s family’s back porch when a man with a beard and long hair stepped through the bushes and asked if they wanted to jam. He was Joseph Campbell, better known among Allmans aficionados as the band’s roadie, Red Dog. They passed a pleasant afternoon together, and later he took the boys to the reconditioned mill the Allmans used as their headquarters. There he showed them one of Duane Allman’s old guitars and dug into the band’s gear box for cords, effects boxes, and other equipment. “Just take it. They ain’t never gonna miss this stuff,” he said with a wave of his hand.

  A few years later Wilson befriended the Allmans’ road manager, Twiggs Lyndon, who came to the Mills house to hear the boys’ band and stuck around to play with them. He came back another night accompanied by Jaimoe, the Allmans’ drummer. “That was fun, goddammit, man,” Wilson says. “It meant nothing to our future, but it was an amazing experience. Jaimoe was a real nice guy, real nice and humble. All these people were regular people, just older and successful.”

  Wilson and the band worked out a repertoire of cover songs, jam-friendly Allmans tunes including “Statesboro Blues” and “One Way Out,” plus a few Marshall Tucker Band songs and popular rock radio hits such as Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” and Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild.” Ingley made a signature piece out of Chicago’s ballad “Colour My World.” They called the band Shadowfax, after the magical horse in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and started playing parties for their friends and then for kids from other schools. Shadowfax soon became a solid cover band, particularly for a bunch of high schoolers, and Ingley still marvels at how accomplished his teenage bandmates were. “David was one of the most pure musical souls I’ve ever met; he could play slide just like Duane Allman. And Bill was the best drummer I’ve ever played with. He didn’t take himself seriously and could do anything.”[5]

  As the band’s reputation grew, Shadowfax got professional bookings from adults: entertaining at kid-centric businesses at the nearby mall, weekend events at the skating rink, a video game arcade, and more. One local attorney paid them a few hundred dollars, plus all the beer they could drink, to play a party at his lake house. The affair was for members of some kind of civic organization for young leaders, but it turned into a bacchanal, with heavy drinking and a green marijuana haze. “We just wanted to play, but we had a blast,” recalls Ingley, who got so swept up in the moment that on the drive home the otherwise clean-living young man took a turn with the band’s communal joint. “They were so shocked, the car nearly stopped on the highway when I did that,” Ingley recalls.[6]

  Shadowfax had a good run, but as the band members approached the end of high school, they had to think about their futures. Either that or make a point of not thinking about them, which is what Mike and Bill resolved to do. Wilson was also content to stick with music for the foreseeable future, but Ingley, so often the odd man out in the band, had more traditional plans.

  When the end came it was sudden, and jarring. Someone in the band scheduled a show for the coming weekend without consulting Ingley. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have been a problem: they were teenagers, they didn’t have many other places to be on a Saturday. But Ingley was scheduled to visit a college out of town. He had an appointment for an interview with the admissions department and it wasn’t something he could skip. No matter, his bandmates were furious. “It felt like instant hatred,” Ingley says. “It breaks my heart, but I don’t think I talked to those guys after that.” The abrupt freeze-out from his bandmates turned Ingley against music, at least for a while. “I got rid of my guitars, everything.”[7] Ingley ultimately went to the University of Georgia and graduated in the spring of 1980, just a few weeks after his former bandmates played their first show at St. Mary’s Church.

  * * *

  —

  The remaining members of Shadowfax recruited another guitarist, who didn’t work very well, so they evolved into a three-piece called the Back Door Band. They stuck to Allmans-style jams and blues songs and started experimenting with originals, and they booked a few shows, but by summer’s end they had lost steam, and in the fall of 1976 they drifted to a halt.

  No longer in high school and not ready to think about college, Mike and Bill rented an apartment in Macon and went looking for jobs. Bill landed a cool one, working as an office boy and chauffeur for Paragon Booking, the concert booking agency associated with Capricorn Records. Mike took a position at the Sears department store. They were done with playing music, they figured. “We quit and sold our instruments,” Mike said later.[8] It might not have been literally true, but they certainly didn’t need them anymore. Not for a little while, anyway.

  23

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

  Los Angeles, June 19, 1984, the Palace nightclub in Hollywood. The place is packed with highly excited, highly coiffed club kids. Teased blond hair and Ray-Bans, sculpted brows and frosted lips. Trimmed mustaches and Vuarnet shades, unbuttoned shirts and a flash of glistening chest. Also cameras, swooping this way and that, capturing the dancers’ jubilant fist pumps and gyrations, closing in and zooming out. Everyone in motion, everything moving in time to the music, and to the musicians, who are also moving and also looking excited, and entirely themselves. Michael Stipe, golden curls falling over the shoulders of his denim jacket, leans into the microphone stand, dancing it this way and that, while Peter Buck struts and leaps with his black-and-white Rickenbacker and Bill Berry, dense hair long and heavy with sweat, hammers and writhes behind his drums, occasionally looking up to sing into the microphone hanging over his head. Mike Mills is going full tilt too, his slight torso wrapped in a stylized Elvis T-shirt, his hands working a new Rickenbacker bass, leaping one way, then dashing the other before stumbling back to his microphone to pitch in a harmony.

  This shiny setting, with all the stylish L.A. club kids exerting themselves toward delirium, or some camera-friendly approximation of it, feels a long way from the 40 Watt club in Athens. But they’re taping an episode of Showtime’s Rock of the 80’s, a monthly concert series that focuses on up-and-coming acts, generally ones that programmers would describe as new wave. This evening’s show includes the artful soul singer Nona Hendryx, then in the midst of a modern makeover, and is headlined by the surging Britpop band Simple Minds.

  The middle portion begins with Jason & the Scorchers ripping through a brief set of flashy cowpunk. As the last notes of “Great Balls of Fire” hang in the air, the revolving stage spins, R.E.M. comes into view, and the pretty young crowd seems to erupt. It feels like an odd fit, playing their weirdly constructed, impossible-to-parse songs to this room full of camera-ready club kids. But somehow…maybe it’s the cameras, maybe it’s the booze you can see them quaffing, maybe it’s actually the music…it works. The band kicks into a lightning-paced “Sitting Still,” which segues into “Radio Free Europe.” The opening chords of “Little America” ring out, the band clicks into an even higher gear, and when the camera finds Mike he’s bouncing down the stairs to where a small knot of girls exult. He takes a seat on a lower step and keeps thrumming along, not missing a note, even when the camera comes in close. He thrusts a playful tongue into its lens.

  * * *

  —

  If R.E.M. had learned how to dazzle audiences of all sizes in all kinds of settings with their live shows, their records were casting just as powerful a spell on critics in mainstream and underground publications, on both sides of the Atlantic. And Reckoning more than lived up to their expectations. Chris Connelly’s review in Rolling Stone inventoried some of his least favorite aspects of the band’s sound—the occasionally gnomic lyrics, what struck him as an underwhelming drum presence, and the album’s occasional digressions into studio jams and chatter—but still gave the album four stars, concluding that “these guys seem to know exactly where they’re going, and following them should be fun.”[1] The Washington Post’s Joe Sasfy proclaimed that “there isn’t an American band more worth following.”[2] Writing for Musician, Anthony DeCurtis could only shake his head in wonder. “How much better can they possibly get?”[3] Over in England, the New Musical Express’s Mat Snow played the record and heard the cathedral chime of the American Dream: “the journey west to the Promised Land with nothing but a shimmering horizon ahead and a blazing, deep blue sky above.”[4]