Work in the studio went relatively smoothly. The songs were sounding good. And yet the bad mood persisted, the rubbed-raw feeling that came from too much proximity under too many high-pressure situations for too long. How long could they keep it up? And where would it leave them?

  * * *

  —

  Michael’s crisis continued to unfold. He had always been a quirky eater, prone to strict regimens such as the macrobiotic diet he’d subsisted on for most of the ’80s, which allowed only grains, vegetables, and legumes and forbade meat and dairy products. But the British restaurants, with their emphasis on virtually everything he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, eat, bent his palate in increasingly odd directions. For a long time he lived on some kind of all-potato diet that ravaged his digestive system and made his face look puffy and distorted. He continued to find new ways to make his hair look odd, clipping it in a monk’s tonsure for a time, then coloring it yellow with mustard and other household products.

  Still, Michael’s intellectual curiosity thrived. He was shy around Boyd until it turned out that the producer not only knew of but had actually met Brion Gysin, the midcentury artist who had worked with poets William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg on cut-ups, a kind of poetry composed by writing down sentences, cutting them into fragments, tossing them into the air, and then gathering the random shards into verse. “From that point on I was cool,” Boyd recalls. “And when I saw his lyrics I said to myself, Aha, I get it! They’re quite like cut-ups.”[4]

  Michael’s words were also full of energy, and increasingly clear-eyed and direct in their portrayal of his thoughts and feelings. As the record came together, so did Michael’s sense of himself. “I found a sense of purpose,” he told National Public Radio many years later. Depression, like the chilling blankets of fog that cloak London during the winter, can clear as abruptly and inexplicably as it descends. One moment you’re trapped, lost within yourself, with no idea where you are, where you’re headed, or how to find your way home, then the dark goes gray, turns wispy white, then sunlight gold. It took some time for it to happen to Michael. But he kept himself going, one foot in front of the other, through that dismal winter and sleepless spring and into the summer, which was when he felt the light warming his shoulders. “Suddenly I just felt elevated, free of the concerns and fears I’d had. It got as dark as I could possibly get…Then I came out of it, and it felt transformative.”[5]

  * * *

  —

  The opening guitar figure sounds cattywampus. Loud and dissonant, the first notes of “Feeling Gravitys Pull” tumble into the speakers like a beam of light warping through outer space. Michael’s voice calls through the noise. He’s asleep and reading, he sings to himself, setting the scene for the vision he describes as the rhythm section kicks in, joining the guitar in a gut-rippling groove, the thudding drums and rumbling bass, the caterwaul guitar. Peel back the mountains, peel back the sky, Michael sings, pulling the listener into his dream. Stomp gravity into the floor. It’s the artist’s statement, a governing rationale for himself and for his band. He evokes the surrealist artist Man Ray, signaling that we’re entering a place where laws don’t hold, where time and space bend to the imagination, where dreams prevail. A cello, viola, and violin rise, low and warm, and the artist ascends with them. He controls the light; gravity bends to his touch. The song builds, crests, falls back, builds again. Go back to the start of the second verse and this might be the pivot point for the song, the album, the year, an entire life:

  Somewhere near the end it said,

  “You can’t do this.” I said, “I can, too.”

  They called the album Fables of the Reconstruction, or alternately Reconstruction of the Fables, or possibly Fables of the Reconstruction of the Fables. Whatever: the use of “Reconstruction” set the album not just in the American South but in the ruins of the Confederacy, where history and fantasy weave together. “Driver 8” launches at full throttle, a drawn-out guitar line spinning like the wheels of the train its narrator pilots. The thing thunders across the terrain as its exhausted driver catalogs the landscape flashing by. Farms, fields, stone walls, tree houses, power lines, churches, the rural South blurring at a mile a minute. Home is distant, but closer by the second. “Can’t Get There from Here,” the lightest of the songs, bops along the back roads, kicking up dust with its R&B horns as it zips here and there, waves to the locals, ignores their instructions—You can’t get there from here—and keeps on going: I’ve been there, I know the way.

  Throughout, the sound shines a bit brighter than the Easter/Dixon–produced albums; Boyd leaves space between the instruments and allows their individual textures to stand in higher relief. Mike’s and Bill’s backing vocals swell into gorgeous harmony in the choruses of “Green Grow the Rushes” and “Maps and Legends,” and Michael’s solo voice climbs into a sweet falsetto at the end of the lovelorn “Kohoutek.”

  But the heart of the album is in the songs that serve as portraiture: character studies set to music. The spirit of Howard Finster flits through most of the record, and “Maps and Legends” is dedicated to him by name. The song moves purposefully, waves of guitars and backing vocals pushing the minor chord pattern into something more thoughtful than brooding. The singer describes an artist, clearly Finster, whose eyes don’t perceive the same world on view to the rest of us. It’s easy to dismiss him as a fool, but, the song cautions, just because a truth is broadly accepted doesn’t make it right. Maybe these maps and legends have been misunderstood. One of Finster’s friends inspired “Old Man Kensey,” the tale of a fantasist whose career plans are rarely hampered by experience. “Life and How to Live It” describes the worldview of a real Athens eccentric/schizophrenic who turned his house into a fully stocked duplex so he could live on either side depending on his mood. “Wendell Gee” concludes the album on an elegiac note. A banjo twangs, the strings and backing vocals weaving together as Michael describes the final moments of its title character, a certain kind of old-fashioned southerner, “reared to give respect,” who lives on his own, communing with nature until another dream—the album begins and ends with them—signals his death. So whistle as the wind blows, Michael sings, his voice gone wistful. Whistle as the wind blows, with me.

  25

  A Magic Kingdom, Open-Armed

  They came home in April to a nation with a supersized sense of itself. Ronald Reagan, reelected in an enormous landslide the previous November, now rode astride a Cold War nationalism that had made the United States even noisier than usual. American forces, operating in view and in secret, were at work all across the planet, toppling governments in Central America, warehousing nuclear weapons in Europe, and propping up oil-rich tyrants in the Middle East. And the nation’s movies had become just as bellicose. Rambo and Rocky, Indiana Jones and Axel Foley. Speeding cars, gunfire, cavernous mansions, and mountains of cash. The music was just as noisy: Michael Jackson and Madonna, Prince and Bruce Springsteen all looming over the globe like star-spangled behemoths, beaming the American fantasia to the masses of seven continents. They were all video stars too, dancing and feeling and sort of performing their songs for the cameras, often in elaborately plotted mini movies that had the same velocity as the movies that unspooled in the multiplexes. You could go to the theater, the arena, or a stadium, or simply sit in your living room, TV remote in hand, and feel the booming in your sternum, your hair blown back by the sheer holy fuck of it all.

  Or you could snap on the radio and spin the dial to the left, where the college stations jostled for bandwidth with the public radio outlets, jazz devotees, and classical holdouts. Where the music could get murky and the between-song patter convoluted. Down here, anticipation for R.E.M.’s next record was electric. The challenge for the band was to beam a signal that would also register at a higher frequency.

  * * *

  —

  The promotional campaign for the record began during the third week of April 1985, just a few weeks after the band returned from London, with a three-week swing through college auditoriums and sports arenas; they called it the Preconstruction Tour. This was their home turf, where they had come from and still felt most comfortable. Lori Blumenthal, who first got to know the band as a college intern working for I.R.S. Records’ distributor, A&M Records, in the early 1980s, had scored a job with R.E.M.’s label by the time Fables of the Reconstruction came out, and she was impressed by how much energy and time the band, who were, as she recalls, “pretty much rock stars” by 1985, put into college radio stations. On tour they were always eager to drop in on campus stations, do whatever interviews were desired, and stick around to chat afterward. “They had a passion for college radio, because they helped [the band] come up, and they were passionate about the bands who got played alongside them,” she says. “And they were important to college radio, because [the band and the medium] had grown together and lifted each other up.”[1]

  But the growing buzz around the band made it feel a little like a farewell, a series of graduation ceremonies. MTV sent a reporter to Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where they were appearing that night, to see how the band’s most committed fans, college students, were feeling about all the new attention R.E.M. was receiving. The guy spinning “Carnival of Sorts” at the school’s radio station seemed delighted. “We played them because we like them,” he said. “If they’re becoming popular, it couldn’t please us more.” After the show, another fan broke down the music’s appeal: “They talk about dreams. They talk about things inside us that we don’t always think about.”

  Interviewed before the show that same day, Peter and Mike also talked about their connection with college students. Peter: “It’s one of three things: they have more leisure time, more money, or they take more drugs. I haven’t decided which one.” The host, sensing the sound bite forming in front of him, asked if they’d worked out the answer yet, leading Peter and Mike to shoot back, reflexively and in unison: “More leisure time!”[2]

  * * *

  —

  Production on a video for “Can’t Get There from Here,” the first single to be pulled off the album, took up a week in late May, most of the work being done by Michael, who codirected with his University of Georgia friend Rick Aguar. They came up with a silly art school twist on the usual MTV formula: a compilation of rural roadside food-stand signs (boiled peanuts, etc.), A Hard Day’s Night–style sequences of Michael and Jefferson Holt leaping streams, rolling over hay bales, and sitting in a puddle coated in red Georgia mud, and footage of the band dancing and riding in old cars to a drive-in theater where they seem to watch a film and hurl popcorn at one another. And more: a globe, held aloft, then tossed across a stream. Wild animals on the hoof and wing. Backlit figures dancing, wielding hammers, playing horns. Occasional lines of lyrics in subtitles. Holt peering fishily at the camera over a pair of aviator shades. Cars in motion, movie projectors spinning. It was the most elaborate video they’d ever attempted, a confused and confusing explosion of seemingly everything Michael and Aguar could think of.

  MTV opted not to put the clip in heavy rotation, but it aired on occasion, and the world’s most powerful vehicle for popular music found other ways to feature the rising young band, most often in news reports about their whereabouts, some larger-than-usual college shows, and the release of the new album. “It seems to have more of a feeling of place about it,” Peter told the cable channel’s cameras in a sit-down interview with Mike that spring. “It feels like it was made in a specific place, down in the South, whereas our other records could have been from almost anywhere, really.” This, of course, came with a built-in punch line, because where was Fables recorded? Peter and Mike answered, and cracked up, once again, in unison: “London!”

  * * *

  —

  Making such an American album in the heart of England carried a certain poetic justice for Peter. From the moment reporters, or anyone, would listen, he had been grousing about British acts, and the way so much music made in England, Europe, and elsewhere had crowded American music out of the marketplace. “American bands don’t get signed, American bands don’t get promoted, American bands don’t get played on the radio,” he told the British magazine Sounds in the spring of 1984.[3] A few months later he expanded on his plaint for Record magazine back home. “There’s deeply heartfelt music being made by American bands that most people in this country are ignoring,” he wrote. “I’m moved by music made by real people for real reasons.”[4] Peter had a distinctly non-mainstream kind of music in mind—he name-checked Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, and Mission of Burma, among others—but he and his band were on the leading edge of a wave that was just gathering force.

  Peter’s ears were tuned to the fringes, as usual, but that upsurge in American consciousness would soon elevate them all. You could see it building momentum on MTV in 1984 as Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. album lobbed “Dancing in the Dark,” the first of its handful of smash singles/videos, all constructed around distinctly American sounds and ideas. John Cougar Mellencamp’s Scarecrow and Tom Petty’s Southern Accents did the same thing in 1985, when former Creedence Clearwater Revival leader John Fogerty’s long-delayed comeback album, Centerfield, arrived and promptly climbed to the top of the album charts. Rising alternative bands including Lone Justice and Los Lobos drew on distinct regional forms of Americana, and when MTV turned its attention to the upswell in domestic pop music for the Fourth of July with its 1985 All-American Rock N’ Roll Weekend, R.E.M. was prominently featured. And though none of the mainstream acts could be mistaken for a musical wing of the Reagan administration—Springsteen was particularly explicit about being the face of an American character that opposed the president’s form of patriotism—R.E.M. presented a distinctly alternative cultural grounding that resonated with a younger, increasingly restless audience. One whose patience with the prevailing culture of the 1980s was wearing thin. And whose size and tastes would soon become transformative.

  * * *

  —

  The wave of publicity, on top of the band’s years of effort, paid off. In most cities, demand for tickets had pushed R.E.M. into theaters and amphitheaters with capacities of three to five thousand or higher. The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, in Portland, Oregon; the Paramount, in Seattle. The Cullen Performance Hall, in Houston; the UIC Pavilion, in Chicago. Minnesota’s St. Paul Civic Center; the Leroy Theatre, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The Greek Theatres of Berkeley and Los Angeles, and Radio City Music Hall, in New York City. They didn’t always fill the halls, and there were a few cities where ticket sales lagged noticeably, but that just meant they had more work to do, more shows to play, more interviews to conduct. And if there were a lot of things the members of R.E.M. weren’t willing to do to sell records, they were definitely up for making themselves available to newspaper writers, TV cameras, and anyone else with access to readers, listeners, or viewers.

  Along with the multiple appearances on MTV News, band members spoke to, were photographed by, and/or appeared on video on dozens of occasions, including an endless array of local newspapers, both dailies and weeklies, magazines of every size, readership, and geographic scope, radio stations up and down the dial, and television programs on national network and cable systems, local broadcast and cable, and, what the hell, cable access channels, too. In Los Angeles, Mike spent a couple of hours talking about his band and introducing videos by other artists (“This is ‘Perfect Kiss,’ by New Order!”) on the local cable music station KWHY-22.

  At the start of the summer tour, in early July, Mike and Peter promoted the night’s show at Portland’s Schnitzer Hall, appearing on ABC affiliate KATU’s afternoon chat show Two at Four, where they sat around a coffee table fielding questions from the amiable host, Jeff Gianola (“First of all, how do you describe the name R.E.M., what does that stand for?”), and young audience members. Among them was Marshall from Portland, who noted that their singer, Michael Stipe, “has been termed pretty vague.” He went on: “Do you guys have any messages you’re trying to get across? Because the imagery in your lyrics is, um, pretty vague.” Peter nodded thoughtfully. “The songs are pretty personal; sometimes they are a bit oblique,” he said. “But I think one gets the meaning, and the heart to the songs, when you listen to them.”[5]

  More cities, more shows, more interviews. Some interviewers were more formal, meeting a deadline and working from notes someone else had typed up. They tended to be older. The younger ones, the ones who not only knew what they were talking about but felt it, leaned in closer, hoping to make an impact. In Vancouver, Michael sat with a young reporter who had some sharp questions to ask and tough observations to make. What did Michael think about the pro-American feeling that had been coming out in so much music? “Well, that has two sides to it,” the singer said. “One of them is kind of Reaganistic, jingoistic, patriotic America that is pretty much a facade. The other one is this mythological America that doesn’t really ever exist. Or doesn’t seem to exist. We’re probably dealing a lot with the latter.” The guy nodded and moved on. He’d been listening to Murmur recently, and this time it struck him as naive. Actually, what he said was “incredibly naive.” Michael took that in and nodded. “Yeah, that’s the word that pops into my head, too.”

  The singer was wearing a Skoal chewing tobacco hat pulled low over his eyes, and glasses. He looked at the interviewer and blinked, girded for the next one. “Is the sound of R.E.M. bucolic art rock?” Uh-oh. Now Michael frowned. He didn’t care for that at all. “Well, that’s a dumb term,” he shot back. The guy was taken aback, you could see him wince, but he also stood his ground. “Well, I don’t know. There’s a certain pastoral thing about the music, but it comes from people of a university background, in a university town.” Michael smiled but shook his head, still bristling: “Well, what does that have to do with art rock? To me art rock is like Genesis and Procol Harum. What do you mean by art rock?”