In retrospect, it’s easy to see that what happened here was a disagreement, a misunderstanding, about semantics and the definition of art rock. But in the moment it was just awkward. For the interviewer, at least. The guy stammered, explained that he wasn’t talking about prehistoric art rock…said something about folk art and a naive sensibility, you know, Howard Finster? The sound of the familiar name made Michael relax a little, and the interview tacked back to a more companionable territory. Michael didn’t like doing interviews. All that talking and explaining got on his nerves.

  * * *

  —

  Even in the spring before Fables came out, a new narrative about R.E.M. started to develop. Taking note of the larger crowds at their shows and the increasing buzz around the stubbornly indie band from Athens, now reporters wanted to know: Would success spoil R.E.M.? The story reached Entertainment Tonight over the summer, and in August the nationally syndicated show sent a crew and reporter to Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall, where they shot the band in concert and pondered the group’s ascent. “There’s even a fan club!” the narrator marveled. Michael, sitting on the tour bus with his hat turned backward and several days’ growth of beard on his face, conceded that nightclubs had an intimacy, a certain atmosphere, that bigger halls didn’t have. Then he thought more and cracked himself up. “But they also have carpets that smell terrible, and I don’t miss that at all.”[6]

  A tension emerged. What did the growth of the band’s audience mean for its original, core supporters—the fans they’d greeted, and often talked and partied with, as friends? A large part of the band’s appeal to their first fans had been how different they were. And what would all these thousands of new fans make of the songs that drew inspiration from literature and outsider culture, that painted unsettling scenes and asked uncomfortable questions, usually in a secret language of symbols and phrases that even the most committed listeners could only guess at? More casual fans would be mystified, assuming they even tried to figure out what was going on.

  On yet another interview in front of another camera, Michael and Peter addressed the same question from slightly different perspectives. Michael fretted about the risk of approaching a larger audience, what might be expected, what they might have to sacrifice. In fact, he said, he’d prefer that the I.R.S. publicists limit outreach to the audience the band already had. “Because we’re not really willing to change.” But Hüsker Dü was on a major label, and so were the Replacements, so maybe…Peter broke in, helpfully: “The mainstream changed, but we’re still just us.” And did they still consider themselves underground? Michael responded instantly: “I do.”[7]

  You could see them debating the issue for themselves, among themselves, in real time. Peter, who spent more time talking in front of cameras than any of his bandmates, talked about the importance of maintaining an adversarial relationship with the media. Or at least with the music industry—radio, the record companies, all of that. “We’re on the outside looking in,” he proclaimed. “We have to work in our own way…If we sell a million records, I’ll still feel on the outside.” From there they talked about what might come next. Sitting under the lights with the cameras trained on his face and the microphones pointed in his direction, Peter felt expansive. “I want to do blues stuff. I want to be a great band. I want to be on the Johnny Carson show.”

  Michael: “We don’t want to do Pepsi commercials.”

  Peter: “I was offered a Pepsi commercial, and that was one thing I decided not to do. I’m not a Pepsi commercial actor. There are some things I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a Republican.”

  Michael: “We don’t want to go on Dick Clark.”

  Peter: “I dunno, I might want to do that. I mean, we went on Solid Gold. It could be fun!”

  * * *

  —

  Released in the United States on June 11, Fables of the Reconstruction was an instant chart topper on the college radio airplay list. It stayed at or near the top of the CMJ chart for much of the rest of the year, becoming the most popular album in the chart’s history. The record peaked at number twenty-eight on the Billboard chart, a notch lower than what Reckoning had achieved a year earlier, but sales remained strong for months, lifting Fables close to 300,000 in sales during its initial run. A healthy jump over the previous album, which in turn had sold far more than Murmur. The sour mood that hung over the recording sessions clouded the band’s sense of what they had achieved with the album, but once again, reviews were almost uniformly positive, and once again the CMJ voters awarded R.E.M. with its Album of the Year honors, and were this time thanked by the band members in person. Mike did most of the talking behind the podium, thanking Holt, Downs, and everyone at the Athens office and, it seemed, nearly everyone he could think of. Except the album’s producer, Joe Boyd. Watching back in London, Boyd had a realization. “Well, I won’t do the next album, then.”[8] He was right.

  26

  What If We Give It Away?

  A quick flashback. It’s April 5, 1984, the fourth anniversary of Kathleen O’Brien’s birthday party, and three members of R.E.M. are sitting in the grass next to beat-up old St. Mary’s on Oconee Street, being interviewed by Debi Atkinson, from Athens’s Observer TV. Atkinson, who once lived in the same group house as the band’s singer, is perched on a red blanket with Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills, marking the four years the band has been together: where they’ve been, where they are, where they’re going. It’s an easygoing, celebratory exchange, with plenty of inside jokes.

  “I have a question for Peter,” Michael says near the start. “What really happened on this very spot four years ago on this very day?” The guitarist laughs. “That shall remain a secret,” he proclaims. “Some things are better left unknown.” Michael, poker-faced, points toward the street. “Pan to the van.” There’s no van parked there now, but there was one in 1980, and apparently Peter spent a little time inside of it before their first show, possibly not on his own.

  Peter’s more eager to talk about his distaste for the “wonderful rumors” that are circulating about R.E.M.’s members. “Like Michael’s disappeared or is raising monkeys in the Tibetan hills, that we’re all millionaires now, or that one of us has a terrible drug habit and is about to be hospitalized…none of which are true.” But the guitarist seems delighted to be the subject of such feverish contemplation. As Peter knows, it means that they’ve worked their way into people’s imaginations. This doesn’t seem like an accident. Both Peter and Michael have affected the otherworldly look of modern troubadours, the guitarist shaggy-haired, with sunglasses, a worn denim jacket, and a silk scarf around his neck. The singer’s chestnut curls fall over his own denimed shoulders, his bangs blowing across his clear-framed, tinted glasses. But the problem with dressing to be noticed is that once people see you, they want to come up and say hi. “People should realize that it’s the last thing you want to talk about when you’re having dinner out, or if you’re at Walter’s [Bar-B-Q] or at a movie,” says Michael, who hears himself complaining and turns to address the camera with a smile. “That’s my big gripe! For today!”

  But increased popularity offers as many opportunities as it does problems. Talking about the prospects of the long-form, abstract music video being made by Jim Herbert seeing airtime on MTV, Peter acknowledges that it’s unlikely. “If we sell two million records, they’ll play anything we put out. Not that we’re planning to sell two million records.” Do they want to hit the top, Atkinson asks, or are they happy on the plateau they’ve already reached? Michael: “It’s a pretty good plateau.”[1]

  What’s compelling is that this talk of reaching for the top is more than a fantasy. Just four years after that first party, R.E.M.’s blend of artistry, ambition, and luck, and their willingness to earn starvation wages while spending weeks, months, and years on the road while subsisting on fast food, beer, and pharmaceuticals and sleeping on people’s floors, has put them in this position.

  “We’re really happy selling 200,000 records at a time,” Peter says. “[But] you’re always kind of ambitious. You always think, well, gosh, you wish that one more person had bought the record, and then everyone you see who hadn’t bought it, you kind of wish they owned it. And I definitely wouldn’t mind the money. But I certainly don’t want to be famous. I don’t know if the trappings that come with selling x millions of albums is anything we’d want.”[2]

  Or maybe they would. Of course they would. After all, being that successful—being a damn rock star, with all the money, fame, and power that come with the gig—gives you license to do nearly anything you want to do. Go anywhere, meet anyone, say exactly what’s on your mind. To live as far beyond the bounds of society as you care to. And, most important, to make the art you feel like making.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of 1985 they still faced the same questions, from an even higher perch in the pop culture galaxy. Where would they go next, what kinds of songs would they write, and how should they record them? Who did they want to appeal to, and why? Were they an art band like Pylon, an arty party band like the B-52’s, or arena-scale rock heroes like U2? More than strategic, the questions felt existential. Vexed both by the external gloom of wintertime London and the internal murk that came from five years of uninterrupted grinding down the rock ’n’ roll road, they had nearly come apart.

  It wasn’t surprising that Michael had taken it the hardest that year. Standing at the front of the stage, projecting fire and tumult through his chest every night, with all those eyes locked on him, made him all too aware of how unsettled he was about what he was doing. From where he was standing, it wasn’t just the band; it was him. Was he an artist or a rock ’n’ roll star? A celebrity or a social-critic-slash-commentator-slash-activist? And why did he want to be any of those things? Then they finished the Fables record and started playing again, and at first he looked like he wished he could be anywhere else. At the start of the summer tour, Michael stood stiffly behind the microphone stand, wrapped in a shapeless overcoat, tightly shorn head cradled in a broad-brimmed hat and eyes shielded by impermeable round sunglasses. But they played their way through the summer and into the fall, greeted again and again by cheerful, enthusiastic fans, virtually every hall crackling with energy, the eyes radiant with fascination and warmth, and by the time they got to the Rockpalast live music program in Germany in October, he had emerged from his shell. The hat was gone, and his hair, while still obviously dyed, was now a glossy platinum. The shapeless overcoat had vanished too, replaced by a stylish blazer and T-shirt, in which he cut a fine figure as he danced with the songs, moving easily in the spotlight.

  * * *

  —

  This time they took the winter off, spending the first months of 1986 at home in Athens, enjoying the fruits of the year they’d spent touring theaters, selling far more tickets than ever before. Each musician received a significant check for his share of the tour profits, and an even greater sum in performance and publishing royalties from the sales of their record. The total amount wouldn’t have been enough to make a real rock star blink, but for a quartet of young musicians who had never had the cash to move out of the sort of group houses and apartments frequented by college students, it was enough to transform the texture of their lives.

  Peter was the first to buy a house, an older but not ill-kept yellow clapboard home with a big front porch and enough room out back for the swimming pool he had installed, and the others eventually followed suit, setting down real roots in the Athens soil. They all found extracurricular musical activities to keep themselves busy, Peter performing with his new side group, Full Time Men, and Bill and Mike playing sets of covers with Bill’s old friend and former R.E.M. guitar tech Gevin Lindsay in the Corn Cobwebs. Peter also made a practice of hopping onstage with virtually any band or artist who asked him to come up and jam and signed up to spend one day a week back at his old job, working the counter at Wuxtry Records, taking his pay in records. The guitarist grew his hair until it hung down thick and dark, almost like Joey Ramone, the dense shag of a bone-deep rock ’n’ roller. To emphasize his creature-of-the-night vibe, he took to wearing pajamas and a bathrobe throughout the daylight hours, walking around town like he’d just padded out of bed, though it was maybe four o’clock in the afternoon. Also he’d be carting around a tallboy can of Budweiser, because he was a rock star and had made enough money for the arms of the clock to no longer restrain him.

  Mike lived the dream life of a different kind of teenager. He got a house on a quiet residential street off Prince Avenue and invited his friend Tony Eubanks to move in with him. Eubanks, who had come to the university to pursue a graduate course in accounting while having as much fun as possible, was an elite Ultimate Frisbee player and sports obsessive who earned his living tutoring high school kids in mathematics. Eubanks could talk politics and baseball, two of Mike’s passions, and he had a way with women and knew how to party, two more of Mike’s most avid interests. And if the musician wanted to go to Atlanta to see the Braves or get in a round of golf somewhere, or a softball game somewhere else, Tony was almost always up for it, so they traveled as a pair, these grown-up boys about town who were approachable and friendly and ready to have a good time.

  Bill bought a house just a few blocks away and settled in with his girlfriend, Mari, whom he’d met and fallen for at a show in 1984. The couple, who would get married in 1986, oversaw the renovation of their home while Bill spent his free time pursuing various musical interests, playing in his cover band with Mike and Gevin Lindsay and writing and recording songs for his own amusement. One of these, “My Bible Is My Latest TV Guide,” a satirical country song, would eventually be released under the pseudonym 13111, which, if you look at it carefully, spells “Bill.” The drummer played most of the instruments and sang over the banjo and pedal steel with a country crooner’s twang. Drinkin’ beers and flippin’ stations / It’s my strongest inclination.

  Michael bought his own house just around the corner from Mike’s, spent his free time traveling to sing with Anton Fier’s band the Golden Palominos, and assumed the role of Athens arts community leader by consulting for the producers of the documentary Athens, Ga.: Inside/Out, steering the filmmakers to capture the work and lives of friends and heroes, including the poets Chris Slay and John Seawright, artist/filmmaker/art professor Jim Herbert, and the folk artist Howard Finster. Michael also got his bandmates to agree to play for the filmmakers’ cameras, gathering on the stage of the tumbledown Lucy Cobb Chapel to play the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” and an acoustic take on a haunting new ballad called “Swan Swan H.”

  * * *

  —

  The musicians also met regularly to work on new material, crafting a small handful of songs that built on the growing melodicism they’d displayed on Fables’ “Wendell Gee” and “Green Grow the Rushes,” while Michael’s lyrics took on a new political awareness that resonated both as humanity and idealism. Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up, he sang in one song. Trust in your calling, make sure your calling’s true, he sang in another. The songs were a little trickier than they first seemed. Michael’s skepticism of fame and idolatry made his narrators less than entirely reliable. They didn’t come up with a full album’s worth of new stuff, but a quick sift of the better tunes from the band’s early days, including some that went as far back as mid-1980, yielded two or three bar-tested rockers that added punch and a boyish wit to balance the more serious new ones. Together they made for a compelling blend, with songs that described the darkness, songs that called out for hope, songs that shrugged it all off and headed for the dance floor, and songs that somehow did it all in three-plus minutes of electric, fast-moving rock ’n’ roll. Was it the best thing they’d ever done? Maybe so. Was it as good as anything else you could hear on the radio? They certainly thought so. Was it even better than that? That was for other people to judge. But first they needed to make a record that was too powerful for mainstream radio to ignore.

  Now the stakes were rising. They’d worked so hard for so long. Put so much of themselves into their music, into making their band the best it could be, into writing songs that felt vital and alive and maybe even important. Of course they wanted people to hear them. And not just a few people. Peter had made that clear that day outside the church during the interview with Debi Atkinson. “I mean, I like our records enough that I think people should own them. So I guess that means [I] do want people to buy eight million copies.”[3] They’d taken a significant step in that direction with Fables, and it didn’t feel like they were compromising anything. So why not keep going?

  Surely there had to be a way to both enhance the power of the new songs and reach out to new fans without sacrificing the band’s uniqueness. A way to draw the attention of mainstream listeners without shrinking themselves into the lowest common denominator. And it wasn’t as though everything on the radio was awful; when word came that the producer of John Cougar Mellencamp’s records was interested in working with them, the band was standoffish at first, then intrigued. Of course they knew the rootsy Indiana rocker’s songs; his singles “Jack & Diane,” “Pink Houses,” and “Lonely Ol’ Night” were part of a chain of hits he’d sent into the top ten in the past few years. The songs weren’t anything like what they were doing, but their sound was both powerful and distinctive. A weave of traditional instruments and modern rock instruments that resonated with a huge audience without copping to the sonic tropes that defined so much of the 1980s pop mainstream.