His producer, Don Gehman, had also made records with Stephen Stills and the Stills-Young Band in the mid-1970s, and all had the same clean, timeless sound the members of R.E.M. hoped to hear on their next album. Gehman wasn’t an R.E.M. fan; in fact, he was a little skeptical of their brand of murky artiness. But he agreed to see the band perform near the end of the Reconstruction Tour, then meet with them in Athens and help them work on some songs at a local studio. The producer spent a few days with R.E.M., recording demos that, to the ears of the band members, had a power and clarity that suited their ambitions for their next record. Gehman signed on to do the album, and R.E.M. prepared to get to work.

  * * *

  —

  They went to Indiana to work at Mellencamp’s Belmont Mall recording studio, a new facility he’d recently had built not far from Bloomington. Gehman arranged for R.E.M., Jefferson Holt, and their assistants to stay in some condominiums Mellencamp owned at the Eagle Pointe golf course, next to Lake Monroe, about ten minutes from Bloomington and twenty minutes from the studio. The remote location was a hit with the band, who liked being able to focus on their work without distractions.

  Bloomington was a college town, the home of Indiana University, and its array of bars, restaurants, and shops catered to the musicians’ tastes and interests. The lakeside/golf-centric condominiums were perfect for Bill and Mike, who brought their golf clubs and rented a boat so they could start their days with a round on the links or an hour or two of fishing. Peter would hoist a pole from time to time, and the whole band, plus Gehman, engineer Ross Hogarth, and band assistant Curtis Goodman, tended to stick together after the sessions when they went into Bloomington to eat dinner and hit the bars near campus. Delighted to have the members of the nation’s most popular college band in their town, the IU students greeted the musicians as something between heroes and old friends. “Those guys were stars to the college kids,” Hogarth recalls. “But they were also one of them, so we all had a great time.” The engineer was even more impressed by the closeness of the musicians. “Those guys were really connected; they were really friends. They dug each other and hung out.”[4]

  Much of the instrumental work in the studio went smoothly, and quickly. Seasoned by their years on the road, the three instrumentalists laid down the basic tracks easily, sometimes with Michael singing a scratch vocal along with them. Then they’d work to enhance the songs, overdubbing additional guitars, keyboards, and other effects. This process began with all three of the musicians, but Mike took the lead, and eventually it came down to the bassist/multi-instrumentalist working with Gehman and Hogarth to add new layers and textures to the songs. Realizing how conversant Mike was with other instruments and how inventive he could be, Gehman brought in a pump organ for him to fiddle with, and then a set of water glasses the bassist and Hogarth filled with different levels of water so they’d hum different notes when they ran their fingers across their rims, playing the set like a harmonium.

  “I realized early on that this guy was the secret weapon,” the engineer says. “Anything that was orchestrated in some interesting way would be him. He’d be coming up with countermelodies, cool organ parts. Then he’d talk to Don about his counter-vocals and harmonies. That impressed me, because in a lot of bands the bass player is done when the bass parts are done. The drummer and bassist just take off, they’re off in town. But Mike and Bill were there every day, and the band always worked as a unit. Bill would come up with stuff and cheerlead whatever was going on, and Mike would be scheming different parts.”[5]

  For Gehman, the band’s gradual way of building their records, letting the songs evolve during the recording process, at first grated against his impulse toward productivity and efficiency. He was used to working at a pace of about a song a day, building a basic track with everything but a few overdubs and perhaps a finished vocal by the time they closed up shop at the end of the evening. But R.E.M. was accustomed to a more fluid process, sometimes rewriting the songs when they were half recorded. “It was hard,” Gehman says, “because producers are supposed to be under budget and on time, and I.R.S. wanted hits. But their process seemed aimless. [Eventually] I learned the beauty of it: once I realized everyone was really talented, I realized that if I didn’t relax and let it flow, it’d never come to fruition.”[6]

  The most difficult part for the producer was trying to convince Michael to put more effort into polishing his lyrics, and then sing clearly enough to be understood by even casual listeners. “I was definitely pushing Michael to make more narrative sense,” Gehman says. “I can remember laying on the couch in the studio saying, ‘What are you trying to say here? I’m frustrated.’ I definitely didn’t want to make another moody, abstract record. I wanted [the lyrics] to be concise and punchy, and have the listener feel like they’d been through something. And he pushed back. He’d get angry: What does it matter? I like these words, I like how this feels! I’m not gonna make a record that is some stupid pop thing! That was a daily discussion, as I recall.”[7]

  They never fought, per se. “He was so genteel, there was never any screaming,” Gehman says. “But it was as close as you could get to arguing with him.” Instead they both found ways to adjust to the other’s style. “He could see I would have his voice up loud and there’d be no doubt about what he was saying.” Hogarth, the engineer, was a part of those conversations, too. “Telling Michael, look, these are amazing lyrics, let the people hear them! I mean, listen to those songs. ‘Cuyahoga,’ ‘Fall on Me.’ There’s so much to those lyrics.” Feeling more at ease in his role as the band’s front man, and increasingly interested in investing his lyrics with political and social statements, Michael continued working. “And at the end of the day he’d come in with lyrics that would be amazing,” Gehman says. “And his melodic sense and the sound of his voice would make things blossom. I relaxed, and he admitted later, maybe even during the process, that I was having an impact.”[8]

  * * *

  —

  The I.R.S. executives flew in to visit and have a listen. Boberg, who worked most closely with R.E.M., was delighted. “I felt like it was a major step,” Boberg says. “The songs were great, the lyrics were clearer, there were a few songs that were constructed to maximize the melodic punch in a way that other songs…that I had suggested [earlier] songs could have been, were not. I was excited.”[9]

  Miles Copeland, on the other hand, still wasn’t sure. “I played him the record,” Gehman recalls, “and he said, ‘Uhhhhnnn, maybe you’ve got something here.’ But he was hoping for something more like Fleetwood Mac.”[10]

  * * *

  —

  They finished the album in May and headed back to Athens for their first summer apart since before they came together in 1980. All resumed their various side pursuits through the end of July, when they reconvened to rehearse and sit for round after round after round of interviews to promote the new album. In contrast to the heavily freighted title of their previous album, they titled this one Lifes Rich Pageant, after a throwaway line from the Pink Panther movie A Shot in the Dark, delivered by Peter Sellers just after Inspector Clouseau tumbles into a fountain and climbs back to his feet, dripping wet. “It’s all part of life’s rich pageant,” he says philosophically. R.E.M. trimmed the apostrophe from “Life’s,” for Stipeian reasons that are impossible to parse, but the cheerful sense of resignation in the face of potential humiliation shone through.

  27

  Life’s Rich Demand

  September 10, 1986, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. The theater goes dark, the crowd roars, and onstage the show starts with a shout from Mike Mills, One-two-three-four!, triggering a sharp downbeat from Bill Berry. Then, wham, the whole band blasts into “These Days,” the deceptively sardonic call to duty from the new album. It’s the opener for every show this year, and no wonder: the song starts at full throttle and doesn’t let up. Now I’m not feeding off you, I will rearrange your scales, Michael Stipe begins, and he belts every word like a preacher whose faith is as fervent as it is ambiguous. He’s dressed all in black, lurching around the stage in a black stovepipe hat that seems lifted from a nineteenth-century medicine show. But the band rockets him forward, volume, clarity, and velocity that sound like stone-cold belief. Mike’s supporting vocal shouts are so ardent, a call for happy throngs to absorb his joy as their own, that they feel like a stirring invocation.

  Volume, clarity, and velocity. Rock ’n’ roll at its most. Mike’s fingers flying up and down his fretboard, his shoulders moving to the rhythm as he staggers backward, slides sideways, then snaps forward to sing, looking sharp but still comfortable in a pressed button-up shirt and vest. On the other side of the stage, Peter flings perfect runs and chords out of his black-and-white Rickenbacker, even as an invisible current sends him sprawling one way, then veering another, then launches him into the air, dropping him back to his feet to meet the downbeat of the next verse. Bill at the drums, a factory of rhythm. The sound is electric, and the charge they send out comes right back to them from the audience, which roars for the opening notes of “Sitting Still” and gives a solid cheer to “Hyena,” also off the new album. A few more songs, with barely a pause between them, and then it’s “I Believe,” another anthemic rocker from the new album that catapults the crowd upward to cheer Michael’s spiky declarations of belief and purpose. I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract! He yanks the microphone forward to face the audience, his band blazing behind him. Volume, clarity, velocity.

  I believe my humor’s wearing thin / And change is what I believe in.

  * * *

  —

  Lifes Rich Pageant announces its squirrelly intentions with the first notes of the first song, a quick, snaky guitar riff that triggers the stomping, feedback-laced rocker “Begin the Begin.” Singing in a taut but tuneful growl, Michael wields his impressionistic pen on his nation’s conflicted present through the lens of its checkered history. Here’s Myles Standish leading the slaughter of the natives; here’s the brutalist authority of money, the moral compromises dictated by fear and convenience. Here also, the perpetual hope for renewal. Let’s begin again, he declares, a bold assertion he undercuts in nearly his next breath: I can’t think clearly…I can’t even rhyme, here in the begin. This traces the tension at the heart of the record: the singer’s impulse to lead coupled with his reflexive distrust of leaders, including himself.

  The same contradiction appears in the uproarious “These Days,” whose narrator alternates idealistic exhortations (We are hope despite the times!) with unsettling admissions about his motivations, and in “I Believe,” with its calls to faith (You’re on your honor…trust in your calling) ringing alongside inexplicable shout-outs to wild dogs and theoretical physics. “Just a Touch,” one of the 1980 rebuilds, recalls Elvis Presley’s death in a rollicking tumult of disconnected memories—shock, public mourning, and youthful incomprehension—ending it all with a drawn-out cry of I’m so god…damned…youuuuunnnnnggggg…his purposeful echo of Patti Smith.

  The direct evocation of Smith, Michael’s musical-poetic lodestar since his adolescence, opens another door, this one leading to the stark, unadorned emotionality that laces the album’s more reflective songs. The midtempo “Cuyahoga” presents a clear-eyed portrait of the American settlers’ toll on the land they claimed and the people they displaced, symbolized in a river running red, first with the blood of the natives, then with industrial waste. “The Flowers of Guatemala” opens on a delicate circle of arpeggiated chords, the guitar and bass joined by vibes and finger cymbals that evoke a child’s music box. A dream, but for the discordant wail of feedback swelling just beneath the surface. Singing with airy wonder in his voice, Michael conjures a sweet vision: kind, colorful people on a street surrounded by flowers. But there’s something off in this tableau. The flowers are amanita, which bloom at night. An eerie notion that draws a louder wail from the guitar, the sound of a darker truth that, like America’s financial support of the government death squads leaving so many Guatemalan peasants in flower-covered graves, goes unspoken.

  The same construct of plangent music, densely layered instrumentation, and dreamy, fretful lyrics joins with a soaring chorus in “Fall on Me.” First performed in 1985 with a lyric about acid rain, the song was revised by Michael, who improved the melody and wrote new verses that switched the focus to government oppression, evoking Galileo’s experiments with gravity. But if the Italian scientist’s dark fate at the hands of his government comes through in the minor chords pivoting around the verses, the chorus tilts in a more hopeful progression, the chords ascending as the three vocalists pursue separate words and melodies. Michael’s repeated Don’t fall on me is contrasted by Mike’s higher What is it up in the air for? and Bill’s lower It’s gonna fall. The power of the song, which the I.R.S. Records executives identified immediately as the album’s best shot at a radio hit, comes less from the moody grandeur of the music, the comforting folk-rock chime of Peter’s guitars, the warmth in Michael’s voice, or the way Mike’s and Bill’s voices weave with his into such rich harmony than from the way all of those things come together into such perfect balance. As dark as its vision might be, the sound of “Fall on Me” is, ultimately, ecstatic.

  Pageant has a few lighter songs, most notably the album-closing cover of “Superman,” an obscure single from the ’60s that Mike had been singing with his and Bill’s side band the Corn Cobwebs, along with the galloping concert staple “Hyena” and the brief, all-but-instrumental Latin-esque “Underneath the Bunker,” a musical gag that leavens the album’s emotionally dense core considerably.

  * * *

  —

  Released on July 28, 1986, Lifes Rich Pageant hit stores with a significantly harder impact than any of its predecessors. “Fall on Me” went out as a single a week or two later and soon gained a foothold on AOR playlists across the country. The song stalled in the mid-nineties on the Billboard Hot 100, but it became a favorite on rock radio, ultimately reaching the top five of Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart. The airplay juiced album sales, and by mid-October Pageant had climbed to number twenty-one on the Billboard album chart, half a dozen slots higher than Reckoning, selling more than 400,000 copies, on pace to reach 500,000 by the end of the year, at which point it would become R.E.M.’s first gold record. An exceptional achievement for any young band, and even more so for a bunch as stubbornly unconventional as this one was. For all the clarity of its production, Pageant’s songs were both offbeat and distinctive, the work of artists who were busily mining their own unique vision. Nevertheless, some people didn’t care for it. In rock ’n’ roll, certainly when you get to the leftward fringe, where music crackles like dissent, the first murmurs of something like mellifluousness can strike some ears as betrayal.

  “This record is pretty much what you’d expect,” began the review in Spin magazine, then at the apex of its run as the punky opposition to Rolling Stone’s aging hippie authority. “The big news is that R.E.M. used John Cougar Mellencamp’s producer.” The critic, Sue Cummings, was actually happy with the album’s sharper sound, noting how the opening track “rocks right out, with a snare sound that pops like a firecracker, the rhythm guitar packs lead.” But the clarity of Michael’s vocals, and the glimmers of idealism in his lyrics, triggered her contempt. “What a strange burden it must be to be Michael Stipe these days,” she wrote, “middle America’s nouveau-hippy art school urchin turning up regularly at your doorstep to spend his nights on your couch, his days in your garden picking berries in futile attempts to manufacture natural hair dye.” It’s the futile that was engineered to sting, apparently in response to the part of “These Days” where Michael sings, We are young despite the years…We are hope despite the times. Cummings didn’t seem to catch the eruptions of silliness in the song that continually deflate the narrator’s proclamations, e.g., for heaven’s sake, I wish to eat each one of you. Which would seem to indicate that something a little more complex than moist sloganeering was afoot. But Cummings was too busy mourning the lost obscurities of Murmur to notice.[1] And it wouldn’t be the last time in their career that they’d hear that plaint.

  Other critics had similarly critical, if more deeply considered, complaints. Tom Carson, writing in The Village Voice, located a disconnect between the political/social observations in Michael’s lyrics and the persistent haziness in his writing. “The sounds of challenge, possibility and change all work as pleasant sensations, but nothing more,” he wrote. What resulted, Carson continued, was “an uncritical preference for sentiment over thought…(if something can’t be mythicized, it doesn’t exist for them). This is the emotional syntax of Reaganism, pure and simple.”[2]

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  —

  The Pageantry Tour kicked off on September 5, 1986, at the 10,500-capacity Oak Mountain Amphitheatre, just outside Birmingham, Alabama, before heading back to the band’s springtime residence in Bloomington, where they packed the Indiana University Auditorium with 3,200 cheering fans who had come to see R.E.M. as hometown favorites. Stories about the band fanned out across the mainstream media, landing them on the covers of magazines like Spin, Creem, Tower Records’ in-house publication Pulse, and Rock Bill.