They spent the next three months playing medium to large auditoriums in most cities, performing to crowds typically ranging from 2,500 to 5,000, with a few 10,000-seat venues thrown in. In Nashville they played the 4,400-seat Grand Ole Opry, then they were booked into the 10,000-seat City Coliseum, in Austin, and the 4,950-capacity Mesa Amphitheatre, in Mesa, Arizona. They drew more than 6,000 to the Universal Amphitheatre, in Los Angeles, more than 9,000 to the UIC Pavilion, in Chicago, and then played back-to-back shows to the 5,600-capacity theater then called the Felt Forum, at New York’s Madison Square Garden. In city after city, the crowds pressed so tightly against the stage that the shows had to be paused so Michael could urge the fans to back up or in some way tend to the injured. During the encore on the first night in New York, he stopped singing “Driver 8” to help lift a woman to the stage and escort her backstage for assistance. He returned to say it seemed she’d suffered a broken rib, then led the band through a dispirited cover of “Femme Fatale” and ended the show.

  Security became more important. Not just out front, where the crowd would get so worked up they’d all but do one another in to get closer to the band, but onstage and offstage, too. Playing larger venues required the band to carry a larger sound system, a sizable lighting rig, multiple screens, and projection gear for the onstage light show that now accompanied the band’s performances, so the road crew expanded to more than two dozen, plus management staff, personal assistants, instrument techs, trucks, buses, multiple professional drivers, and whatever friends the musicians asked to keep them company on their travels. Reporters, photographers, and camera crews cycled in and out too. Getting the gear in place, set up, plugged in, turned on, and made ready to do its job required dozens of workers and precise attention to detail. A litany of new rules and policies came into play, including a tiered system of backstage passes and access limitations, particularly for the musicians’ dressing rooms and lounges. “It got more businesslike,” says tour manager Geoff Trump. “That’s because a tour is a business. And in that period you had to create boundaries where the artist had their space and their time, and the guys on the crew did their thing. But it begins to get a little more impersonal.”[3]

  The tour came to a climax just before Thanksgiving with three shows at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre. Almost exactly six years had passed since they first performed at the theater, playing twenty wide-eyed minutes to warm up the crowd for the Police. Now the Police were a memory, broken into angry shards after their 1983 tour, and the band that had once opened for them had sold out the same theater for back-to-back-to-back shows.

  28

  Things We Never Thought Would Happen Have Happened

  The Athens, Ga.: Inside/Out documentary opened in Athens a week after the end of R.E.M.’s 1986 tour, a few weeks before Lifes Rich Pageant’s sales officially crested 500,000, reaching the Recording Industry Association of America’s threshold for gold status. The B-52’s had sold more than a million copies of their first album and passed the mark for the gold record award with the next two albums, making them the most commercially successful Athens-bred musicians at that point. But the Bs had also relocated to New York when they signed their first record deal, in 1979, so while they appeared in the film reminiscing affectionately about their early days, they spoke as veterans of a time that had faded into memory. Now R.E.M. represented the apex of the Athens art/music scene. They were why MTV broadcast the film nationally on the night of its Athens premiere, and why I.R.S. Records released the accompanying soundtrack album, which launched local club bands the Squalls and Flat Duo Jets to the upper reaches of CMJ’s college radio charts.

  Michael’s and the band’s authority radiates across the film. Director Tony Gayton and producer Bill Cody had found it difficult to connect with locals until R.E.M.’s singer met with them and volunteered his band’s services, at which point all the doors in town swung open. Gayton hired University of Georgia art professor, local artist, and R.E.M. video director Jim Herbert to be his cinematographer. Many of the people featured in the film, including Howard Finster and the poets Chris Slay and John Seabrook, were friends of the singer. Jeremy Ayers, Michael’s onetime lover, leader of the recently disbanded group Limbo District, and an influential figure in Athens’s bohemian circles for a decade, served as a consultant on the project. Michael and Peter Buck both speak on camera—the guitarist shows the camera the Elvis-themed bathroom in his house, and the singer sets up a song performed by Reverend John D. Ruth and his wife and does a little dance for the camera (“This is how Popeye exercises!”)—and the four band members perform twice, taking their acoustic instruments to the stage of the Lucy Cobb Chapel to play “Swan Swan H,” then, over a concluding montage of the film’s interviewees, a Michael-and-Mike duet of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.”

  The implication for the faces flashing over the sound of the increasingly successful R.E.M. was obvious. At the end of the year Michael would seem nearly stunned by how far he and his three bandmates had been carried by the dream they had dreamed for themselves. “Things we thought would never happen have happened,” he would tell MTV that December for the channel’s Top 100 Videos of 1987. The interview segment would set up the clip for one of the band’s most recent songs, one that, unbelievably enough, took them into the top ten of Billboard’s Hot 100 singles. “And I’d say we’re at a real crossroads right now, in a lot of different ways.”[1]

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  The first step on R.E.M.’s road to the top ten took place at the end of November 1986, when the members of R.E.M. gathered to record a song for the soundtrack of Love at Large, a romantic comedy directed by Alan Rudolph. Digging again into the sack of disused originals from the band’s first few months, they came up with “Romance,” an ardent, upbeat rock song with snapping drums, an assertive bass line, and one of Peter’s simple but memorable guitar riffs. At first they figured to have Don Gehman behind the controls, but the producer, who was busy with John Mellencamp’s next album, begged off. Instead, he suggested, they could work with Scott Litt, a thirty-two-year-old engineer from the Power Station studios, in New York City, who was building a career as an independent producer. Litt didn’t have a lot of solo production credits yet but had coproduced the hit single “Walking on Sunshine” for Katrina and the Waves, helmed a record for the dB’s, and mixed an album for Mitch Easter’s band Let’s Active. With only one song to work on and the clock ticking, the band gave their okay, with one condition: they would have the authority, and credit, of coproducers. Litt didn’t have a problem with that, so they met at Soundscape Studios, in Atlanta, on November 28, the day after Thanksgiving, and got to work on “Romance.” It wasn’t the song that would elevate them to the upper reaches of the Top 40, but the day after that they had the song in the can, a coproducer for their next album, and a new sense of possibility.

  As they had done the previous year, R.E.M. took most of the winter off, the members largely devoting themselves to side projects. Peter, Mike, and Bill went to Los Angeles to back Warren Zevon on his Sentimental Hygiene album and did so much jamming on cover songs with the singer, tape rolling, that they wound up with enough material to construct a Zevon-Berry-Buck-Mills album under the moniker Hindu Love Gods. (The self-titled album would not be released until 1990.) Michael also traveled to Los Angeles to record, contributing backing vocals to an album by the band 10,000 Maniacs, with whose singer Natalie Merchant he had been spending quite a bit of time.

  The band also got together to work on new songs, and in early February they spent a couple of days recording demos at John Keane Studios, in Athens, including a revised version of a tune Michael had performed a few times with the Golden Palominos, called “Finest Worksong.” As performed by the Palominos, the song had a pensive, coiled sound, and a bridge with lyrics about a Judas stone and marching off to sea. In R.E.M.’s hands the song became thunderous: pounding drums, grinding guitar, and slapped bass notes behind a steely Michael vocal. The Judas-stone bridge, and anything beyond the barest essentials of rhythm and a monochromatic melody, had been excised, seemingly to draw focus to the urgency in the verses. Take your instinct by the reins…What we want and what we need has been confused. There was a message in there, and it had nothing to do with dreaming.

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  At the end of March the band met Scott Litt in Nashville and prepared to make a new album. They rented a big house to live in, the four musicians, their producer, and Jefferson Holt. When they weren’t recording, Michael relaxed by working in the garden out back, while Bill, Mike, and Peter went out to see music or just grab dinner and have a few drinks. Young guys on the town with plenty of cash and a healthy appetite for fun. When Bill got into it with Sound Emporium engineer Gary Laney over who made the best guacamole, they bought a huge sack of avocados and other supplies, plus tortilla chips and a couple of cases of beer, and invited everyone in for a competitive guac-off. “It was all creative and fun,” Litt says of the time they spent in Nashville. They’d start in the studio at about 11 a.m., work straight through until 8 p.m. or so, grab a bite, and either head home to rest or go back to the studio for another couple of hours. “When we weren’t working, we were getting amped up to do more work.”[2]

  Michael also spent some of his free time exploring Nashville with his camera, taking black-and-white photographs that he developed and posted around the studio, along with architectural images of Works Progress Administration–era buildings and other similarly imposing structures. Something about monochromatic images, particularly ones that evoked the heroic ideal of the mid-twentieth century, resonated with his growing vision for the album. Getting deeper, he brought a video monitor into the control room and played Olympia, the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s icily composed documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, propaganda for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. They alternated this with footage from the 1954 Army-McCarthy Senate hearings, which ended Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade and led to his censure by the U.S. Senate. “It’s a very black-and-white record,” Litt says. “It’s a singer, a guitar player, a drummer, and a bass player. And nothing gets in the way of that. They’re strong in their identity; their personalities are coming through.”[3] But their personalities went beyond the simple voice-guitar-bass-and-drums instrumentation, and Litt helped the musicians incorporate keyboards, a dulcimer, a Fairlight synthesizer, and an array of found sounds, including crickets, the clatter of the manual typewriter Michael used to write lyrics, and snatches of dialogue from the McCarthy hearings.

  The mood of the photographs and the videos seeped into the music, giving some songs the flickering light of an industrial furnace and others the clang and bang of a factory. Oppression looms, sometimes through governments, sometimes through more intimate arrangements. “The whole album is about fire,” Michael told Musician magazine that fall. “About everything you think about fire as being cleansing, or something that destroys everything in its path.”[4] One song seemed to burn a little brighter than the others. It was taut, tight, blazing from the slam-bam drum pickup that triggered the opening guitar riff, a jagged four-step run up the neck that repeats before Michael belts the first line: This one goes out to the one I love / This one goes out to the one I’ve left behind. And there it was, alive in the light of its paradoxes. Love and rejection. Dedication and abandonment. Power generated, power wielded, power abused.

  “The One I Love.” Titles deceive, words don’t always mean what they seem to say. The song’s two verses are abrupt—four short lines, including one line that repeats. The second verse reprises the first, the third does the same, except for one line that shifts to the past tense. And when the words run out, another repeats: Fire! Four letters stretching over three syllables: Fiiiii-yuuuhhhhh-huhhhh. Not much of a narrative when viewed on the page, but, coupled with Peter’s seething guitar, it says it all, and then some. “We’d play that to people when they came in to hear what we were up to,” Litt recalls. “And it sounded killer. You just knew.” Litt knew, anyway. That this song, for all its rock ’n’ roll snarl, could play alongside the hookiest pop songs on the Top 40. Whitney Houston, George Michael, Madonna, take your pick. Nothing on the air sounded more electric or more immediately memorable. “It was too much fun to listen to,” Litt continues. “It was infectious. And everybody felt that way.”[5]

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  Throughout the 1980s the MTV music video channel served as the locus of pop music and, to a great extent, Western popular culture. Drawn from some combination of the Beatles’ 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night, the Monkees’ mid-1960s TV sitcom, teen dance shows like American Bandstand, and no small amount of musical theater, the most popular videos emphasized glamour over musical verisimilitude. Guitarists flailed at unplugged instruments atop towering desert mesas or, as with Bryan Adams, at the bottoms of drained swimming pools. Singers spilled their hearts from the bows of yachts cutting across Caribbean seas or while dancing amid choreographed street gangsters in a subway station. Sometimes they pretended to make music where music might actually be made—on a stage or in a recording studio—which seemed to give viewers a glimpse into the moment of creation. Wherever, the point of the form was to distill the essence of the song or the performers and translate it into visual shorthand for what made the music so exciting. That’s what MTV’s viewers wanted to see, time and again, and the channel’s size and cultural ubiquity guaranteed that a popular video could sell a song, and an artist, with unprecedented speed and impact. But time and again R.E.M. refused to make videos MTV would consider adding to its playlist.

  If anything, the band’s videos seemed designed to show their contempt for MTV. Apart from the clip they made to accompany “Wolves, Lower,” in 1982, the band, and particularly Michael, refused to be filmed lip-synching to their songs. They tried one compromise with “So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry),” pairing shots of Peter, Mike, and Bill feigning to the recorded track behind translucent screens while Michael stood in the open, performing a new vocal for the camera. But in every other video they made, the visuals accompanying R.E.M.’s music had little or nothing to do with the songs. When the band members appeared on camera, they were usually nowhere near their instruments. They toured sculpture gardens and chatted with old men in trucker hats. The hurtling train song “Driver 8” was set to footage of locomotives rounding a bend and pulling into a rural station, greeted by unglamorous men in work clothes. When the band incorporated stage performance footage, it was blurry and pointedly not synchronized with the rhythm of the song being heard. Even as R.E.M.’s songs gained punch and even as Michael stepped forward as a singer, the band continued to produce videos that all but insisted MTV’s programmers avoid them. The clip Michael directed for “Fall on Me” consisted entirely of black-and-white footage of an Indiana quarry. Shown upside down. When Don Gehman, who produced Lifes Rich Pageant and had particularly high hopes for the song’s prospects as a single, first saw the “Fall on Me” video, his reaction was succinct: “Oh, fuck.”[6]

  For Jay Boberg and the rest of the I.R.S. staff, the band’s resistance to making accessible videos grew more frustrating as R.E.M. started to play larger halls and sell more records. “Fall on Me” cracked radio playlists across the country and became popular enough to spur occasional airings on MTV. But four minutes of upside-down quarry footage was a tough sell for the channel, no matter how catchy the song. “Can you imagine what would have happened with that record if we’d had an arty but watchable video with Michael singing in it and the band playing?” Boberg asks. The executive did his best to convince the singer, describing the way a hit video could raise the band’s profile and break them overseas in countries they hadn’t been able to play in yet. But Michael’s artistic sensibility leaned toward the avant-garde, and he liked pairing his band’s music with visuals that challenged the audience’s expectations. Maybe because being in a band with a good shot at having a hit song that would land them on MTV’s heavy rotation playlist challenged his own expectations. “I had those conversations with Michael. I knew it was Michael we had to convince. And we sat there and had very long and multiple conversations about what the impact would be if we could get a video. But we weren’t successful. And part of what made him such an interesting figure was that he’d do that to himself.”[7]

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  They called the new album Document, as shorthand, Michael said, for documentary. We use the term most often to describe filmed journalism, the weaving of fact, anecdote, and other documentation into a narrative. But as ever in the quicksilver consciousness of Michael Stipe and R.E.M., fact and meaning can shift from one moment to the next. The fire imagery weaving the songs together (the original vinyl edition had File Under Fire written on its spine, an answer to Reckoning’s File Under Water) lends a chaotic air to the piece: lovers detached, societies in flux, nations at odds, the planet on the brink. Whether we’re teetering toward destruction or renewal is unclear. As one song title puts it, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” It could go either way, it seems. For now the only thing to do is buckle up and try to hang on.

  Released on August 31, 1987, the album kicked off a new era for R.E.M. in appropriately determined form with “Finest Worksong,” the grinding martial stomp that worked both as an anthem to a worker revolt and a mission statement: The time to rise has been engaged. Most of the songs look beyond such personal matters. “Welcome to the Occupation” describes the toll of economic imperialism in South America (Sugar cane and coffee cup / Copper, steel, and cattle…Fire on the hemisphere below), while “Exhuming McCarthy” takes on hyper-patriotic scoundrels such as the titular senator, whose anticommunist investigations proclaimed fealty to the U.S. Constitution while shredding the rights the charter supposedly guaranteed.