“Disturbance at the Heron House” tells an Animal Farm–like parable about a failed rebellion against an oppressive government, and “The End of the World…,” which starts with four machine-gun-like drumrolls, rockets forward with staccato urgency, unspooling the whole riotous scene, earthquakes, wars, TV news, religion, patriotism, heroes, villains, and who knows which is which, all flashing by at the speed of a TV remote clicking around the television omniverse. Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline, he cries near the end, but the world keeps right on spinning, hurtling into its uncertain future at breakneck speed. And yet the possibility of transcendence persists. The speed-waltzing “Fireplace” alludes to the ecstatic dancing of the Shaker communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and “King of Birds” ruminates on existence to the exotic twang of a dulcimer.

  Song to song to song the guitars sparkle, the bass pulses and thrums, while the drums lock into the groove even as they remain loose enough to swing. The textural embellishments, from Los Lobos saxophonist Steve Berlin’s honking assertions to the dulcimer to the found sounds that pop in here and there, add even more dimension to the music. Michael’s performances have also gained clarity and depth. Whatever self-consciousness he might have once felt about standing at the fore has vanished. His lyrics straddle the poetic and the sharply observed, and he takes full advantage of his strong, resonant voice, as fierce on “The One I Love” as he is sensitive on “King of Birds.” It was as if the purposefully murky image of themselves that R.E.M. had been projecting for half a dozen years had finally snapped into focus.

  Document’s combination of pop hooks, rock grit, and thoughtful, arty elaborations hit, and hit hard, on every level. “The One I Love” took pop radio by storm, elevating R.E.M. all the way to the ninth slot on Billboard’s Hot 100. The album climbed nearly as high, just entering the top ten and selling a million copies in the space of four months, enough to earn platinum sales status. Both were helped along by the similarly focused video, whose director, Robert Longo, employed a visual vocabulary that combined the steamier side of southern gothic with doubled images of flowers and fireworks and quick, tight shots of Bill’s sticks on his drums and Peter ripping at his guitar strings to underscore the impact of the song’s opening seconds. This time MTV embraced the video, broadcasting it to its millions of viewers at least a dozen times a day, every day, for months on end.

  * * *

  —

  Two months before Document was slated for release, I.R.S.’s national publicity director, Cary Baker, composed a letter to Jim Henke, the editor of Rolling Stone. The two-page missive got right to the point: R.E.M.’s fifth album was coming out at the end of the summer, and the label, along with the band, was pulling out all the stops to make sure this record would launch the band as a fully fledged mainstream act. And, he continued, “once the record is out, the tour is crossing America and the songs are on the radio, it may finally be time for a Rolling Stone cover story.”

  Every record company publicist on the planet wanted to get their acts onto the cover of the most prominent popular culture journal in the United States. But in the course of eight numbered paragraphs, Baker made an exceptionally strong case. Start with the fact that Lifes Rich Pageant, the band’s most recent album, had earned the acclaimed band its first gold record and launched “Fall on Me” to the top of the album-oriented radio charts while also making a respectable impact on contemporary hit radio charts. Then consider how Rolling Stone’s readers had voted R.E.M. and Pageant into the top three of the Band of the Year and top four of the Album of the Year lists, while the magazine’s writers voted it into the number six slot of their year-end poll. And while RS had chosen not to publish a feature about R.E.M. or anything beyond a review of Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986, the band had made the covers of nearly half a dozen of Rolling Stone’s competitors, including Spin.

  The new album, he predicted, was “the most accessible and vexing work R.E.M. has ever recorded,” and more than strong enough to fuel a popular breakthrough. And he had more: Dead Letter Office, the collection of B-sides and leftovers I.R.S. released in the spring of 1987, had climbed to number fifty-two on Billboard’s album chart despite having next to no publicity. Then there was R.E.M.’s star turn in the Athens, Ga.: Inside/Out documentary and the recently released collection of the band’s distinctly inaccessible music videos, R.E.M. Succumbs, which was making a surprising amount of noise on Billboard’s videocassette chart.

  Baker saved one of his most potent sales points for the letter’s second page, and it had less to do with R.E.M.’s commercial hopes than it did with Rolling Stone’s. The growth of college radio, and the rest of campus media, had obviously made a big impact on the magazine’s publisher. Sensing the existence of a large and largely untapped readership, the magazine had taken after the college audience with a vengeance, publishing special college issues and devoting significant chunks of regular issues to collegiate concerns. So Baker played his ace: “R.E.M. is the #1 college act of all time.”[8]

  Baker’s letter made the desired impact. Five months later, the cover of Rolling Stone’s December 3, 1987, issue was dominated by four serious, half-shadowed faces gazing out from under the magazine’s red title, and alongside the large white cover line describing who, and what, they were:

  R.E.M.

  America’s Best Rock ’n’ Roll Band

  29

  Conquest

  It makes sense that it’s Mike Mills doing the talking. Michael Stipe sits right behind him, face alight as he shakes his bandmate’s hand. The singer’s hair is long again, the curls backlit, while the big, not quite sheepish grin on his face seems to light him from the front. It’s an up-and-coming young man’s smile, just a little bit prankish as he shakes and shakes and shakes Mike’s hand (the bassist eventually turns to him and says “That’s enough” as he reclaims his paw), at which point Michael starts waving to the camera, waving and waving and smiling and waving, and he’s being silly, but also happy to be where he is, and proud to be here, too.

  “Hello, Warner Bros.,” Mike says. “Welcome to New Orleans, the sun and sin capital of the world!”

  They are not in New Orleans; this is a videotaped introduction made in the summer when they were working on their new album in Woodstock, New York—where, Mike makes sure to point out, they’re working hard on R.E.M.’s new album. “Which we’re thrilled to be putting out with all of you.” They did two takes of this intro; in one Michael is waving; in the other he’s just sitting there, beaming, and they’ve been edited so it blinks back and forth, lending a whole other layer of ironic distance to the spiel, though Mike is in no way being backhanded, or even tongue-in-cheek, when he holds up a quarter-inch instrument cable that is still looped to the brand-identifying cardboard packaging, which Mike points at with a drumstick, thwacking the name for emphasis because, he says, this is what they’re looking for with this new record: conquest. So much so that Michael says the name with him in perfect synchrony, nodding for emphasis: “Conquest.”

  It’s all new songs, Mike continues. “And it’s great stuff. And I hope you like it as much as we do, and, uhhh, I hope it’s big. Big, big, big.”[1]

  * * *

  —

  There’s that way people describe how things change: slowly, and then all at once. It’s a cliché, but only because it’s so often true, or at least it describes the way people perceive change. Anyway, it’s also how R.E.M., after spending half a dozen years with the not-small-but-also-not-big independent label I.R.S. Records, came to sign a multi-million-dollar deal with a major label.

  * * *

  —

  At first, signing a contract with a major-label record company was such a remote prospect it was easy to dismiss. It was already amazing that anyone would come to see them play, let alone pay for the privilege, let alone want to hear the songs they made up, let alone pay them to record a couple of their tunes and release them on vinyl. That was so crazy at first that it was impossible to imagine it going much further. “We’re serious about what we do,” Peter told the University of Georgia’s Red & Black newspaper in May 1981. “But we’re doing it for fun. This really isn’t a big career for us. Whatever happens, happens. That’s the big thing. We’re doing this because we enjoy it.”[2] And wasn’t that the point of the whole enterprise? It still sounded that way three years later when The Red & Black profiled the guitarist on the eve of Reckoning’s release in 1984, a year after the full-length Murmur had won so much acclaim and then, how could this be, sales in the low six figures. “As long as you can keep on playing, that’s privilege enough,” he said. “Everyone would like more money, but I’m not sure I’d want to sell a million records. A million records might make it one of those situations that might not be fun.”[3]

  Which wasn’t to say they didn’t have their eyes on what the future might hold for them. They just wanted to be realistic about their hopes and not bite off more than they might want to swallow, as Peter acknowledged to a reporter from Musician in 1983. “We’re kind of unassumingly ambitious, in that we never do anything expecting any kind of feedback,” he said. “We just do things to please ourselves—we write to please ourselves, record to please ourselves, do the cover, hand in the record and then we think, ‘Hmmm, I wonder how this is going to do?’ And we still wonder—we still talk about how many records we want to sell. ‘Okay, no more than this many, because more than that and it starts getting kinda bullshit.’ ”[4]

  And as far as Peter was concerned, he told Trouser Press magazine, R.E.M. had already gone as far as they would ever need to go. “To me, ‘making it’ means being able to play and make records, having people appreciate your music, and enjoying what you’re doing. Right now, we’ve made it. If we went on like this forever, I’d be happy.”[5] And that was in 1983, just as Murmur was coming out.

  * * *

  —

  The I.R.S. contract they signed in early 1982 called for one EP and five full-length albums, and though they at first resisted making the sort of records that would pop on Top 40 radio, and refused to make watchable videos at the height of MTV’s power, and would rarely tour as the opener for bigger bands whose audiences would have been likely to fall hard for their tuneful indie sound, each of R.E.M.’s albums sold significantly more copies than the one before it. Once Lifes Rich Pageant went gold, Jay Boberg and the rest of the I.R.S. executives knew their years of work and dedication to the band were going to pay off, almost certainly in a profound way. When the band started work on Document, the final album in their contract, Boberg and his team campaigned hard to get their fast-rising act signed to another contract.

  Actually, the I.R.S. executives, including company president Miles Copeland, had been trying to extend R.E.M.’s contract for at least a couple of years, offering to give the band a richer deal immediately if they agreed to extend their contract for another few albums. But the band, following the counsel of manager Jefferson Holt and attorney Bertis Downs, didn’t take the bait. They’d stick with the deal they had and trust that their album-to-album sales would continue to move in the right direction. In the United States, anyway. Because as far as they could see, I.R.S. was doing a terrible job selling the band overseas. And this, for the members of R.E.M., was a problem.

  In 1985 they had taken two swings through Europe and the UK and were consistently underwhelmed not just by the sizes of the audiences they faced but also by the amount of promotion that I.R.S.’s overseas distributor, CBS International, had done to draw attention to their records and shows. Again and again, Peter complained, he’d wander the streets of the cities they were about to perform in across England and Europe and not find any evidence that R.E.M. existed or that they were about to perform in town. “I’d go into stores in, like, Germany and not find our records, or else they’d be filed under miscellaneous ‘R’ or whatever,” Peter said in 2017.[6] Bill noticed the same thing: “It was a little disheartening to go over there and you go to Germany and there aren’t posters at all. You play to like two hundred people and there are a lot of American GIs stationed over there.”[7] And for R.E.M., even in 1985, that wasn’t good enough. No matter what they said about it in public.

  * * *

  —

  In 1986 Mike shrugged off the suggestion that his band might want to become bigger stars. “It’s not our design to be really big. It’s not a goal,” he said. “We just make as good a record as we can and hope that it satisfies us first and then satisfies our audience. A small increase over the last one is enough for us. If a record breaks any bigger than that, that’s fine. There are a lot of bad things that come with a huge, successful album.” He listed a few of them. Being called a sellout was one. Having to perform in sports arenas was another. “I mean, a lot of people are going to scream if [Lifes Rich Pageant] is a big success. But we didn’t do anything different than we usually do.” You can’t please all of the people, especially the ones who’d had to stomach all the acclaim R.E.M. had received in the preceding half dozen years. “I think that people get sick to death of hearing how good we are. All the acclaim we’ve gotten from critics has just really turned a lot of people off. They look for the first thing they can find that reeks of sell-out.”[8]

  * * *

  —

  They kept working, and working, and working some more. Track their progress from 1983 to 1984, 1985, 1986, and then 1987. They’re like an army on the march. Bigger halls. Bigger crowds. Bigger reactions. Bigger numbers tracking the units they were shifting. And even bigger talk: about making a hit single, about selling a million records, about touring basketball arenas. Big, getting bigger, nothing to stop them from being even bigger than that. All the while they would shake their heads, roll their eyes, and say things like…

  “Everything that’s big is bad.”[9]

  That was Michael talking to MTV in 1986. So was that why he wasn’t interested in making a single that would get played on the radio and maybe even become a hit? Michael shrugged. “I don’t think radio deserves me. Yet.”[10] A year later, after R.E.M. had launched a single and an album into the top ten and were well on their way to selling a million copies of Document, Michael still shrugged it all off. “I don’t like big things,” he said to MTV’s Year in Rock wrap-up at the end of 1987.[11]

  * * *

  —

  And yet that was the year the band’s self-composed narrative began to shift, when annoyance over the prospect of becoming successful started to get edged out by annoyance over people who assumed they weren’t successful. That they were little more than an overhyped cult band. “I don’t know any cult bands that sell four or five hundred thousand copies of a record,” Mike told the Toronto Globe and Mail just as Document was coming out, in August 1987. “It’s just a case of a tag sticking, which I don’t mind, except that’s the excuse radio programmers use not to play our records. They say ‘they’re a cult band and you can’t understand any of the words.’ Well, that’s a bunch of crap.”[12]

  * * *

  —

  For Mike, success only made it all better and better. And better. Achievement had always come naturally to him, which was part of why Bill Berry had loathed him so thoroughly when he first encountered Mike in school. But once he got to know him, Bill realized that the teenage bassist, for all his natural abilities, wore his talents with a casual élan that made him good company and a wonderful coconspirator. Mike didn’t need to brag or condescend to others to shore up his sense of himself. He knew who he was, and that he was capable of things that not everyone else could do. But that didn’t mean he had to lord it over you. Mike was comfortable enough inside his skin to be kind and to live with his decisions and even enjoy himself, no matter how absurd his circumstances became.

  R.E.M.’s growing success may have triggered an existential crisis in Michael; it might have spurred Peter to make like a rock ’n’ roll wastrel, walking the midday streets of Athens in his pj’s and robe, sipping Budweiser like some kind of bastard scion of Keith Richards and Brian Wilson; it might have irritated Bill’s skin and made him so expert at locating, and then vanishing through, back doors that his nickname within the band became “I Go Now.” But Mike never doubted what they were doing, and never worried about how it was changing him. Maybe because the life he had come to be living was only a slightly different version of the one his father had once dreamed for himself.

  That was the crucial thing: that Frank Mills had never stopped singing, and never stopped wanting to sing for others. Even after his glory years with the U.S. Army chorales and then the Atlanta Singers, he always made certain he had an outlet for his music. Most often with the church choir, but he also had a friend who played piano and they’d team up to play standards at retirement homes, veterans’ centers, or anywhere that people liked hearing the good old songs. He didn’t mind the attention, of course, Frank had a big personality and loved to see the glow of his talent reflected in other people’s eyes. And when his older son centered his life on music, his father couldn’t have been more delighted. Both the Mills parents, Frank and Adora, would come to the shows and know all the songs, singing along as they watched their son working his bass and pitching in his harmonies. After the show, Frank would be backstage buttonholing his son’s friends, hoisting a cocktail and reveling in the moment. “I think he loved everything about it,” says Mike’s close friend Tony Eubanks. “He was proud of his son and his son’s band, not only for their success but how they carried themselves.”[13]