* * *

  —

  Julie Panebianco met R.E.M. in 1983 when she was still at Boston University, writing occasionally for Boston Rock magazine and for the city’s Phoenix alternative newspaper. Entranced by “Radio Free Europe,” Chronic Town, and then Murmur, she arranged to interview the band when they got to Boston, and they all hit it off. The musicians invited her to come with them to their show in Providence, Rhode Island, so Panebianco jumped into the van, beginning a friendship that continued after she graduated and scored a marketing job for Warner Bros. Records, focusing on the label’s growing list of alternative music acts. Panebianco worked out of the company’s New York offices but made occasional visits to the central headquarters in Burbank, California. And that’s where she was in May 1987, just when her friends in R.E.M. were in a nearby studio putting some finishing touches on the Document tracks. Panebianco stopped over to say hi and hang out.

  She was taking in the action when Jay Boberg noticed the visitor, figured out who she was, and made straight for Jefferson Holt. The two spoke urgently for a minute, Panebianco recalls. Holt nodded and whispered something to Peter Buck, who sighed and shrugged. Then Holt went up to Panebianco and, as gently as possible, told her it’d be a good idea if she left. He didn’t explain why she had to go, but when Peter took her out for drinks later, he told her the whole story: R.E.M.’s deal with I.R.S. was about to end, and the last thing Boberg wanted was to have employees of competing record labels hanging around recording sessions his company was paying for. Up to that point it hadn’t even occurred to Panebianco that she might have any role in signing artists to Warner Bros., or any label. But, still burned by the scene in the studio and jazzed on margaritas, she went home and wrote a memo to her boss, telling him how R.E.M. was up for grabs and that I.R.S. was nervous.

  Two weeks later she was strolling into her New York office when the receptionist flagged her down: company president Lenny Waronker, her boss’s boss, was looking for her. She had barely met him, and they’d never had a substantive conversation, but that clearly didn’t matter to Waronker. “He didn’t ask how I knew them; he just knew I knew them really well,” she says. “And he said the company was absolutely interested in landing them.” Waronker left her with one standing instruction: “If they ever invite you to go anywhere with them, you go.”[14]

  Set loose with a company credit card and carte blanche to go anywhere and do anything that would shore up her friendship with the members of R.E.M., Panebianco became a consistent and generous presence, going to multiple shows on their 1987 tour, taking the musicians out to dinner, picking up their tab wherever they were drinking, and occasionally introducing them to friends who, as it turned out, were also Warner Bros. Records executives. When they played Radio City Music Hall that fall, Panebianco came to the show with Karin Berg, the A&R executive who specialized in Warner’s slate of alternative artists. “Michael was so excited, because she’d signed Television and Hüsker Dü,” she says.

  When the tour got to the final stand of shows in Atlanta a month later, Waronker arranged to go with Panebianco. The Warner president was knocked out by what he saw, and when she introduced them all after the show, the band members were happy to meet him, too. Waronker, as they knew, had started his career as a record producer and had helped make dozens of landmark records, including longtime Peter favorites such as Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle, Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys, and Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” single.

  At the beginning of 1988 the band, along with Holt and Downs, started scheduling meetings with executives from an array of record companies including I.R.S., Warner Bros., Arista, Columbia, and several others. When the industry gathered in New York for the Grammy Awards at the start of March, the band and its representatives came to the city for a week of meetings. Warner Bros. had a head start thanks to Panebianco, who served as a conduit between the band and her bosses. “Peter would be telling me what they wanted, and I’d tell Karin and Lenny,” she says.[15] Warner Bros. Records chairman Mo Ostin, Waronker’s boss, was in New York for the Grammys, and the company’s two top executives came to Panebianco’s small, crowded office to talk strategy before their first official sit-down with R.E.M. When the band arrived, the executives seemed to forget that they were there to talk business, instead leading a freewheeling bull session about music and the records they all admired.

  For Peter, who had been following Warner’s artists since he was a teenager, it confirmed a long-standing sense he had that the label was uniquely committed to its artists, and to music that ventured past the mainstream tried and true. Now they were all learning that the company’s leaders were simpatico, unlike the executives they’d met who were quick to badmouth the other companies or tried to sell themselves in ways that made the musicians wonder what they were thinking. “Clive Davis [the former head of Columbia Records, then with Arista] showed us a little film about himself and then was like: Any questions?” Peter recalled in 2017. “And we were like…What the fuck?”[16]

  They still entertained offers from other labels, but the talks with Warner became more serious when the band flew to Los Angeles and had a longer, more focused meeting with Ostin and Waronker in their Burbank headquarters. Peter was further impressed by the company when he stepped out of Waronker’s office, got promptly lost on his way to the men’s room, and poked his head into an open office door to ask directions. “These five hipster-like kids were sitting around an office listening to music and they told me where the bathroom was, and one of them said, ‘Hey, why don’t you sign with Warners, we love your band.’ And I was like, ‘Okay!’ So whoever she was…that helped a little.”[17]

  As the talks with Warner Bros. picked up steam, Jay Boberg and Miles Copeland tried to figure out how to hang on to the act they had spent most of the ’80s building into platinum sellers. The thought of R.E.M. slipping from their grasp led to intense stress and a nauseating sense of incipient heartbreak all over the company. “Listen, that relationship was so cherished, and so important to us, and so authentic,” Boberg says. “We had all grown up together, and we were peers. We were never going to outbid Warner Bros., and we were never going to outmaneuver them with our offices around the world. What we could offer them was to achieve the same result but in a manner in which they would have their process and their decisions fully respected and supported.” But as Boberg and his colleagues were learning, Warner Bros., with their old friend Panebianco on board, could give them a version of that, too. “Julie really was the critical link,” Boberg says. “If they hadn’t felt comfortable about [the Warner staff], they wouldn’t have been comfortable leaving.”[18]

  Warner Bros. had a lot of money to offer. But money, according to Peter, was never the decisive factor for the band. Ostin and Waronker were among the most admired executives in the industry, not just for their company’s financial success but also for the quality of their records—Warner and its subsidiaries either were or had been home to groundbreaking artists including Neil Young, Van Dyke Parks, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and Prince, as well as R.E.M. contemporaries/friends like the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, and Los Lobos—and their willingness to stick with artists for years, even decades, if they liked the music they made. Everything they said about being committed to their artists’ creative freedom was confirmed by the Warner artists R.E.M.’s members spoke with. And the company also had one of the largest and most powerful distribution systems on the planet. Unlike I.R.S., which depended on CBS International to sell its records overseas, the Warner executives controlled virtually every aspect of their company’s record production, packaging, national and international distribution, and promotion in-house. All that, plus a five-album deal reported to be worth somewhere between $8 and $10 million, sealed the deal. In April the news became public: R.E.M. was now signed to Warner Bros. Records.

  In retrospect, maybe that’s exactly where they’d been heading the entire time. Love Tractor bassist Armistead Wellford never forgot the twinkle of the Telecaster stud he saw in Peter’s earlobe as he crawled through Kathleen O’Brien’s closet on April 5, 1980. That guy’s a rock star!, he’d thought. Kit Swartz, whose band the Side Effects also made their debut that night, sensed the difference too. “They were a breed apart,” he says. “They had a mission, and they just approached it so much differently. They had an agenda. Me, I was just doing it for fun.”[19] Pylon drummer Curtis Crowe, looking down from the perch his band had already achieved by the spring of 1980, saw it from the start, too. “We were tourists visiting the rock star world. But R.E.M. said, ‘We are going to be rock stars.’ And they thought and worked diligently, block by block, till they got to where they got.”[20]

  Part IV

  The Monster

  30

  Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi

  They’d gotten into the habit of using an album’s opening song as a kind of overture, and a commentary on where the band found themselves as they dove into the new record. “Feeling Gravitys Pull” (Fables of the Reconstruction) described a band determined to stretch creatively, “Begin the Begin” (Lifes Rich Pageant) signaled the blossoming of a political consciousness, and “Finest Worksong,” opening Document, sounded like a declaration of unity and professional intent. But the kickoff to their first major-label album required an explanation of sorts.

  Had the 1980s’ most successful indie/art band sold out? Had they sacrificed their edge for fame and fortune? The song launches at full blast, snare cracking on every beat, guitar and bass wham-whamming across a couple of chords, before a razored curl of a guitar riff introduces the singer, who also hit the ground at full speed. Hello, I saw you, I know you, I knew you…Dude is blurting out everything he can think of without pause, without heed, without a clue. Should we talk about the weather? / Should we talk about the government? By the second verse he’s taking it all back—they’ve never met, he has no idea what he was talking about, he’s not even sure who he is. But the come-ons continue, as transparent and ridiculous as the song’s title. Which is the joke, and the point, for a self-described outsider band kicking off its first major-label album. They want to introduce themselves, hopefully to a whole new galaxy of record buyers and potential fans. But of course they do; they’re stepping onto the big stage now, making their bid for pop stardom. It’s all been said and done before, but here it is one more time: “Pop Song 89.”

  Hi, hi, hi, hi, Michael chants as the intro’s careening open riff repeats over and over.

  Hi, hi, hi, hi.

  Hi, hi, hi, hi.

  * * *

  —

  The new five-album contract with Warner Bros. Records provided the band with more up-front money than they’d ever seen. It’s always hard to separate the actual money a recording artist will receive from a major label from the theoretical kind that might come if they hit certain sales targets and finish paying off whatever expenses the company dumps onto their side of the ledger, but still. Signing with Warner Bros. elevated R.E.M. into a new orbit, and as they started work on their next album in the spring of 1988 they could feel the difference immediately. After spending a few days making demos of new songs in Athens, the band moved operations to Memphis in May, setting up shop in Ardent Studios, where their 1970s power-pop heroes Big Star had once recorded. The renowned, if star-crossed, band’s drummer, Jody Stephens, managed the studios now, which made the connection to the past feel real. The Warner Bros. money meant that every band member could rent his own condominium in midtown, though Peter and Michael decided to share a place. They could eat in any restaurant and drink in any bar for as long as they wanted to without worrying about blowing through their per diem.

  More importantly, the Warner Bros. deal provided more than enough income to keep themselves afloat for the year, so they could afford to take a break from touring, focus entirely on writing and recording, and let the new music dictate the pace of the sessions. With the eyes and ears of Warner Bros. on them, and many millions of dollars riding on the outcome, they got to work. “There was definitely pressure to follow Document,” producer Scott Litt says. “But we had a ball there. It was just a little different…a different environment. And the record came out more soulful; there were definitely more instruments involved.”[1] That was the money talking again, in the new instruments Peter and Mike brought in, in the time they spent experimenting with texture, in the side musicians they hired to add strings, pedal steel, and more, and the array of found sounds—crickets, music boxes, more—they invested time in locating, recording, and mixing into the tracks.

  “They were excited to be working at a higher level,” recalls engineer Jay Healy. They weren’t profligate spenders, at least not in the jewels-and-furs-and-sports-cars way. But the influx of cash had clearly changed their outlook. “I think that’s where the title Green came from, in part,” Healy says. “These were people who were buying houses; they weren’t concerned about spending money. It was a different lifestyle they were able to lead.”[2]

  * * *

  —

  Another song, another journey into the sonic beyond. “Get Up” comes storming out of the gate, drums pounding beneath a crisscrossing chord pattern traced by Mike’s wordless vocals on the way to a chugging verse. Here Michael’s perky vocal admonishes the sleepyheads around him (particularly Mike, according to legend[3]) to untangle themselves from their bedclothes and face the day. Particularly when there’s work to be done and your bandmates are waiting, was the unstated message, but before long the song is stopped in its tracks, courtesy of Bill, who contradicts every word Michael has uttered. Because even as the singer was penning his up-and-at-’em lyric, the drummer had a dream about a room full of clocks, or clock sounds, ticking and chiming a gloriously psychedelic sound that came with him into the daylight, and then into the studio, where he and producer Scott Litt hatched a plan to re-create it for the microphones with a dozen wind-up music boxes, all chickering and chiming at once.

  After six weeks in Memphis and Ardent Studios, they took a three-week break, then reconvened in upstate New York, in the rural hills of Woodstock, where they continued working on the new songs. Warner Bros. president Lenny Waronker had heard some of the developing tracks and had a couple of minor notes, but they were on a roll, all working harmoniously, all eager to expand their palette of sounds, feelings, and ideas. Peter had recently bought himself a mandolin, and the instrument’s fluid chime became a central part of a few of the tracks. Mike brought in an accordion, and when he set his bass down to play it, or to sit at the piano, Bill would take up the bass, and they would either overdub the drums later or come up with other forms of percussion. The new instruments pushed the music in new directions, particularly for Peter, whose self-taught, trial-and-error style of learning allowed him to fall into chord changes and modulations that he wouldn’t find on the well-worn fretboard of his guitar. The songs they wrote on their customary guitar, bass, and drums started on more familiar ground, then meandered in unexpected directions, due to either eccentric structural ideas or the melodies and lyrics Michael draped over the top.

  When the instrumentalists presented him with a jaunty set of circular changes that reminded him of bubblegum pop from the 1960s, Michael responded with a lyric he figured was just as dumb, only his idea of dim-wittedness turned out to be quirky and strange and sort of hilarious. Your feet are going to be on the ground, he wrote. Your head is there to move you around. Peter used a wah-wah pedal to give his solo a wonky late ’60s psychedelic sound, and Mike added a circuslike organ that completed the kandy-kolored silliness of it all. “Stand” was born.

  A new sense of possibility was blossoming, and not just for the band. The Reagan administration was entering its final months, and the Democrats’ presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts, was a bookish technocrat who came off like the mirror opposite of the gung-ho Hollywood cowboy who had occupied the White House for almost the entire decade. Dukakis’s opponent, George H. W. Bush, the sitting vice president, seemed like a weak candidate: too geeky to emerge from Reagan’s shadow, but not nearly as smart as Dukakis. It’s always a risk to take up a candidate or a cause: the moment you stand for a cause or a candidate, you risk being let down. But after eight years of feeling alienated from the American political system, Michael was ready to believe in something. “There’s a lot of store-bought cynicism traveling around America these days,” he said. “It was time for an album full of songs that weren’t particularly happy but had an element of hope. Music that’s more uplifting and less cynical.”[4]

  The optimism came less in the text of the songs, which avoided explicit mention of politics or ideals of any sort, than in their openheartedness. In the way their meanderings beyond traditional pop instrumentation and song structure challenged listeners’ sensibilities without being punishingly discordant or maddeningly oblique. There’s a vulnerability in the music, in the hopeful peal of the mandolin and the melancholy hum of a cello, but also in the spoken regrets of an authoritarian leader, or perhaps lover, and even in the lunatic appeals of the man bursting through the door to say all the wrong things. Memories and dreamscapes, apologies and sweet melodic filigree. Increasingly, Michael’s lyrical perspective came from within. He sang about his childhood, he sang about beauty, he sang about his fears and the feelings of love that could sweep over him like a tidal wave. I stayed up late to hear your voice, he sang in one song. I’m not supposed to be like this, he sang in another. You are here with me, he sang. You have been here and you are everything.