He also sang about his father and the wartime haze that had hung over him when he returned from Vietnam more than fifteen years earlier. The band gave Michael a grinding pattern set to a martial beat, and he matched it with a lyric he called “Orange Crush,” a soldier’s impressionistic portrayal of the thrill of battle. The finished track began with a torrent of machine-gun-like snare hits, establishing a groove that played out between Peter’s guitar notes, hanging like tracer fire while the vocalists trade lines, Mike and Bill calling cadence against Michael’s swaggering lead, shouting out his own courage, righteousness, and infallibility. I’ve got my spine, I’ve got my Orange Crush, he sings, invoking soda pop and Agent Orange, the deadly defoliant America sprayed across Vietnam, in one go.

  When the song breaks down halfway in, it heads straight into the war zone, helicopters buzzing overhead, a platoon drilling, and Michael, through a megaphone but only just audible above the cacophony, speaking in the voice of what sounds like a helicopter pilot, circling and circling, seeing everything, not even needing to look because he had it all wired. I knew it all, he proclaims. I knew every back road and every truck stop. He could be speaking with the voice of a Vietnam recon pilot, like his father, or as a road-crazed traveler speeding through the wee hours. Or he could be talking for both of them, the son of the recon pilot psyching himself up for his most daring incursion yet: R.E.M.’s assault on the sports arenas of the United States, Europe, and beyond.

  31

  Are You Ready to Rock ’n’ Roll?

  Another April 5, another show. Nine years had passed since Kathleen O’Brien’s birthday party in the crumbling church on Oconee Street, and other than the four young men making the music, nearly everything had changed. They were in Detroit, seven hundred miles to the north of Athens. They were also performing for more than ten thousand people, all of them on their feet from the moment the lights went out, according to Gary Graff’s review in the Detroit Free Press the next morning.[1] Behind the musicians, the projection screen, which had panned across a scabby landscape while the band sprinted to their places on the stage, shifted to a black screen with tall white letters spelling out Hello. Which worked on two levels, since it’s also the first word in the first song they were about to perform. But a lot of what was about to happen would take place on two levels—as ironic commentary on the tropes and tactics of arena rock, and also as spellbinding arena rock.

  They opened with “Pop Song 89,” the leadoff track for their new album, Green, a crunchy, power-chording portrait of a man, or a band, trying too hard to make a good impression. He’s up for anything—talking about the rain, talking about politics, whatever—and the letters on the screen projected it into the back row: Weather for a moment, then Government, flashing back and forth to underscore the ludicrousness of it all. And yet that made less of an impact than Michael Stipe. Because the singer’s transformation from reluctant front man to rock ’n’ roll demigod was complete. When the band came out at the start of the show, he marched straight to the lip of center stage and faced down the arena. Standing tall in a boxy white two-piece suit, spotlights glinting off dark Ray-Ban Wayfarer shades, hair shaved tight on the sides, a long, ratty ponytail hanging most of the way down his back, he stood there for a long moment, looking utterly impermeable. And also a little absurd, something about that boxy-jacket-and-Ray-Ban combo edged him a tiny bit toward Max Headroom, right up until the band started playing. At which point he erupted. Legs working, shoulders moving, his body electrified by the rhythm. Then he was singing, his authority, assisted by a top-drawer sound system, rippling your diaphragm. All that, and then there was the music at full blast, the lights and the noise, the throngs and the cheers, the trucks and the buses, the vast machinery it takes to put on a show this big. Wrapping his arms around it, kissing it on the lips, and then shoving it away and dancing out of reach.

  * * *

  —

  R.E.M.’s new era began with the release of Green on November 8, 1988. In the next few weeks the album was greeted with good, if not spectacular, sales, and positive if not overwhelmingly terrific reviews. The matter of the band’s artistic integrity in the wake of the Warner Bros. deal still loomed, although the critics couldn’t agree on whether the band had responded to its big break by becoming too commercial or not commercial enough. Arguing for the former was the San Francisco Examiner’s Barry Walters, who began his review (headline: “Simplistic Green May Leave R.E.M. Fans Seeing Red”) by declaring allegiance to the shadowy depths of Murmur (their “first and finest album”), then asserted that the quartet, the “Beatles of college radio,” was so intimidated by Murmur-loving critics and so determined to prove it was something more than a Byrdsian jangle band that the musicians had made a crucial error, opting for slickness and commerciality. “These criticisms have provoked the band to leave behind what has given it its identity.”[2]

  Unless they hadn’t, which was what troubled the Baltimore Sun’s J. D. Considine. “For in its haste to avoid the obvious, R.E.M. has amplified its eccentricities, as if the band were somehow ashamed of its own accessibility.”[3] Steve Morse, writing in the Boston Globe, also worried that the album wasn’t accessible enough: “There’s a general absence of Top 40 material.”[4] Meanwhile, Robert Christgau, in one of the short, sharp reviews he packaged into his regular Consumer Guide column for The Village Voice, went big in both directions, celebrating the “bite of their realest rock [and] the shameless beauty their cult once lived for,” then denouncing the “heavy tempos and dubious poetry” of “The Wrong Child” and the other songs he didn’t like.[5]

  More casual listeners heard something that stood apart from everything else that had been coming out of their radios. The album’s first single, the marauding rocker “Orange Crush,” was a mainstream rock radio smash, reaching number one on Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart. The album sold fairly well for the first month or two, but when Warner Bros. opened the new year with a single release of the jaunty “Stand,” the pop-friendly song that had inspired Michael to compose the silliest lyric he could imagine, the skies opened. Boosted by a sweet, playful video that made great visual hay out of how silly this song by the oh-so-serious indie rock heroes truly was, “Stand” vaulted up the pop charts at an even faster pace than “The One I Love” had, climbing all the way to number six on Billboard’s Hot 100 and pulling Green into the top ten of the album list. The album hit the platinum sales mark easily and kept right on going, passing the two-million mark by the end of 1989.

  * * *

  —

  Planning for that 1989 tour started in mid-1988 and picked up steam in the autumn. In the wake of two top-ten singles, a million-copy-selling album, and a new album on track to sell even better than that, and with one of the world’s most powerful record companies now putting its muscle behind them, prospects for the coming year were well beyond anything the band had previously encountered. Projected audiences in every city ran to ten thousand and beyond, which put R.E.M. into exactly the sort of basketball arenas they had once sworn off playing. Peter had always been the most vocal about his hatred of playing arenas or anywhere larger than a theater, but after Document’s success put them into a few sports venues, including Philadelphia’s eighteen-thousand-seat Spectrum, his position evolved. “We’re successful enough that we pretty much have to play the large places,” he told the Indianapolis music writer Marc Allan in 1989. He rarely enjoyed seeing other bands play arena shows, he admitted. “But I’ve seen Prince in big places, and Springsteen in big places, and I like those shows. There’s a way to do it without selling yourself short or selling the audience short. There’s a way around it. I consider that we’re ourselves, we’re just in a bigger place.”[6]

  R.E.M.’s touring apparatus had grown steadily since they first piled into Bill’s parents’ old station wagon to make that first trip to North Carolina. Now it had become something like a traveling circus. They needed semis to lug the gear and multiple buses to transport the band and crew from city to city, and arrangements for the flights and other forms of transportation required to get all of it, and them, to Japan, Australia, England, and the various European countries in which R.E.M. was booked to perform.

  Dozens of rock bands could fill arenas in the late 1980s, and with so much money in play, an entire industry had grown to accommodate the oversize shows’ many requirements. Now that R.E.M. had joined the arena-size ranks, they expanded their staff to meet their new circumstances. Geoff Trump, who had served as tour manager for the previous few tours, moved over to tour accounting to make room for David Russell, an experienced hand who had managed national and global tours for the likes of Tina Turner, Bon Jovi, and Pink Floyd.

  The band tapped more than two dozen full-time employees, roadies, instrument techs, sound techs, lighting techs, personal assistants, drivers, and others to come with them. That workforce was matched in each city by a crew provided by the local promoter, which was obligated to meet the traveling crew before the show with half a dozen riggers, four truck loaders, six stagehands, a licensed electrician, one forklift driver with forklift, ten stagehands, and two runners with vehicles, along with security guards on all the doors. Four deck hands, a house-lights operator, and an electrician were needed to work during the shows, and the load-out at the end of the night was to be staffed by eight truck loaders, the six riggers, two forklift drivers with forklifts, and even more workers if the stage was farther than twenty-five feet from the stage doors. They also needed caterers to feed and water the band and the workers. Altogether it ran like a small, temporary city, and generated nearly as much revenue. The potential ticket revenue for one night at the Meadowlands Arena, outside New York City—which did not include sales of T-shirts, sweatshirts, concert programs, or albums, the majority of which went to the artist—was more than $325,000. A sellout at the Alpine Valley outdoor amphitheater, outside Milwaukee, could amount to nearly $675,000.

  * * *

  —

  Rehearsals for the tour launched in Athens just after the start of the new year. They hired Peter Holsapple, the singer/songwriter/guitarist from the dB’s, to serve as a utility musician onstage, playing second guitar and keyboards and adding to the backing vocals. In addition to preparing the music, they worked to coordinate it with the visual effects—films, written messages, and more—Michael helped develop for the large projection screens that would loom behind the band during the shows. They’d featured projected backdrops on previous tours, but now that they would be performing for larger crowds, a sizable percentage of whom would be too far from the stage to make out the expressions on their faces, the projections became a more significant part of the show. Particularly when it came to establishing the layers of their intentions as full-on arena rockers.

  The entire production moved to a larger Atlanta rehearsal hall after a couple of weeks, and after a couple of days of work with the full ensemble, the entire group boarded a plane for Japan and the start of what would be a nearly yearlong world tour. They started with two shows in Tokyo’s Sound Colosseum MZA, then moved to New Zealand for three performances before settling into Australia for eight shows over two weeks.

  * * *

  —

  This is how the shows would go: thousands of people in the arena, the band blasting away, one slam-bam song after another. “Pop Song 89” to start things off on a sardonic yet ass-kicking note, then the one-two punch of “Exhuming McCarthy” and “Welcome to the Occupation” to give the show some political/social gravitas. Serious rock ’n’ roll. Then there’d be a break, that moment when Michael, or another band member, was supposed to greet the crowd in that way rock stars always greet the crowd. To have ever seen a rock concert was to know exactly how that was going to go. Hello, Cleveland!, etc., etc. So instead of actually saying the words, they put them up on the screen:

  Hello (your city here)

  Greetings (your city name here)

  We Are the Band R.E.M.

  It’s Great to Be Back In (your city here)

  Are You Ready to Rock ’N’ Roll?

  Great.

  When Michael did talk to the crowd, he’d set up the next song by pointing at some random person in the crowd and insisting that the next one had been written just for you, or making some other obviously lame but stage-tested proclamation. And the screen, meanwhile, had its own rap going:

  What a Giant Place This Is

  Let’s Try to Hear a Pin Drop

  Shhhhh

  Great

  Okay

  Are You Ready?

  (crowd noise)

  Then they’d launch into song, playing with more power, precision, and depth—Holsapple really added another dimension to the sound—than ever before, and there was nothing the least bit ironic about that.

  * * *

  —

  David Russell ran the tour like a military operation, with the roadies all garbed in black, carrying walkie-talkies on their belts like sidearms, every functionary moving in precise accordance with the instructions of the central command. All backstage doors were monitored by security staff, who gave or forbade access to the various levels, halls, and chambers according to the shape, size, and color of the proffered tour credential. True insiders wore a laminated tour pass on a chain around their neck; visitors had silk stick-ons good for that night only, and usually for a limited section of the backstage area. Russell also produced a daily tour bulletin, mimeographed and distributed among the tour personnel and always posted on the walls and doors backstage, to remind everyone what day it was and where they were, with a map of the venue and a sheet of “Mr. Load-In’s Fun Facts” compiling technical details about the venue (the locations of power outlets, door dimensions, wattage and location of house lights, etc.) as well as the name and contact information for the night’s promoter, the local stage manager, the union shop steward, and so on.

  Russell also noted the name of the artist opening the show and the precise timing of their set, which usually began a few ticks less than an hour after the venue’s doors opened and ended precisely forty minutes later. Not forty-one minutes later, and definitely not forty-one and a half minutes later, as the members of Pylon learned when they finished the first of the fifteen shows they opened on the tour. “We rehearsed and rehearsed to get a performance that was that tight,” singer Vanessa Briscoe Hay recalls. “They’ve got a guy in a headset talking to another guy in a headset, and they count down, ten, nine, eight…and then you’re up there. We were kind of congratulating ourselves a little when we came off the first time, but then the stage manager said we’d gone ninety seconds over. He was very nice about it, but we thought, Uh-oh, we gotta cut something.” As they learned, the crew needed a precise number of minutes to switch the instruments between acts, and if the openers ran even a few seconds late, the whole event got off-kilter. “It’s all about professionalism,” Briscoe Hay says.

  * * *

  —

  Pylon’s 1988 reunion, five years after they had disbanded, was due entirely to R.E.M. Specifically to Bill’s offhanded comment to Rolling Stone, when told that the magazine planned to bill R.E.M. as the best band in America, that his band still took a backseat to Pylon. The foursome had missed performing together, and when sales of their albums leaped after the publication of the interview, they began fielding offers to play shows. Then they dusted off their instruments and started rehearsing. They played a few shows around their old haunts in late 1988 and the first half of 1989, and when R.E.M. asked if they’d like to come with them for a couple of weeks on their big tour, they signed on. Knowing how unpleasant opening for a bigger band can be, R.E.M.’s members tried to make it easier for the friends they brought with them, which included two Atlanta bands—Drivin N Cryin and the up-and-coming folk duo Indigo Girls—the Boston neo-punk band Throwing Muses, and the new band fronted by former Soft Boy Robyn Hitchcock, among others, paying them all a decent $2,500 a night, giving them enough time to play a full set, and instructing their crew to treat them with the same respect they gave the headliners.

  Having Pylon with them felt particularly satisfying, since they had taken so much inspiration from their Athens neighbors and predecessors, and when Bill saw some fans waving signs with the opening band’s name on it, the drummer waded into the crowd and invited them backstage. When the fans, in turn, invited the Pylon members back to their apartment for a party after the show, Bill and Mike went along too. “We ended up at someone’s apartment with a kitchenette, dancing around to records,” Briscoe Hay recalls.

  * * *

  —

  Show after show after show after show. The tour divided into five legs, starting in Japan in January, swinging through the antipodes in the first half of February, then spending March and April barnstorming the eastern and southern United States. The company headed to Europe in May, visiting fourteen countries before returning home in early July. They got a summer break through Labor Day weekend, then launched into another city-to-city-to-city crawl through the United States, hitting some regions they hadn’t visited the first time around. But they were less popular than the projections had indicated—the failure of post-“Stand” singles “Pop Song 89” and “Get Up” to make an impact on radio or record stores cut into Green’s and the band’s momentum, particularly in secondary markets—and by the middle of the fall they found themselves playing to venues that were, at best, half-filled.