When Craig Franklin first saw Mike Stipe, it was the summer of 1975 and he was standing with some friends near the pool at the Town & Country club. The new kid made a distinctive entrance by strolling out of his house and hopping the fence that separated the properties. He wore a swimsuit with a long-sleeved button-up shirt, its dangling shirttails rolled up and tied around his midriff. A popular look at the time, but for women. Noticing a guy he knew from his Boy Scout troop, one of the kids Franklin was standing with, Mike gave a big wave and headed their way, a smile on his face. His friend, however, wasn’t feeling especially friendly. “Let’s get out of here,” he muttered. “This kid is kinda weird.” A few of the kids, including Franklin, stayed put. They got to talking, mostly about music, and became friends.[3]

  * * *

  —

  In high school Mike followed his own sense of style, perching a fedora atop his shoulder-length curls and accessorizing his button-up shirts and jeans with a vest, a bandanna flowing from a pocket, and/or a line of safety pins. Joining the cast of a high school production of the Cold War satire The Mouse That Roared, in which he played Benter, the opposition leader portrayed by Leo McKern in the 1959 film, Mike made friends with Melanie Herrold, a vaguely androgynous girl who shared his off-center perspective on school and life in general. Their schoolmates noticed and did not approve. “We were both typical high school outcasts,” she recalls. “You don’t fit in and they have to label you. I was always a dyke or a slut, and he was either gay or just weird.”[4]

  The two outsiders bonded quickly, especially when it turned out that they had the same passion for music and a fervent desire to become rock stars. After school they spent hours in one another’s room listening to records by Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd, flipping through magazines and debating which one would end up featured in the pages of Creem first. For one of Herrold’s birthdays Michael got them both matching kimono tops, the sort of silky, belted shirts Robert Plant wore onstage, and they took turns pairing them with some shiny silver pants Herrold’s mother had made for her, posing for the camera just like the stars in the magazines. “We were both so androgynous,” she says. “We always wore each other’s clothes.”

  Herrold later got a job at the Varsity movie theater, in St. Louis, and she immediately alerted Mike when the midnight showings of Rocky Horror turned into costume parties for young outcasts with a penchant for group singing, dancing, and noisy inside jokes. Mike became an instant convert, taking on the guise of the movie’s most louche character, the charismatic singing and dancing transvestite from outer space, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, played by Tim Curry. On his way out to the theater one night, Mike sauntered past Lieutenant Colonel Stipe, who looked up from his newspaper to see his son in a red bustier, leather jacket, and fishnet stockings, his face garish with mascara, eyeliner, powder, and rouge. “You’re not going out like that, son, are you?” Mike grinned at his dad. Yes, he was. The elder Stipe, still wearing his Army uniform, had seen too much on the battlefields of Vietnam to get fussed about his son’s choice of evening wear. Shrugging, he went back to his newspaper. “Okay, then. Have a good night.”[5]

  Lieutenant Colonel Stipe did his best to interest Mike in more traditional pursuits. One Christmas he gave his son a few Foxfire books, the popular series of titles that described old-fashioned Appalachian homesteading skills, such as hog slaughtering, furniture building, and possum cooking. It was a sweet gesture, but Mike was far more interested in modern urban life, particularly the bohemian demimonde in modern New York City.

  The conduit opened when Cyndy found one of those Publishers Clearing House offers to subscribe to a dozen magazines for a penny. Mike signed up for The Village Voice, the weekly journal of downtown arts and culture. Every week he’d carry the newspaper down to his basement bedroom and marvel. The stories about up-and-coming artists and writers, the reviews of exhibitions at the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, and the palatial Metropolitan Museum, the listings for the downtown galleries, the art-house movie theaters, the nightly haul of plays taking place on Broadway, off-Broadway, and so far off-Broadway they were staged in alleys…Mike was enthralled. The personal ads were just as thrilling; the endless churn of people looking for jobs, roommates, friends, even lovers. The pages of movie ads featured The Towering Inferno, The Exorcist, and Woody Allen’s Love and Death next to displays for Kyoto in Bondage and Heavy Leather, whose ad noted the “four great S&M features” that came with it.

  When he showed it all to Craig Franklin, his friend gaped. “I said, ‘What’s all this gay stuff?’ ”[6] Mike just shrugged and pointed him toward the music pages. He didn’t have to hear a note; the band names and photos alone sent his imagination reeling. The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, the Cramps, Richard Hell, the New York Dolls—artists who were both wild and artistically daring, who pushed against the boundaries of rock ’n’ roll, who not only ignored but actively undermined the rules about propriety, gender, and sex.

  Mike had always been drawn to the music that gestured to rock ’n’ roll’s more transgressive impulses. The mini wave of glam-rock hits that washed across the Top 40 in 1972 and 1973—T. Rex’s “Get It On,” Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes,” David Essex’s “Rock On,” and the Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz”—coincided with the dawn of his adolescence, and the music, amplified by the looks and attitudes of the artists behind it, resonated in his imagination. Not that you had to venture out of rock ’n’ roll’s mainstream to see men testing the limits of gender. A decade earlier, the mop-topped Beatles had sparked fury among conservatives for their androgynous locks…hanging all the way to their ears! By the end of the 1960s shoulder-length hair was nearly de rigueur for pop musicians, and Mick Jagger showed up for the Rolling Stones’ vast Hyde Park concert in a filmy cloak that hung like a virginal white dress. He peeled it off to reveal tight white pants and a sleeveless T-shirt that emphasized his biceps. David Bowie took androgyny to a whole other level, and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant split the difference, pairing feminine blouses with denim tight enough to make his maleness obvious even to fans sitting in the back of the arena.

  Transgression, or at least the appearance of it, was stylish. But Mike had an appetite for the real thing, and with The Village Voice serving as a weekly dispatch from the front lines, he started recognizing names and tracking their stories and exploits. In 1975, one name that kept coming up was Patti Smith. Her photos, showing a slim, waifish woman who wore her dark hair in a Keith Richards–esque shag, appealed to his eye for androgyny. And the breadth of her work, which encompassed literature, rock ’n’ roll, performance art, and, through the lens of her similarly androgynous and sexually divergent photographer boyfriend, Robert Mapplethorpe, visual art, stretched across the artistic horizon. But it was her music, or what people said about her music, that catalyzed Michael’s imagination. Greil Marcus’s review of Smith’s first album, Horses, describing the record’s themes and influences—old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll raves, the New York avant-garde, early-twentieth-century surrealism, beatnik poetry, punk rock—riveted Mike from the start. The words on the page made it sound like the rock ’n’ roll of his dreams: the music raw and spare, the words closer to poetry than pop lyrics, the narratives fracturing into dreamlike scenes that drew more from the free verse of the romantic nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud than from anything in the rock/pop canon.

  The release of Horses was a watershed moment for Michael Stipe. The tale he tells, years later, of buying and listening to Horses is as emotionally vivid and phantasmagorical as the songs on the album. He’s said that he had to beg the owner of a local record store to order the album for him, and also that he bought it the day it came out. “I sat up all night with my headphones on, listening to it over and over again while eating a giant bowl of cherries,” he told Interview in 2011. “In the morning I threw up and went to school.”[7]

  The chronology of the story doesn’t quite add up. Horses was released on November 10, 1975. Greil Marcus’s review of the album didn’t appear in the Voice until the November 24 issue. And Melanie Herrold recalls Michael getting Horses as a Christmas present from one of his sisters, received in the same haul as the Foxfire book from his father. Plus, the summer crop of cherries would have likely vanished from the shelves of St. Louis grocery stores by November. But the literal truth of his account matters less than the emotional truth of the experience: the black of night, the music filling his ears, and the sense of overwhelm. The vomited cherries symbolize a kind of rebirth, then the return of the daylight and ordinary life, his transformation complete.

  Mike took up the record like a signpost, a talisman, a divining rod. All of his friends recall having the same exchange with him: Do you know who Patti Smith is? Have you heard Horses yet? He called Craig Franklin and told him to come over as soon as possible and just listen. Franklin had his mom take him to Camelot Drive, where he found his friend waiting for him in the front yard, eating one of those nut-covered balls of cheese, holding it in his hand like an apple. That was the first odd thing that happened. They went inside and Michael took the record out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable, set the needle on the vinyl, and sat down to measure his friend’s response. Franklin, who was used to the sleek hard rock of Styx, Kansas, and the rest of the album-oriented rock bands, was flummoxed by the bare instrumentation and flights of unsettling poetry. “I was like, ‘What is this?’ ” Michael found a more flexible pair of ears when he carted the record over to Michael Edson’s house. “It was like wow, a whole different world,” Edson recalls.[8]

  One song in particular wouldn’t let him go. “Birdland,” a nine-minute epic inspired by a memoir Peter Reich wrote that described a dream he’d had soon after his father, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, died. In the dream the elder Reich returns to his son in a spaceship. Reich père invites Reich fils to come aboard, and the boy is overcome with joy: he’s reunited with his lost father and they’re going to go off into the stars, together for eternity. Except then he’s back on Earth and his dad is soaring off without him, leaving Peter to cry out, in Patti’s words:

  Take me up, daddy, to the belly of your ship,

  Let the ship slide open and I’ll go inside of it

  Where you’re not human, you are not human.

  It’s a powerful moment, and it’s easy to imagine how it resonated for a teenager still processing the fear he felt as a boy, imagining the fate his father might meet in his helicopter in Vietnam. Lieutenant Colonel Stipe didn’t talk about the war when he got home, but his silence echoed through Michael’s experience of “Birdland.” It fueled his connection to the music, and his understanding of how poetry could function within the confines of a pop song. It made him feel airborne. And it made him fantasize about the life he wanted to lead in the future.

  “It was like the ground didn’t exist,” he would later say. “And at that moment I decided what I would do with my life, with all the arrogance of a 15-year-old who’d never written a song.”[9]

  * * *

  —

  Whenever Mike and Melanie Herrold were together, they’d end up singing. Driving in the car, belting along with the radio, walking home from school. They pooled their money to buy books of sheet music for their favorite albums, then rushed back to one or the other’s house and cranked up the music so they could follow along and learn all the words and phrasing, working out the harmony parts as they went. Led Zeppelin, the Who, Aerosmith. Sometimes they’d pull out a cassette player and record themselves to see how they sounded. Herrold still has a tape of them doing “Fistful of Love,” as performed by Jim Dandy and Ruby Starr on Black Oak Arkansas’s Live! Reading ’76 album. Their tastes evolved as they got older, and the songs did too, to Patti Smith’s “Pissing in a River” and “Radio Ethiopia” and favorites off of records by New York artists like Television and Talking Heads. But the teenagers’ growing interest in punk and new wave music didn’t supplant their taste for commercial rock ’n’ roll, and when a few school friends invited Melanie to sing in their cover band, she dove in eagerly. Avatar, as they called themselves, stuck with the favorites: Led Zeppelin, Rush, Deep Purple, one or two by Bob Seger, and a few originals that didn’t meander very far from the songs everyone knew.

  At first Mike could only marvel at his friend’s courage. He’d go with Melanie to rehearsals, and then to the parties and talent shows where they played, and be transfixed by it all: the interplay of the musicians, the way his friend let the music carry her past her self-consciousness. Melanie had a real voice, throaty and full of fire, and was able to not just hit the right notes but also deliver the words with a passion that projected the songs right into your chest. Mike was less sure about his voice, though he wasn’t shy about belting along to songs on the radio. One night he was in a car with some friends when Aerosmith’s “Dream On” came on the radio. Somebody cranked the volume and they all sang along, right up until the point near the end when Steven Tyler’s repeated Dream onnn, dream onnn, dream onnns climb up an octave to the very top of his range. Nobody else bothered trying to keep up, but Mike made the leap into falsetto easily, much to his friends’ surprise. Jeez, you can really sing! Mike shrugged: no big deal. But it stuck with him. Not that he had the guts to go audition for a band…no matter how much Melanie urged him to give it a try.

  3

  Bad Habits

  Then a band came looking for him. It was early spring of 1978, Mike Stipe’s senior year, and he got to talking with one of the other Rocky Horror fans, another Frank-N-Furter impersonator who, like Stipe, kept his hair long and shaggy enough for rock ’n’ roll. Joe Haynes was a few years older and had already played guitar in a couple of neighborhood bands. Now he was putting together a new group and was looking for a singer: Would Mike want to try out? Umm…maybe? He consulted with Herrold, who urged him to go for it. You gotta! You’ll be great! Mike went back to Haynes. Sure, let’s see what happens. Haynes, for his part, was already sure it was going to be terrific. “He called me one day and said, ‘I met this guy, he’s the coolest, he’s the best, we gotta get together with this guy,’ ” says Jim Warchol, the band’s other member, who played the drums. Haynes set up a meeting at a nearby burger place, and the three of them spent an hour or two talking about music and what kind of band they wanted to make. “Mike didn’t have a lot of experience,” Warchol says. “But he was definitely a rock ’n’ roller, definitely a singer, and he had the attitude and determination.”[1]

  The group they envisioned would play other bands’ tunes, but, unlike all the other cover bands in St. Louis in 1978, they would focus on playing punk and new wave songs. They didn’t have a bassist yet, but the three band members started rehearsing anyway, gathering one or two nights a week to play in the basement of an old house where Warchol’s uncle ran an insurance company. Together they worked out a list of favorites they figured they could master. The Clash’s arrangement of “I Fought the Law,” the Who’s version of Johnny Kidd’s “Shakin’ All Over,” Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen,” and tunes by the Sex Pistols, Tuff Darts, the Damned, and a few others. Finding a bassist proved tough. Warchol figured he and Haynes ran through at least a dozen without finding one who seemed to fit.

  They still hadn’t settled on anyone when they got their first engagement: a sweet sixteen party for the daughter of one of Haynes’s neighbors. They set up in the living room, Haynes cranking up the bass setting on his amplifier and doing his best to keep up a propulsive low end while they ran through about an hour’s worth of material. The kids, Warchol recalls, did not seem terribly impressed. “I don’t remember anyone caring about us.”[2] No matter; it was a start. They found a bass player soon after that, a mustached, fast-fingered guy named Buddy Weber, and got back to practicing.

  Meanwhile, Craig Franklin and a few friends were putting together a group to play at Collinsville High’s annual talent show. Franklin played guitar, and a pair of brothers, Andrew and Danny Gruber, played bass and drums, respectively. But none of them sang or could think of anyone at school who could. Desperate to find a front man, Franklin thought of Mike Stipe. Specifically, he thought of how he looked: the shoulder-length curls, the bandannas that dangled from the pockets of his bell-bottom pants, and the shirts he wore open to reveal his impressively hairy teenage chest. Finding his friend by his locker in the hallway one afternoon, Franklin posed the question: Want to be the singer in our band? Mike, who had kept his musical adventures separate from his life at school, shrugged. I don’t really sing, he said. But Franklin, who didn’t know about his friend’s extracurricular band, bucked him up. “Well, you look like a rock ’n’ roll guy.” That made Mike laugh, and once he took a moment to contemplate the prospect of making like a rock star in front of all of his high school classmates, he nodded. Yeah, let’s do it.[3]

  Mike went over to Franklin’s house a day or two later, carrying a couple of his sheet music books, collections of songs by the Rolling Stones and the Who. They kicked around some ideas. Franklin and the Gruber brothers had already jammed on a couple of Rush songs and had settled on the grinding “Working Man.” Mike opened his Stones book and pointed to “Gimme Shelter.” Could they learn how to do that one, too? The chords weren’t too hard, Franklin decided, so sure.

  They practiced a handful of times, and as the show got closer Michael started proposing some band names. The Dirty Habits? The Bad Habits? That sounded rock ’n’ roll to him, but the other guys shrugged. Michael kept trying: How about the Jotz? That came from the world of cartoons. Jot was this childlike thing, a sort of smiling dot that learned simple lessons about life and morality courtesy of the Southern Baptists. They all agreed that’d be a funny name for a band, so sure. But just as they were about to take the stage the evening of the show, someone grabbed Franklin to ask for the band’s name, and in a moment of panic he spaced out: “Just call us the Band,” he said. Apparently Franklin forgot there was another, quite famous rock group with the same name, but nobody seemed to notice or care. The Grubers, Franklin, and Mike earned enthusiastic applause for their two songs, and the judges, a panel of teachers, rated the Jotz/the Band as the second best of the four group acts on the bill, giving the trophy to a dance group who called themselves Dancing Shoes.