36

  The Most Improbably Successful Group in Music Today

  For a time it was perfect. The band, the music, the moment, all of it whirring away in such easy synchrony. Sitting in John Keane’s studio in late 1990, with Out of Time in its final stages and the publicity machine just sputtering to life, Bill could see it all coming together. Relaxed in a white sweatshirt, his eyes clear and sharp, hair silky and well cut, he sat between two guitars and spoke excitedly about how they were doing the best work of their career, that this was the best moment in R.E.M.’s history. “It’s our tenth year,” he said. “And I’ll tell you what, I think we’re on fire…I mean, we work hard. But the songs, the records, they’re coming easier and easier. It’s pretty scary. So hopefully this is just the half point for us. Maybe we’ll be here in 2000. I hope so.”

  When it all started to pay off a few months later, Bill could only marvel. “We are definitely the most improbably successful group in music today,” he said during the promotional tour in Europe that spring. “We sell more records than anyone else who gets as little airplay as we do. But we kind of did it the hard way. We built our following slowly and steadily, and those foundations tend to stick with you longer.”[1]

  Could it get even better than that? Yes, it could. At the start of 1992, with more than three million copies of Out of Time sold in the United States and even more overseas, with two smash singles, including one that sold more than a million copies, and a crop of awards that were only just starting to accrue, including nominations for seven Grammy Awards, due to be handed out at the end of February, R.E.M. was in a position to do anything they felt like doing. So they gathered themselves, their manager, their lawyer, and a few close friends and left town.

  Left the country. Left the continent and the Northern Hemisphere, bound for the jungle of Paraguay. Joining with some friends from the Nature Conservancy, including the musicians’ friend Jim Desmond, one of their earliest fans and now the environmental group’s assistant general counsel. Desmond had helped midwife the invitation to have representatives of the group at every stop on R.E.M.’s 1989 concert tour. The band followed that with a hefty donation of their own, and when they had a chance to visit one of the conservancy’s signature projects in South America, they were all eager to go.

  The band, Holt, Downs, Desmond, and the others in their party flew out of Atlanta on January 23, 1992. After a day or two in Asunción, they all boarded a bus for the Mbaracayú region, more than six hours east of the capital city. They spent the next week in the wilderness, hiking between tribal villages, marveling at the lush wildflowers and other flora, following some tribesmen on a bow-and-arrow hunt, slapping mosquitoes, washing in rivers, pushing trucks out of the mud, and sleeping in tents. When the tribesmen in one village put on a banquet featuring the local delicacy, the musicians took their bowls and graciously tucked into the monkey stew.

  After a week they emerged unshaven and grubby but recharged by the experience of being so far away from the modern world. Seeing the work the Nature Conservancy was doing, and the real difference it was making for the Aché people, was inspiring. Even if they were just rock stars, even if they passed their days doing the silliest things they’d ever heard of, and even if their music wouldn’t last, at least they could still help other people achieve worthwhile goals. And if people were going to look at them and listen to what they had to say, they could talk about things that mattered to them. And do what they could to make those things matter to everyone else, too.

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  —

  They’d always set about their work in a different way. To be aware of how the things they said or did would impact other people, and how that might reflect back on them. It went all the way back to when they were still riding around in a used van, building their following on a night-to-night, hand-to-hand basis. Pat Biddle, the Athens soundman who traveled with the band from time to time near the start of their career, remembers how the musicians always seemed to know the names of the people they’d met the last time they were in a city or club. “They always remembered the people who helped them before,” he says. “And they always took care of their friends.”[2]

  The band made a point of keeping their offices and rehearsal space in Athens, and when they were successful enough to buy houses, offices, and other buildings, they kept their money in town. They tried to model what struck them as responsible behavior, outfitting their workspace with desks and carpets made from recycled materials. And as their footprint grew, so did their opinions about how Athens should look and how city business should be conducted. All the band members, along with Holt and Downs, thought the city’s essence resided in the historic buildings and houses that still made up so much of its urban core. When developers sketched plans to steamroll older buildings, or entire blocks, to make room for more modern developments, the band and its representatives joined with the citizens and groups opposing the developers. The band’s manager and lawyer became familiar faces at planning commission meetings, and Michael was a regular attendee of public meetings too. In 1990 the group, along with Holt and Downs, were prominent supporters of Gwen O’Looney in her campaign for the Athens/Clarke County chief elected officer, the equivalent of a regional mayor. O’Looney was an underdog in a race against a developer-supported candidate, but the band’s public support and financial contributions evened the playing field, and O’Looney, along with a like-minded city council candidate they also supported, won the election.

  The band’s engagement with politics flowed in significant part from Holt. Raised in Burlington, North Carolina, a conservative rural area an hour from the more urban centers of Raleigh and Winston-Salem, Jefferson was the son of Bertha Merrill Holt, known as B., who was one of the first women to attend the University of North Carolina School of Law and, after being appointed in 1975, the first woman to represent her district in the state legislature. Reelected to her seat eight times, B. spent nearly twenty years in office, introducing and passing laws that protected the rights of women and workers, and furthered an array of progressive causes in a state not known for being a bastion of liberal politics.

  B. also raised her children to be public-spirited, and when her son became an unexpected success in show business, he took his mother’s ideals along with him. As Holt helped Michael grow into the charismatic front man he became in the 1980s, the manager encouraged the singer to invest his work, and his image, with his own political beliefs. At first Michael was hesitant. “If you want to talk about politics or your love life or social problems or what it’s like to live in 1983, then you should do it somewhere other than on stage,” he told Record magazine in 1983.”[3] He would come to change his mind.

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  By the time Green came out, in 1988, political awareness was central to R.E.M.’s group identity. The album’s title was at least in part a nod to environmentalism, one of the band’s core issues. It might have been a coincidence that the album was released on Election Day, but the band’s grousing about the victory of George H. W. Bush and the increased emphasis on activism was very deliberate. And, as the 1992 election approached, surprisingly effective.

  The irony was that the songs on Out of Time were so deliberately nonpolitical. If the record had a central theme, Michael said repeatedly, it was about relationships and love. “Belong,” the closest any of the songs came to being a social/political message, was cloaked in so many layers of metaphor and surrealism you needed a pick and shovel to uncover the point of the story. It was much easier to understand why R.E.M., along with their more socially/politically active fellow recording artists, were starting to protest how their albums were being packaged.

  In the early days of compact discs, when record stores started carrying the new format, the record companies packaged the small discs in long cardboard boxes so they would fit into store shelves designed for vinyl albums. But the long boxes, as they were called, served no purpose for customers, who tended to toss the packages the moment they opened them. The environmental impact of the boxes was only too obvious to the likes of R.E.M., and talk of an organized protest among artists had started to grow. Then a Warner executive named Jeff Gold came up with a brilliant compromise: they could use the back of the long box to promote one of the band’s pet causes. What Gold proposed for Out of Time was a clip-and-send card to petition the U.S. Senate to make it easier for citizens to register to vote. The band saw the potential immediately, and they signed on happily. Again, they were in perfect synchrony with the times.

  The organization behind the petition was Rock the Vote, a political nonprofit dreamed up by a Virgin Records executive named Jeff Ayeroff, whose primary motivation had been countering the work of the Parents Music Resource Center, a group founded to pressure record companies into censoring their artists. Ayeroff found an ally in MTV founder Tom Freston, who was looking for ways to add depth and gravitas to the channel’s cultural coverage. Teaming with Rock the Vote, which was already defending the freedoms of popular, edge-pushing MTV acts like Madonna, was an easy call. At the same time “Losing My Religion” saturated MTV’s playlist, the channel’s regular reports on the brewing 1992 presidential campaign came under the Rock the Vote banner. For a time they included detailed coverage of the clip-and-send postcards on R.E.M.’s new album.

  Then Michael started appearing in an ad for Rock the Vote promoting the National Voter Registration Act, which was nicknamed the Motor Voter bill because a central part of the federal legislation involved Department of Motor Vehicles offices, along with other government centers, giving newly licensed drivers a chance to register to vote. The bill passed Congress in mid-1992, only to be vetoed by President Bush in September. Bush’s opponent, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, promised to sign the bill if elected, and when Clinton’s running mate, Al Gore, came to a rally in Athens, Michael introduced him to the cheering crowd. Gore, whose wife, Tipper, was one of the founders of the censorious Parents Music Resource Center, a fact that went unremarked upon that afternoon, shook the singer’s hand with evident enthusiasm and thanked him and his band for their support. “And to paraphrase Michael, some people may not know it yet, but George Bush is out of time,” the senator proclaimed.

  Gore was right. And when he and Clinton defeated the incumbent president and vice president on November 3, they did it with the help of younger voters, whose participation jumped 6 percent from what it had been in the 1988 presidential election.

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  —

  Near the end of their week away in Paraguay, Bill sat for an interview with a reporter affiliated with the Nature Conservancy to talk about how much the visit to the wilderness project had meant to him and his bandmates. “Well, we try to be environmentally conscious, and it’s important to be more than just rock stars,” he said. “Now that we’ve reached a certain level of success, we can take the time to do things that are important to us, like coming here.”

  He looked relaxed, sun-kissed. A little grungy around the edges, his face still marked by the bee sting he’d suffered a few days earlier. But being out in nature and being surrounded by his friends always felt like the right thing to do. When the reporter noted that R.E.M. had been together for more than a decade and, unlike other successful bands, actually seemed to enjoy one another’s company, he smiled. “It’s amazing,” he said. “One of the reasons is that we didn’t get together with the intention of becoming big stars. We were in school together and we met first as friends. We became a band because we wanted to have fun together. We had no inclination of becoming, you know, big world music stars.” The reporter nodded, then observed that they certainly were big stars now. “Right, but we didn’t get together to form a band to get big. It was a hobby for us, and we all liked each other and liked the same kind of music. And we had so much in common. Our political beliefs, our moral inclinations are very much the same.” He shrugged. “A lot of bands get together purely to make money and get famous. We didn’t intend for that to happen, it just did.”[4]

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  —

  It had grown slowly, over a dozen years. For a long time they’d done their best to keep it at a distance, to make their music their way, for the people who liked what they did enough to treat it, and them, with respect. But then things had changed. They had changed, to a degree. At least, their ability to write songs and turn them into records had changed. Their music had become sharper and taken on a depth that resonated with a lot of people who had never cared to listen before. That had been going on for a few years, going all the way back to when “The One I Love” first blared across the airwaves. But now, in the wake of “Losing My Religion” and Out of Time, even that level of success seemed positively quaint.

  They thought they were leaving their famous selves behind when they got on the airplane to fly down to Paraguay. They’d never been to South America before; nobody had ever asked them to come down and visit, let alone play their music for people. But they had only just stepped off the airplane after the long flight down and were drifting through the throngs in the airport when it started to happen. The kids, teenagers and younger, looking over at them and pointing. Shouting at one another and then chasing them, jumping up and down and singing “Losing My Religion” in perfect English. Which was odd, because none of them could speak a word of English.

  “That was a real holy shit moment,” Jim Desmond recalls. “That song had broken through in a way even they didn’t understand at first. They were just shaking their heads in wonder.”[5]

  37

  These Are Days

  By the time Michael stepped to the microphone on an unseasonably warm Washington, D.C., morning in January 1993, it was just another in a long line of astounding things that actually happened. Standing at a lectern on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the singer wore a stylish black blazer, a crisp white shirt buttoned to the neck, and a gray fedora perched on top of his neatly shorn head. He’d spoken at his share of protests before, but now the outsider spoke from the highest corridors of power, celebrating the inauguration of President-elect Bill Clinton by joining a round-robin of celebrities reading inspiring quotations from other distinguished Americans. Michael recited a few lines from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” then a bit of an essay on the global commons from the environmentalist Les Brown. The presentation was a part of several days of celebration that had been given the heartening name An American Reunion, climaxing with the new president’s oath of office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 20.

  An array of inaugural balls took place across the city that night, among them MTV’s Rock ’n’ Roll Inaugural Ball, which included performances by Don Henley, 10,000 Maniacs, En Vogue, Boyz II Men, and Soul Asylum. R.E.M.’s shadow loomed over the televised portion of the ball, even if the full band did not make an appearance. Instead, Michael and Mike joined with U2’s Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. for a one-off acoustic performance of the Irish band’s recent hit “One,” with Michael handling Bono’s vocal part and Mike playing guitar. The crowd greeted the two bands’ union with unreserved enthusiasm.

  But the dreamiest collaboration of the show had come earlier, during 10,000 Maniacs’ set. Well known to the members of R.E.M. from the alternative club circuit in the 1980s, the Maniacs had been a part of the band’s orbit for nearly a decade. They’d toured together for a few spells during the mid-1980s, with the band from western New York state opening, and both had released breakthrough records in 1987. The bands’ singers had the same ability to blend artistry and performance, and both balanced the same impulses toward shyness and flamboyance. And, as it turned out, they also had a natural rapport. Once they got to know each other in the mid-1980s, they became friends, and then something more than friends. They didn’t always get a lot of time in the same place, but when the groups toured together, Natalie Merchant would ride on Michael’s bus. Sometimes Michael would pop up on the other band’s tours when R.E.M. wasn’t working; he sang background vocals on the Maniacs’ “A Campfire Song” and would step onstage to perform the song with the band. And now here they were again, on the same bill.

  10,000 Maniacs appeared just after the president and first lady’s appearance, starting the music portion of the broadcast with the sunlit anthem to the moment, “These Are Days.” A cover of Lulu’s “To Sir with Love” came next, seemingly a direct nod to the new president. But a second microphone had been set on the stage next to Merchant’s, and after the first verse Michael strolled out, dapper in his dark jacket, white shirt, and fedora, and the crowd whooped its approval. He bowed to Merchant as she sang the chorus, then stepped up to sing the song’s next verse while she smiled and danced along. They slow-danced together during the saxophone break, then wove their voices together for the final chorus. They beamed at each other during the ovation, then split the vocal on the band’s last song, “Candy Everybody Wants.” It’s a catchy song, one of the Maniacs’ best, and the singers danced together as they sang, harmonizing on the chorus and following it with a joyous version of the bump during the guitar solo. When it ended, they stepped up together for their ovation, greeting the cheers at center stage, hands clasped together, standing exactly where the new president and first lady of the United States had waved to the crowd twenty minutes earlier.

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