—

  The stagecraft of Clinton’s inaugural celebrations, the American Reunion, like the political campaign that had preceded it, evoked a utopian ideal of American society. Of the nation as a community: good people coming together to make something bigger and greater than what they could achieve on their own. At the Athens rally for Al Gore in the week before the election, the vice presidential candidate had pivoted from his R.E.M.-informed crack about George Bush being out of time by promising, with another nod to Michael and his band, that “Bill Clinton and Al Gore are gonna be automatic for the people!” Whoever had written Gore’s remarks that day had done a clever job. In the space of a single sentence, the candidate had ripped the opponent and underscored his own campaign’s core promise while also name-checking the popular local star’s two most recent albums.

  The latter record, Automatic for the People, was released at the start of October. It had come together in the same unhurried, unhassled manner as its predecessor, starting with casual writing sessions in the band’s rehearsal space, then continuing with bursts of recording in studios located in cities the musicians knew they liked or wanted to explore. Throughout, the process was collegial, collaborative, and abundantly fruitful. Utopian, in a sense. Which made it easier to produce songs that addressed a sadness that had been growing around them, and within the restless soul of their singer. It’s these little things, they can pull you under, he cautioned in one song. So many little things, and so many not-so-little things, too. Surrounded by gloom, disease, and death, there is only one thing to do: Live your life filled with joy and wonder. The music they made in 1992 overflowed with both.

  The writing sessions at the Clayton Street rehearsal space started in early January 1992, almost exactly two years after the start of the Out of Time project. They were even more prolific this time, coming up with dozens of pieces they started to turn into demos at John Keane’s studio in mid-February. As on the previous album, the musicians made a point of avoiding their traditional instruments, Peter wielding his mandolin, bouzouki, and other stringed exotica, while Mike worked with an organ and other keyboards and Bill handled the bass and acoustic guitar. If Peter wasn’t using one of his new instruments, he had his guitar in an open tuning, the better to find odd chord structures and unexpected changes.

  Their ability to collaborate, to pull different pieces into a unified whole or otherwise enhance one another’s work, was at a level somewhere beyond purely conscious. Recording an acoustic guitar for one song, Peter noted how sensitive the microphone on his strings was and cracked that while he played he’d have to try not to breathe. Michael, already sketching a lyric about mortality, took note: Peter had just given him the perfect title for the song. When Bill, his left hand forming a C chord on a guitar, accidentally slid his fingers up two frets while reaching for something on the floor, the sound of the change, the C major sliding up to an augmented D[*1] and then back down, rang in his ears. Peter had already found the chords for the chorus for a song; now Bill had just provided the chords for the verse, in the correct key, too.

  The sessions moved to producer Daniel Lanois’s New Orleans studio for the first half of March, then reconvened at the Bearsville studios, in New York, one of their favorite recording sites, for most of April. They took a week off, then decamped to Criteria Studios, in Miami, where Aretha Franklin, Derek & the Dominos, the Allman Brothers, and the Bee Gees had all made classic albums. The members of R.E.M. were less interested in the echoes of the other artists than in the unique sound they were finding for themselves. It was apparently still taking form when Warner A&R executive Karin Berg came down from New York to check in. She was not thrilled by what she heard, and when she called Lenny Waronker in Burbank with her report, she told the label president he should intervene in the R.E.M. project, pronto.

  “She said, ‘We might be in real trouble here,’ and I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me,’ ” Waronker says. No matter: he flew to Miami a few days later. “I went in with low expectations and they started playing stuff. And what she heard must have been in a rough stage, because I was just unbelievably relieved.” They played Waronker a few unfinished songs too, and one in particular caught his ear: the one with the C-to-D slide chord pattern on the verse. “I just remember hearing that and saying to the guys, ‘You’ve gotta finish that one. The chorus is a killer.’ ”[1] Indeed, he’d just heard the demo for what would become “Man on the Moon.”

  * * *

  —

  Some of the songs were louder than the others; two were flat-out rockers. One of those was melodic and lighthearted, with a vocal call based on the chorus of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” the Tokens’ adaptation of Solomon Linda’s South African folk-pop hit of the 1930s, “Mbube.” They recast it as “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite.” The other raged, all slashing guitar, hard-pulsing synth bass, and wailing harmonica, the backdrop for a political rant Michael called “Ignoreland.”

  Bill came in with what sounded like an old-fashioned soul ballad, arpeggiated chords played out with graceful precision, music for lovers embracing on a darkened floor. A love song for hard times: “Everybody Hurts.” Mike had his own ballad, built on multiple organ sounds, a vocoder-type synthesizer that played the sound of his voice going ahhhhhh, natural backing vocals, and a slinky, echoing guitar, over which Michael oozed the words for “Star Me, Kitten.”[*2]

  Most of the other songs rising to the surface shared an elegiac quality: music that touched you where you felt a little sad, or maybe nostalgic, maybe a little rueful, but also gently celebratory and, inescapably, loving. This is what Michael picked up on as he traced the melodies and sketched his lyrics. He thought of people he’d loved, and people he’d lost. There had been so much loss lately. A grandparent or two, sad but inevitable. And also friends, and some ex-lovers, cut down by AIDS. It was everywhere in the arts communities, and the government’s refusal to confront the disease or even acknowledge its existence for most of the ’80s was a large part of what projected him into the political dialogue. It was, to be sure, a matter of life and death. And so were the songs on the new record. So much death. And so much life.

  * * *

  —

  Back in Georgia at the end of May, they went to Atlanta to record string parts, working with the help of ex–Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, whom they’d hired to orchestrate a few songs. A week later they went to the Bad Animals studio in Seattle to finish the last few songs and make final mixes for the tracks bound for the album. Michael had finished composing and singing his lyrics for almost every song, with one exception: the one they still referred to as “C-D Slide,” named for Bill’s accidental but lovely chord pattern. Ordinarily the instrumentalists and producer Scott Litt didn’t pressure Michael to write to a particular track; the singer just focused on the pieces that caught his ear and spurred his muse into action. Michael hadn’t resisted this one—if he flat-out rejected a song, that was the end of it—but everyone liked this song a lot, and then Lenny Waronker’s half-joking instruction to finish the song with the killer chorus had only intensified their urging that Michael at least try to give it a go. Litt dubbed a cassette of the track for Michael, who put it on his Walkman tape player and listened to it as he explored the streets of Seattle. It took a few days, but the words he came up with, which drew from childhood memory, from 1970s pop icons, and from the autumnal melancholy that flowed through so many of the songs, not only distilled the essence of the track’s music but also encapsulated something of the album as a whole.

  What connected the song, now titled “Man on the Moon,” to the other songs, what connected the band members to one another, what connected the band to its rapidly growing legion of fans, was also what connected the American voters to Bill Clinton, or at least the idea of Bill Clinton circa 1992. A sense of tenderness, of empathy; of hearts pulsing in the same rhythm, feeling the same hopes and fears. Of recalling the world as you experienced it as a kid in the family rec room, through games and books, through the hazy blue window of the television. The characters came and went, but they all seemed to be on the same show. Moses and Elvis. Sir Isaac Newton and “Classy” Freddie Blassie. Prophets and rock stars, physicists and wrestlers. All with their own kind of magic, their own transcendent logic.

  And then there was Andy Kaufman, the absurdist comic whose odd, reality-warping put-ons spun them all together. His moment was brief, a flickering comet that appeared on the old Saturday Night Live in 1975, lip-synching cartoon themes, gibbering in a thick foreign accent, abruptly affecting an Elvis Presley impression so masterful the King himself bowed down before him, assuming multiple personae, some helpless, others brutally toxic, right until his death in 1984. Kaufman was only thirty-four at the time, and his passing was so unexpected that many people assumed it was just another one of his weird bits. Andy, did you hear about this one? Michael sang, as if posing the question to the comic himself. To everyone else: If you believe there’s nothing up his sleeve, then nothing is cool. He could have been talking about Clinton, too.

  Elliptical, nostalgic, lightly satirical, and loving, the lyric met the music as easily as the new music slipped into the breeze. The album was finished, the summer turned to autumn. The airwaves buzzed, new music tingled against the skin. The new R.E.M. album arrived in early October. If you expected a descent from the heights of Out of Time—a reasonable expectation—you were surprised. “Fairly wonderful,” observed MTV’s senior newsman, Kurt Loder, asserting it as a fact in the midst of a news report. No one argued. When the wind blows with the tide, when the planets spin a particular way, there can be no debate. Just observation, appreciation, a sense that this right here, this sound, this feeling, is the sound of now.

  * * *

  —

  The album title also arrived fully formed and without debate. The expression came from Weaver D’s, one of the band’s favorite barbecue joints in Athens, whose owner, Dexter Weaver, responded to his customers’ requests with the same snappily delivered affirmation. Ribs and dirty rice? Automatic! Pork chops and gravy? Automatic! The sign outside put the philosophy in grander terms, and this was where they had found their title: Automatic for the People.

  Once again choosing to forgo a concert tour, they prepared for the album’s early October release with another round of interviews, though nothing close to the globe-trotting two months they’d done to mark the release of Out of Time. This suited them for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they didn’t expect the new album to sell anything like its immediate predecessor. Which had been, in Mike’s words, an aberration in the band’s career. “That was the one big seller of our lives,” he told a reporter for Canada’s MuchMusic cable channel. “This one’s as good or better than that one, but I don’t think it’ll zap people like that one.”[2] Certainly the production was more spare, with an emphasis on acoustic instruments and strings, and much less sonic sparkle. This was due in large part to the nature of the songs, which, as the Canadian reporter observed tartly, concerned themselves with the gloomiest of topics: “It seems to me that the whole first side is dealing with death!”[3]

  Her interpretation of the half dozen titles on side one wasn’t quite right, if only because one of the songs is an instrumental and another includes a retelling of a key plot point in Dr. Seuss’s children’s book The Cat in the Hat. Its concluding thought, exclaimed over a ringing rock ’n’ roll climax: We’ve got to moogie, moogie, move on this one! But she might not have been responding to the songs themselves as much as to the fact that Michael, who had done so many interviews in 1991, had decided to beg off his press duties this time around. The other three didn’t begrudge his reticence. He’d never enjoyed having his molecules examined beneath the media microscope, particularly when the reporters were so determined to reveal the parts of him that felt most private. Which was exactly what the Canadian reporter had in mind as she pondered the intentions of the missing singer and the meaning of his absence. “It seems like he’s closing a chapter on his life somehow,” she mused, getting at something.[4]

  Finally she just asked the question.

  “What about these persistent rumors that Michael’s sick?”[5]

  * * *

  —

  “Drive,” the opening track. Here comes a man, brooding, solitary, mysterious. You’ve seen him before, but what do you really know about him? He may be sick. He may be superhuman. He has an unspeakable secret. He has endless promise. He’s collapsed in a gutter. He’s reclining in the back of a limousine. Is he dying? Will he live forever? It can’t all be true, except for when you reach a certain level of fame, at which point reality and fantasy become one and the same. This is where Automatic begins, in the platinum backwash of Out of Time, which the narrator of “Drive” observes from behind tinted glass, scrutinizing his followers from his freon-cooled remove. He greets them, tosses in a quote from a glam-rock favorite out of the distant past. Hey, kids, rock ’n’ roll (David Essex, “Rock On,” a signal song when it hit the top ten in mid-1974).

  But the music behind him is spare, mostly acoustic, and not quite in gear. The guitar strums, the bass hits a desultory note or two, eventually an accordion joins, then the drums. But only for a few beats before it all pauses. A beat, then it starts again, and gains momentum. An electric guitar slices the air, a string section rises, smooth and powerful, Doric columns revealing the edge of a grand edifice. There is a crowd and he addresses them directly, congratulating them for their wildness, their freedom, for rocking around the clock. Maybe they’re even crazy. More than anything, they are in his thrall, though they have no idea who he is, really. Maybe I ride, maybe you walk / Maybe I drive to get off…baby. The strings ebb, the electric guitar fades, the music grows sparse, then vanishes, taillights slipping away in the night.

  * * *

  —

  The woman on MuchMusic wasn’t the only one. Rumors about Michael, his life, his habits, his romances, had followed the band around for years. More recently, as the band opted to stay off the road and the singer’s once lustrous mane of hair was shorn and then glimpsed only beneath a hat, the whispering turned to his health. Didn’t he seem skinnier than usual? And why had he stopped doing interviews? What was he hiding?

  With no answers forthcoming from Michael, the curious turned to the music. Many of them heard the references to death, to the sick and the resigned, and figured the songs described a grim truth Michael wasn’t strong enough, or healthy enough, to tell them face-to-face. What they tended to miss, in the twilight of the songs’ settings, was how much life they contained.

  * * *

  —

  Spinning and ardent, speaking in the voice of a faltering man, “Try Not to Breathe” welcomes death by celebrating the life that was lived. An acoustic guitar strums, a simple bass part shores up the bottom, an electric guitar line lights the room. Michael’s narrator enters, assured and determined, announcing his intention to let his life, at long last, come to an end. This decision is mine, he declares. And his demise, no matter how jarring, is not a tragedy. Not even close. His life has been fulfilling, his experiences rich. I have seen things that you will never see.

  “Sweetness Follows” begins at another graveside as squabbling adult children prepare to bury their parents. A cello huffs beneath an acoustic guitar, an organ sanctifies from above. Michael’s narrator examines his shattered family, notes his siblings’ distance and the toll of the years. An electric guitar set to feedback swoops in like a raven, its wings beating waves of dissonance through the air. But Michael rises over it, his voice warm and even. It’s these little things, they will pull you under, he sings. There is darkness all around, but every moment can be magical, every breath holds the possibility of redemption. Live your life filled with joy and wonder.

  The life force shimmers in the night, triggers the dawn, troubles the dirt piled next to the freshly cut grave. It is the joy and wonder, the pleasure and pain, the rock around the clock, the moogie-moogie in The Cat in the Hat. But that urge to the pleasures in life is also, in the age of AIDS, a source of rage, shame, and death. We want to assume that the narrator of “Try Not to Breathe” is on the far reaches of elderly. These eyes are the eyes of the old, he says. But by 1992 AIDS had reduced too many healthy young men to shriveled, shivering husks to make that a safe assumption. The fear of and hatred for gay people had sundered enough families to form another possible subtext for the disconnection beneath “Sweetness Follows.”

  And it is, without a doubt, the unspoken force behind “Monty Got a Raw Deal.” Singing above a stern set of chords played on a bouzouki, propelled by tightly wound drums, Michael addresses the story of Montgomery Clift, the movie idol of the 1950s and ’60s forced to live a series of lies out of fear that his sexual orientation would destroy his life. As Michael recounts, Clift seemed to have it all. He was beautiful and gifted, an acclaimed actor with his choice of roles. But, as the singer acknowledges, nonsense has a welcome ring. Clift was drawn to other men in a time of overpowering homophobia. A well-placed fear of exposure, and the self-loathing triggered by the hatred around him, pushed Clift toward self-destruction. Drugs and liquor, car accidents, a life shot through with chaos before his death, in 1966, when he was just forty-five years old. Speaking across the decades, Michael doesn’t trouble Clift’s ghost with sympathy; it’s neither useful nor wanted. What he can offer, to the spirit of the actor and to himself, is understanding. A loving nod from a fellow traveler who not only comprehends his own life force but accepts it. Not as a curse, but a blessing. Mischief knocked me in the knees / Said “Just let go. Just let go.”

  The specifics, and deeper implications, reside between the lines. In “Nightswimming,” it’s beneath the surface of the pond Michael recalls splashing in as a teenager. The wistful portrait of youthful pleasure, fit to a gorgeous piano piece by Mike, describes one of those warm summer nights where reckless, carefree kids can frolic without fear, their physical abandon perceived as nothing but good, clean fun. In this life such ecstasies are short-lived. September’s coming soon, he sings. Now time has passed. Something unspoken has gone wrong between the narrator and his midnight companion. You, I thought I knew you. A friendship sundered, an intimacy violated. You, I thought you knew me. But a photograph survives, a memory persists. As does generosity. We forget to do so many things in our lives. To call our moms. To wash the dog. To tell a friend we love them. To understand and forgive. You I cannot judge.