The same spirit fills “Everybody Hurts,” the slow R&B groove Bill brought in, swung in a distinctly humanistic direction with Michael’s lyrics, a love letter to every vulnerable person within the embrace of its sound. “Find the River” concludes the album on a similar note, the gentle groove drifting lazily downstream to some other, greater form of existence. The river empties to the tide, he concludes. All of this is coming your way. Whether this is the sound of resignation, another song of death (as per the MuchMusic host), or an expression of the most transcendent kind of hope is up to you.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Technically a D major sus 4 add 9, according to my professional guitar-playing source, aka my girlfriend’s brother, who adds that this in no way describes the delicious texture created when the open strings vibrate against the fretted ones, constructing a chord from notes across two-plus octaves, all ringing together.

  *2 Whose wink-wink use of the word “Star” in the title (though the phrase in the lyric is clearly “fuck me, kitten”) tips the hat to the Rolling Stones and the 1973 song they similarly titled “Star Star,” when its chorus is in fact a recitation of the word “starfucker.”

  38

  Does Everyone Still Want to Do This?

  If the members of R.E.M. thought that releasing an album full of quiet, textured meditations on sorrow, death, and forgiveness would give them a break from the glare of mainstream success, they were wrong. Automatic for the People was an immediate and overwhelming smash, drawing even stronger reviews than Out of Time, maybe the best reviews in all of their ecstatically reviewed career. There was a five-star write-up in Rolling Stone (“musically irresistible”), raves in Time (“a so-called alternative band can keep its edge after conquering the musical mainstream”) and The New York Times (“beautiful and moving”). The videos for “Drive,” “Man on the Moon,” and “Everybody Hurts” all rated saturation play on MTV, further establishing the band’s image as the most effortlessly artful pop act in the popular culture mainstream. In commercial terms Automatic hit the marketplace like a late-period Beatles album, with advance orders in the millions, and that still wasn’t enough to satisfy popular demand as the songs played across radio formats and the videos lit up the screens. In a time when someone’s CD collection served as an index of their engagement with the world, possessing a copy of the latest R.E.M. album felt as basic as owning a stereo or subscribing to the daily newspaper.

  Ultimately, Automatic sold just as well as Out of Time had done, moving more than ten million copies around the world in its first year, a number that has nearly doubled since then. By the spring of 1993, when the four musicians, along with their manager and lawyer, gathered for a strategy session at Warner Bros. Records’ vacation house in Acapulco, they were in a position to do anything with their lives and careers that they could imagine. When they finally got down to business, Bill kicked off the discussion with typical directness: “Does everyone still want to do this?”[1] He wasn’t certain that he did, was the thing. And Bill wasn’t the only member of the band having doubts about R.E.M.’s future. Extraordinary success can be affirming, but it is also less fun, and more destabilizing, than it might seem. Something about the sheer tonnage of CDs, albums, and tapes they’d sold since the turn of the ’90s, combined with the mountain of magazines and newspapers bearing their faces, words, and thoughts, along with the endless waves of R.E.M.-focused sound and images humming through the atmosphere, seemed to warp the air around them. It wasn’t just strangers looking at them differently; it was their closest friends and family. And it was in the mirror, too: how exhausting the sight of your own stupid face could become, the dopey sound of the things you say, the grating sound of the simple riffs you made up blaring incessantly from the radio, the television, from the open window of a car cruising down South Milledge Avenue on an otherwise peaceful Sunday morning.

  For Bill, R.E.M.’s outsize good fortune was beyond absurd. So many of his friends were musicians, and so many of them were so good, and in bands that were just as good as or even better than R.E.M. “They weren’t getting famous like him, and that made him feel guilty,” then-wife Mari recalls. “It was one of the things, how much that bothered him. It didn’t seem fair. That’s just him being self-deprecating, but it really did bother him a lot.”[2]

  He wasn’t the only band member navigating an existential malaise. Propelled by the crumbling of his marriage (to Athens club owner Barrie Green, whom he’d wed in 1987) and his distaste for his own celebrity, Peter tossed his guitar in the back of a car and headed into Mexico, where he spent most of the winter on his own, crashing in cheap roadside motels, reading books, drinking beer, and strumming for his own amusement, just like he’d done in the days before bands, gigs, records, and all the rest. He grew a beard, put on some weight, slipped off his persona, and retreated into himself.

  The other guys fell into fame more easily. In 1992 Mike appeared on the Live with Regis and Kathie Lee daytime talk show, the epicenter of middle American housewife culture, astounding cohost Kathie Lee Gifford by showing up at the taping with his mom. “We don’t expect rock stars to have mothers,” she observed. Her older cohost, Regis Philbin, agreed with customary enthusiasm, barking, “He looks like such a normal guy!” The normal-guy rock star chatted about his band’s years on the road, the unexpected success of Out of Time, then sang “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville,” accompanying himself on acoustic guitar.[3] When he wasn’t on daytime TV, Mike was happily taking up invitations to play in celebrity-rich charity golf tournaments and to attend professional sports events and the sorts of parties peopled by the famous, rich, beautiful, or some combination thereof. Beneath his perpetually collegiate, such-a-nice-young-man exterior thumped the heart of an unreconstructed party boy, and if he was beckoned somewhere that promised to provide fun, music, and women in quantity, the bassist was happy to come. “Believe me, my life is stranger than any rumor you could come up with,” he snapped when that MuchMusic interviewer started digging for fun facts about Michael’s health in the summer of 1992. “Why? Because I’m living it, that’s why.”[4]

  Michael rode the tidal wave of acclaim into Los Angeles, where he fell in with a glitzy crowd of movie stars, directors, and other A-list types. His interest in film went deeper than the glamour of his new friends. He and the filmmaker Jim McKay had been directing and producing videos and short films through their C-Hundred Film Corp. for several years, and the pair were launching a production company to make feature-length scripted movies. Michael grew close to the actor River Phoenix and cultivated a circle of other famous friends whose lives and concerns had little to do with rock ’n’ roll, let alone the close-knit art-rock gang from Athens. The writer Anthony DeCurtis, who had known the band since 1981, recalls walking into a party Michael threw in New York in the 1990s and seeing the adolescent actor Macaulay Culkin, then best known for his role in Home Alone. “I was like, What the fuck is going on here?” DeCurtis says. “My turn of phrase was that Michael was the only person who had to get famous to get starstruck. He seemed to miss the point that rock stars are cooler than everybody. Let me introduce you to Macaulay Culkin? Oh, shit.”[5]

  * * *

  —

  Another dismaying side effect of their extraordinary success came when Peter Holsapple, who played guitar and keyboards with them throughout the 1989 tour and beyond, fell out with the group. The conflict centered on “Low,” one of the two Out of Time songs that debuted during that tour. According to Holsapple, the song emerged during a pre-show soundcheck. He was playing bass, Mike was on organ, Peter on guitar, Bill playing the congas, when they fell into the song’s central chord pattern. The foursome played through the progression for a while, then found the variation that became the song’s bridge. Once that was established, Michael wrote the words and the minimalist melody that fit the changes, and they all liked it enough to perform it onstage at the show in Syracuse, New York, on April 11.

  They didn’t play it again until the fall, but the song became a regular part of the encores, appearing near the end of every show during the climactic fall leg of the tour. The composition of the music in “Low” struck Holsapple as a four-way collaboration: the bass part traces all of the song’s changes, which in his memory came as much from his exploration as from any of the others. Still, when the song appeared on Out of Time, the credit read, as it almost always did, “Berry-Buck-Mills-Stipe.” This struck Holsapple as both inaccurate and, given the flood of royalties due to anyone with even a partial credit on what was almost guaranteed to be a million-selling album (it eventually turned into something much more than that), well beyond disappointing.

  Holsapple’s manager encouraged him to pose the question directly to his friends in the band. They’d spoken so often of their admiration for him and for the dB’s. Peter in particular had declared himself thrilled to meet the North Carolina musician when they first crossed paths in 1981, and Holsapple, who had known Jefferson Holt before either of them met the band from Athens, had played a significant role in connecting them with Mitch Easter. The dB’s broke up in 1988, just as R.E.M. was planning its 1989 tour and looking to add a utility musician to play guitar and keyboards and contribute to the band’s onstage vocal blend. Holsapple proved such a good fit that they asked him to join them in the recording studio for the Out of Time sessions, playing acoustic and electric guitars and, on “Low,” his usual bass part. After the album was released, Holsapple accompanied them in all of their promotional appearances, including on Mountain Stage, where Michael introduced him to the audience as “the fifth R.E.M.” But when Holsapple bumped into Peter at the 40 Watt and asked about his missing credit on “Low,” the other guitarist shrugged. That was just how they did things, he said. The one time they’d made an exception, adding Jeremy Ayers’s name to the credits of “Old Man Kensey” when Michael insisted he had cowritten the lyric, the disruption of their four-way credit policy had caused so much unhappiness that they all swore to never do it again. So. That was that.

  At this point Holsapple had a few choices. He could, as his lawyer suggested, file a lawsuit. He could let it go and keep working with them. Or he could resign his position with R.E.M. and go back to making his own music, which is what he ultimately did.

  * * *

  —

  As the talks in Acapulco continued in the spring of 1993, the band and their advisers sketched how R.E.M.’s next two or three years would go, and what they would sound like. Bill had a few points that were, as far as he was concerned, nonnegotiable. If they made a new record, it would have to rock. He was a drummer, he was tired of being presented with songs that gave him no opportunity to really play his instrument. And once the new album was done, they would have to go back on the road again. After all, R.E.M. was a rock band. And what rock bands do is make music in front of live audiences. If they wanted to be a band that didn’t perform its music for living, breathing people, that was something they’d have to do without him.

  Nobody argued. Peter was ready to crank up the volume again too, and was also itching to tour, but he had his own conditions. He was already in his late thirties, and by the time they had an album recorded and released he’d be pushing forty. As much as he enjoyed being on the road, he didn’t want to slide back into the boozy, hard-partying habits that had defined their offstage hours during their tours in the 1980s. To make sure they were focused on something productive, he wanted the band to use the time they spent sound-checking and hanging out in dressing rooms and hotel rooms to write another new album. They could even work the new material into the shows, record the tracks, and end the tour with a live album of all-new songs. Mike liked how all of that sounded, and even Michael, who had felt particularly depleted at the end of the 1989 tour, knew that the time was right for R.E.M. to mount another global attack. By the time they got rolling, they’d have three full albums of new material to perform and a vast new audience of fans who had never seen them play. Which made for another enticing fact: the next R.E.M. tour was guaranteed to be the biggest they had ever done. Probably the biggest they would ever do. By the time they left Acapulco, the plan was clear, the next three years of their lives mapped out.

  * * *

  —

  Nothing came easy this time around. In late August they aired out two or three new tunes at the Clayton Street rehearsal space, while they were preparing to play their two songs (“Everybody Hurts” and “Drive”) at MTV’s 1993 Video Music Awards, then went their separate ways until mid-October. Then they gathered in New Orleans to sift their new music, figure out what worked, what could be cobbled together, and how it might sound when the whole band had its way with it. They sketched out the music for about twenty songs, and Michael had just started writing when some devastating news stopped him in his tracks: the actor River Phoenix had died.

  He had passed abruptly, in a drug-related incident that was all the more shocking considering his longtime adherence to veganism. Phoenix was only twenty-three, ten years younger than Michael, but the actor played music—performing in the band Aleka’s Attic—with the same passion Michael brought to the films and videos he produced and/or directed. They had traveled together, and Phoenix had been something of a muse for Michael’s visual art; he took numerous photos of the actor on their trips across the country. Michael was devastated; he’d finished lyrics for two of the new songs, but the shock of the death hit him like a lightning bolt. Numbed by grief, he navigated his days in a blank-eyed haze. He barely had the focus to read a book, let alone think about writing lyrics. He wouldn’t start trying for four months.

  * * *

  —

  Pop music evolved quickly during the first half of the 1990s, as R.E.M. was dominating the sales charts and Bill Clinton was mounting his charge for the White House. When Out of Time hit number one on Billboard’s album chart in the spring of 1991, it was the first rock album to top the list in close to two years. But since then something had shifted. After nearly a decade of dominance, keyboard-based pop acts with an emphasis on sleek, synth-based sounds started to recede, along with the Bon Jovi/Def Leppard–style pop-metal bands that had crowded rock ’n’ roll radio and MTV. In their place rose a crop of alternative acts and, with an incandescent roar, an entire school of hard-edged rock bands coming out of Seattle.

  Until then it had seemed impossible that music that loud and unrelentingly raw could connect with a mainstream audience. In the months after Out of Time’s debut, Nirvana had broken through, scoring a smash single with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in late 1991. The tsunami unleashed by the song’s impact swept the band’s first major-label album, Nevermind, to the top of Billboard’s list in January 1992. Pearl Jam followed with its debut album, Ten, which also topped the charts in 1992, and both Soundgarden and Alice in Chains launched a string of top-selling albums soon after that. Most of those bands cited R.E.M. as an influence, if only for their ability to build a mainstream audience without watering down their sound or their values. But grunge had an emotional intensity and a clamor that altered the musical landscape for nearly everyone making pop music, including R.E.M.

  Already determined to create an album of songs drawn from the band’s harder-rocking side, the instrumentalists in R.E.M. recorded demos that leaned hard on distorted guitar sounds, basic bass parts, and prominent drums. Peter strummed power chords, used a tremolo pedal to make it pulse, and ran the whole thing through buzz-saw distortion. A few songs reached back to the band’s more elegant, melodic works, but the tunes that caught Michael’s ear were the ragers, the hard, ornery ones that tapped into the darker corners of his imagination, the appetites and passions, where the claws came out, where tongues emerged and teeth bit down. The world as seen through the eyes of a media sensation, a subject, a target. I’m not commodity, he wrote. But that’s exactly what he was, what they had all become. And as they worked to follow their previous ten-million-selling album, which had followed their previous ten-million-selling album, while girding themselves for the biggest concert tour of their career, it put them all on edge.

  Sparks flew, and not just the creative kind. Michael had started traveling with an entourage, a clutch of friends he could chat and laugh with during slow moments. That was fine almost everywhere, but when he started bringing his friends into the studio and getting distracted by them when the band was working, it could get on his bandmates’ nerves. And a fissure had been growing in the band’s core, a two-against-two creative divide between Peter and Bill, both of whom preferred to record with a minimum of fuss, overdubs, and post-performance embellishments, and Mike and Michael, who thought it was important to have every note and nuance on their records sound as right as possible. They’d always managed to find a balance that worked for everyone, but now that they were all intent on making a loud and rowdy album, the rough-and-ready pair felt like they’d been handed a mandate. The whole point of rock ’n’ roll, particularly in the age of grunge, was to cut through the bullshit—to scream and flail at your instruments until the phoniness around you crumbled into dust. Which didn’t amount to an absolute rejection of mellifluousness. It just meant, to two members of R.E.M., that they didn’t have to overinvest time in making sure each note fell in precisely the right space, with just the right intonation. The only problem was that the other two members didn’t always agree with them, and some days the bickering overcame the music.