There were other interruptions. In the early spring of 1994, Mike got appendicitis, requiring surgery to remove the inflamed organ and then ten days to recover from the ordeal. A bad case of the flu sent Bill to bed for a week, and Michael had a small medical emergency when he suffered an abscessed tooth. The delays mounted. Peter, who had fallen in love with Stephanie Dorgan, co-owner of the Crocodile Cafe nightclub, in Seattle, had moved to the Pacific Northwest to be near her, and getting together with his bandmates now required planning and travel. This also put him in the middle of Seattle’s thriving music scene, where he soon got to know all the key figures, including Nirvana singer/songwriter/guitarist Kurt Cobain, who was so impressed with Peter that he and his wife, Courtney Love, leader of the band Hole, bought the house down the street from where Peter and Dorgan lived.[*] Peter befriended a legion of the Seattle musicians, becoming particularly tight with Scott McCaughey, whose band the Young Fresh Fellows had traveled the same alternative music circuit R.E.M. orbited for most of the 1980s. When McCaughey started the Minus 5, a conceptual band with a rotating cast of members to record and perform his songs, Peter joined in as often as he could.

  Cobain, meanwhile, honed his friendship with Michael. He had been particularly impressed with Automatic for the People and spoke at length with his fellow front man about the new songs he was working on, and how he wanted the next Nirvana album to explore the same acoustic palette R.E.M. had used on their record. Gazing at his new friend, Michael could sense the emotional instability just beneath the surface. Cobain was a sensitive kid who came from a broken family in a tough blue-collar town. He’d learned to channel his anger and sadness into music and to dull his angst with drugs. Cobain had worked hard to win his band a following and to get a contract with Seattle’s influential Sub Pop record label, but the sudden move to a major label, a leap to multi-platinum status, and the relentless media attention such mammoth success spurred took him by surprise. Beset by depression and self-medicating with heroin, Cobain felt his vision grow increasingly dark as 1993 turned to 1994. He turned to Michael for emotional support, and as he continued to spiral, the more experienced singer tried to buoy Cobain’s spirits. When an apparent suicide attempt ended Nirvana’s European tour in March, Michael tried to interest Cobain in making a soundtrack for a movie he was producing—they could work on it together, it’d be fun and creative and get him away from his usual grind for a while. Michael sent Cobain an airline ticket so he could join him in Athens, but Cobain went into a rehab facility to kick heroin, then checked himself out and disappeared. When they found him a few days later, he was in the garage of the house so near to Peter’s, dead of a self-inflicted shotgun blast.

  Michael might have been closest to Cobain, but the death had a devastating impact on all four members of R.E.M. Cobain’s suicide note had focused on the dehumanizing toll of the music industry. He’d become convinced that he’d been taken in by a conspiracy to package real emotions and the art they inspired into commercially salable materials, and in his diminished circumstances the feeling had sapped his soul until there was nothing left. “I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now,” he wrote. “The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.”

  Cobain had a psychiatric illness; his perception of his life, work, and artistic corruption were distorted by misfiring synapses and the opiates he took to alleviate his psychic pain. But the members of R.E.M. also knew how the bohemian impulse to form a band with your friends, make up some cool-sounding songs, and buzz down the highway to play them for other people could not only land you in the midst of corporate industry but make you that industry’s product. It had been a jarring experience for all of them, and they’d had many advantages Cobain lacked. A four-way creative team, for one thing. A manager and lawyer committed primarily to their physical, artistic, and spiritual well-being. And they’d all had ten years to grow into their roles, and to grow up, before the big lights swung in their direction. Cobain didn’t have any of that, and when he faltered, the people closest to him either didn’t know how to help him or didn’t care enough to try.

  Another death, another jolt to the band’s creative spirit. This time the result wasn’t frustration or anger, but joint creativity. Mike picked up a guitar, turned it up until the music frayed into noise. A couple of dark chords made the verse, then a step up into a major three-chord progression that sounded less like a celebration than an appeal, a plea. The others joined in, Bill on percussion, Peter on simple two-finger organ. Michael wrote his lyrics to speak directly to their vanished friend, the wounded man who had not found the strength to continue his fight. Heeeyyyy, let me in, he sang over the chorus, the point where Peter’s organ line turned skyward, then tumbled back down again. That had been Michael’s message to Cobain, in the form of the offered soundtrack, in the airplane ticket his fellow musician had never taken up for the journey to Athens. Let me in, he sang. Let me help, you don’t need to do it all yourself. But by then Cobain’s ears were beyond hearing. The band played the new song together in the studio, the four of them joined together by the song, the sadness, the unified call to a friend they could no longer reach.

  * * *

  —

  Soon after Cobain’s death, Peter’s girlfriend, Stephanie, gave birth to twins girls named Zoe and Zelda, and he went back to Seattle to be with his new family. A glorious distraction, but still. Bill had settled on a farm outside Athens and fell into the slow, placid rhythms of farming hay. Michael had his array of film projects and friends. Mike was living his version of the high life, growing his hair, trading his postcollegiate wardrobe of jeans and T-shirts for flashier threads. With Holt, Downs, and company back in the office plotting a yearlong world tour, the need for a new album, one strong enough to keep R.E.M. at the apex of global pop culture, was piercing. And yet the group continued to struggle, and work on the new album floundered. At one session in Los Angeles, the arguing grew so jagged that the four musicians could only agree that they couldn’t take it anymore: Fuck this, fuck you, we’re done. Four cars zooming off in four separate directions. No, but wait. They held a meeting outside the studio to see if they could talk through the problem and started remembering the things they still agreed on. That they’d built this band together, that they loved the work they’d done, that they could each give up a little in order to get a lot more of what really mattered. The work, the music, this huge moment they were about to create.

  * * *

  —

  They called the album Monster. The blurry image on the cover, a bear with glowing, angry eyes, animated the implacable force they were addressing. As with the lower wolves from Chronic Town, the provenance of the beast in the night, the relationship between the hunter and the hunted, is unclear. The music offers no clues. Fast, distorted, and almost unrelentingly loud, it comes out of the speakers like a battered muscle car, all chrome, rust, and manifold rumble. Peter, trading his chiming Rickenbacker for the throaty power of a Gibson Les Paul (as per Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, and nearly every testosterone-fueled guitar hero of the ’60s and ’70s) and used stomp pedals to distort its sound.

  The keyboard sounds came out of roller rinks and fairgrounds, the sound of cheese and cheap thrills, while the bass stayed simple and close to the ground, more felt than heard. Bill, who had been the most insistent on making a rock ’n’ roll album, used his drums the way an assassin wields a high-powered rifle: precise, percussive, deadly. Michael’s lyrics taunted and teased, accused and denied, flirted, fingered, and fucked. I’m the real thing, he boasts. Anybody can get laid, he declares. I pushed the button and erased your master tape. Strutting and smirking, sulking and complaining, he rises naked, cloaked only in the neon glare of glam rock.

  “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” a guitar-forward rocker composed by Mike, strung together a long series of chords that Peter played through heavy distortion and elicited one of Michael’s most urgent yet tuneful melodies. The lyric, which took its name from the insane cries of the man who had assaulted CBS anchor Dan Rather in New York in 1986, became a metaphor for every inexplicable thing the media culture broadcasts across the endlessly glowing screen. I’d studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines, the narrator declares. I never understood the frequency.

  In “King of Comedy,” the perspective shifts to the inside of the screen, where the man on the business end of the camera refuses his role as industrial product. I’m not your king of comedy…I’m not commodity. The fact that we’re hearing this via a shiny disc made available for purchase by a vast multinational conglomerate implies otherwise, but everyone’s got an angle in this sheeny, monstrous world. In “Star 69,” named for the code you used to have to dial to call back whoever had just dialed your number, the singer lambastes a hapless conspirator who is only just learning that the jig is up. I know all about the warehouse fire, he gloats. I know squirrellies didn’t chew the wires.

  When the pace slows, the music turns lurid, guitar chords hanging like come-ons, keyboards ripe and throbbing, cymbals sizzling, Michael singing in a leering falsetto, hot breath in your ear, arm slung casually, if unbidden, over your shoulder. What I want to feel, I want to feel it now, he declares in the sultry R&B ballad “Strange Currencies.” Don’t leave that stuff all over me, he sings in the suggestively titled “Tongue.” Another steam-fest begins: You kiss on me, tug on me, rub on me. Did he tell his mom not to listen to “Bang and Blame”? It takes us straight to bed and does not pan away at the crucial moment. You let go on me. Talking to a TV reporter about the new album, Michael cheerfully affixed his own parental warning. “It’s a dick record.” When his interviewer laughed awkwardly, he glanced at the camera with a devilish sparkle in his eyes. “Can I say dick on this?”

  Skip Notes

  * Their block of Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood, overlooking Lake Washington, was quite a place in the early 1990s: Peter Buck in one house, Cobain and Love a few doors away, and Howard Schultz, the CEO of the Starbucks coffee company, next to them.

  39

  Enter the Monster

  This was how R.E.M.’s biggest year began.

  On January 5, 1995, at Los Angeles International Airport, which briefly took on a tinge of Beatlemania. The band of the moment caught in transit, fielding questions about their new concert tour, their first in half a dozen years. The musicians were charming, laconic, bemused if not surprised to find themselves the subject of so much fervent curiosity. A few things had changed since the days of the moptops. This was a private conference held solely for the benefit of MTV, which was airing it live around the world, underscoring how significant R.E.M. had become to the network and to the tens of millions of largely youthful viewers watching all around the world. In the United States the interview was broadcast live, like Apollo space launches used to be.

  MTV had been promoting the exclusive interview all day, counting down the hours until the live broadcast, which began with the network’s chief anchor, Kurt Loder, at his desk in New York unveiling the dates of the American leg of the band’s world tour. The stateside shows wouldn’t start for another four months, but tickets would go on sale within a few days. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, Loder’s colleague Tabitha Soren sat in a temporary set in LAX’s international terminal, facing three of R.E.M.’s four members, all lined up in tall chairs to talk about the new tour. But first she had to congratulate them, because Monster, which had been released the previous September, debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart, and gone on to sell close to ten million copies, had just been nominated for two Grammy Awards. As it turned out, they hadn’t heard. The nominations were for Best Rock Album and something to do with design. The musicians looked at one another and shrugged. Well, okay, they said. Great. For a moment Soren seemed taken aback by the musicians’ indifference. “I guess you’ve won them before,” she mused, and Mike nodded. “We’ve lost them before, too.”

  Bound for the tour’s opening concert, in Perth, Australia, the musicians were all dressed for comfort. Mike in a white sweatshirt and jeans, Bill in a corduroy jacket, black jeans, and a T-shirt, with a tall, muffin-shaped hat and, less explicably, a spoon tucked behind his ear. Michael also wore jeans and a T-shirt, with a black watch cap pulled over his head and a scruffy blond goatee bristling on his chin. Peter was running late because his flight from Seattle had been delayed. Or maybe, as a prankish Bill announced, he’d just been fired. “So all you young, aspiring guitarists, send your résumés in.” Or maybe, as Michael proposed a few minutes later, it was the drummer who’d been made redundant. “We’re programming all the drums, so Bill just goes out to dinner.” At the time, this was intended to be ridiculous.

  More questions, more jokey answers, more glimpses behind the scenes of the moment’s biggest rock band. How did they keep themselves entertained during long flights? Mike said he planned to sleep and play games on his portable backgammon set. What was the weirdest thing they packed? Bill pointed to the utensil tucked behind his ear. He’d heard they don’t have spoons in Australia, he said. Was it easier for Michael to perform with spotlights in his face now that he’d grown out of being so shy? Sure, he said. “My skin got better too, and that helped a little bit.” What songs were they going to play? A rain of jokes followed on that one: Nothing from their new album, but they would play the entire Green Day album. Also a lot of covers of Molly Hatchet songs, Michael said, digging back into his memory of relatively obscure southern rock bands of the 1970s. “I loved Molly Hatchet in junior high!” Soren yelped. “Really? Well, I knew that,” Michael said flirtatiously. “That’s why I said it.”

  Eventually Soren posed a question directly to Bill. Now that they were about to set off on their biggest-ever tour, a high-flying, globe-trotting marathon across scores of cities, dozens of nations, and multiple continents, with hundreds of thousands of fans cheering them and millions of dollars at stake, what part of it all was he looking forward to the most? The drummer answered without hesitating.

  “The end of it.”[1]

  * * *

  —

  It had all been leading up to this. That was certainly Bill’s position when they were in Acapulco, talking about where they were in the wake of Out of Time and Automatic for the People, the album they should make next, and what should happen after that. And he’d been clear about what he wanted: a rock ’n’ roll album they could play on the road. That’s what they’d set out to do, and even if the recording of Monster had come close to splintering the group, they had emerged from the process feeling excited about the work, and as unified as they’d ever been. Nearly fifteen years into their career, the band’s ascent had only grown steeper and faster. Now, in the wake of their two most successful records by far, and with another strong album on the verge of being released, and with their first concert tour since their stunning ascent to the summit of Mount Pop Culture guaranteed to be the biggest, most lucrative enterprise in their career, they were ready to pull out all the stops.

  Early the previous August, the band had spent a couple of days shooting a video for “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” They worked with director Peter Care, who had already made strong clips for “Drive” and especially “Man on the Moon.” Both of those videos had animated the spirit of their respective songs in vivid ways, but with “Kenneth” the charge was different. This time the video didn’t engage with the song’s mass-media-mayhem message or with the frustration of its befuddled narrator. Instead it focused on R.E.M. itself—the evolved identities of the musicians, and their extraordinary power as live performers.

  Michael’s resistance to lip synching now a distant memory, the “Kenneth” video is, from start to finish, a mimed performance, shot in an empty warehouse in which the band’s instruments, amplifiers, and other gear are set in a stage formation. As the opening chords play, the camera frames Michael as a body: feet, legs, midriff, and shoulders, that’s it. We glimpse the bottom half of his face when he hitches up his pants, but as the first verse begins and the other musicians start to move amid flashes of clear white light strobing from offstage, we see them first in quick, surprising glances. Mike, last seen performing in a lightly spangled suit at MTV’s 1993 Video Music Awards, has been reborn as a glittering electric cowboy. Shiny boots, blue flared suit spangled in rhinestone peacock feathers, his hair long, blond, and curly, his soft eyes hidden behind sinister dark shades. Peter’s loose white shirt and black pants are relatively plain, but he’s cut back his hair to reveal thick muttonchop sideburns. Bill keeps it simple behind the drums with a sleeveless white T-shirt, his muscles working, his sticks flashing in the strobes. The song speeds and spins, they’re all moving with it, pushing the sound forward. When the current finally hits Michael, his body erupts as if he’s brushed against a high-tension wire. Feet pumping, arms flailing, hands grabbing at the microphone on the stand in front of him, body moving but face centered in the frame. And in that moment, as his eyes find the lens and the strobe ignites the top of his freshly shaven head, we grasp for the first time that Michael Stipe, or at least the version Michael is willing to present to the world, is no longer who he used to be.