* * *

  —

  “He’s not going to survive.”[12]

  This is what Mari Berry heard when Bill was headed into surgery and she called home to her friend who worked as a nurse. The friend had seen this before. She was so sorry, so very sorry, but when the aneurysm bursts they’re done for, and it was best for Mari to be prepared. But that’s not what Mari had heard from the doctors who were caring for him, so she dismissed her friend’s version and focused on the here and now, in this Swiss hospital, where they seemed so much more optimistic.

  They opened his head, found three bleeds, and employed the vascular clips to seal them. Seemingly repaired, Bill was still in blinding pain, but they didn’t want to give him morphine; he needed to be conscious so they could see how his body was responding. A day or two passed and he seemed to be recovering. They were about to send him back to the hotel when a final test, a walk down the hospital hallway, got scary. Bill’s left side went limp; something was wrong. They wheeled him back into surgery, discovered that his clipped veins were collapsing, then employed another newly developed technique, moving balloons up his carotid artery to expand the vessels until they had healed. Bill was back in his room soon after that, conscious and talking. This time he really was on the mend. He went back to the hotel, and a few days later they moved him to a resort in Evian, where he stayed until he was strong enough to board a jet and fly home to Georgia. There, his bandmates, who flatly refused promoters’ attempts to talk them into performing with a substitute drummer, waited anxiously for their fallen comrade’s return.

  Considering how close he came to death, the speed of Bill’s recovery was astounding. Back in Georgia, it took just a couple of weeks for him to get back on the golf course. And even before that he was on the phone to Holt in the office. When could they get back on the road? Bill was ready. Or he would be in just a few weeks. He was already going at his drums, getting his groove back, raring to go. His doctors were fine with it, too. He was as good as new; even better.

  * * *

  —

  They were off the road for exactly six weeks. They lost a couple dozen shows, mostly in Europe and the UK and then a handful of dates in Southern California. But the touring party re-congregated in Oakland for a few days of rehearsals during the first week of May, and on May 15, R.E.M.’s tour, now dubbed Aneurysm ’95, launched its American run at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, just south of San Francisco in Mountain View. Bill, wearing a black baseball cap over his recently opened head, played with all the power and poise he’d had before his fateful visit to Switzerland. Michael made a point of asking after his health a couple of times during the show, prompting the drummer to fake convulsions once and then fall off his stool altogether. It was all in good fun, as was the new image they’d added to the montage that played behind the band during the set: an X-ray of Bill’s head taken in the Swiss hospital, burst aneurysms and all.

  And I feel fine.

  Part V

  The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. and This Is What We Do

  41

  How the West Was Won…

  After fifteen years of relatively smooth travels, the road got bumpy. They rumbled across the United States through the end of June, climaxing with three sold-out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden, then returned to Europe for a run of big outdoor shows: festivals, stadiums, castles. Everywhere, the audiences thronged and cheered in numbers large enough to reroute traffic, affirming R.E.M.’s place at the apex of rock ’n’ roll.

  And yet something in the air had changed. Ten days into the European swing, another medical emergency hit. Struck by a high fever and abdominal pain, Mike required surgery to repair an intestinal adhesion, an aftereffect of the appendix surgery he’d had a year earlier. They lost nine shows to his recovery, got back at it in time for an enormous show at Ireland’s Slane Castle on July 22, then barely made it through the next three weeks of shows before Michael, also laid low with abdominal pain, was diagnosed with a hernia—a result of bearing down to sing night after night. He pushed himself through the final European show, in Prague, before jetting back for surgery at Emory University Hospital, in Atlanta.

  The personal dynamics within the band were shifting. Bill, though happy to be alive and relieved that the “little boo-boo” in his head,[1] as he called it, hadn’t spelled the end of the band’s yearlong tour, pulled a baseball cap over his brow and kept his eyes beneath the brim. He’d always been shyer than the other guys, but now Bill withdrew even further. “He didn’t want to be around everybody, didn’t want to socialize,” his then-wife Mari recalls. “He didn’t do much game playing or hanging out. He was tired; maybe his brain aneurysm was making him feel sicker than he thought.”[2]

  They were seeing less of Jefferson Holt, too. He’d once been the indispensable fifth member of the band, perpetually available to lend support and counsel for every significant event in their day, but much of his role had been given over to the musicians’ individual posses of assistants, spouses/partners, and friends. And while Bertis Downs could usually be found in the management office at the day’s venue when he wasn’t on the links with Bill, Holt started to find more time for sightseeing or visiting museums or just doing his own thing. Still, the manager stepped up in a big way during Bill’s crisis, staying at the drummer’s side to the point of sleeping in his hospital room, until he was back on solid ground. Their luck held—everyone got better, the tour went on, the crowds continued to cheer.

  * * *

  —

  Michael was mostly healed from his operation when work resumed in the United States in early September. The band dropped by MTV’s Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall to collect the Video Vanguard Award, a career achievement kind of prize that Michael, in his acceptance speech, described as indicating that they’d been around for a long time and made a lot of videos “that don’t suck.”[3] Also invited to give a musical performance, the band chose to play “The Wake-Up Bomb,” one of the brand-new songs they’d composed on the road, but had yet to record. Most artists would take advantage of the national/global platform by featuring a new single or anything that was commercially available. But with more than two more months of road work ahead of them, R.E.M. were already promoting themselves within an inch of their lives. Which was, in large part, what “The Wake-Up Bomb” was about. I’ve had enough, I’ve seen enough, I’ve had it all, I’m giving up, Michael sang as the band crunched and blasted behind him.

  From New York to Miami, Florida, to Antioch, Tennessee, to Birmingham, Alabama, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Heading west for half a dozen shows in Texas, up to Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, to upstate New York and on and on into October, then November. They continued working on new songs along the way, and as they settled into the fall leg of the tour, they were performing as many as four new songs during the set. Like “The Wake-Up Bomb,” most were big, loud, and blurry, the products of musicians who had spent the year seeing the world through the window of a fast-moving tour bus. Distance is my tendency, Michael sings in “Binky the Doormat.” In “Undertow” the road mania becomes a wall of water closing over the singer’s head. I’m drowning, he repeats in the chorus, and Mike, tracing a higher melody, fills in the rest of the thought: Breathing ourselves. And while the singer of “The Wake-Up Bomb” struts and preens like a character off of Monster, he’s stopped believing his own hype: My head’s on fire in high esteem.

  The last three shows were a homecoming stand in Atlanta, at the eighteen-thousand-capacity Omni Coliseum. A camera crew shot all three nights, capturing performances for what would become the Road Movie concert film, released the next year. The end of the tour, along with the hometown setting, prompted a little goofing around. The first night’s encore included a cover of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider,” and the next night’s encores worked in Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” And though Michael made a point during the final show of saying how unsentimental he was about the end of the tour, the band still surprised the audience, and possibly themselves, by pulling out “Radio Free Europe.” (“Let’s do it!” Mike shouted just after they finished “Departure.” “Yeah, fuck yeah, why not,” Michael said.) It was a sluggish rendition, grungy and about half a beat too slow, but after such a long and unexpectedly jarring year, they seemed thrilled to be able to play it at all. The usual show closer, “End of the World,” came next, but the night and the tour weren’t over until they stomped through a thudding, sloppy version of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing.” Finally, the sweaty, exhausted band members took their final bows, waved, and left the stage. It was the last full show the four of them would ever play together.

  * * *

  —

  They all went home to rest, but not for long. So many things were going on, all at once. In January 1996 the band got together at John Keane’s studio in Athens to start working on the songs they’d written and partially recorded during the Monster tour. They worked sporadically through February, then upped sticks to Seattle in early March, where they worked in the Bad Animals studio through mid-April. The initial plan to build the new album entirely from the soundcheck recordings went by the wayside when they started coming up with newer songs they liked even better.

  Both the new and newer songs echoed the blur and blare of the road, of the relentless pace of a life lived in the spotlight, of the media that both served their interests and, in turn, served them up like so much fresh-sliced roast. For all the creative energy they had going, most of the songs had a flat, monochromatic feeling. As if they had been written while in a defensive crouch, absorbing one blow, girding for the next. The only thing harder than not getting what you want is getting even more than you’d hoped for. I attain my dream, I lost myself, Michael sang in “Leave,” over distorted guitar growl, pounding drums, and a relentlessly shrieking siren. I know it well, ugly and sweet.

  * * *

  —

  Everyone had their appetites, and Jefferson Holt was no exception. He was a courtly fellow well known for his kindness and progressive sensibility, but he was also a little eccentric, with a few eyebrow-raising habits. Even before R.E.M. came into his life, Holt reportedly kept a Polaroid camera behind the counter of the North Carolina record store where he worked and used it to snap photos of attractive women who came in to shop. He was also said to keep an illustrated history of erotica on the coffee table in his living room, and to doff all but his underpants when in his home, even when entertaining friends and other company.[4] None of those things are crimes, though it’s hard to know how the women in the shop felt about being photographed. And none of these things were a secret from the members of R.E.M. when they invited Holt to join their touring group and then serve as their manager.

  And if Holt was a sexual libertine, he was not the only passenger in their van who could have been described that way. They were healthy young men who spent a lot of time away from home, in a traveling rock band that made them the center of attention nearly everywhere they went. It was easy for all of them to meet new friends with similar enthusiasms. “They probably slept with all their fans in those days,” says Karen Glauber, a college radio disc jockey who went on to work for I.R.S. Records. “I was talking to Bertis about it recently and I told him, ‘You have no idea what sluts your boys were.’ He was like, ‘Really!’ He had no idea.”[5]

  We can only assume that everyone had a good time. That they were of age, and clear-minded enough to give their consent, and then walk away with happy memories and maybe even a friend they might see when their paths crossed again. R.E.M. and their associates were nice young men, it seems. Mostly. “Jefferson never did anything with me to make me lose my trust in him,” says Ingrid Schorr, who knew them all from the start. “He never did anything to me, but I’ve seen him be pretty sleazy.”[6] Apparently he wasn’t the only one, as Michael told the newspaper The Guardian in 2020 when the reporter asked to whom he’d like to apologize. “Everyone I slept with before the age of twenty-seven, because I was a selfish, cold-ass bitch.”[7]

  * * *

  —

  “New Test Leper” was one of the new songs they worked on in Seattle, built around a fast-strummed acoustic guitar, an organ pad, and shaker percussion. The acoustic guitar and understated percussion put it squarely in the folkier end of R.E.M.’s catalog, as does its discussion of faith and how the words of Jesus can be distorted. But Michael’s lyrics, voicing the thoughts of a man appearing on a television talk show, describe a scene from a celebrity’s life. And not just that, but a celebrity mourning an appearance that went sideways when he attempted to refute his host’s bullying religious views. The song aims for social commentary, a denunciation of the sort of small-minded evangelicals who use faith as a cudgel against the weak and the different. But this isn’t about the persecuted or the downtrodden. It’s the tale of a celebrity who finds himself on the wrong TV show, getting bullied by a bunch of dicks. Whether he knows it or not, his real problem seems to be his own hubris. I thought I might help them understand, he proclaims. Sadly, no one is interested. The other guests shout him down, the host cuts to commercial. Ridiculed and ignored, the benighted celebrity thinks again of the Bible and identifies with Jesus’s lowliest friends. Call me a leper.

  Look, everyone has problems. The angst of a celebrity is still angst; nobody likes to be insulted and humiliated, let alone on television. But it’s hard to tell exactly what this glimpse into such a rarefied world is intended to achieve, other than to make us feel ooky about the recurring references to actual lepers, whose problems are so much more real and profound than those of a guy who has a bad day on the talk show circuit.

  * * *

  —

  At one point during the recording, a few executives from Warner Bros. Records came up to Seattle to hear the new tracks. What they heard made their mouths water. The album was, by their estimation, packed with hit singles. This was excellent news for the Warner executives, and also for R.E.M., and not just because the top people at their record company were now that much more motivated to promote their next release. It was also the last album on the contract R.E.M. had signed in 1988. And given what was taking place within Warner Bros., it could not have been a more perfect time for R.E.M. to be heading into contract negotiations.

  * * *

  —

  “Be Mine” was one of the songs that chimed with hit potential. Based on a delicious, elegantly modulating chord progression Mike came up with during an all-night bus ride, the tune begins quietly, just Mike’s guitar (taken from the demo he recorded on the bus) and Michael’s gentle protestations of love. At first his love language is childlike, evoking the Easter Bunny, a Christmas tree, then fairy tales about birds and the lion with the thorn in his paw. But as the music builds—drums, bass, another layer of guitar, and the wail of a synthesizer—he dines on lotus and peyote and his imagery becomes epic. Sacred fountains, temples, the Ganges River, a vast and stormy sea. And if you make me your religion, he sings at one point, I’ll give you all the room you need. It looks daffy, maybe even a little sinister on the page. What kind of maniac offers himself as a deity? But the music is so lovely, and the layers of sound so overwhelming, it makes sense.

  * * *

  —

  Playing music with other people is maybe a little like sex. You keep your clothes on, you stand a respectable distance apart, but there’s a physicality and an intimacy to the act. A rhythm is established. A sound, a feel. The energy builds. The pace might quicken. Thoughts are intuited but rarely spoken. Sometimes you think you’re doing one thing, but then someone does something else and it’s even more perfect than what you intended. When it’s done, you look at each other and smile, or sometimes laugh. That was fucking amazing, someone might say. Or maybe that’s just what they’re thinking.

  * * *

  —

  One day in Seattle, Bill walked into the studio and found Mike playing a little piano figure. Dee-dee-dee-DEET. Over and over again. Dee-dee-dee-DEET. He went to his drums, found the rhythm, started playing a light but vaguely funky pattern. Boom-boom-POP, bah-boom-boom-POP. When Peter came in, he picked up a bass and started playing with them, a simple four-note part, tracing the root chord. It was a midtempo groove, a kind of Ennio Morricone vibe, something out of a modern The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The whole thing came together very quickly. They played it through, recorded it, and built it up. Mike added a piano solo, chords, and notes tumbling here and there. He was thinking about Thelonious Monk when he played it, though he wasn’t certain he knew what Monk sounded like. Michael listened, scratched out some lyrics about bad breaks, things falling apart, then a title: “How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us.” It became the leadoff track. Later they all said it was their favorite song on the album.

  * * *

  —

  Love is grand. Sex can be fun. As “Be Mine” implies, sex with someone you love can feel like religion. Two souls touching, intermingling, ascending briefly to heaven, then drifting down to earth cradled in each other’s arms. But sex with someone you don’t love can be empty and sad. And sex with someone you work for, particularly if you’re not entirely sure you want to have sex with them, can be beyond dispiriting. That’s when passion can evolve into something else entirely. A wielding of power. An expression of fear. Two people can fall into bed, even repeatedly, uttering words they either don’t mean or wish they didn’t have to say.