That certainly was Bill’s attitude when he dropped out of college to focus on R.E.M.’s career and then insisted that Mike and Michael do the same. It was still his attitude when he rejected Peter’s idea that the band spend 1995 touring clubs instead of the mega-arenas they could, and did, fill most nights. “He said, No, we’re gonna do what we’re supposed to do,” Bill’s ex-wife, Mari, recalls. The drummer stuck to the plan and made sure his bandmates did the same, and look where it got them. And they’d gotten there with their artistry, their ideals, and their minds and bodies generally intact. Heading into the fall of 1996, with a few close scrapes and one personal/organizational catastrophe behind them, with another strong album on its way into the shops, and their financial security—and thus their artistic freedom—set for life, the four members of R.E.M. had everything they’d ever dreamed of, and too much more to mention.

  43

  I’m Outta Here

  The lead single for New Adventures in Hi-Fi was “E-Bow the Letter,” whose mystifying title was a cobbling together of the name of the electronic device Peter used to get the howling guitar tone on the song and the fact that Michael’s lyrics were the text of a letter he’d been writing during the Monster tour. Midtempo and dark, the music had an engaging slinkiness, and Michael’s epistolary lyrics describe the detached reality of a wanted man (This fame thing, I don’t get it / I wrap my hand in plastic to try to look through it). Descending like a hawk, the voice of Patti Smith swoops over the chorus, drifts in for a few lines, then takes off again. “E-Bow” scraped into Billboard’s top fifty, but just barely, peaking at number forty-nine before it, too, flapped out of sight.

  The soundcheck songs filled in most of the album with reverberations from the Monster year, glam bluster muffled by road-weariness. But the final track, “Electrolite,” glimmered like a new dawn. Singing atop a cheery piano riff backed by a folky acoustic guitar, lightly spanked drums, and banjo, Michael describes the lights of Los Angeles as viewed from atop the Hollywood Hills. Surrounded by film stars and swelled with hope, he senses the end of one century and the start of the next one with something like contentment. A guiro hums, a fiddle joins the party. On the cusp of immense change, it’s a moment of respite, a gathering of wits, a foot on the threshold. In the end, the music stops and Michael’s voice hangs in the air. I’m not scared, he concludes. I’m outta here.

  Released on September 9, 1996, New Adventures was greeted with the usual critical accolades and a fast leap to the highest reaches of the album charts. They had to settle for number two, however, and then a relatively speedy descent. For the first time in a decade, an R.E.M. album only just squeaked to platinum status. Overseas sales added up to another million copies, but after the multi-platinum performances of the previous three albums it was a notable comedown. And it wasn’t just them, as Mike noted on Irish television in 1998. New albums by U2, the Smashing Pumpkins, and other preeminent rock bands had faltered in the past year or two. “We’re in very strange place in the world of rock ’n’ roll right now,” he said. “If you don’t have a hit single, the bulk of the people are not going to go out and buy this record.” He spoke of computers, the internet, all the new media distracting people from the music that used to define their identities. “There’s just so much competition for kids’ attention and your money; the days of a ten-million-album-selling rock band could be over.”

  It was that light on the eastern horizon again, the dawn of a new century. “Rock ’n’ roll as we knew it is gone.”[1]

  * * *

  —

  The last R.E.M. project of 1996 came in early November in Los Angeles, a three-day shoot for the video of “Electrolite,” slated to be the third and final clip for the New Adventures album. As visualized by the director Peter Care, it combined shots of the band members and of people in the street. The ordinary Angelenos, young and old, black and white, male and female, animated various kinds of captivity, chained to street signs, lampposts, palm trees, and one another, dragging balls and chains around their ankles, while the band members express freedom. In the first band scenes, the musicians’ images are upside down, a (perhaps unwelcome) reprise of the notorious quarry video Michael shot for “Fall on Me.” The image rights itself after a minute or so as we see, but don’t hear, the individual band members speaking enthusiastically to some unseen interlocutor. There is lip-synching and slapstick, light psychedelia. It starts to feel like a lost episode of the Monkees’ TV show.

  They’re playing their instruments dressed in neon shades of satin. They’re zooming across the desert in dune buggies. They set up in band formation in the parking lot of a truck stop, and on a street. As they play, they perform magical feats, tilting sideways until they’re parallel to the ground, falling over and through the surface of the earth, popping up into the air. They all get their close-ups, their moments to shine. But given what was about to happen, it’s hard not to focus on Bill. We’ll never see him like this again.

  So here he is. Smiling warmly and gesturing as he talks, soundlessly, to the other side of the camera. He whacks a set of congas, wearing a gold spangled top, orange satin pants, and a bright green feather boa. Now he’s sitting in a chair in a yellow satin shirt going at a pair of bongos, his upper body moving fluidly with the rhythm of his playing. He looks young and handsome, a small smile on his lips, happily lost in his music. The dune buggy sequence is mostly fast cuts, but when the camera finds the drummer, it lingers for a moment until it catches his eye. He holds up a hand in greeting, then spins his wheel to the right and zooms off in another direction.

  The clip’s final moments have the musicians set up in the parking lot, and then in the street, digitally rendered into various uncanny positions. At one point Bill seems to grow into a giant, stooping farther and farther to play the drums shrinking beneath him. As the song moves into its final moments, everything goes berserk. Mike leaps into the air and hangs there, frozen. Peter shrinks into the ground and vanishes. In the final seconds Bill jets upward and hangs briefly in midair. When they made the video, this was just another moment in a cheerfully surreal clip, but in retrospect it’s something else altogether. I’m not scared, Michael sings. I’m outta here. At which point R.E.M.’s drummer soars abruptly out of the picture.

  * * *

  —

  The band took a few months off, then, in April 1997, went to Peter’s house in Hawaii to work on songs for their next album. As always, Peter had a bunch of new material to share. He’d spent much of his time off in the studio he’d built in his house in Seattle, fiddling with synthesizers and other electronic doodads, coming up with atmospheric grooves that tilted toward electronica. Mike also had plenty of new tunes, and the two of them engaged in the usual push-me-pull-you, seeing what fit together, while Michael came in and out, listening, sketching melodies, thinking about words. Bill was there, too. Sort of.

  He was sitting outside. He would pop in and listen but not say much of anything. He was walking on the beach. So, okay, he had a lot going on. His marriage to Mari was ending. A divorce could knock anyone sideways. Bill had also been particularly upset by the Jefferson Holt rupture. And now, in the wake of New Adventures’ relative flop (if that’s what you call an album that sells only two million copies), they had decided to end their run with Scott Litt and make their next album with a new producer. Bill was a big fan of stability, so maybe all that change was doing a number on his head. Anyone could have a bad week, right?

  They all went back to their respective homes at the start of May. Peter set off on a tour called “The Magnificent Seven vs. the United States,” a project he’d started with Scott McCaughey, the American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel, and a few other musician friends. They barnstormed the country for a month, heading to a final performance on May 31 in Atlanta. The three other members of R.E.M. came to see the show and were expected to play a few songs together at the end. But by the time the encores rolled around, only Mike and Michael were still in the theater. Bill had slipped out a side door and was already on his way back to his farm.

  * * *

  —

  Even in the earliest days, Bill had an eye on the exit. Late in 1980, the drummer started moonlighting with Love Tractor, the mostly instrumental band put together by art students Mark Cline, Armistead Wellford, and Mike Richmond. The band’s first drummer was Kit Swartz, who left to devote himself more fully to his other band, the Side Effects. Bill loved Love Tractor’s fluid instrumental style, so when they asked him to fill in at a show or two, he surprised the others by offering to join outright. He’d already dropped out of school to focus on music and could figure out a way to work them into the holes in R.E.M.’s schedule. He brought his drums to Love Tractor’s rehearsal space and launched right in with them; he already knew their songs. When they played shows, he’d fall into a groove with bassist Armistead Wellford, those twin guitars spinning their curious textures on songs like “Hairy Beat” and “Chilly Damn Willy.” When it was over he’d be laughing happily.

  Soon Bill was overflowing with ideas and plans: they should play here, get some recording time there, really make a go of it. And that led to a question: “Are you guys ready to quit school and make this real?” Bill, it turned out, was ready to ditch R.E.M. and devote himself to Love Tractor. But he wasn’t going to do that until the other guys went all in on the band, too. And as Cline recalls, that’s where it ended. “I was so close to graduating, and Armistead was too,” Cline says. “I knew I could be in school and do the band too. It was an art project for me. So I said, ‘Naw, I gotta graduate first.’ And he went to the R.E.M. guys to see if they’d drop out to focus on their band and they said yes.”[2]

  Bill recommitted himself to R.E.M. But, for a few moments at least, it was that close.

  * * *

  —

  In most bands the drummer isn’t quite so essential. Even the truly distinctive drummers, Charlie Watts in the Rolling Stones, Ringo Starr in the Beatles, Dave Grohl in Nirvana, don’t touch the architecture of the music. They may elevate a song, but the writing, along with the conceptualizing of the band’s sound, spirit, and identity, is the purview of the guitarist, the singer, the guys on the front line. This was not true in R.E.M. Bill not only was a composer of songs as central to the band’s repertoire as “Driver 8,” “Everybody Hurts,” and “Man on the Moon” but also contributed key ideas to the arrangement of “Losing My Religion,” among other songs. “His musicianship was super special,” says Scott Litt. “I depended on him, and I know the guys did, too.”[3] Particularly when it came to keeping songs tight and focused. “If anyone was going off into left field, Bill would be depended upon to say ‘This is too much’ or ‘not enough,’ ” Litt continues.[4]

  Nathan December, who joined the band for the 1995 tour and worked with them on the songs that became New Adventures, says the other band members trusted their drummer’s instincts. “He was the gut of the band. If a song passed Bill’s litmus test, then it moved forward. And if he wasn’t on board it got shitcanned. I saw that happen on the tour. And his instinct was real good. If he said a song didn’t work, he was right.” And, December continues, he was very clear about what made a song work: “Basically, it’s gotta rock.”[5]

  * * *

  —

  The band returned to Athens at the start of October to work on studio demos of the songs for their new album. They had chosen Pat McCarthy, an Irish studio engineer who had worked on some New Adventures sessions and done some striking mixes for albums by Madonna and Patti Smith, to produce the new material. Peter came to town in the company of Scott McCaughey and Barrett Martin, a multi-instrumentalist who played the drums for the Seattle band the Screaming Trees. Peter had bought a drum machine for his home studio, and the demos he’d been making with the electronic gear made him think about new ways R.E.M. might approach drums and percussion. Which could also reignite Bill’s interest by liberating him from the drum stool and allowing him to take up the guitar, keyboards, or any other instrument he felt like playing. Work at John Keane’s studio started on October 3 and continued for a few days, with Peter, Mike, and Michael, supplemented by McCaughey and Martin. Obviously, someone was missing. “We kind of started thinking something weird was going on,” McCaughey says. “But they weren’t talking.”[6]

  What they weren’t saying was that Bill had told the others that he’d had enough of being a pop star. He wasn’t mad at anyone. He still loved playing music. But everything that went with it, the constant travel, the long hours in recording studios, having to perform in videos, and the many life-altering requirements of fame, had finally worn him out. After seventeen years of doing nothing but being in R.E.M., he didn’t want to do it anymore. In fact, he couldn’t do it anymore. He’d broken the news to Mike first, calling from his farm a few days before the sessions were supposed to begin. They’d talked a few times after that, but the bassist resisted telling the others until he was certain his old friend couldn’t be swayed. Finally, the night before they were supposed to meet at Keane’s studio, Mike called Peter and Michael and told them both, individually, to gird for trouble. Bill’s going to say something to you, and you won’t want to hear it. Neither of them guessed how sweeping, and final, his announcement would be.

  First they wanted to make sure he wasn’t depressed, and that he wasn’t making an impulsive decision he’d regret later. Bill assured them he’d talked it through with several people, including a therapist, and he knew what he was doing. They tried bargaining with him: He didn’t have to tour with them. They could do all their recording in Athens. He could play any instrument he wanted to play. No and no and no. Actually, Bill said the only thing that would convince him to stay was knowing that the band would dissolve if he departed. That had once been their promise to one another if any one of them decided to leave, but he was too big an R.E.M. fan to let that happen now. “I did not want to be the schmuck who broke up R.E.M.,” he said later.[7] He’d stay with them under those circumstances, Bill said. “But I’ll be miserable.”

  What could they say to that?

  * * *

  —

  Some lingering questions were more difficult to pose. Mostly the ones about the effects of the aneurysm. Had something in Bill changed after the events of March 1, 1995? And if so, was it an emotional response to having a near-death experience? Or was it more neurological than that? Had the aneurysm and all that blood that soaked into his brain in the hours after his veins had burst done something to change his personality? One friend put it to me like this: “Before the aneurysm, Bill saw the world like an ordinary thirty-five-year-old man. But after that, he saw the world like a sixty-five-year-old.” More cautious. More fearful. Something would come up that involved the band going to a different city and he’d shake his head. “Denver? Why do I want to go there? I didn’t leave anything in Denver.”

  But his ex-wife, Mari, says Bill’s retirement talk began before Lausanne, before the Monster tour and even before Monster was recorded, when they first moved into the country and he settled into life on the farm. The peace, the quiet, the absence of crowds or anyone with urgent questions about this, that, and everything else. This was where he belonged, Bill said, not living the hectic, high-profile life of a damn rock star. So maybe it was time to call it a day. “I said, ‘You’re too young to retire. What are you going to do, ride around on your tractor all day?’ ”[8] He thought about it and agreed with her. Then he was back with the others, saying it was time to make a noisy rock album and get back on the road like a real rock band. If they didn’t want to do that, he added, he’d quit the band. In retrospect, the paradoxes are clear, up to and including how he was, in effect, setting their course straight to Lausanne.

  * * *

  —

  We should take a moment to discuss the eyebrow.

  In terms of classical male beauty, Bill’s unibrow, the dense bank of fur that stretches like an ancient land bridge from the far corner of one eye to the most distant corner of the other, is a problem. The sort of thing the other kids make sport of, that you would never see on a matinee idol, that an aspiring pop idol, or anyone concerned with looking like everyone else, would eliminate from his visage with extreme and rigorous prejudice. But for Bill and for R.E.M., it was an enormous asset. Because it was so very distinctive. And also a metaphor for who he was and who they were.

  Which is to say, guys who were determined only to look like themselves and not care at all about how anyone else thought they should look. It became a trademark, a kind of logo. So much so that the only time the band put a recognizable portrait of a band member on an album cover during the first twenty-five years of their recording career was when they put Bill’s face on 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant. Divided into two, the cover’s bottom half shows a pair of buffalo. The top half is dominated by the top two-thirds of Bill’s face, with that epic brow at the center of the image. It was their first album to sell enough copies to be certified gold.

  * * *

  —

  They made the announcement at the end of the month. On October 31, all four band members sat together speaking to MTV News reporter Chris Connelly. Peter wore sunglasses. Michael’s eyes looked red-rimmed, as if he’d just had a good cry. Mike looked steady, and Bill looked immensely relieved. Interviews were his least favorite thing, but this was the last one he’d ever have to do. Asked for his feelings, he was forthright. “I feel horrible,” he said. “I wish it wasn’t me. I wish one of these other guys would do this first.” He talked about knowing what it took to make a record, the enthusiasm and inner mettle, and knowing he didn’t have it anymore. That it wouldn’t be fair to the other guys to be there giving anything less than his all. Asked if he had any words for R.E.M.’s fans, Bill looked into the camera.