“Thanks for giving me the greatest job a guy could ever have. I really mean that,” he said, eyes glistening. “It’s been a lot of fun right up until right now. And I’m sorry.”[9]

  44

  Airportmen

  A lot of things were unsettling about R.E.M.’s appearance at the massive two-day Tibetan Freedom Concert in Washington, D.C.’s RFK Stadium in mid-June 1998, and not all of them were the band’s doing. But it was hard to get around what Michael chose to wear for his band’s first concert appearance in nearly two and a half years. Which was also R.E.M.’s first-ever appearance without Bill Berry. It would have been stressful enough, given the large crowd (an estimated 66,000 people) and the wattage of the acts sharing the stage, including Radiohead, the Beastie Boys, the Fugees’ Wyclef Jean, the Dave Matthews Band, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

  To add to the pressure, the organizers had been forced to collapse the two-day concert into a single day when a bolt of lightning hit the stadium partway through the first day, sending at least one concertgoer to the hospital and forcing the cancellation of the rest of that day’s sets. R.E.M., on tenterhooks, had to squeeze their performance into the next day’s schedule. By the time they came out on Sunday afternoon, the tension was high on- and offstage. Musicians from the other bands, so many defining artists of the late 1990s, crowded the wings to see what the revamped R.E.M. would do. And here came Michael, dressed like…well, it was hard to say.

  His shirt, a heavily patterned long-sleeved chemise in a kind of washed-out off-gray, was about three sizes too small, revealing the bottom half of his forearms and most of his gaunt midriff. Beneath that he sported an ankle-length sarong, also densely patterned, but in floral colors that neither reflected nor matched the color of his top. It looked uncomfortable, to say the least. And when the band launched into “Airportman,” a heavily atmospheric electronic piece with no drums or apparent melody, the new-edition R.E.M. sounded about as magnetic as its singer’s clothes made him look. The stadium audience sagged visibly. And though a quick pivot to “Losing My Religion” pulled the crowd to its feet a few minutes later, the rest of the band’s eight-song set, consisting of three unfamiliar, largely electronic new songs, two tunes from the underloved New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and a set-closing “Man on the Moon,” amounted to something less than an auspicious relaunch.

  Work on the band’s new album wasn’t going nearly as well.

  * * *

  —

  When they announced Bill’s departure the previous October, Michael had described the challenge of a three-man R.E.M. like this: “I guess a three-legged dog is still a dog. It just has to learn how to run differently.”[1] Looking on the bright side, it could be a rebirth. A way for a veteran band to reinvent itself into an entirely new phase of discovery and creativity.

  The loss of their partner overwhelmed any thoughts of work that fall. When the band resumed their efforts in San Francisco in February 1998, they discovered that their three remaining legs no longer seemed to be connected to the same animal. Peter had added so much equipment to his home studio, including synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines, he could bring in demos that sounded like finished recordings. Mike didn’t know how to collaborate on those, or if Peter even wanted him to try. The bassist, meanwhile, no longer wanted to play the bass. He was much more interested in his own keyboards, while Michael, who had added minimalist keyboards and other instruments to the art-noise band Tanzplagen in the early 1980s, now felt pulled to the guitar, from which he could draw similarly rudimentary lines. So many things had changed, so many standard operating procedures peeled away, it felt as if they had evolved into a different creature altogether.

  Whatever they were, they no longer seemed to speak the same language. Often they didn’t speak at all. The work on the recordings went slowly, and painfully. They spent a lot of time at loggerheads, resolving some conflicts by working in two separate studios. After two months in San Francisco, they emerged with a handful of tracks that sounded less like traditional songs than banks of vaguely musical fog; sonically dense and yet amorphous, many with lyrics that were, to put it mildly, elliptical.

  They also had a few tracks that sounded more like what the world, and they, had come to understand as R.E.M. songs. But a chill had leached into the studio air. Mike, never the most punctual person, took to showing up for sessions hours late, much to Peter’s unhappiness. Already unmoored by Bill’s departure, Michael sensed the growing disconnection between his remaining partners and felt his muse slip away. Words stopped coming, and stayed away for weeks, then months. As the sessions dragged on, Peter, whose hours in the studio meant taking time away from his wife and young daughters, grew even more resentful.

  * * *

  —

  They left San Francisco in early April, resumed in Athens in mid-May, slammed through rehearsals for the Tibetan Freedom show in mid-June, then, with the album still unfinished and the intra-band relationships somewhere between distant and icy, felt themselves coming to the end of something. Realizing the situation was spiraling out of control, Bertis Downs petitioned the three band members to join him for a getaway in a remote lodge in Idaho, where they could talk, or perhaps shout, through their disagreements with no one but the trees and perhaps a passing moose to overhear. All three were skeptical that a resolution could be found. Peter was so unconvinced, he nearly didn’t bother to go. But his wife, Stephanie, urged him to give it a shot, and after three days of talks that Michael described as “vomiting on one another,” they found their way back to the band. R.E.M. finished recording and mixing the album during the second half of the summer, then prepared for a late October release. The album would be called Up.

  Still raw from all the upheaval of the preceding year, the band opted not to mount the concert tour they had once assumed they’d use to promote the first album on their new contract with Warner. Instead they played a number of smaller but high-impact performances, starting the week before Up’s release with an acoustic set at Neil Young’s annual Bridge School Benefit shows at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, in Mountain View, California. Playing with Scott McCaughey and drummer Joey Waronker, Lenny’s son and a seasoned player fresh from engagements with Beck and Portland singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, as well as Ken Stringfellow, from the power-pop band the Posies, to fill out the sound, the band performed eight-song sets that opened with “Losing My Religion” and included two of the stronger, non-electronic tracks from Up, “Daysleeper” and the Beach Boys–like “At My Most Beautiful.” In New York the next week, and then in a few media capitals in Europe, they made special TV appearances playing full-band sets of older favorites and a few new songs, including powerful new arrangements of the new album’s “The Apologist” and “Walk Unafraid.”

  Back in New York by mid-November, they appeared on Sesame Street, joining the show’s famous Muppets on a cheerful performance of “Shiny Happy People,” revised for the occasion to “Furry Happy Monsters.” When they made the original, candy-colored video for “Shiny Happy People” in 1991, Peter had appeared dour, not the least bit shiny, let alone happy. But now, as a forty-two-year-old father of four-year-old twin girls who were in the studio watching from just beyond the cameras,[2] he was all smiles, clearly delighted to strum a banjo along with the recorded track and dance with those silly, endlessly reassuring Muppets.

  * * *

  —

  Reassurances. The title of the album provided one—upward and onward, despite everything—and the interviews given by all the current band members described a litany of others. As usual, they seemed to have agreed on the themes beforehand: that it had been a tough year, a hard album to make, a difficult transition following Bill Berry’s departure. They had nearly broken up, maybe more than once, but had rediscovered themselves instead and emerged with, yes, that’s right, the best album they’d ever made. “Who’s to say that all the stress and strife and arguments and unspoken anger didn’t make it a better record?” Peter said in the hourlong This Way Up documentary that the band produced to promote the album. “Because I think it’s our best record.” Old habits die hard, even for former R.E.M. members. When the VH1 video channel (MTV’s second network, aimed toward older music fans) produced an R.E.M. episode of its Behind the Music documentary series, Bill sat for the camera and talked about the band’s first record without him with a sweet, rueful smile. “When I heard it, I felt like a chump,” he said. “I quit, and they make their best record.”[3]

  * * *

  —

  With fourteen songs adding up to more than sixty minutes of music, Up is long and, at times, elusive. “Airportman” opens the set, with its haze of looped synthetic and natural sounds. Michael sings in a low murmur, describing a man in an airport taking in the fluorescent light, the processed air, and the travelers standing passively on the moving floors. A guitar enters, feeding back on itself somewhere on the edge of the scene. Labored breathing and sallow skin, Michael breathes amid the whir and whoosh. Great opportunity blinks, great opportunity blinks.

  For R.E.M. the opportunity was reinvention. Absent its drummer, who had also been the band member most focused on songcraft, they set themselves adrift on the sonic tides. “You’re in the Air,” “Sad Professor,” and a few others are ambient and still, hazy and nearly arrhythmic, the work of what sounds like an entirely new band. Often they seem to be consciously avoiding themselves. “Hope” has the ringing chords and driving melody of a tuneful rocker, but tucked into the synthesizer icebox. “The Apologist” is dark and crafty, its verses building to a riveting chorus—I’m sorry, so sorry, so sorry—that, on a different album, could have been volcanic. Here, not so much. “Walk Unafraid” also tilts toward the anthemic, then goes the other way, crowding the chorus with synthesizers, auto-drum clicks, and atonal guitar howl.

  A few songs edge back to familiar territory. “Lotus” is a new variation on the Monster sound, with the synthesizer lines strung through electric piano, a blazing guitar hook, and pounding drums courtesy of Joey Waronker. “Daysleeper” sounds closer to Out of Time, with an acoustic guitar foundation, pensive verses, and ascending, spiraling choruses. The delicate love song “At My Most Beautiful” tips its hat to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, with natural piano, organ, a huffing bass harmonica, cellos, stuttering drums, and dense backing harmonies. Still, the album’s final song, “Falls to Climb,” returns to the electronic realm with peals of synthetic sound. The song, and the album, ends in the most heroic terms. Meeee, Michael sings. I am free. Then he sings it again, I am freeeee, holding on to the key word for as long as he can, his voice rising, falling, and rising again. Free.

  * * *

  —

  Unleashed on a large and eager American audience, Up shot instantly to number three on the Billboard chart, where it resided for a week, just long enough for their most fervent fans to give it a spin and tell their friends about what they heard. Then came another unexpected sound, the whistling of the album in free fall, hurtling out of the top ten, then off the chart after just sixteen weeks—six fewer than New Adventures had enjoyed and scarcely more than half of Murmur’s thirty weeks on the list. Granted, the band’s first album had never climbed higher than number thirty-six in 1983, and Up still sold enough copies to win gold certification. But it was the first R.E.M. album in more than a dozen years to not sell enough copies to yield platinum. Part of the problem was that “Daysleeper,” the single released two weeks before the album’s appearance, barely cracked the top sixty of the Hot 100, and did only moderately better on the other charts (Alternative Airplay, Adult Top 40, Mainstream Rock, etc.) before it too sank without much of a trace.

  Overseas, and particularly in England, where Britpop bands such as Blur, Suede, and Oasis still defined the airwaves, it was a completely different story. In the UK, Up jumped to number two on the album chart and stayed in the upper reaches for months, thanks to the strength of “Daysleeper,” which rose as high as number six on the singles chart. Up ultimately sold more than 1.5 million copies in the UK and Europe, nearly three times what it sold in the United States.

  Critical reaction on both sides of the Atlantic was almost entirely positive. Writing in Rolling Stone, Ann Powers gave the album a four-star review, while the influential UK music magazine Q also awarded four stars. David Stubbs, writing in the UK’s Uncut, termed it an “unexpected return to peak form.”[4] What made it so unexpected, apart from the loss of Bill Berry, was unclear. Perhaps it was the fact that R.E.M., in the wake of nearly two decades of experience, tens of millions of records sold, and untold scores of millions of dollars in profits, had no business making a record as experimental and vital as Up.

  The songs on Up, and perhaps R.E.M. as an entity, didn’t enchant American listeners in 1998 in quite the way the band and its records had during the first half of the decade. And maybe it had as much to do with larger cultural tides as anything else. In the United States the year’s dominant albums were almost all by pop, soul, or hip-hop performers. The most successful rock albums, apart from a greatest hits collection by U2, were by the mainstream likes of Kid Rock and the Offspring. Guys with guitars, the classic rock formation, had ebbed. The sounds of urgency, avalanching drums, caterwauling guitars, and singers whose thoughts came in a snarl or scream had lost their primacy.

  But not everywhere.

  * * *

  —

  Almost exactly a year after the Tibetan Freedom Concert, R.E.M. stepped onstage at the Glastonbury Festival, in England, facing an even larger audience than the one they’d faced the previous June in Washington, D.C. It was the same iteration of the band, Peter, Mike, and Michael, joined by Joey Waronker, Scott McCaughey, and Ken Stringfellow, armed with the same new songs from Up. But as the closing act on the storied festival’s Friday night, with 95,000 festivalgoers primed and ready for their set, the band delivered a significantly different version of the act they’d presented at RFK Stadium a year earlier. This time “Airportman” was limited to walk-out music, a little textured sound for the audience to listen to while contemplating the neon symbols and pictures that glowed and blinked on the backdrop. A two-headed snake here, a pair of upward arrows there, a fish, a radio tower, and, centered at the very top, a big, shining R.E.M.

  When the musicians emerged, the ambient music faded and Michael took the microphone. He had a band of light blue makeup around his eyes and wore a blue button-up shirt over loose blue athletic pants, white stripes up the sides. “We finally fuckin’ made it to Glastonbury,” he said, triggering an ovation and then the drum pattern of “Lotus,” the most stage-ready of the songs on Up. The opening riff spurred another cheer—Up was huge in England—and from there the onslaught began. The swaggering decadence of “Lotus” to the multimedia breakdown of “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” into “So Fast, So Numb,” the road warrior smashup from New Adventures, then a blisteringly intense arrangement of Up’s “The Apologist.” Next came “Fall on Me,” the first song anyone would think of as an oldie, since it was all of thirteen years old, but the opening notes of “Daysleeper,” which had scaled the UK charts just a few months earlier, got a much bigger cheer. When the time came to set up the first hit single they’d scored a dozen years earlier, Michael made certain to establish that they weren’t doing it just to be agreeable showmen. “This is technically known as a crowd-pleaser, but we happen to fuckin’ like enjoy playing it, okay?” He shrugged. “Hope you like it.” A short landslide of drums launched a sped-up “The One I Love.”

  Half an hour into the set, they had the festival crowd electrified, and they’d done it almost entirely with songs that were less than five years old. Nearly half of what they’d played had come from their latest album, released less than a year earlier. Four years after their global superstardom had peaked, in the wake of losing a member and nearly abandoning their group identity, they had emerged strong and sleek, performing a new version of what they’d been doing since they played Kathleen O’Brien’s birthday party in the church in 1980. Even after everything, the art and the politics, the videos and the record deals, the headlines and the vast fortunes, it always came down to this. The songs, the performance, the power to do exactly what they wanted at any given moment.

  “This is me and Peter’s favorite song,” Michael declared. “Grab yourself a partner and start to cry.” The mournful, elegiac “Sweetness Follows” began a suite of songs that traced the band’s tender heart: “At My Most Beautiful,” then “Losing My Religion,” and then a massive sing-along “Everybody Hurts,” the AIDS-era ballad that had taken on extra resonance in England in the wave of grief following Princess Diana’s death in August 1997. On “Walk Unafraid,” Up’s darkly inspirational heart, remade from a computer-driven smolder into a full-band conflagration, Michael sang with fierce intensity, recalling the child he used to be, stumbling and awkward but determined. I’ll trip, fall, pick myself up, and walk unafraid, he sang, dragging the microphone stand with him as he staggered one way, then the other. Hold me, love me, or leave me high.

  As the band cornered into the set’s concluding half hour, the bangers, “Finest Worksong,” “Man on the Moon,” alternated with newer, lesser-known tunes. A stripped-down acoustic-guitar-and-vocal “Why Not Smile,” from Up, the nakedly erotic “Tongue” paired with the sleazy rocker “Crush with Eyeliner,” from Monster, and, in an unexpected choice, the lovely if relatively obscure “Cuyahoga,” from 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant. They concluded, per usual, with a wild “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” Michael leaping off the stage to greet the forest of arms reaching over the barricade. Fans taking his hand, patting his shoulder, rubbing his glistening bald head. A communion, the artist and the audience merging into one sweaty, screaming mass. He went down the line, reaching out and being touched, holding out the microphone, amplifying other voices, repeating the chorus until the musicians stopped and it was just the crowd chanting over and over. It’s the end of the world as we know it, it’s the end of the world as we know it, it’s the end of the world as we know it…When that dissolved, Michael called out a final thank-you and good night, and it was all over. But something he’d said just before they started playing that final song hung in the air.