“This is now, now is here, here is where you are, and it’s all real good.”

  45

  The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.

  Twentieth century, go to sleep / Really deep / We won’t blink.

  This is how you age when you’re a rock star: quickly. You race your way through your twenties, then if you’re lucky things get good in your thirties, so you work even harder. The next thing you know you’re in your forties and people start to look at you differently. Because rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be the music of youthful rebellion. The sound of insurgency, of tearing it all down and standing glorious in the ruins. If you can stay on your feet, you might get a chance to build it back up again according to your own vision. That’s when people really start to listen. If you’re doing it right, what they hear reminds them of what they’ve already been thinking. You’re still one of them, even after they lift you up and gather in droves to listen to your wisdom. If you’re good, and also lucky, you can keep that going for a while. You feel something in the wind, you write it into a song, and people you’ve never met, people whose lives you can’t imagine, hear it and think, Hey, wow, me too.

  How long can anyone keep that going? Because everything is always changing, and when your job elevates you above the crowd, it’s hard to know what’s going on around you. You can read the paper, watch TV, keep up with current events, know what’s going on. But now you travel in a higher orbit than almost everyone else. Also, familiarity kicks in. Popular music, popular anything, revolves around the next big thing. And there’s always someone behind you, someone younger or newer, coming up with a completely different set of followers and shared values and ideas. One of those is aimed at you, and it goes like this: Fuck those guys.

  * * *

  —

  The handful of promotional shows they played in the fall of 1998, mixing the new material with songs from the ’80s and early ’90s, lifted the band out of its post–Bill Berry doldrums. They set up a fifty-three-date European and American tour for the summer of 1999, the first stretch climaxing with that ecstatic evening at Glastonbury. Reacquainted with their powers, R.E.M. paraded across Europe and the UK through the end of July, playing twenty-nine shows in all, then returned to the United States and Canada for twenty-five shows to run through the first half of September. The European concerts were larger, mostly in venues for fifteen thousand or more, all overflowing with cheering fans. The American shows were smaller, almost all in the midsize outdoor amphitheaters promoters call the sheds, five-to-ten-thousand-capacity venues outside major cities. Old-line fans would hire babysitters or else pack up the kids and a picnic, come out, and make an evening of it.

  The trend continued when the band released its next single in November. Written as the theme song to a big-budget biopic of Andy Kaufman that had been titled Man on the Moon, after the Automatic for the People song that reflected on the late comedian’s death, “The Great Beyond” sounded like a sequel to the earlier song, employing a similar musical structure and lyrics that played off the images and ideas in the original song. The movie, starring Jim Carrey as Kaufman, underperformed with critics and viewers, which didn’t help sell the song in the United States, where it peaked in the mid-fifties on the Billboard chart. Away from home, R.E.M. was still popular enough for that not to matter. “The Great Beyond” rose to number eleven on the all-European list, while in Britain it leaped into the top three, the biggest hit they’d ever have in that country.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually the world spins in a different direction. Yesterday’s idealism is revealed as naivete or, worse, foolishness. Trusted leaders disappoint or, worse, betray you. In the United States, President Bill Clinton, whose ascent to the White House was concurrent with R.E.M.’s ascent to superstardom and fueled in part by their advocacy, used his power to launch or support laws that did not serve the band’s, nor, arguably, anyone’s, better interests. While the Clinton administration made long-overdue progress in the fight against AIDS, the president didn’t have the will to root out the institutional homophobia of the U.S. armed services. Rather than strip out obviously unconstitutional rules forbidding gay, lesbian, and bisexual citizens from serving in the military, Clinton began a policy known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which forbade the military from compelling its members from disclosing their sexual orientation (the Don’t Ask part) but also forbade service members from living openly (Don’t Tell).

  Clinton also oversaw widespread deregulation of the media, allowing a small handful of tycoons to gain control of an overwhelming number of the nation’s commercial radio and television outlets. The consolidation of ownership diminished variety among broadcasters, making it even more difficult for non-mainstream artists to find a home on the airwaves. At the same time, the growth of digital music sites and the explosion in file sharing spurred by the Napster site all but ended the need for even the most devoted music fan to actually purchase music. Album sales collapsed, and the recording industry that had supported R.E.M. for two decades staggered.

  * * *

  —

  The current that once picked you up and shot you forward slows, then stops. Then it seems to run in the opposite direction, tugging at your feet, pushing you backward, determined to topple you. No matter: you keep working, writing songs, recording songs, doing your job. You have a recording contract, for one thing. But you also still love the process, finding new chord progressions and melodies, looking for new sounds, new ways to express how it feels to be alive in this way, in these circumstances, in this moment.

  As ever, R.E.M. experimented with new ways to make their music. Working in the studio with performance mainstays Scott McCaughey, Joey Waronker, and Ken Stringfellow, the musicians would track a song, then trade instruments and play one another’s parts to see if clumsier fingers could add some more interesting textures to the piece. The album they released in the spring of 2001, Reveal, was a cornucopia of sound: layers of synthesizers and natural instruments, drum machines, and electronic distortion. Melodically and lyrically more upbeat than the tunes on Up, the new songs prompted Michael to write words and melodies full of sun, warmth, and lazy breezes. A summertime album, he decided, and so the songs came back with titles like “Beachball,” “The Lifting,” and “I’ve Been High.” All had things to recommend them, but none were as striking as “Imitation of Life,” which had the urgency and melodicism of mid-’80s R.E.M. and was nearly cut from the album as a result. Too predictable, they worried. And yet it was also a great song, so they not only kept it on the album but released it as the first single, scoring another top ten hit in Europe. American record buyers gave “Imitation of Life” a miss (it topped out at number eighty-three on Billboard’s Hot 100). Album sales reflected the disparity, with Reveal selling only around 500,000 copies in the United States but more than a million in Europe.

  * * *

  —

  At home they were seasoned entertainers. Overseas they were still conquering heroes. To start 2001, R.E.M. ventured to the Rock in Rio festival, a gathering so immense it made Glastonbury feel intimate, and performed for their largest audience yet: an incomprehensible 195,000. They played to a more fathomable thirty thousand at the Hot Festival, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a few days later, but felt even more moved at the end of April when they performed at the South Africa Freedom Day celebration in London’s Trafalgar Square. The seventh anniversary of free elections in the country also served as a tribute to President Nelson Mandela, who had ascended to his nation’s highest office after spending twenty-seven years as a political prisoner of the white apartheid government. A crowd of twenty thousand filled the square, and greeted R.E.M.’s seven-song set, which included three songs from the as-yet-unreleased Reveal, with an ovation nearly as rapturous as the one that greeted Mandela’s climactic appearance. When Peter picked up his mandolin and played the opening riff to “Losing My Religion,” the roar sounded from Hyde Park to the banks of the Thames.

  * * *

  —

  Then came a season of repeats. Another appearance on MTV’s Unplugged, marking the tenth anniversary of the band’s landmark show in 1991, when they were just reaching the height of the Out of Time ecstasies. In October they had another go at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit shows at the Bay Area’s Shoreline Amphitheatre. They featured Reveal songs at both appearances and were greeted with polite if not rapturous attention, with the exception of “Imitation of Life,” whose signature R.E.M. opening of strummed guitar chords tumbling into the chorus earned an immediate ovation. Which served as a pocket illustration of the veteran band’s conundrum: How can you move forward creatively when your audience prefers the way you used to sound?

  * * *

  —

  R.E.M. hadn’t been officially involved in their first greatest hits collection. Eponymous, released in 1988, was entirely a product of I.R.S. Records, whose executives timed its release to coincide with the arrival of Green and the mammoth promotional campaign Warner Bros. Records uncorked to herald the first album by its new signing. Given that R.E.M. had scored precisely one hit single during its I.R.S. years, Eponymous was more like a best-of, featuring songs that had either played well on college radio or been fan favorites. The band clearly did not begrudge their former record company the chance to piggyback on their new label’s promotional campaign: Michael provided his senior portrait from the Collinsville High School yearbook for use in the Eponymous artwork (with the plaint They Airbrushed My Face covering the lower third of his visage), and the unsigned song-by-song sleeve notes were written by Peter.

  Fifteen years into their career with Warner Bros., and in the wake of two albums that had not come close to fulfilling anyone’s sales expectations, seemed like an excellent time to release a collection of the hits the band had scored over its previous seven albums. Titled In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988–2003 and released in the late fall of 2003, it soon cleared a million copies in the United States, making it the band’s first platinum record stateside since 1997, and sold three times that number around the world. The ongoing appeal of the songs obviously had a lot to do with that, but the band also primed the pump by spending the late summer and fall on the road performing old favorites they hadn’t pulled out since, in some cases, the 1980s.

  “Maybe we’re a little defensive about it,” Michael admitted during an interview with the TV reporter Adam Weissler when the tour got to Los Angeles in September. “We’ve always worked really hard as a band not to repeat ourselves or to stagnate.” Still, when they thought back to the weeks they’d just spent performing in Europe, it was impossible to overlook the transformative effect the older songs had on the crowd. “People are really excited,” he said. “It was phenomenal. And really fun for us.”[1]

  * * *

  —

  And yet work on new or at least newish music continued. Preparing to release In Time, the band went back into the studio to record three new songs to make the collection feel fresher, and perhaps give fans who already owned all their albums a reason to buy the greatest hits collection, too. Two of the songs were re-recorded versions of oldies. “All the Right Friends” was as old as R.E.M. songs came, a tune Peter and Michael wrote together before they had even met Mike and Bill, performed regularly by the group in 1980 and 1981. “Bad Day,” an early and less good draft of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” dated back to 1986. The one truly new song, “Animal,” was a lightly psychedelic rocker whose lyrics had a futuristic, even sci-fi theme involving, I think, aliens dropping out of the skies with transcendent knowledge. The answer landed on my rooftop, Michael sings, then adds his own commentary: Whoa.

  Hoping to score a hit with one of the new songs, the band pulled out “Bad Day” and made an elaborate video in which they portray TV news personalities, all of them in blazers, ties, earnest expressions, the whole bit. Michael was the anchorman, and Peter and Mike played correspondents calmly reporting on the various forms of havoc taking place in the world around them, only they’re lip-synching the lyrics of the song. They all seemed to be having a ball—even Peter, who usually moved through videos with the evident joy of a man having a tooth extracted, a procedure that was about as fun as the band’s attempts to get their new songs played on mainstream radio had become.

  All three band members confessed as much that day they were sitting together in Los Angeles waiting to talk about In Time with Weissler, the real-life TV reporter, in September 2003. Chatting with the band while the technicians adjusted their lights and levels, the journalist mentioned that he’d already heard “Bad Day” online. It was so great, he enthused, he expected to start hearing it all over the radio, including the city’s powerful rock station KROQ-FM. Hearing this, all the members of R.E.M. sighed deeply. “Well, I hope,” Peter said. “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Mike added. When Weissler seemed shocked by their skepticism—it was such a catchy song!—Michael flashed a boyish smile. “Call ’em up and request it, could ya? Pleeeeeze?” He continued, more seriously. “KROQ’s a very important station that turned away from us at some point.” He took a sip of coffee and shrugged. “But maybe they’ll love this song. I hope so.”[2]

  They didn’t. “Bad Day” was a top ten hit all across Europe. In the United States it didn’t dent the Hot 100.

  46

  The Murmurers

  To the reader: Hello out there. I’ve been thinking about you, sensing you on the other side of the screen, and I’ve been wondering about you. It seems like a safe bet that you’re an R.E.M. fan, but what kind of R.E.M. fan, I wonder, because there are several. Perhaps you discovered the band belatedly, possibly through younger artists who were influenced by them, and you’re absorbing their story for the first time. Or maybe you’re part of the Great Migration of R.E.M. fans, from when they were all over the radio and MTV, and your memories of the late 1980s or early 1990s all play to the tune of “The One I Love,” “Losing My Religion,” and “Everybody Hurts” and, ha-ha, “Shiny Happy People.”

  Or maybe you’re the other kind of R.E.M. fan. The OG followers. Let’s call them the Murmurers.

  If you’ve spent any time on any of the online fan communities, or if you’ve read certain critics with an affinity for alt-everything and a vocabulary heavily freighted with words like indie and authenticity on the one hand and corporate and sellout on the other, you know who I’m talking about. The guys (and they’re almost always guys) who got into R.E.M. during the early Reagan years, when they were still on I.R.S. Records, or perhaps even before that. Who first saw them play in a bar or maybe a pizza parlor. Who have at some point discussed the relative merits of the bands on New Zealand’s Flying Nun label with Peter Buck, probably after that show in the bar, and over beers. The particulars may vary, but one thing doesn’t: the conviction that the best album R.E.M. ever made, and it’s not even close, is Murmur.

  I think we all know why. Because that’s when they were at their murkiest, when Michael was at his mumbliest. When every note and every word rang out in opposition to mainstream culture. When they weren’t just obscure but pointedly so. Not just uncommercial, but proudly, defiantly anti-commercial. “That soft-focus, Pre-Raphaelite, dance-barefoot-in-the-kudzu utopian vision,” as Sue Cummings wrote about Murmur in the savaging of Lifes Rich Pageant she published in Spin in 1986. Cummings gets bonus points for being so early to the Murmurer game (Murmur was only three years old at that point; R.E.M. was still releasing its records on I.R.S.) and even more points for being an actual woman among the legions of indie rock boys. Was she still bending her ear in the band’s direction by the time Jim DeRogatis published his cri de indie R.E.M. coeur (“It’s often noted that the band now regularly breaks promises it made early in its career”) ten years later? What would either of them think if they saw Michael, while plugging R.E.M.’s new greatest hits collection, yearning openly to crack the playlist of Los Angeles’s KROQ-FM, because it’s such an important commercial station? Whatever happened to the Michael who said he didn’t even want a hit single, because “I don’t think radio deserves me”?[1]

  He learned how to make records that millions of people loved, is what. His band had a ton of hit albums and hit singles. So many, in fact, that their sound and vision became not just the sound of mainstream music but also the sound of mainstream culture. Whether you think this is the worst thing that could have happened or the best depends on a few factors. Not the least of them being how highly, when discussing the relative merits of R.E.M.’s albums, you rate Murmur.