Here was Eddie Vedder, the famously articulate lead singer of the Seattle grunge band Pearl Jam. He stood behind a podium in this formal ballroom in the Waldorf Astoria hotel, talking about those skinny, penniless kids who had wandered these very streets during that long-ago spring break. “The story of how they got together could not be written, especially considering this evening, any more romantic,” he proclaimed. “And that is that Michael Stipe and Peter Buck first meet at a record store where Peter is working. Wuxtry Records in Athens, Georgia. Their first conversation, their first discussion, was about Patti Smith’s first four records.”

  The audience, largely middle-aged and older, garbed in ball gowns and tuxedos, whooped and applauded the name of the onetime punk-rock poet of the downtown demimonde. Vedder spoke of R.E.M.’s music, about their influence on as well as their generosity toward other artists. So many people feel so much gratitude to R.E.M., he continued, it was hard for him to imagine that the honor he was about to bestow could begin to repay it. But it was what he had. “And by some strange power invested in me, right now I hereby induct R.E.M. into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.” It was an industry crowd, top-heavy with chief executives, A&R directors, show business attorneys, power-wielding managers, magazine editors, and program directors. There were friends and family, romantic partners, and a few children around R.E.M.’s tables too, and they all stood up and cheered as the four musicians from Athens came strolling out.

  More than a quarter century later, they were pretty much who they always were. Michael came in the lead, looking both cool and dapper in an ivory-colored suit. Peter followed in shirtsleeves, carting a generous glass of red wine. Bill slipped out behind the guitarist, dressed for rock ’n’ roll labor in a black blazer and T-shirt. Mike brought up the rear in a more restrained version of his cowboy spangles, a black-and-turquoise affair he set off with his bleached blond mop and rectangular eyeglasses that balanced bookish and stylish. Onstage, Peter and Bill stepped back, letting the others speak for them. The bassist went first, describing how humbled and awed and honored they all were by the “sheer talent of the musicians and non-musicians here tonight.” He thanked a few people, his bandmates and parents, then gave a special shout-out to the late Ian Copeland, the concert booker who was so instrumental in the launch of R.E.M.’s career, as well as being, in his words, “the older brother I never had.” Michael stepped up next, donning a pair of glasses and graciously calling out each of the four other inductees, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Van Halen, the Ronettes, and, in an amazing coincidence, Patti Smith. From there he launched into an even longer list, citing a litany of record company executives and staffers, spouses, girlfriends, a boyfriend, promoters, bookers, and the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Nearly everyone, it seems, who makes a career as extravagantly successful as R.E.M.’s possible. With the exception, of course, of the band’s former manager and partner Jefferson Holt, whose existence went unacknowledged.

  Then came the music. They started with “Gardening at Night,” the four original members with Scott McCaughey adding a little guitar off to the side. Next came “Man on the Moon,” with a joyous Eddie Vedder joining Michael on the lead vocal. Patti Smith came up next for a snarly cover of Iggy Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” ending with a surprising bit of old-school rock nihilism when Peter, infuriated by an ill-performing amplifier, picked the thing up and hurled it off the stage. And nearly into the laps of an elegantly coiffed couple sitting near the front of the stage.

  After that came the traditional ending to these high-wattage, high-dollar investitures, one of those enormous jams involving all, or nearly all, of the musicians who had either been inducted or done the inducting. Which in this case included the members of R.E.M., Sammy Hagar from Van Halen, Grandmaster Flash, Ronnie Spector, Stephen Stills, Keith Richards, along with Paul Shaffer’s house band, all playing Smith’s “People Have the Power.” Which was a strange sight to behold, this mash-up of styles and generations, of egos and attitudes, of downtown art and uptown commerce. Of the active construction of temples to worship the memory of rock ’n’ roll insurrection.

  * * *

  —

  This is the essential conflict at the heart of the rock ’n’ roll industry, in the gear-jamming clash between the core values of rock ’n’ roll and industrialized anything. Which only becomes more profound when it’s the kind of rock ’n’ roll that wields its power in the pursuit of social, cultural, and, especially, political activism. Because if it turns out that someone at a record company hears the chime of cash registers beneath a song, no matter its politics (or theirs), they’re going to look for a way to commodify it. And if it turns out, further, that the musicians are, like the MC5’s Wayne Kramer, like Bruce Springsteen, and like the members of R.E.M., at least as determined to have their music heard as they are to change the world, you wind up with the bracing spectacle of dissent being transformed into a commercial product: a brickbat affixed with a universal bar code. And given rock ’n’ roll’s fixation on authenticity, defined by the clear, traceable line between the lived experience of the artist and the content of their art, well, it gets a bit tricky. When dissent becomes commodity, is the protest being corrupted or is the corporate machine being turned against itself?

  * * *

  —

  Two months after their night at the Waldorf Astoria, the three active members of R.E.M. gathered in Vancouver, British Columbia, along with McCaughey and drummer Bill Rieflin and the Irish record producer Jacknife Lee, to start work on their new album. Their installation into the rock ’n’ roll sarcophagus and, perhaps more to the point, the unhappy response to the languid Around the Sun had given the threesome something to prove. That they weren’t dead yet; that they could still work up a rage; that they still had the will, and the power, to turn up the volume and rattle the fucking windows. Still feeling burned by the endless studio tinkering and the keyboard-heavy sound on their previous album, Peter asserted himself. This time there would be a lot of guitar, and no Hammond B-3. They were going to work quickly, record live, get the songs on tape, and get out. “Most of that record is just me and Peter on guitar, Mike on bass, and Bill Rieflin on drums and Michael singing,” Scott McCaughey says. “All the sessions for Accelerate were nothing but fun. Jacknife Lee was the perfect guy for us to meet…He was totally on board with keeping things moving and not getting bogged down.”[2]

  They worked on songs for three weeks, then dispersed. In late June the band went to Ireland for another few weeks of recording. To see how the new material worked, particularly in comparison with the older songs, they decided to try something new. A series of concerts they called “working rehearsals,” at the Olympia Theatre, an intimate venue in Dublin. Starting each performance with a tongue-in-cheek announcement that This is not a show!, the band played full sets weighted heavily with the new songs, usually eight or nine a night. To measure the fresh material against their classics, they dug deep into their catalog, playing songs like “Letter Never Sent,” “1,000,000,” “Kohoutek,” and “Romance,” among other youthful missives they hadn’t dusted off in twenty years or more. But the not-a-show shows were mostly about the new material and returning to the practice followed in the years of constant touring: getting the hang of a new song well before they took it into the studio. They played five shows, then spent another three weeks recording, and the new record, minus the mixing and mastering, was finished.

  * * *

  —

  On Accelerate, R.E.M.’s fourteenth album, the most basic foundation of rock ’n’ roll—guitar, bass, drums, vocals—stands almost completely unadorned. A musical construction of brick and steel, raw concrete footings, and rusted metal girding. From the blazing, melodic guitar that kicks off the lead track, “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” to the final shout of the concluding “I’m Gonna DJ”—You cannot resist! You cannot resist! Yeah!—it’s a barely controlled riot of sound and feeling. “Man-Sized Wreath” distills everything that’s right about the album in its first thirteen seconds: a flash of guitar, an explosion of drums and bass, then Michael in brilliantly sarcastic thrall: Turn on the TV and what do I see? A pageantry of empty gestures all lined up for me—wow! It’s that sardonic “wow” that seals the deal, and it keeps happening, song after song, that good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll kablammo. Distorted guitar, leering insouciance, bulldozing bass, thunderclaps of anger, reassuring jangle, admissions of guilt, the broken wheeze of an organ, halting bursts of sorrow. And still, the glimmer of hope. Belief has not failed me, Michael declares in one song. Then, in another: Where are we left, to carry on.

  Not quite thirty-five minutes from front to back, Accelerate plays like a hurricane in a bottle. Everything moves fast. Two of the songs are barely more than two minutes. Only two of the tracks meander past four minutes. Released on March 31, 2008, it performed the precise task the members of R.E.M. hoped it would: restoring the band’s critical standing and giving their long-standing fans a reason to buy something new from the band that defined their youth. The growth of streaming music, along with everything else, had diminished record sales across the board, but within the reduced context of the twenty-first-century marketplace, Accelerate performed admirably, debuting at number two on Billboard’s album list and hitting the top of the charts in Canada, the UK, and seven other European countries. Still, total sales tallied to something less than a million copies.

  * * *

  —

  They set out on a concert tour in late May, mostly playing in arenas and outdoor amphitheaters across the United States and Canada through late June. The company moved to Europe in early July, playing even larger venues, festivals, stadiums, and such, until early October. They took a few weeks off before playing a pair of shows in the South. The second was in New Orleans, for a huge crowd at the annual Voodoo Fest. It was October 26, 2008, the day R.E.M. would perform their last full concert in their home country.

  From there they headed to Argentina to kick off a three-week tour of South America before returning north for a sold-out show at the Auditorio Nacional, a ten-thousand-seat venue in Mexico City. There had been some talk about doing a couple of shows in Florida after that, but when the time came to commit to the dates, the road-weariness had already kicked in. “We were like, Why are we doing that?” McCaughey recalls. “And then bagged ’em and just finished with Mexico City.”[3] The tour had gone very well; the band felt sharp, the audiences were generally large and enthusiastic. They hadn’t spoken of breaking up, not in a serious way, but a realization had come into the air. The first hint of autumn that comes at the end of a perfect late-summer afternoon.

  The afternoon of the Mexico City concert, sometime between soundcheck and the start of the show, Peter and Michael found themselves together in the empty hall, contemplating the show they were about to perform. The last show in every tour feels like a valedictory, the end of a distinct experience that, having been lived, will never be lived again. But this time the feeling ran deeper than usual. “I went, ‘This is kind of sad,’ ” Peter told New York magazine. “And Michael goes, ‘Yeah, a little. We’re probably never going to play any of these songs again.’ ” And I went, ‘You may be right.’ ”[4]

  Skip Notes

  * “Awards! They do nothing but give out awards!” Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer grumbles about Los Angeles and/or show business in general in the film Annie Hall. “Greatest fascist dictator, Adolf Hitler!” Say what you will about W.A.’s personal life; he was on point there.

  48

  It Was What It Was

  As it ended Michael fell to his knees. The band playing behind him, looping through a few chords, Patti Smith keening up the scale, singing his words. Oh, over, over, over, baby, over. His suit was black, and a black beard bristled on his chin, white beneath his mouth, the frost of age. Behind and to his right, Mike worked his bass, and twenty feet to his left Peter strummed guitar. Both musicians also garbed in black suits, over black shirts. They were in Carnegie Hall, before a hushed crowd, maybe that accounted for the formal attire. Maybe the funereal quality is visible only in retrospect, now that we know this was R.E.M.’s final public performance. Which is also why it seems so striking that Michael spent the song’s final minute on his knees. An expression of obeisance, or perhaps gratitude, that something so magical took place and that he got to be a part of it.

  * * *

  —

  The Carnegie Hall appearance, an unbilled, one-song shot at the end of an R.E.M. tribute show, was the band’s only public performance in 2009. It took place on March 11, at a fundraiser for music education programs for underprivileged students. That was a big night, full of artists who had influenced them (Patti Smith, the dB’s, the Feelies) and even more artists who had been influenced by them (Throwing Muses, Darius Rucker, Dar Williams, many others). R.E.M.’s appearance was a surprise, closing the show with “E-Bow the Letter,” with Smith reprising her vocal from the original recording.

  The closest R.E.M. came to performing during the rest of the year was at the 40 Watt, in Athens, in September, when Peter and Scott McCaughey came to town to play with McCaughey’s conceptual group the Minus 5 and the Baseball Project, a band the Seattle musician cofounded with Peter to produce songs about baseball. Mike contributed vocals and tambourine during the encore, and Bill Berry, his face lit by a huge smile, jumped in on drums for a shaggy, high-spirited run through the Beatles’ “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and the McCoys’ “Hang On Sloopy.” Michael was in the house, too, but opted to enjoy the show with the rest of the crowd.

  * * *

  —

  Time moves faster as it passes, then circles back on itself. Patterns repeat and become ingrained. The scenery starts to look familiar. Haven’t we been here before? Yes, they had, if only because they’d been at it long enough to know what worked. Now the three members of R.E.M. were in their fifties, 2010 marked the thirtieth year of their collaboration. They knew how to make music together. They knew how they made music. The critical and commercial success of Accelerate, the latter in the reduced terms of the twenty-first century’s music industry, and then the across-the-board success of their 2008 world tour underscored the power of their traditional ways and means. Their music was beloved around the world. And so when the time came to do it again, they did it again.

  In the early spring of 2010 they got together at their practice space in Athens for five days of songwriting and preliminary recording. Then Peter and Mike met up again in Portland, Oregon, along with Bill Rieflin and Scott McCaughey, to demo more instrumental tracks. They sent the recordings to Michael for his consideration, and in early November the entire band returned to New Orleans for three weeks of studio sessions with Jacknife Lee, to start recording what would be the band’s next album.

  Circles and patterns. Another Bush had departed the White House (although this one served his full two terms), and the ascendance of another handsome young progressive to the presidency renewed the old sense of hope. Maybe good things were possible after all. Walking the revived streets of post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans inspired Michael to compose the lyrics to “Oh My Heart,” a new version of a song he might’ve written during the optimistic early 1990s. The government changed, he sang over a warm acoustic guitar and accordion. Hear the song, rearranged. The power-chord-fueled “Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter” retraced the leering crunch of Monster, flirting and insulting in the same breath: If I didn’t like the way you stared at me / I could knock you sideways. Not all of the music had such direct antecedents, but as the new songs emerged, they came on like old friends. Sounds and textures, narrators that evoked voices from days gone by. Once, the band would have sent the familiar faces away; they’d had no interest in retracing their footsteps. Now the road forward had turned in a new direction, back toward home.

  * * *

  —

  In April 2010, almost exactly thirty years since their first public performance, the members of R.E.M. were back in New Orleans to work on the new record. “All the Best” came on like a tempest, drums pounding, guitar blaring, bass booming, all of them hitting on every beat, blam blam blam, while Michael shouted about bad breaks and fuckups. A pie in the face, falling on his ass, making so much noise that blood spilled from his ears. He’s a human tornado, hurling furniture and cats as he goes, but here’s the punch line: that’s exactly what you want him to be. He’s a mirror reflecting your dreams back on you. The band keeps blasting away. There’s not really a melody here, just a lot of shouting and pounding, and that’s not going to stop, even after three decades. Let’s give it one more time, he yells at his bandmates. Let’s show the kids how to do it!

  * * *

  —

  R.E.M. first entered Corin Tucker’s imagination when she was ten years old. That was in 1983, when her dad, a psychology professor working at the University of North Dakota, in Grand Forks, came home with a copy of Murmur. This is a great record, he told his daughter. He had already introduced her to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Queen, among others, and as the new songs played, Corin could tell that R.E.M. belonged in the company of those older bands. It was love at first listen. She followed their career as she grew up, noting the many distinctions between the Athens quartet and the rock bands that filled the commercial airwaves. “They were so different from the hyper-masculine thing that came from the music industry for a while,” she says. “They seemed to respect women. Michael was like this romantic poet, and they had an emotional sophistication that was huge.”