REM: Subverting Small town Boredom

Musician circa 1984
BY JD. Considine

Almost everybody else at the Athens, Georgia Holiday Inn was there for some convention being held at the University of Georgia- seminars in bovine prosthetics or some such. I was there to interview the members of R.E.M. on their home turf and in the process soak up local color, After all, given Athens' ability to churn out interesting and unusual rock bands, ranging from nationally-known acts like R.E.M. and the B-52s to such stalwarts of Independent America as Pylon, the Method Actors, Love Tractor and the Swimming Pool Q's, the local scene here must be some sort of new music Nirvana. Imagine the bands! Imagine the fans! Imagine the insights to be gained, the sounds to be savored!

Imagine the 40-Watt Club, the hub of the Athens club scene since Tyrone's, the only other venue willing to book untried talent, urned down. Standing outside the club, a discreet distance from the door, is REM's Michael Stipe, an accordion strapped to his chest. Along with two friends, one on xylophone, the other on snare drum, Stipe is faking his way through Nina Rota-style Italian cafe music. On the sidewalk in front of the trio is Stipe's accordion case, propped open with a few dollars inside to give passers-by the right idea. They play for about an hour, get harassed by a drunken Atlanta club owner, and make about four dollars.

This is the Athens new music scene?

'There's not much else to do, unless you just want to sit and drink in a bar," says REM's bassist Mike Mills the next day. Although Mills was not party to Stipe's bit of busking, he's no stranger to the sort of boredom that sparks such adventures. "There aren't any out-of-town acts that come through, except for the one or two major acts the university will bring in. So when you get bored with listening to records, you get up and do it yourself."

Which is essentially what REM. did, although with uncommon success. Within a year after the band's formation in February 1980, R.E.M. was touring the southeast. A single, "Radio Free Europe," was released in 1981, and astonished the band by topping the singles category in the Village Voice critics' poll. Chronic Town, an EP that the band recorded in October, '81 was picked up by I.R.S. and released in 1982; it topped the Voice polls EP list for '82. Nor were the critics alone in their ardor. According to Mills, I.R.S. was "as surprised as we were by how well Chronic Town sold; Murmur, the band's album debut, leaped up the charts at an even more surprising rate, and looks likely to catapult a redone "Radio Free Europe" onto the singles chart.

All of which should make the band extremely happy. "Success beyond their wildest dreams," and all that. But at a point where other bands would be waiting with bated breath for the next week's charts and spending their spare time at the local Porsche dealer, REM. is unusually wary of success or its trappings.

"We're kind of unassumingly ambitious, in that we never do anything expecting any kind of feedback," explains guitarist Peter Buck. "We just do things to please ourselves- we write to please ourselves, record to please ourselves, do the cover, hand in the record and then we think, 'Hm mm, I wonder how this is going to do?' And we still wonder- we still talk about how many records we want to sell. 'Okay, no more than this many, because more than that and it starts getting kinda bullshit.'

"I don't know," he shrugs. "The record just took a big jump today, thirty places or something, and I'm really pleased, I'm really happy. It's nice to be appreciated. I just don't know when it would start affecting us adversely."

If worrying about the adverse effects of success when your first album makes the prodigious leap from #130 to #97 on the Billboard charts seems a bit, uh, premature, singer Michael Stipe puts things into perspective. 'I was shopping the other day," he says, "and this guy walked up to me and said, 'You're Michael Stipe, and you're going to make a lot of money.' He went on to explain how he was going to start a production company in Athens, and use the Athens calling card to sell unheard-of songwriters, get them published around the country.

"I was going, 'Great He shakes his head in amazement. "It was a real gregarious kind of thing for this guy, while I was trying to plan my menu for the week."

No wonder the band is tired of hearing about the wonderfully unique Athens Sound. This theory, which came into play after the B-52s emerged from a Georgia town that none of the New York critics had ever heard of, takes the argument that if more than one band worth listening to can come out of a town nobody has ever heard of, all the bands must belong to a school founded by the first group to make it big. After all, how many ideas can there be in a town that gets the Village Voice a month late?

"It's just a mistake to lump all the bands together," complains Mills. "In the first place, we don't sound like anybody else, and if you listen, they don't really sound that much like each other, either. What it really comes down to is the same thing that's happening in a lot of other places- there's just a real good atmosphere here, and club owners who will let you play when you're small and unknown. It's a very low-pressure area, in that you can play, play a lot, and improve yourself. Because everybody is horrible when they start out. We certainly were."

As drummer Bill Berry puts it, REM. got started as "nothing more than something to do, maybe annihilate a little of the boredom that you get around here." The quartet first met at a party through a mutual friend, Berry and Mills had come up to the University of Georgia together from Macon, where they had played in an assortment of high school ensembles as well as a few south em-style top forty bands. ("We did a few originals that I would be afraid to even think about," confesses Berry,) Stipe, whose previous experience included "a real bad punk band in St. Louis," was living in a dilapidated church in Athens with Buck, the only one in the group who was not a day student at the university- he studied at night, while selling records during the day.

"When we first got together, it was just, 'What song does everybody know?"' recalls Stipe. "We played old 60s songs, like 'Stepping Stone,' Troggs songs, stuff like that. Then Kathleen, the woman who lived there with us, had this grand idea to have a birthday party in three weeks, and she said, 'Why don't you guys play?' So we sat down and wrote a bunch of songs which probably took as long to play as they did to write. I guess we had fifteen songs and a bunch of covers we ended up doing three sets that night. It was a real hootenanny."

Despite REM's garage band- or, given their rehearsal hall, abandoned church band- origins, the sound they emerged with was a far cry from the usual Gospel According to Nuggets. Buck's guitar figures tend towards lean, graceful arpeggios instead of jagged power chords, while Mills' bass lines emerge more as a form of counter-melody than anything els' Strap on Stipe's dark, nasal vocals 3nd power the whole thing with Berry's practical, melodic drumming, and you've got a package that's irresistible to almost any rock fan.

But try to work out historical antecedents, and you're fishing in an empty pond. Because of the group's twangy guitars and resolute tunefulness, a number of listeners have likened REM's best to "Eight Miles High" or 'Turn! Turn! Turn!," but as far.as the band is concerned, such comparisons are for the Byrds.

'It's just coincidental to the way Peter picks guitar," shrugs Mills. ~'None of us really listened to the Byrds until after we started getting all these comparisons. So I went out and bought a couple of Byrds albums to see what everybody was talking about, and a lot of it is in the picking style."

"I use a pick, but also these two fingers," says Buck, holding up his hand and waggling his second and third fingers. "What I'm trying to do now is teach myself the Chet Atkins style without learning what Chet Aktins really sounds like." He laughs. "I'm really limited. I certainly like the way I play, but I'm more style than anything else. I can't sit down and play an.ything but what we play. And I can play a little country and western, because I've always liked that kind of stuff, but that's really about all."

Noble new wave, sentiments, to be sure, but Buck has other reasons for shying away from solos. Earlier in the day, Michael Stipe and I had been out on the porch of the house where Buck and REM's manager, Jefferson Holt, live, discussing the relative merits of Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper" (one o; Stipe's favorites). I mentioned that it would be a great tune for REM. to cover, provided they left the guitar solo out, and Stipe replied, "That's okay. Pete only knows one guitar solo anyway, and he did it on Murmur."

"Yeah," Buck agrees later, "and Mike (Mills) taught it to me. On 'Talk About The Passion,' that little thing. That was something Mike just taught me. I probably could have figured it out myself, because I come up with things that are pretty much similar, but I thought it was really funny- my one little guitar solo, and the bass player came up with it."

Mills, in fact, turns out to be R.E.M.'s real utility player. In addition to the bass, he also provided the keyboard parts for Murmur. Given R.E.M:'s straightforward stage sound, the amount of detail on the album- multi-tracked acoustic guitars, piano doubling the bass line, even a bit of cello on "Talk About The Passion," vibraphone on "Pilgrimage" - may come as a surprise to fans of the band's energetic live shows, but asMills puts it, "Well, there's no way that we're going to be able to come into the studio and reproduce the live sound, and why should we? We figured we'd go into the studio and approach each song separately, both separate from our live performances and separate from the other songs, and see what we could do with them. As long as you're in the studio, you might as well use what.you can, as long as you're avoiding the tinkering 'syndrome; of using everything you can put your hands on."

One thing you won't hear on an REM record, at least not all that clearly, is lyrics. Between Stipe's swallowed enunciation and producer Mitch Easter's intentionally murky mix, the listener is lucky.if he or she can make out two words in six. Which is fine with R.E.M. "If there is a philosophy to the band," says Stipe, "it's that every individual person who hears or has anything to do with the band has their own idea of what it's about and what's going on. What they get out of it is what they put into it, kinda. It's great- with the EP, people would send in their idea of what the lyrics were, and often I would like what they sent better than what they originally were."

Nonetheless, Stipe has been toying with the idea of making up an official response to requests for lyrics. "He was just going to mimeograph a sheet and say, okay, these are the lyrics- they're not necessarily in order, some of them are missing, and some of them are extra thifigs," explains Buck, "but this is a vague idea.of what we're doing."

An even vaguer idea of what the band is up to can be gleaned from the video to "Radio Free Europe," which shows neither Europe nor free radios. Instead, it has the band wandering around a church in Summerville, Georgia, and other seemingly unrelated terrains. Perhaps REM. has some secret mania for old churches, sparked by their early days in Athens; perhaps not. When Peter Buck took me by the band's first Athens home, he was surprised to see that it was no longer condemned, "It's a real dump," he said, "but it's such a cool idea, living in this old church, that every year there are kids from the university who move in. I think we lasted the longest- we were in there for almost a year." The Summerville church, on the other hand, is the home of Vernon Finster, a renowned folk artist and self-taught preacher who, among other things, receives the word of God in visions of Elvis Presley, and who, in an attempt to save the world, is fashioning a sort of Garden of Eden out of other people's junk.

What's the point? "I think there's a particularly southern sensibility to it," offers Buck (who, by the way, was born in Indiana but has lived the bulk of his life in Georgia). "When we were making the album, it struck me as having a real southern sensibility, real Flannery O'Connor. That was one of the things we wanted to do on this album, affirm that we're a southern band without pandering to the Lynyrd Skynyrd-type mentality. I don't know if that came across, though," he adds, laughing. "The cover's probably more southern than the record is."

But if REM doesn't come across as the Rock'n' Roll equivant of "Go Down Moses, they certainly come up as a band with an immense potential.

Although Berry Admits that, "we're still basically an untight garage band," REM. is very together when it comes to managing its career and putting its "untight" musical ability to good use. It all come down to working within certain limitation and R.E.M. seems no more likely to 'hit.the coliseum circuit than to hire the London Symphony Orchestra for its next album. So far in its brief career, the band has turned down opening spots with the Clash, U2 and the Go-Go's- moves that have left the band's agents scratching their heads in bewilderment.

But as Mills explains, passing up such opportunities makes far more sense than accepting them. "The thing with U2- what they were saying was that touring with U2 would be..a shortcut to getting bigger. But that's not our goal. We didn't start this whole thing to get a record contract arid to be big. We started it in order to play live and have a good time. And it's so much truer to the spirit of being a live band to play where everybody can see you. You can't really commtinicate .. with people more than a hundred feet away; you lose an incredible amount of intimacy when the closest people to you are ten feet below you and twenty feet out.

"We would much rather set up in any bar in the country and just play."

R.E.M. Gear

Although REM's proficiency has improved since the band first bashed out Stepping Stone" in an Athens church, their equipment, for the most part, has not.

Peter Buck likes 'guitars that sound like acoustic guitars made electric," and started out on a Telecaster. He now plays a Rickenbacker- he isn't sure what model- with 'a long cord going straight nto a Fender Twin Reverb." Although he played acoustic guitar on Murmur, those instruments were all borrowed.

Mike Mills also plays a Rickenbacker, a 4001 bass, run through a 100-watt Fender Dual Showman head 'that used to belong to 10cc a long, long time ago," and into a cabinet with two JBL 15-inch speakers. Like Buck, he uses no effects, but his bass has been modified with a Fender Jazz bass pickup in the treble position.

Bill Berry's drums are a five-piece Rogers set that he bought years ago, used." The hardware has been completely replaced with Tama hardware, except for the rims and tuning pegs, and he uses a Tama snare. His cymbals are Zildjians, wth one Paiste 505 Chinese, and mr the moment, his heads are Tama coated.