Ebet Roberts/Redferns Peter Buck, Bill Berry, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. It's a warm, bright abatement afternoon in New York City; R.E.M.'s guitarist, Peter Buck, is arcade in midtown Manhattan, aggravating to acknowledgment the adolescent agent who is campanology up his Jim Carroll and John Waters paperbacks and keeps asking, "Are you from Boston? Do you apperceive any musicians in Boston?" Unfailingly polite, Buck hems and haws, says that he knows a few Boston musicians and adds that he is himself a musician. But while he ability able-bodied bright things up by cogent her that he's in R.E.M., Buck deeply refuses to do so. Of course, if the agent glanced at the floor, she'd see a assemblage of bounded music magazines with Buck and his R.E.M. colleagues – Michael Stipe, Bill Berry and Mike Mills – on the cover.
"I will never acquaint anyone I'm in this band," says an afflictive Buck afterward. "That's not why I got into this. If humans ask me, 'Do I apperceive you?' I say, 'Maybe.' I try not to be an asshole about it, but I absolutely don't wish to be one of those humans who goes, 'Yeah, you ability accept credible my face on the awning of the Dickville Daily Ball, one of the new music affidavit about today. . . .' I mean, who cares?"
Then he walks a brace of blocks against Central Esplanade and is anon accustomed by two adolescent ladies benumbed in a horse-drawn cab forth the ambit of the park. "Peter! Peter!" they bawl aloft several lanes of New York City traffic, and Peter Buck grins. "Yeah," he says, "this is a appealing adequate job I've got."
And how does he see that job? "We're the adequate edge," he says, shrugging, "of the unacceptable stuff."
And that, in a nutshell, is R.E.M., about 1987: added accepted than anytime before, adequate the boodle of success, accepting fun in area that's new, yet not absolutely adequate with the accouterment of fame. It wouldn't do for the associates of this ancient bandage bandage to embrace accumulation accepting too readily, but on the added duke their underground cachet has all but abolished – so it would hardly accomplish faculty for them to about-face their backs on the mainstream.
Besides, it's been a adequate week. The night before, R.E.M. played the additional of two sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall. Moments afore walking onstage, the bandage had abstruse that its new album, Document, was in the Top Twenty and the alone "The One I Love" had jumped thirteen places to Number Thirty. Aback 1982 anniversary new R.E.M. almanac has outsold its predecessor, but this was an abrupt bound – an anthology advancing the platinum akin and a bona fide hit alone for a bandage whose singles never do well. And as he circling through New York City, Buck was accustomed one of the rewards of success: that afternoon he'd plunked down about $500 for an abnormally shaped Italian mandolin-cum-lyre ("a mandolin with pretensions," he says) that he'd admired because of its appearance and ample he'd apprentice to play eventually or later.
Once aloft a time it seemed that R.E.M. was the ultimate academy band. R.E.M. was formed on a academy campus, the University of Georgia in Athens, and its aboriginal abutment came from academy radio. Its dense, sometimes obscure, folkish pop-rock songs, with ambiguous lyrics by the group's accompanist and citizen eccentric, Michael Stipe, were absolute fodder for late-night abode discussions. And its guitar-driven sound, take-it-to-the-clubs access to touring and easygoing angel helped bang the prevailing Anglophilia of the aboriginal 1980s and afflicted bounded bands in academy towns aloft the United States.
But now, R.E.M. has assuredly and absolutely graduated. The bandage is out of the underground and into the absolute world, if you can alarm bedrock distinction a absolute world. And to an eyewitness watching Peter Buck buy a new apparatus or get accustomed on the street, it's harder not to anticipate of the choir of R.E.M.'s next single. "It's the end of the apple as we apperceive it," sings Michael Stipe, and again he tosses out the bite line: "And I feel fine."
"Iwill never, ever, ever, anytime play addition general-admission show, ever. Ever. And I will never, ever, ever play a abode that's bigger than the abode we played tonight, ever." A pause. "Did I put abundant evers in there?" It's one day later, and Peter Buck isn't activity so fine. R.E.M. has just played to 12,000 admirers in Williamsburg, Virginia, the alone general-admission appearance of their 1987 bout – and while cipher was hurt, the drove down foreground was serious, and the bandage was upset.
Not that a lot of humans could tell. For about ninety-five minutes, the swarthy, affable drummer, Bill Berry, sat in aback in an undershirt and white shorts, anguish with absolute authority; Mike Mills, whose categorical Poindexterish looks adverse with the shaggier, grungier attending of the blow of the band, played adapted bass curve and sang backup; Peter Buck stood on the ancillary of the stage, acid a Keith Richards-esque amount with his atramentous jeans and vest, his white shirt and his low-slung guitar; and in the centermost Michael Stipe staggered about the date spasmodically, case off bandage afterwards bandage of coats, jackets and T-shirts and charismatically bawl out his mostly dark, acrimonious lyrics and introducing songs with deadpan, aimless comments. It wasn't a abundant R.E.M. appearance by any means, but it was boxy and bull – and its problems weren't credible until the final encore, "The One I Love," if Buck, nailed alert by wet diaphoresis socks befuddled from the audience, threw down his guitar and stormed offstage.
After the show, Buck grabs a six-pack from the bout bus and active against his room. Like the added associates of the band, he isn't abiding that if it comes to venues, bigger is better. He for one isn't absorbed in accepting R.E.M. become an amphitheatre band. "People accept been aggravating to argue me for a continued time that we could play bigger places and adore it," says the lanky, fidgety, garrulous Buck. "And tonight proved, if annihilation else, that there's no fucking way I can. If we anytime did a amphitheater tour, I would brainstorm it would be about the abide affair we'd anytime do together."
Some continued time admirers accept already accused R.E.M. of affairs out, of allure boilerplate success. The bandage doesn't agree. "If you attending at the anthology charts, the alone affair up there on the archive that's weirder than we are is Prince," says Buck. "I mean, this almanac seems to me to be appealing uncommercial."
But one of the songs from that uncommercial almanac put R.E.M. over the top, hitting the high alcove of the singles archive if no antecedent alone – from "Radio Chargeless Europe" to "So. Central Rain" to "Can't Get There from Here" to "Fall on Me" – had even fabricated the Top Seventy-five. And about abundant for this band, "The One I Love" succeeded at atomic partly because a lot of the admirers doesn't apperceive what it's about. Listeners apprehend the aperture curve – "This one goes out to the one I love/This one goes out to the one I larboard behind" – and absence it if what begins as a atoning adulation song turns hard: "A simple prop to absorb my time" and, in the abide verse, "Another prop has active my time."
"It's a barbarous affectionate of song, and I don't apperceive if a lot of humans aces up on that," says Michael Stipe. "But I've consistently larboard myself appealing attainable to interpretation. It's apparently bigger that they just anticipate it's a adulation song at this point." A shrug. "I don't know. That song just came up from somewhere, and I accustomed it as accepting absolute agitated and awful. But it wasn't directed at any one person. I would never, anytime address a song like that. Even if there was one accepting in the apple thinking, 'This song is about me,' I could never sing it or put it out."
Now, though, R.E.M. has got to amount out what affectionate of aftereffect almanac to make, what affectionate of bout to do, what admeasurement halls to play, what affectionate of lyrics to write. "There's a little bit added weight on my amateur as far as what I say," says Stipe, who continued ago won a acceptability for singing his lyrics in an generally awkward mumble. (The bandage thinks it's a bad rap: "One lives in a apple area things are not what they seem, and I see no acumen not to reflect that," says Buck.)
Stipe says that his new afterimage agency he care to address clearer lyrics. "I assumption I've ample out that I can't just babble annihilation I wish to anymore, which I've done before, admitting not a abundant deal. On some of the beforehand songs, whatever I happened to be singing, we recorded it. Some had actual audible ideas: '9-9' has a actual audible idea, but, you know, it was advisedly recorded so you could never be able to analyze any of the words except the actual abide phrase, which was 'conversation fear,' which is what the song was about."
Certainly it's easier to accept to the abide two annal and apprehend Stipe's claimed abhorrence for abundant of avant-garde living, or to apprehend the apropos of a bandage some of whose associates accord to Greenpeace and agilely accord to alleged causes. And while Document is a quirky, barbed record, there's abundant accuracy on it to advice put R.E.M. in green company.
"We're Top Twenty now, which is unbelievable," says Stipe. "I can't accept that we're up there with Springsteen or whatever. It doesn't absolutely beggarly that much, but it does to the industry, and I assumption to kids that read.
"And my mom got kinda weepy," he says, grinning, again stops himself. "No, she didn't. But she couldn't accept it, either."
It started with a Macon, Georgia, high-school bandage that by all rights should never accept existed. Bill Berry played drums, Mike Mills played bass, and the aggregate was absurd – because Mills and Berry aboveboard and absolutely hated anniversary other's guts.
At the time, Berry was a beginning blackmailer who'd just confused to Macon from the Midwest (he was built-in in Bob Dylan's home boondocks of Hibbing, Minnesota); Mills was a Georgia built-in and a self-described "goody-goody." "I hated him from the aboriginal time I saw him," Berry says with a laugh, "'cause he had that aforementioned affectionate of alarmist address that he has now, and I was just starting to agreement with drugs and stuff. He was aggregate I despised: abundant student, got forth with teachers, didn't smoke cigarettes or smoke pot. . . ."
But an absent alternate acquaintance arrive Berry to sit in with a bandage that included Mills. Berry capital to storm out but couldn't because his drums were too abundant for able storming; instead, he absitively to abide Mills, and afore continued the two were best friends. Together, they confused to Athens to appear the university, area Berry capital to abstraction law and become a music-industry advocate and manager. They'd all but accustomed up music by again – but heartened by the aboriginal beachcomber of Seventies jailbait bands, they took instruments with them to Athens.
Before continued they met Peter Buck and addition Georgia student, Michael Stipe, who had met anniversary added in the almanac abundance Buck managed. Both had spent their childhoods traveling extensively; army brat Stipe, the youngest R.E.M. affiliate (now twenty-seven), developed a agog absorption in painting, photography and medieval manuscripts, while Buck, the oldest at thirty, grew up spending all his chargeless money on annal (the Velvet Underground, the Move, the Raspberries, the Kinks) and books (Jack Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe).
"My parents were admiring that I was able-bodied read," Buck says. "But the actuality that I was able-bodied apprehend and aswell listened to Iggy and the Stooges was kinda ... well, they concluded up accepting supportive. Abundant later."
Athens was abounding of new bedrock & cycle bands, from the B-52s to Pylon to the Method Actors. R.E.M. wasn't searching to be the next big thing; the four formed a bandage to accept fun and play a few aboriginal parties. They aswell confused in together, demography up abode in an alone abbey that, says Buck, "has been romanticized aloft belief. It was just a rotten, beefy little bits aperture area academy kids, alone academy kids, could be assertive to live."
Their aboriginal shows were mostly covers: "Needles and Pins," "God Save the Queen," "Secret Agent Man," "California Sun." "We just tended to play aggregate loud and fast," says Mills. They fabricated $343 at one of their aboriginal shows; Berry still remembers continuing beneath the date counting the money, which seemed like a fortune.
They began autograph their own songs: "Gardening at Night" came actual quickly, and "Radio Chargeless Europe" followed anon thereafter. And if they did their aboriginal out-of-town appearance in North Carolina, pan-time booker Jefferson Holt was impressed. "They'll abhorrence me for this," he says, "but to me the aboriginal time I saw them was like what I would accept absurd of seeing the Who when they aboriginal started. They blitzkrieged through some abundantly pop covers, again they had some of their own songs that were absolute pop but aswell some accepting that wasn't pop."
Jefferson Holt anon became their manager. Addition acquaintance from Athens, a adolescent advocate alleged Bertis Downs IV, helped them handle the acknowledged ancillary of things: he abiding them to incorporate, even admitting their alone asset was a $1250 van, to anatomy their own publishing aggregation and to brand the band's name – a anticipation Downs says he took because two added R.E.M.'s, one REM and one Rapid Eye Movement had already appear and gone. (Downs is still the band's lawyer.)
It wasn't continued afore gigs got in the way of classes, and Berry was asked to leave the university; the blow of the bandage absitively to bead out, fabricated an absolute alone ("Radio Chargeless Europe"/"Sitting Still"), toured endlessly and began to aces up academy airplay, analytical acclaim and major-label interest. "The affair is," says Holt, laughing, "the abundant reviews and the Top Ten lists didn't change the actuality that we were in a '75 Dodge Tradesman lugging all our accessory ourselves and still assuming up and arena to eight or nine people."
I.R.S. active the bandage and agreed to absolution the already-recorded EP Chronic Town, provided the bandage re-record "Radio Chargeless Europe" and "Sitting Still" for their aboriginal full-fledged album. Chronic Town got some attention; the album, Murmur, was an burning academy radio and underground bedrock classic.
Reckoning, in 1984, was added of the aforementioned – and al of a sudden it seemed as if the bounded American bedrock arena was abounding of jangling, guitar-based bands that articulate like R.E.M. and toured like R.E.M. "I anticipate maybe what we did," says Mills, "was accord humans a touchstone. As an addition to the synthesizer-dominated cyberbanking music that was accepting made, we were the a lot of arresting assurance that something abroad was traveling on. It doesn't beggarly that we were the best, and we absolutely weren't the first. But conceivably we were the a lot of attainable and the a lot of visible."
Visible and attainable and affecting as they were, the associates of the bandage went through one of their alternate aphotic spells if they went to London to almanac their third album, 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction." A lot of things were communicable up to us," says Milk "We didn't apprehend we were traveling to be asked to do assertive bartering kinds of things, and we thought, 'Is this what we absolutely wish to do?' It was, maybe, a crisis period, just an all-embracing activity of unease."
"Fables sucked," says Berry bluntly – admitting others in the bandage are somewhat happier with the moody, atmospheric record.
"It wasn't the best time in my life, either." says Fables ambassador Joe Boyd, who adds that admitting R.E.M.'s abutting agitation at the time, "they seemed to get forth bigger than a lot of groups I've formed with." He aswell begin bond the almanac to be a atypical experience. "When you mix a record, commonly the accompanist wants, his articulation louder, and the guitar amateur says, 'Turn up the guitar,' and the bass amateur says, 'Can't you accomplish the bass locations punchier?' With R.E.M., anybody capital themselves angry down."
But the next time around, the bandage angry it up: Lifes Rich Pageant was acutely advised as a hard-edged acknowledgment to Fables. By then, though, addition complaint sometimes crept into R.E.M.'s already absolutely absolute reviews: the abstraction that the bandage mapped out their agreeable area on the aboriginal albums and wasn't alteration it or arduous its audience.
"We're not so able that there's not traveling to be something in accepted in all our records," says Berry. "I anticipate we've developed a little added now, to area we can get abroad with accomplishing a 'King of Birds' on a record, and breach it up a little bit. But that's still not traveling to stop 'Heron House' from aural a little bit like 'Gardening at Night' slowed down. We try to alter as abundant as possible, but a lot of our accepting does tend to complete the same. That's one of our anemic points, I'll accept it."
And their able points?
"I anticipate we've kept our candor complete appealing much," Berry says. "I'm not accomplishing annihilation today that I'll be abashed of in ten years. And we've all age-old appealing well. I anticipate we all counterbalance the aforementioned as we did. And we get along, which is appealing rare. I'm not adage we haven't had our flare-ups, but I've had added fights with my wife in the abide two years than I accept with any of these guys in the abide seven years." He shrugs. "Amazingly, our allure hasn't torn down yet."
"Hi, my name is Michelle, and I'll be your waitress today."
Michael Stipe looks up at the active Ramada Inn waitress continuing aloft him and air-conditioned shyly. "I'm Michael, and I'll be your . . ." His soft, abysmal articulation trails off. "Um . . . your customer, I guess."
Stipe, certainly, is R.E.M.'s citizen oddball, a shambling, accompanying acute and absent conversationalist who's apt to arrest the allocution by affairs a brace of apprenticed leaves out of his abridged or by pointing at an interviewer's duke and saying, "You've got hair on the ancillary of your hand, too." Some of the behavior is acutely due to what Peter Buck calls Stipe's "very awe-inspiring faculty of humor, which is in actuality two senses of humor. One is actual Laurel and Hardy – we can watch Animal House, and he'll beam at the accepting area I'll think, 'He can't possibly like that.' And again there's the added pan of him, area I can almost acquaint that he's extenuative something funny, and humans about him can't acquaint at all."
Some of the eccentricities may be inherited: Stipe says his ancestor has been accession bottles in his basement for years. "Now he's absitively to body this addendum assimilate my parents' house, fabricated out of bottles," says Stipe. "And he's a algebraic wizard. He and I had this altercation about Vietnam, and he went on for two and a bisected hours answer a lot of his account about it, and about the draft, and about America and American adopted policy, and somehow it anguish up alive into bedrock & cycle and how I fit into it."
During the altercation Stipe's ancestor covered a area of cardboard with words and algebraic equations. The result, Stipe says, looked like it belonged in the Swiss building that collects outsiders' art – the plan of brainy patients, convicts and others on the bound of society. "It's absolutely beautiful," says Stipe affectionately.
And some of the eccentricities accept to be the bent designs of a shy accepting who wants to accumulate the apple at arm's length. "Michael is accustomed as hell, and as altered as anybody you'd wish to meet," says Jefferson Holt, who lived with Stipe briefly. "It's an act of will by which he creates his activity and the amplitude in which he lives."
But if Stipe is the band's shyest, a lot of clandestine member, he's aswell the one a lot of generally besieged by R.E.M. fanatics. "I anticipate a lot of humans get presumptuous, anticipate they're body mates, anticipate Michael is speaking anon to them," says Mike Mills. "I mean, that's the point of some of his lyrics: to get to someone's insides. But that doesn't beggarly he wants them to appear over to his house, you know?"
When the accountable is broached, Stipe grows visibly uncomfortable. "Athens is abounding of humans searching for R.E.M.," he says, afraid his head. "Not all the time, but . . ." He trails off. "I don't absolutely wish to allocution about that because I'm still a little absinthian about it."
Still, Stipe says he's acquirements out how to accord with the attention. "Not to be Cartesian," he says, "but, you know, I feel adequately able-bodied adequate now from humans advancing up to me and absent a section of me. I'm able to allotment out what I want, you know. Whereas afore I was a lot added attainable for humans to ability in and cull out basic organs."
So Stipe stays in more-protected situations: a large, able-bodied claimed abettor stands beside him at backstage gatherings, and he rides from appearance to appearance in his own bus (accompanied, on the aboriginal leg of the tour, by 10,000 Maniacs accompanist Natalie Merchant, whom he abutting onstage every night during the Maniacs' aperture set), abstracted from the blow of the band. The abstracted buses, says the band, weren't planned – but Stipe, who eats bloom foods and can't angle to be anywhere area the windows will not open, couldn't abide the closed windows in the bandage bus.
"I acclimated to absolutely abhorrence touring," says Stipe. "But it's gotten easier for me. It's not that I've airy more, it's just that the blow of the apple has airy a little bit, so it's easier for me to airing the streets and stuff. To acquisition aliment and acquisition water. And acquisition windows that attainable occasionally."
But the abstracted buses aswell reinforce Stipe's break from the blow of the band, a break that already existed to some degree. "There is a difference, and it's consistently been there," says Bill Berry. "There's no agnosticism that he's an aberrant individual, that that's the way it should be. He is who he is, and R.E.M. is who they are because of who's in it."
Stipe concedes that there are differences amid himself and the musicians in the band: for one thing, he prepares for a appearance by accepting quiet and withdrawn, which agency the hyperactive Buck has continuing orders to say abroad for a brace of hours afore anniversary concert. Still, Stipe says, "we allotment so abundant added in accepted than a lot of humans would anytime accord us acclaim for. We're actual abundant a group."
Stipe glances aloft the room, again all-overs his head. "I'm watching TV in a mirror," he says. "I just accomplished that. I've been absorption in on this thing, and it's a television set in a mirror." He grimaces. "Nothing absolutely upsets me more, on a absolutely approved basis, than television. And the accomplished ability that's congenital up about it is horrifying. The actuality that I can sit actuality and allocution to you, and there's a TV in the corner, and I'm admiring to it . . . The best allegory I can accomplish is moths to a light."
Television ability provided allotment of the afflatus for "It's the End of the Apple As We Apperceive It (and I Feel Fine)," a song, Stipe says, about "bombastic, airsickness acoustic overload." But the aboriginal bandage of that song deals with addition calamity – "That's great, it starts with an earthquake" – and if he finds out the reporter's from Los Angeles, Stipe's thoughts about-face to the contempo 6.1 agitation that he's been advertence if introducing "End of the World."
"Wow, were you there if the convulsion and aggregate happened?"
Yep.
"Are you gonna move?"
Nope.
"A lot of my accompany from the West Coast alleged me immediately, because they capital to apperceive if the next one was coming. I usually get headaches if an convulsion happens – if Mexico City went down, I was on my aback for three days, absolutely bad. But abide anniversary was the aboriginal time aback I became acquainted of it that there's been an convulsion anywhere in the abstemious and I didn't apperceive about it advanced of time."
He rambles on about earthquakes for a while, mentions the Superman cine in which Lex Luthor buys up -to-be beach-front acreage in Nevada, again admits that even if California were to abatement into the ocean – if it does, he's not adage that it absolutely will – the blow of the country would be in big trouble, too.
"My parents' acreage is appropriate on a accountability line, in Georgia," Stipe says absently. "But it's not like the San Andreas."
He looks up and action and does his best to change the topic, admitting in his own aimless fashion.
"Anyway, convulsion talk," he says with a shrug. "It's the end of the world."
With that, Michael Stipe raises his coffee cup. "Cheers."
"We've already agreed that we will not accomplish Michael go to the West Coast in 1988," says Jefferson Holt, chuckling, as he sits backstage in Fairfax, Virginia, the Washington, D.C., suburb area the bandage is arena a acceptable reserved-seating show. But then, abstracted Stipe's convulsion anxiety isn't traveling to beggarly R.E.M. will abolish any shows or reroute any tours next year – because for now the bandage affairs to chase up its bigger success to date with a year, in Bill Berry's words, "to apple-pie out the afterpiece and adapt the shoes.
"We've been bound in this affair for the abide six years," he adds, "We go in the studio, put out a record, tour, rehearse. It's accepting to be a absolutely anticipated thing. And I'm not adage it's airless us, but this almanac bought us the befalling to yield a year off." He laughs. "We were gonna do it anyway, so acknowledge God the record's accomplishing what it is."
After the tour, Berry affairs to go fishing, play some golf, absorb time on his boat, do some account and artlessly adhere out in Athens with his wife of a year and a half, Mari. Mills will acceptable hit the golf advance himself, conceivably accompany a softball or basketball alliance and absolutely absorb some time alive in his yard. Buck will go aback to the big new abode he afresh bought, which is chaotic with the flotsam and jetsam of the road; he'll apparently plan with a few new bands or with accompany like Fleshtones guitarist Keith Streng. Stipe – who's directed some of the band's videos in the accomplished – has some video projects in the works. Already in a while, Mills and Berry will get calm in the Corncob Webs, their Sixties-cover band. Many nights the accomplished bandage will wind up together, in one of Athens's three clubs. And next abatement they'll go into the flat to accomplish their sixth album, one they achievement will be awe-inspiring rather than commercial.
R.E.M. is aswell at addition crossroads: with Document, the band's accord with I.R.S. Annal has expired. Plenty of added labels accept already bidding absorption in signing abroad I.R.S.'s bigger band. "We may or may not assurance with I.R.S.," says Berry. "That's undetermined."
The band's abiding affairs are nebulous: the alone connected is that they all accept that one day they'll stop alive together. It's not that the bandage seems to be in the bosom of any above personality conflicts – by all accounts they get on bigger now than they anytime accept – but that they artlessly don't plan on accomplishing this indefinitely.
Stipe says he's not abiding he'll even be in the music business in addition decade; if he is, he says, he can see himself accepting like Tom Waits, with an offbeat, affected ensemble. Berry says he artlessly hopes that until almanac authoritative gets to be backbreaking – which he assumes will appear continued afterwards they've chock-full touring – they'll still plan calm in some form, even if not as R.E.M. But afore they alluvion apart, Peter Buck has a goal.
"I anticipate it's aural us to accomplish one of those Top Twenty best bedrock & cycle abundant records," he says. "We haven't done that yet, and I don't apperceive how you cull that out of you. Sometime, somewhere, the afflatus hits. And you achievement it hits if you're alive and you accept a guitar in your hands.
"All I wish to do," he adds, "is accomplish abundant records, and be a abundant band, and play abundant live. But I'm not abiding that I wish to accumulate traveling the way that we're going. I accept no doubts that we can do it; it's just I don't apperceive if I want to do it. For me, personally, I'd rather about-face out a almanac that's absolutely ablaze and again try to acquisition some added way to present ourselves onstage, something that short-circuits the bedrock & cycle rah-rah thing.
"I don't apperceive how to do that, but I anticipate there's some way to do this at an absorbing level. Who knows? Maybe it agency putting out a almanac that's absolutely abundant and doesn't advertise at all. That would be absolutely cool."
In the meantime, R.E.M. has a hit album, a hit single, a new, bigger admirers and a bout that'll run until the end of November. And if they yield the date in Fairfax, they've begin absolutely the appropriate way to acknowledge to their new situation, at atomic for a night: the appearance is a rock-hard, well-paced, bent bang of able and annoying bedrock & roll. For added than two hours, Stipe reels about the stage, and his bandage mates play with hasty fury; with the repertoire fatigued mostly from the abide two albums, you can apprehend the hardening of this band's complete and acutely bolt the avidity and amusement in Stipe's assaults on an ambiance he finds about unlivable.
For the encores, they cull out all the stops: first, there's a three-song set of covers, from Lou Gramm's "Midnight Blue" (the army action uneasily, again responds to the anthemic chords, while Stipe strikes abstract arena-rock poses and the blow of the bandage plays harder on a song they absolutely do like) to Television's "See No Evil." They do the hit, with a gorgeous, hushed introduction; they do Chronic Town's "Wolves, Lower" afterwards Stipe says, "Moving way aback to the Pleistocene era . . ." And at the end, Stipe and Buck angle ancillary by ancillary at centermost date for an admirable apathetic adaptation of "So. Central Rain," which ends with Stipe casting in a few absolute curve from Peter Gabriel's "Red Rain": "I appear to you, defenses down, with the assurance of a child."
Three hours, a few six-packs and a brace of bottles of albino later, the associates of R.E.M. straggle into the antechamber of their hotel. It's 2:30 in the morning, and the alone added guests in the antechamber are a accumulation of Continental Airlines pilots and stewardesses, who accumulation into one elevator and again bawl out, "Don't any of you wish to ride with us?"
With that, Michael Stipe – his flyaway hair angry aback in a ponytail and tucked beneath a beret, his decrepit clothes added disheveled than accepted and his eyes still caked with abundant atramentous eye architecture – strolls into the elevator. As the doors alpha to close, his articulation can just be heard: "So, are you all with an airline?"
And if the added associates of the bandage yield addition elevator to their floor, Stipe is cat-and-mouse on the landing, a huge beam on his face. "They asked if I was in a band," he says enthusiastically, "and if I said I was in R.E.M., they got all aflame and said, 'Is the accomplished bandage blockage in this hotel?' "
In the auberge alley the guy who's declared to be R.E.M.'s shyest affiliate break up laughing, and exclaims, "It was great!" And al of a sudden it looks as if this affected academy bandage ability accept the attitude for the absolute apple afterwards all.
This adventure is from the December 3rd, 1987 affair of Rolling Stone.
From The Archives Affair 514: December 3, 1987
