R.E.M.’s Southern-Fried Art
For about twenty minutes in Ottawa last August, the four members of R.E.M. thought they were the most boring rock & roll band on the planet. Marching soberly into their first number, the harsh, funereal “Feeling Gravitys Pull,” at a local club called Barrymore’s, they trudged through half a dozen songs like studio zombies, hitting every note and plucking every string with numbing accuracy. Their performance was tight, absolutely correct — and utterly lifeless. The sell-out crowd greeted them like conquering heroes, the hip generals of America’s New Music revolt. But R.E.M. knew this was third-rate entertainment, rock by numbers, and they hated themselves for it.
So they hit the covers with a vengeance, starting with clumsy stomps through Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” Singer Michael Stipe recited the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” and blew half the lyrics to “Secret Agent Man.” Guitarist Peter Buck challenged a heckler who yelled “Fuck you” during their a cappella reading of “Moon River” to come backstage after the show, presumably for a good beating. By the end of the set, songs by Marc Bolan, Jonathan Richman and the Monkees had been fried beyond recognition, in spite of Bill Berry’s yeoman drumming, and Buck had ripped most of Stipe’s clothing to shreds. This is how R.E.M. is changing the face of American rock & roll?
“The most crippling thing for a band like us,” bassist Mike Mills explains over a few Buds about two weeks later in a Washington D.C. hotel room, “would be to feel that we have to do a really professional set. Once we decide that because people paid money that we have to give them the most perfect set we can, we’re finished.”
He recalls a similar free-for-all in Buffalo a couple of years ago. “We did maybe five of our own songs and the rest was all covers. A couple of guys came up after the show and wanted their money back because we didn’t play enough R.E.M. songs. We told them they were completely missing the point. We were playing rock & roll, and we gave everything we had for it.”
R.E.M. is now well paid for its sacrifice. Four years ago, they would return home to Athens, Georgia, from a six-week cross-country tour of slummy beer joints and creepy New Wave discos — sleeping five to a hotel room (including Jefferson Holt, their manager), doing up to five hundred miles a day in a green Dodge van — and split forty-five dollars in profit between them. This year, the band’s third album, Fables of the Reconstruction, zipped straight into Billboard’s Top Thirty, selling over 300,000 copies in only three months, while on tour R.E.M. is selling out the likes of Radio City Music Hall. Buck, whose previous job experience includes washing dishes and cleaning toilets, expects to make at least $24,000 this year, not including future Fables songwriting royalties.
That is humble money compared to the megawealth of Prince and Bruce Springsteen, but R.E.M.’s real achievements transcend record-company arithmetic. In 1980 and 1981, when many top New Wave acts mostly toured major cities, R.E.M. whipped through such forgotten markets as Greensboro, North Carolina, and Louisville, Kentucky, establishing a vital link between small, active but heretofore isolated New Music scenes. Later on, they showed good taste in opening acts, booking fellow rebels the Replacements, Hüsker Dü and Jason and the Scorchers, providing national exposure that in some cases led to major-label deals.
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