R.E.M.: Number One With an Attitude
Michael Stipe was the last to know. Hurried, handwritten messages were already scrolling out of a fax machine back at his band’s headquarters: “Congratulations, R.E.M., Athens and everyone,” “Congratulations to all in the R.E.M. world” and “Congratulations. You deserve it, and as my mother would say, may it be the first of many.” Bassist Mike Mills had heard the news. Guitarist Peter Buck had downed a glass of champagne, and his mom had had a good cry. Drummer Bill Berry had said: “Oh, that’s weird. I’m gonna sit down.”
Stipe, however, could not be found. Later it was discovered that the singer had been out at the creek near his Athens, Georgia, home, walking his three mixed-breed pups. He had then proceeded to city hall, where he had attended a meeting about the historic preservation of some buildings in the sweet-smelling, tree-lined university town of 87,000. Midway through the proceedings, Stipe noticed that a friend was staring at him and jubilantly waving her forefinger. R.E.M. was Number One.
“I sat in the meeting for two and a half hours, and I thought, ‘Wow, I’m being pretty calm about this,’ ” Stipe says of the news that Out of Time had become the band’s first album to top the Billboard charts. “And then I got outside city hall and just screamed and jumped up and down and burst into tears and ran around the block. I’d walked out of the meeting early so there weren’t too many people wondering what on earth was wrong.”
Just now, Stipe is sitting behind a desk in his lawyer’s office. He’s wearing a rumpled, automechanic-style outfit, muddy rubber boots and a bright green baseball cap. He’s eating an orange. Stipe is asked if he’d like to commemorate R.E.M.’s tenure at the top by talking a little bit about the other bands in the Top Forty. The singer allows as how he doesn’t know much about them. He reaches for a copy of Billboard and spends a long time trying to find the Pop Albums chart.
“Okay,” Stipe says finally, then delivers his countdown in a quiet, earnest voice. “Mariah Carey I’ve never heard. C + C Music Factory — I think the single is great. Wilson Phillips I’ve heard. I have no opinion about them. The Black Crowes — they’re from Atlanta, right? I have no opinion about them. Enigma have two great videos, and they’re kind of floaty, right? Pretty cool. New Jack City soundtrack – Ice-T was not bad. Chris Isaak — it’s about time. Queensrÿche I’ve never heard. Rod Stewart we don’t need to talk about. ABC [Another Bad Creation] I think is pretty great. Whitney Houston I’ve never heard. Amy Grant I’ve never heard. Roxette I’ve never heard. The Divinyls I’ve never heard. The Doors — see ya. Not interested. The Rolling Stones — see ya.”
Wait a minute. Back up. Stipe has never heard Whitney Houston?
“No,” he says, his face a picture of innocence. “I couldn’t distinguish her from Mariah Carey. I just figured out how to say Mariah. You say it like pariah.”
For four years now, R.E.M. has been keeping some pretty strange company. The band’s albums have always sold well in the first few months after their release — thanks primarily to hard-core fans who have followed the group since it climbed out of the college-radio cellar and became what Bill Berry ambivalently refers to as “the gurus of 1980s mysticism.” R.E.M. broadened that fan base considerably by spending most of the last decade on the road. Each of the band’s albums sold a little better than the previous one. A graph of R.E.M.’s record sales over the mid-Eighties, in fact, would more or less look like an up escalator.
In 1987 the band found it had a radio-ready Top Ten single on its hands with “The One I Love,” and Document became the first R.E.M. album to sell a million. The follow-up, Green, spawned the hit “Stand,” sold a million and a half copies and powered the group’s first arena tour. Out of Time — helped along by the brooding single “Losing My Religion” — has already sold 1.7 million copies. Even R.E.M.’s back catalog is flying out of record stores. The group’s now-legendary debut, Murmur, from 1983, sold only 150,000 copies upon release. It is currently hovering around 800,000.
These days, there are R.E.M. fans who think “Stand” — or even “Losing My Religion” — is the first song the band ever wrote. “The people who listen to Top Forty are generally not R.E.M. record buyers — or they weren’t until the last year or two,” Mike Mills says. “It’s kind of surprising to listen to the fourteen-year-old girls call up and go, ‘How long have you been together? I like your first record.’ And it’s like ‘No, no. See, the first record came out when you were about one year old.’ ”
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