Peter Buck’s Paradise: Inside R.E.M. Guitarist’s Cozy Mexican Fest
“That PA was in my closet at 3:30,” Peter Buck says, pointing at a pair of speakers in the open-air courtyard at La Morena, a bar on the main street of Todos Santos, a small town at the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico. “The one they brought in had cobwebs,” the former R.E.M. guitarist goes on, swirling a glass of wine in one hand as dusk falls overhead. “I don’t think it had been used in 20 years.”
It is 5 p.m. on January 20th, the kickoff hour for the second weekend of the best little rock festival in the world: Todos Santos Music Festival, now in its fifth year in this sun-kissed Pacific Coast cluster of small hotels, restaurants and craft shops. Buck, 59, staged the first edition in January 2012, only a few months after he and his sidekicks in R.E.M., bassist Mike Mills and singer Michael Stipe, announced their retirement as a band in 2011. Buck and his wife, Chloe Johnson, are the chief organizers. The guitarist didn’t go far to retrieve that PA; he and Johnson have a house a block’s walk from La Morena.
As for the music at this happy-hour acoustic session: “It’s gonna be whoever wants to get up and do whatever,” Buck says casually, brushing back the long, silver hair that keeps falling over his mirrored sunglasses. That is exactly what happens for the next two hours as musicians who will play across the weekend — including Mills, guitarist Scott McCaughey, singer-songwriters Steve Wynn and Chuck Prophet, members of the Jayhawks and, in an unexpected appearance, Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones — step up to the small forest of mics to swap songs and instruments, in shifting, improvised combinations.
The Todos Santos Music Festival is basically a feast of friends, drawn from Buck’s deep pool of close pals, studio collaborators and touring buddies, some going back to R.E.M.’s early-Eighties birth in Athens, Georgia. This year, the January 14th–16th weekend featured Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy — Buck produced an album for Tweedy’s old band, Uncle Tupelo — and Filthy Friends, Buck’s new band with Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney. The January 20th–23rd run is also packed with associations. Drive-By Truckers were founded in Athens; the Jayhawks are about to release a new album, co-produced by Buck; and Jones arranged the strings on R.E.M.’s 1992 album, Automatic for the People. Death Cab for Cutie, playing their first concerts in Mexico, stage a mini-R.E.M. reunion one night, performing that band’s “Fall on Me” with Buck on ravishing 12-string jangle and Mills singing at his side.
The musicians play three main shows across both weekend — for free, with all proceeds going to the Palapa Society of Todos Santos, a charity specializing in education initiatives for the community. There are two marathon evenings under the stars at the Hotel California, also on the main drag, then a big, free concert in the town plaza. Jones, in particular, is a genial and generous wingman, playing mandolin and lap steel with virtually the entire cast each night; they, in turn, are thrilled to have their songs graced by a Zeppelin legend. The crowds are practically family as well: 700 people each night at Hotel California, where there are reserved tables and nominal general admission; and about 4,000 people in the finale at the plaza, most of them Mexicans from the town and surrounding area.