Peter Buck on Life After R.E.M.: ‘I Hate the Business’
On September 21st, 2011, singer Michael Stipe, bassist Mike Mills and guitarist Peter Buck of the Athens, Georgia–born rock group R.E.M. issued a statement on their website, declaring that they were “calling it a day as a band.” Founded in 1980 with drummer Bill Berry, who left in 1997, R.E.M. were the American underground’s breakthrough populists, achieving immediate critical acclaim with their 1983 debut album, Murmur, then steadily ascending to multi-platinum success — 1991’s Out of Time and 1992’s Automatic for the People sold a combined 8 million copies — without betraying their creative and cultural ideals.
But when the three remaining members decided to break up, Buck marked the occasion by compiling a list of the things he had come to hate, during R.E.M.’s lifespan, about the music business. “It was five pages long,” Buck said during a rare interview in late January as he made preparations for the fifth edition of his Todos Santos Music Festival, in the small town at the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico, where he has a house.
And what was on that five-page list? “Everything,” Buck replied curtly, sipping orange juice in a bar as his friends the Jayhawks were conducting a soundcheck across the street. “Everything except writing songs, playing songs and recording them. It was the money, the politics, having to meet new people 24 hours a day, not being in charge of my own decisions.”
Even making R.E.M. albums became a trial at times. “Once Pro Tools was invented,” Buck said, “that was no fun. We made a couple of albums where I thought, ‘I don’t even know if this is a record. It’s just some sounds we put together.'”
But more than anything else, “I hate the business,” Buck declared firmly. “And I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
The guitarist got his wish. Buck, 59, is one of the busiest ex-rock stars in America, even though you may not know it. That is because he does almost all of his work off the grid, making records and doing club gigs with old and close friends. He plays with bands like the Minus 5, his long-running combo with late-period R.E.M. guitarist Scott McCaughey, and Filthy Friends, a new outfit Buck has formed with Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker. Buck recently co-produced the Jayhawks’ new album, Paging Mr. Proust. He is also a willfully eccentric solo artist, issuing quirky vinyl-only albums like 2014’s I Am Back to Blow Your Mind Once Again and last year’s Warzone Earth through the small, independent Mississippi Records.
Until our conversation in January, Buck and I had not spoken about the end of R.E.M. I first wrote about the group in 1982, after seeing an early, incandescent show at the New York club Danceteria, and interviewed the band regularly over the next three decades. But Buck was the only member that I did not speak to, for the record, at the time of the breakup. In fact, Buck — who lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Chloe Johnson and has two daughters by a previous marriage — was in seclusion, in Todos Santos, when R.E.M. issued that announcement. “He wanted to be away from everything,” McCaughey said one day during this year’s festival. “That band had been the driving force in his life, and it was a really big change for him. He didn’t want to talk about it.”