After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"Harborcoat" by R.E.M.
Maybe it's because I was young and clueless myself at the time, but when I was growing up in the '80s, the decade seemed somehow… softer than what had gone before. I'd heard all about the libertine, activist atmosphere of the '60s and '70s, and when I looked around at the decade I was stuck in—the decade of AIDS and "Just Say No"—I felt like I'd been cheated. As the '80s progressed, popular music grew increasingly synthesized and frivolous, movies aimed more and more for spectacle and low comedy, and few seemed interested in delving too deeply into politics. Consider the difference between Saturday Night Live in the '70s and '80s. When the show started, it was the hippest thing on TV, alternating druggie surrealism with wise-ass satire, operating under the presumption that its audience knew and cared about what was going on in the world. But watch any given installment of Weekend Update in the mid-'80s and the height of subversion is Tim Kazurinsky saying "orgasm."
Still, there were signs of life that flashed intermittently throughout the decade. The corner video store stocked films by David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and the Coen brothers. The local comic book shop occasionally had a copy of Weirdo or Love & Rockets stashed on a dusty, inaccessible shelf. And while the musical heroes of the '60s and '70s—even the early punk legends—were making records ever-more indebted to the lead-footed sound popularized by producers Trevor Horn and Arthur Baker, we received periodic dispatches from Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere, from bands trying to carve out their own niche, away from the bombast and bluster. Among those bands was R.E.M., serving as a reassuring constant and a bellwether of change.
I first heard R.E.M. in the summer of 1984, while spending a couple of days with relatives in Maryland. During the evenings, my uncle took my stepfather and me to Orioles games and harness racing, but during the days, my cousin drove me to Georgetown to eat pizza and browse record stores. Then we'd head back to his house to watch videos, read rock magazines and listen to music. He put Murmur on at one point, and about a minute into the record, when Michael Stipe sang "straight off the boat" in that high, nasal whine, I was hooked. Nothing in the classic rock or new wave I'd been listening to sounded quite like this strange mix of tight, punchy rhythms, jangly guitar, vocal mumble, and melodies that built ever upward.
Coincidentally, when I got back to Nashville, I caught a repeat of Late Night With David Letterman that featured R.E.M. performing "Radio Free Europe" and "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)." This was back in the days when Stipe was painfully shy, so he retreated to the wings while Letterman came out to chat with Mike Mills and Peter Buck between songs—which only added to the band's curious blend of otherworldly mystique and "just plain folks." (Aside: Speaking of signs of life in the '80s, the Letterman show was definitely among them, though because Letterman's smirky take on TV conventions featured more glib goofing-off than toothy satire, in some ways he contributed to the "nothing matters" vibe that made the decade so frustrating at times; Bret Easton Ellis wrote back then that "the voice of my generation is the voice of David Letterman," and he didn't intend it as a compliment.)
I wasn't old enough to get a job the summer I discovered R.E.M., and my allowance wasn't big enough for me to afford the price of an album, but I had to get my hands on an R.E.M. record, and since none of my friends were fans (yet) and the band wasn't being played on the radio stations I listened to (yet), I fell back on my emergency plan: My grandfather's coin collection, which I'd come into possession of after he died. It wasn't a big collection—just a starter kit, really—but in straight currency terms, it contained about fifteen bucks in coins. (I don't want to think about what they were actually worth.) I rode my bike down to Wal-Mart and bought the only R.E.M. album they had in stock, which was the recently released Reckoning. While pedaling home, a sudden summer storm blew in, and I had to hustle to take refuge in the first shelter I could find: the doorway of a church. I was convinced I had angered The Almighty by spending the coin collection. But then the storm passed, I headed home, I played Reckoning, and I forgot all about my immortal soul. Reckoning was totally worth it.
In the years to come I would read a lot about R.E.M., and by following the bands they cited in interviews—and through my own deeper explorations into rock history—I got a clearer sense of where they were coming from. What was refreshing about R.E.M. in the '80s was their self-awareness. They openly acknowledged their debts to The Byrds, Pylon, The Velvet Underground, The Everly Brothers, Patti Smith, The Soft Boys and The Feelies; and Buck in particular always seemed to have a sense of the band's strengths and weaknesses. Early on, he boasted that R.E.M. could never be U2 or The Clash—"They're a newspaper, we're not," he once said in an interview—but as R.E.M. drew a wider audience and developed the sonic oomph to play bigger rooms, politics did begin to creep into their songs, along with a certain measure of wit and personality that was absent back on the beguilingly aloof Murmur. I remember the first time Nashville's album-rock station played an R.E.M. song, and I remember how their popularity gradually seeped down from the college level to the high school level, and soon to the Billboard charts. No one I knew accused R.E.M, of "selling out" (probably because the band wasn't really part of the punk scene, which obsessed over such things). Instead, the band's success felt like a validation.
Of course I didn't know any of that was imminent during the summer I heard Murmur and bought Reckoning. I had no idea what was coming on the day before 9th grade, when I borrowed a laundry marker from my mom and carefully inked "R.E.M." in tall thin letters on the front of an old blue T-shirt. I just knew that I'd found something new that I loved, and that I wanted to share. For me, allying myself to R.E.M.—or any of the dozens of alt-rock bands I'd devote myself to over the next several years—wasn't about trying to set myself apart from my peers. I wanted them to like R.E.M. too. They had their Van Halen and Journey Ts. I thought of myself as a walking advertisement for something better.
One afternoon, about a year later, I was spending a weekend with my dad in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he was attending seminary at The University Of The South. I took a walk through the quiet campus on a temperate fall day, and perched myself on a big rock under a tall tree that was quickly losing the last of its leaves. A light breeze carrying the sound from an open window in one of the dorms, where some students were listening to Reckoning, so I sat a while and listened along with them, about 30 feet below and a hundred yards away. I imagined myself at college in a few years, away from the get-along throng, making my own choices, studying what I wanted, preparing to usher in the '90s and what I hoped would be a decade of changes both personal and cultural. And one thought crossed my mind:
I like it here.
"Sitting Still" by R.E.M.
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
R.E.M.
Years Of Operation 1980-present
Fits Between The Feelies and The Soft Boys
"All The RIght Friends (1983)" by R.E.M.
"All The Right Friends (2001)" by R.E.M.
Personal Correspondence I'm always eager to read anything my colleague Steve Hyden writes, because I like the way he challenges conventional wisdom without burning bridges just for the sake of it. But Steve's post about R.E.M. last year struck me as wrong-headed on a couple of counts. First off, I don't agree that when it comes to R.E.M. albums "if you own one, you own them all." If anything, I think each album takes a decidedly different approach to the core principles of jangle and obfuscation that the band introduced back on their first single. Sometimes R.E.M. comes out raging, as on Monster. Sometimes they play it softer, or experiment with electronics, or hire a big-name rock producer, or record a whole album at sound check. Each record sounds wholly unique. (Not that they're all masterpieces. R.E.M. certainly has a fair share of duds, though in some ways that's a function of their longevity and productivity, which I find far more inherently commendable than Steve does. But that's a subject for another essay.) I've seen R.E.M. in concert four times—once on the Fables Of The Reconstruction tour, once for Life's Rich Pageant, and twice for Green—and each show was different too, from the rough-hewn Vanderbilt University gig they did for Fables to the massive, coke-fueled arena tour for Green. I also disagree with Steve's contention that no one would punch up R.E.M. on their favorite jukebox when drunk at a bar at 2 a.m. Maybe it's a generational thing, but I know a lot of my friends from college still consider themselves R.E.M. fans, and we'd definitely bellow along to "Can't Get There From Here" or "These Days" or "Disturbance At The Heron House" if we were knocking back a few in the wee hours. (Of course, we all went to school in Athens. Also, we probably wouldn't be drinking at 2 a.m., because we're very, very old.) I've also heard it said by some—not by Steve—that R.E.M. doesn't matter because their influence hasn't endured much beyond the first half of the '90s. But that's a dicey argument to make too. Ten years ago, you could've said that Gang Of Four didn't matter much, because so few bands aped their style. Then, suddenly, seemingly every new band was all about Gang Of Four. I'm confident that R.E.M.'s best albums—and there are a lot of them, albeit none since 1996—will endure, and the decade of hit-and-miss work they've recently generated won't count against them, any more than Voodoo Lounge diminishes the achievement of Exile On Main St.
Enduring presence? The two songs above—the same song, recorded a decade apart—gives two looks at R.E.M., showing a clear evolution of sound. Given a choice, I'll take the former, but more out of nostalgia than aesthetic superiority. And now, having written plenty about R.E.M., I'll spare you the story of how I once spilled a drink on Michael Stipe. Maybe some other day.
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