R.E.M., Chronic Town, and the Uncanny Weirdness of Small-Town Living

 My newest Substack is about REM's debut LP on its 40 anniversary. Deep down it's about how music got me through my teenage years in the middle of nowhere. I will be listening to REM until the day I die because they are the music that illuminated a dismal world. 

Chronic Town (R.E.M. Rewind)

[Editor's Note: It's been too long since I've done a series, and this is a topic I know some of my readers will find engaging. This post begins a new series, R.E.M. Rewind, an album-by-album reflection on the band's music.]

Living in a small, isolated Nebraska town in the late 1980s meant getting access to underground music was not easy. I was basically limited to whatever they stocked at the Musicland at the local mall, or what was played on top 40 radio and MTV. At that time one band had bubbled up from the world of college radio to a high enough mainstream level that I could access: REM. I heard "The One I Love" on the radio and loved it. Peter Buck's jangling guitar and Michael Stipe's keening sounded like nothing I'd heard before.

Beyond the music, REM had a special appeal from me. They hailed from Athens, Georgia, and did not seem interested in being big time. They had emerged from a small town world and their music being off the beaten track felt like an affirmation for those of us living in the sticks. A friend had an REM t-shirt with an image of an old Athens warehouse on the front, and it looked like a scene straight out of my railroad town hometown. To me this seemingly innocuous image was a signifier of identity.

It was perfect then that REM's first collection of recording was called Chronic Town. Living in a small town means a lot of time for dreaming and contemplation, especially if you're a person who doesn't fit into the rigid social conventions of small town life. If there's one thing I miss about living in small towns it's that time slows down enough there for my mind to wander distant fields it never seems to visit nowadays. REM's early music grabbed me because it sounded like the inside of my mind on a darker than dark rural night while I laid in bed, seemingly in another world as the train horns whined in the distance.

The first song, "Wolves, Lower" lets the listener know that REM is taking us to that liminal space, from the title to the mumbled lyrics to the mysterious noises beneath the guitars. While it sounds much more postpunk than future REM music, this song is an apt introduction to the band. There's Peter Buck's aforementioned jangle on guitar, Mike Mills' melodic bass and background vocals, Michael Stipe's haunting and illegible voice, and Bill Berry's driving yet subtle drums. I still have no clue what it's about, and that's fine. Early REM music is impressionistic and abstract, like a Kandinsky painting. It hits you with sensations that your mind makes meaning out of in its own way. Rock music rarely does this, and when it did before this it would be at the hands of someone more self-consciously experimental like Brian Eno. REM were still doing this as a scruffy band of young men from a college town in the South.

The lyrics didn't get any easier to discern on "Gardening At Night," but the sitar added splashes of psychedelia that was an obvious influence on the band as much as punk rock. The first side of the EP closes out with "Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)," where the album's title comes from. REM's small town origins are most evident here in a song that evokes the rhythm of a freight train moving through a junction. I grew up in a town where two major railroads intersected, so it's something I know really well. The constant movement of trains was always a weird contrast to the quiet and empty streets of the town.

Side two of the EP starts with "1,000,000," which has a more anthemic sound that what had come on side one. The bounce of reigning new wave music is evident here as well. I think one reason for REM's success was how their sound drew from 60s psychedelia, post punk, and new wave without ever aping those styles and instead creating something original. The EP closes with "Stumble," which might be a song about growing up if I were impertinent enough to assign hard meanings to REM songs from this era. All in all it's a vital, original set of songs that still holds up extremely well today. It's hard to think of other groups so fully realized coming straight out of the gate.

While I bought up all of REM's back catalog of studio albums in the summer of 1991 after completely falling in love with the band post Out of Time, Chronic Town was the one exception, since it was so hard to find. (I also didn't know that the tracks were included on Dead Letter Office! Damn lack of internet!) I finally got to hear it two summers later when I was working in the corn fields in my summer job detasseling. Our foremen were all teachers earning extra income, and one of them, en elementary school gym teacher, learned I loved REM. He loaned me a cassette tape of the EP to listen to on my walkman as we worked. It turns out that this jock-y gym teacher fell in love with the band at the moment of their birth, and even saw them live in Omaha at a club show well before anyone knew who they were.

As we had to ride the bus to and from the fields to work I asked him about what that was like, but also just shared my REM opinions with him. It was rare to find one of my peers who shared my musical interests, so it was validating to see that an older person loved what I loved with the same level of devotion. As much as I love the music of REM, I can never separate it from those formative moments of developing my own interests and personality. I guess that's why I'm still listening to their music and bothering to write a lot about it over 25 years later.

***

OUTTAKE/B-SIDE HIGHLIGHT: "Ages of You"

Evidently this song was replaced by "Wolves, Lower" at the behest of the record label. I've always liked it, even if it probably isn't up to the level of the album. The drum pattern at the start is very Joy Division.

New Episode of Old Dad's Records (1983 and Duality)

The newest episode of the Old Dad's Records podcast is up!  This time around I was inspired by old music from 1983 I that's popped up in my life.  I start with "Photograph" by Def Leppard, which I heard at a Mets game this week. It is perhaps the starting point of hair metal, a genre I despise. At the same time, it is one of that genre's few real gems. 1983 wasn't just about hair metal, it was also the year that launched REM onto the college radio stations of America with Murmur, an album then gave me a lot of comfort in my youth, and still plays that role in these dark days. I end with a recommendation for Weyes Blood, who has crafted a lovely art folk sound.

REM, Murmur, and Solace in Hard Times

I took my parents to the airport this morning, which means after two weeks of enjoyable distraction I have lost my last remaining shield against the horror of the recent news cycle. In the summer, when I am not immersed in the constant crisis mode of teaching, I find myself on Twitter way too much, more deeply engaged in the happenings of the world. 

In times like this, to quote Alex Chilton and Big Star, it's hard to hold on, but the guns wait to be stuck by. I have resolved to spend the rest of my summer engaged in the struggle, but that also requires having a refuge to escape to. My favorite has always been music.

This hit home on Sunday, when I took my parents on a short day trip to Princeton. While there we made sure to visit the Princeton Record Exchange, my favorite record store in the entire Tri-State area. My parents, who are not part of the current wave of streaming, got some used CDs at bargain prices. I found a copy of REM's Murmur on vinyl and quickly snatched it up and have been listening to it endlessly.

It's an album I first bought on cassette in August of 1991, since at that time back catalog albums were especially cheap in that format and cars still only had tape decks in them. (I later bought it on CD, so this is one of a handful of albums I own in all three formats.) That summer I had become an REM superfan after buying Out of Time with some lawnmowing money in the spring. By winter I owned the band's entire back catalog (except Dead Letter Office) and played it incessantly. 

Murmur was special to me because it sounded, and still sounds, like nothing else ever made. I usually listened to it late at night in the dark on my Walkman, lying on my bed and giving it my full attention. With my other senses dimmed I felt transported into some kind of dream world, one that was as mysterious as it was comforting. Michael Stipe's infamously mumbled lyrics (which are not as illegible as sometimes claimed) allowed me to derive the meaning of the songs by intuition, much like looking at an abstract painting. In those moments listening in the dark I felt more calm and at ease than my volatile teenage emotions ever let me feel in the agitating light of day.

The following school year, my sophomore year of high school, would be a crucial one in my life. I started to gain back the confidence that was beaten out of me in the 8th grade when my "friends" decided I wasn't cool enough to hang out with them. I was too dorky even for the nerds, but embraced competitive debate and started winning. I have a very clear memory of riding a school bus back from a tournament in Omaha to my hometown. I had managed to get to the semifinals, and I listened to Murmur in the antediluvian December darkness of a rural Nebraska night all the way. It was the best way to savor my first feeling of accomplishment in years.

And so I listen to it again, 28 years later and feel that same warm embrace. Just as it gave me comfort in the worst slough of my teenage emotions, it is giving me solace in the midst of the worst slough this nation has fallen into in my lifetime. We need to fight, but we need to draw strength and protection, too. I hope you find it where you can, because we are all going to need it.

REM's Life's Rich Pageant And The First Shadows Of The Reagan Dusk

We often tend to mistakenly think of the 1980s in ways that paint it as uniformly conforming to certain trends consistently throughout the decade. If you look into the cultural and political history of the 1980s, however, you will see something in the late 1980s I call "Reagan Dusk." During this period criticism of unequal social conditions became more prominent in popular culture, and there was a growing negative reaction to what neoliberalism had wrought. This coincided both with the thawing of the Cold War and the Iran-Contra Scandal, which undermined the Reaganite view of global conflict as well as trust in the Gipper, respectively. The president himself was sundowning, growing senile and more prone to health problems. Public memory of the 1980s has mish-mashed it into a big neon spandex blur, the so-called "Greed Decade" for many progressives, or a golden age overseen by Ronald the Great by conservatives.

Both interpretations are wrong. Dissent coincided with greed. Reagan's popularity waxed and waned, and his so-called "revolution" started running into its own limits.

1986 was the crucial transitional year for all of this. That was the year the Iran Contra scandal broke, hampering Reagan's popularity and bringing on talk of a second Watergate. 1986 was also saw a summit in Iceland between Gorbachev and Reagan that heralded a great lessening of tensions between the superpowers. Earlier that year the Chernobyl disaster forced the hand of glasnost in the Soviet Union. In America Reagan signed a massive tax bill that included tax increases on the wealthy from the extremely low levels he had set in 1981 and a tacit admission that supply side economics were not magic beans that could lower the deficit by cutting taxes. (Of course, that idea would soon be back.) All the while, AIDS raged, the horrible toll unacknowledged by the president. In a nation where thousands were dying of disease, there was no "Morning in America."

Popular culture, however, took longer to catch up. The ultimate expression of Reagan-era ideology on film, Top Gun, was the highest-grossing film of the year. The same year also saw Cobra, Sylvester Stallone's bluntest 80s statement on violence as will to power. (His catchphrase, "you're the disease, I'm the cure" sounds chilling post Trump.) Popular music was as big as the shoulder pads and hair so common at the time and as loud as the patterns on the shorts and dresses of Americans that summer.

At the fringes, however, the Reagan Dusk was just barely visible. It could be heard on Life's Rich Pageant, the fourth album from REM, the rock band poised to bring the sound of the underground to the mainstream. REM's first three albums are masterpieces of jangly guitar and mysteriously mumbled lyrics with an overlay of Southern Gothic on top. Your average indie rock fan today still pays homage to them. They are less likely to do so for Life's Rich Pageant, where the band took a turn that in retrospect ought to be lauded rather than disdained.

The change is obvious immediately, as "Begin the Begin" starts with a hard-edged rock riff and loud feedback beneath Stipe's voice, which is suddenly much clearer, the lyrics more legible and now, for the first time, topical. The loud snare drum reflects the times and the production of Don Gehman, who had worked on heartland rocker John Cougar Mellencamp's albums. This song is a call to arms amidst the wreckage of the Reagan Era, but the lyrics are cryptic enough not to make it a traditional "protest song." There is dark talk of "The powers/ the only vote that matters" but a cautiously optimistic cry "let's begin again" as well.

Before the listener can catch their breath, the song transitions immediately without pause into "These Days," with a fast, loud, blistering riff by Buck over muscular Berry drums. (This is the album where Bill Berry's beginnings as a metal-head are most evident.) It might be the only REM song that encourages head banging. The words are fiery too, "We are old despite the times" and "I'll rearrange your scales." The one-two punch of "Begin the Begin" and "These Days" is an announcement that REM has abandoned its Southern Gothic Folk Mystery thing and is grabbing for the crown of Band That Matters.

These days, when Bono has become kind of a joke and social media has made political activism more accessible, the significance of this move has been diluted. In the middle of the Reagan Era, when nuclear war threatened, cities rotted, and AIDS ravaged the country while the media and political figures barely seemed to care, music stepped into the breach. For someone like me, who grew up in a very rural, conservative area, it was not just a lifeline, it paved a way for my embrace of a more progressive politics. Hip hop (and especially Public Enemy) provided me with the most radical musical critiques, but REM was important too. After all, they hailed from Athens, Georgia, and were a sign that resistance to the dominant politics of the time could exist in places like the one where I lived.

The political themes continue on the first side of the album, but songs ease back into folkier territory, such as in the ringing, beautiful "Fall On Me." "Buy the sky/ And sell the sky/ And lift your arms up to the sky/ And ask the sky and ask the sky/ Don't fall on me." I remember Stipe saying it was about acid rain, but for obvious reasons it calls to mind other environmental dangers we face today. The beautiful Mike Mills background harmonies truly make this song, though. While REM might be headed in traditionally more "rawk" directions here, they are doing it their way with their own unique sound.

"Cuyahoga" continues discussion of the environment, referencing the Cleveland river that was once so polluted that it caught fire. It also discusses Native American history, and how this nation's wealth was built on the theft of others' land. Such critical re-evaluations of American history would be more commonplace during the Reagan Dusk, leading to the inevitable anti-PC backlash of the early 1990s. The sound is folkier than the album's start, but the lyrical message is unmistakable.

After those first four songs, the political elements are more subdued once the band has laid down the gauntlet. With different, less big production, "Hyena" could belong on Reckoning. Of course, lines like "The greater the weapon, the bigger the fear" seem to reference geopolitics just a little. The jaunty Latin dance-y song "Underneath The Bunker" with Stipe's unintelligibly filtered voice might be a nuclear war reference, but that's easy to ignore. It closes out side one, cheekily called the "Dinner Side."

Side two, the "Supper Side," goes into more explicitly political territory with "The Flowers of Guatemala." (On CD the transition from "Underneath the Bunker" to this more serious song is quite jarring.) The song references, of course, America's support for brutal military regimes in Guatemala, but does so in a mournful rather than rage-filled way. Stipe sings mournfully of the flowers on the graves of those murdered by the state. It is one of the most moving and powerful songs in REM's canon, and highlights issue that most people in this country, even those who are political progressives, choose to ignore. Amid the justified anger over Russian meddling in American elections, folks in America might want to take a minute and ponder what their own country has done elsewhere.

It's hard to top a side-opener like that, and REM really doesn't. A trio of solid but less evocative songs follows: "I Believe," "What If We Give It Away," and "Just A Touch." The latter is my favorite for its up-tempo punkiness and the story behind it. Evidently as a teenager Stipe witnessed an Elvis impersonator being mobbed on the day of the King's death by a group of distraught female Elvis fans, one of them saying "C'mon love, just a touch." The whole thing is just a fun rave-up and an unlikely segue into "Swan Swan H."

This acoustic song puts us back into REM's Southern Gothic mode big time. The lyrics reference the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Emancipation ("Hurrah we're all free now.") For such a politically important time in America's history, there does not seem to be much politics here, more setting a mood. That said, it's catchy as hell and in my youth I would listen to it over and over again. The album ends on an unlikely note, with a cover of an obscure 1960s song, "Superman" by The Clique. It puts on full display the band's love of psychedelic garage rock (which is all over the rest of the album), but also mirrors another aspect of the coming Reagan Dusk: 60s nostalgia. One could argue it was kicked off in 1986 when MTV ran a bunch of Monkees episodes one weekend. Nostalgia for that decade, of course, was a kind of a political statement in itself in the midst of the conservative backlash.

Life's Rich Pageant is a classic "tweener" album. REM abandoned the formula that the Pitchfork crowd still idolizes, but its new, rock oriented sound did not yet yield any hits. That would soon come with 1987's Document, once the Reagan Dusk had truly started to fall. Life's Rich Pageant is a document of the other 1980s, the 80s of dissent and protest and resistance, of ACT-UP and anti-Apartheid. In our own fraught times when we need to begin again, it is well worth another listen.

REM, "Life And How To Live It"

World events got me down to begin with, and I witnessed something today personally that's got me down much that much more. (Being cryptic, but don't worry, it doesn't directly effect me.) I've been leaning a lot on why I would call "comfort music" these past few weeks, and none has been as comforting as early REM.

REM was the first artist I really obsessed over, the first group whose whole back catalog I consumed. Their music has become almost elemental to my being. I have a special love of their first three albums, perhaps especially Fables of the Reconstruction, an album the band itself used to poo-poo due to its difficult recording in England. It was meant to evoke their native Georgia, and it does have a feeling of Southern Gothic weirdness mixed with London fog. I've used it for 25 years as a warm musical blanket to help me survive winter.

"Life and How to Live It" is one of my favorite tracks on the album. It is a fast-paced song, reminding me a little of the ravers on their Chronic Town debut EP. There's punk propulsion, but it's been put in the service of something more artistic and less angry. In a lot of ways REM were the most successful postpunk band in America, but their rootiness has seemingly caused people to miss that.

Like a lot of REM songs from this period, the lyrics are hard to make out, much less decipher. Michael Stipe's genius was to use his lyrics as a kind of Dada sound poetry, creating moods and ambiguous meanings that the listener could search for. This song makes me think of driving in a Midwestern snowstorm, the flakes flying around me as I sit in rapt concentration, slightly frazzled but pumped up by the adventure.

It's good to go back to music like this, I need it more than ever.

REM, "Fall On Me"

I listened to REM's 1986 Life's Rich Pageant for the first time in years recently, and I was struck by how well it held up and how much I liked it. For years I'd written it off as a transitional album between their early, mystery-wrapped sound and the bigger rock sound of the late 80s that would break them into the mainstream.

That certainly wasn't the case when I first heard it. REM was my favorite band in high school, and the first group that compelled me to raid its back catalog when that still involved locating and buying actual tapes and CDs. Life's Rich Pageant was the first album of theirs I bought that didn't have a hit on it. I'd bought Out Of Time on the strength of "Losing My Religion," then gobbled up Green and Document, which had songs like "The One I Love" and "Stand" that I had head on the radio and MTV. Life's Rich Pageant grabbed me right away, especially "Fall On Me." As the years went by my tastes got more rock snobby, and I decided that like so many other bands, "their early stuff was better." Also since I had the album only on cassette, I rarely revisited it until the age of streaming.

Yes, the production is more in your face 80s than Murmur, but "Fall On Me" starts with one of Peter Buck's most beautiful Byrd-dropping folky guitar figures. The wall of jangle throughout the song is just beautiful and a perfect foundation for the vocals. The boomier, more produced drums give the song a kind of stateliness and immediacy. The chorus is super catchy, and Mike Mills, the band's great secret weapon, adds some pretty  background vocals, his clear voice as always a great compliment to Michael Stipe's nasally tone. In an ideal world it would have been a hit, but 1986 was perhaps the height of Reagan's America, before the Iran Contra scandal and the 1987 stock market collapse made it safe for pop culture to be more critical.

The song, like many on the album, has a political bent. It is about environmental degradation, asking the sky not to fall after polluting the life out of it. While my understanding is that Stipe was thinking here of acid rain, on this unusually hot September day, I think about climate change. Like the best of REM, "Fall On Me" can be political without being preachy or obvious, and is well worth a listen.

Track of the Week: REM "Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)"

We've now entered a strange and liminal part of the year that I usually just refer to as "late winter," but whose effects are more profound than that mundane moniker suggests.  There are signs of spring, but it's not here yet.  Winter has just about worn me down by now.  Growing up it was always rotten because I was usually depriving myself of something I liked because of Lent. For a sports-obsessed kid it was the pits because football was over, baseball hadn't started, and in basketball March Madness and the NBA playoffs hadn't arrived yet.  I also tend to get sick this time of year, and this year was no exception.  Just as I recovered from a wretched bout with the flu, my wife contracted it, and has been laid up for three days.

The air is filled with a mysterious ennui, but also a faint whiff of the green blast of spring life just over the horizon.  That mood has always been the perfect one for listening to REM's early music, which has a similar air of mystery and anticipation about it.  I find this to be the case especially with Chronic Town, their debut EP, released in 1982.  Fitting the title, "Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)" starts with the sound of a faded carousel calliope, before the punky guitar and driving drums come in.  The chorus has one of Peter Buck's best descending, jangly guitar figures, a real beauty.  Like most early REM songs, the lyrics are intentionally vague and sung in a way as to be incomprehensible.  That, of course, only adds to the mystery, one just as ineffable as the strange stirrings in my soul on a late February day when the chill wind carries just a hint of verdant warmth.

An Appreciation of REM

Last year REM very quietly broke up, something that left me with some mixed emotions, certainly not what my teenage self would have expected.  REM was without a doubt my favorite band from the moment in 1991 when I saved up some lawn mowing money and plopped it down on the barrellhead at the local Musicland to buy Out of Time. By the time a year and a half had passed I had bought their complete back catalog (mostly on cassette) and spent hours in my room plumbing the depths of each album. At a time when "alternative" music had not yet gone mainstream, REM fandom was a badge of honor, a sign of sophistication in the face of a wave of hair metal and homogenized pop. During my senior year of high school I became a disciple of punk rock, and for awhile that was about the only music I listened to.  While REM still held a place in my heart, their music no longer seemed quite so revelatory to me. That feeling grew in college, and when the band soldiered on after drummer Bill Berry retired, they began to look more like rock dinosaurs than innovators.  When they finally called it quits, I felt like the decision was ten years too late.

Although the last fifteen years of their career did not produce much of value, REM's classic-era music really holds up.  Today I listened to "Life and How to Live It" as my express subway train rollicked down the tracks, a sublime and exhilarating experience.  Now that I'm older I understand that REM's greatness lay in their collective nature, much like The Band and The Beatles. Most rock bands are one or two charismatic people surrounded by side musicians who usually hog too much of the spotlight. Not so with REM, all their songs had the byline "Berry Buck Mills Stipe," an acknowledgement that the band created the music, not some enigmatic genius. For that reason I think it's hardly a surprise that the group was lost in the wilderness after Bill Berry's departure. Each one of its members made unique and irreplacable contributions.  Let's break it down:

Bill Berry. At first glance, former drummer Bill Berry might not seem all that important, but the group just wasn't the same after he left in 1997. Berry's drumming was not flashy, but that was the point. Instead of distracting from the songs, his steadiness and subtlety allowed them room to breathe, much like Ringo Starr's unjustly maligned drumming. His backing vocals also contributed to the wonderful harmonies that set REM off from clumsier acts. Last, I think his laid back attitude and humor kept the group grounded during their rise to stardom.

Peter Buck. Re-listening to REM's early records I am blown away by the beauty of Peter Buck's jangly guitar parts, which sound like a post-punk reinvention of the Byrds. (My favorite Buck guitar part? The opening to "Pretty Persuasion.") Buck is definitely the musical center of the band, and growing up he was the one I idolized. He seemed like the supercool, laid back guy with a quick sense of humor that I wanted to be, not the shy dork that I really was.

Mike Mills. Bass player Mills is like the guy on a basketball team who can come off the bench and bring everyone else up, the Vinnie "the Microwave" Johnson of alternative rock. Not only do his melodic bass lines fill out the band's sound, his wistful backing vocals often provide great counterpoints to Stipe's leads. On the occassional tracks where they let him take the spotlight ("Texarkana," "Superman") he shines. He's also the guy who's undergone the biggest physical transformation, going from a nerdy look to growing out his hair and wearing Nudie suits. (Hey, if I had the money I would too.)

Michael Stipe. Stipe was probably the most compelling front man in alternative rock, and that genre's sensitive, poetic answer to the preening Mick Jagger. They have plenty in common despite the contrast between Stipe's earnest social conscience and Jagger's decadent satyr personae. They share an androgynous edge, both Jagger and Stipe have uniquely spastic dancing styles, and they even share similar vocal sensibilities. Though Stipe is a better singer, he and Jagger both borrow heavily from, and slightly parody roots music traditions. Jagger's affected drawl imitates the blues with a knowing leer by way of the East End, whereas Stipe's twang sounds like country in drag. For proof, check out this vintage rendition of "Don't Go Back to Rockville," where he amps up the hillbilly factor.

Ages of You: A Guide REM's Eras and their Albums
[This is nerdy and obsessive, but I feel like doing it. There, I said it.  Ed.]

The Early Years of Mystery, 1982-1985 (Chronic Town, Murmur, Reckoning, Reconstruction of the Fables)
Coming out of the gate with songs like "Wolves, Lower," on their debut EP Chronic Town, early REM combined cryptic, mumbled lyrics with fierce jangly guitars and melodic bass over basic drums. Murmur, their first proper album, is one of my favorites to listen to at night, its mysterious nature seems ill suited to the daytime. Off of this "Perfect Circle" and "Moral Kiosk" are particular faves. Reckoning offers up a slightly less mysterious but still strong set of tunes with Mike Mills' bass getting more attention on tracks like "7 Chinese Bros." I used to think that Reconstruction of the Fables was the weakest of the early albums, but now I love its explorations of rural weirdness and rainy-day feeling.  The band, however, always said this one was their least favorite, which is perhaps why they decided to change up their sound afterward. Signs of the future can be found in the funky "Can't Get There From Here" and the less opaque lyrics of "Driver 8."  The music from this period was like nothing else at the time, and its many imitators have failed to match it.  Despite all the great stuff that came after, the first EP and three albums will probably be what REM is known for decades from now.


The Rocking Out Years, 1986-1990 (Life's Rich Pagaent, Document, Green)
With 1986's Life's Rich Pagaent the group switched gears and took on a much more straightahead rock approach which some die hard fans still bemoan. Considering that they had pretty much played out their old approach, I'm happy that tracks like "These Days" rock hard. Another change came in the lyrics, which became a lot less mumbly and a lot more political. "Fall on Me" had an environmental message, "The Flowers of Guatamuala" addressed conflict in Central America, and "Cuyahoga" decried the genocide of Native Americans. 1987's Document perfected the band's new formula under the guidance of producer Scott Litt (who went on the produce most of the following albums), and even yielded its first hits in the form of "The One I Love" (the song that first got me interested in the group) and "It's the End of the World As We Know It." The follow up, Green, was their first on a major label, but mined the same shaft as Document to lesser effect (except for the awesome "World Leader Pretend.")

The Mandolin Years, 1991-1993 (Out of Time, Automatic for the People)
With 1991 the group had their biggest hit, "Losing My Religion," but did so after taking a step away from their rawk sound of the late 1980s. The lyrics are cryptic, but the topic isn't the United Fruit Company or nuclear weapons, it's matters of the heart and perhaps, *gasp* the previously verboten subject of love. Perhaps most momentously, Peter Buck's mandolin part drove the song, signalling a shift towards a more folk rock vibe. Out of Time still had some very pop, Byrdsy guitar moments like "Shiny Happy People," a much attacked song that I will defend to the death. It's a fun homage to sixties psychedelic pop and comes complete with a soaring Kate Pearson vocal and shining Buck riff. What's not to like? The follow-up, Automatic for the People, took things in a darker direction with a similar folky sensibility, and is easily their best album after the early years (or perhaps the best bar none.) "Drive" is an appropriate elegy for rock music, and tracks like "Sweetness Follows" address death head on. "Nightswimming" is perhaps their best ballad, "Man on the Moon" a pop classic, and "Find the River" a sublime way to close things out.  The album?  A masterpiece.

The Return of Rock Years, 1994-1997 (Monster, New Adventures in Hi-Fi)
At the height of their fame and artistic ability, REM decided to go back into rock mode, perhaps influenced by the contemporary grunge explosion. In 1994 they unleashed Monster, the most feedback-laden record of their career, and one that die hards (but not me) love to trash. With the first single, "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" they seemed to announce their relevance to all the flannel clad youngsters out there and claim their status as Godfathers. While touring off of Monster they recorded a lot of 1996's New Adventures in Hi Fi on the road during soundchecks (evidently the recording of Monster had almost broken up the band.) It's got a lot of rock and roll on it, but also a cutting sense of dread on songs like "E Bow the Letter" and "Bittersweet Me." Despite an overlong playing time and some needless filler, it's their last great album.

The Post-Bill Berry Era, 1998 to 2012 (Up, Reveal, Around the Sun, Accelerate, Crash Into Now)
Berry left after having a scary brain aneurysm, and even though REM has produced some good music since then, it's been pretty patchy in quality. Up and Reveal brought in some of the pop feel of the early nineties and a lot more keyboard textures, and even a handful of solid tunes ("All the Way to Reno," "Imitation of Life," "Lotus," "At My Most Beautiful" ) but nothing out of this world. Truth be told, I have yet to listen to their last three records, the only REM albums I don't own. Perhaps now that I have Spotify I can at least see if I was missing anything.  On the bright side, I've enjoyed Peter Buck's contributions to the Minus Five and The Baseball Project, and it's pretty amazing that REM managed to keep updating their style without ever really sounding derivative.