Rock group R.E.M.’s sound is impossible to mistake: layers of jangling guitars, haunting melodies, oblique lyrics, and Michael Stipe’s reedy vocals. Declared “America’s best rock’n’roll band” by Rolling Stone magazine in 1989, R.E.M. grew from a garage band to a cult favourite to superstars as the most popular alternative (rather than mainstream) group of the 1980s. With a name taken from the phrase “rapid eye movement,” the term for the sleep cycle in which dreaming takes place, R.E.M. remains one of rock’s most durable—and visionary—bands.
In 1978, Stipe (b. Decatur, Georgia, January 4, I960), an art student at the University of Georgia, met Peter Buck (b. Berkeley, California, December 6, 1956) in an Athens, Georgia, record store where Buck worked and practiced guitar between customers. Both were fans of British new wave music, and Stipe had performed with a band that had covered punk songs. Stipe and Buck formed R.E.M. in 1980 with two struggling musicians—drummer Bill Berry (b. Duluth, Minnesota, July 31, 1958) and bassist Mike Mills (b. Orange County, California, December 17, 1956). The next year, the band recorded a demo tape that included “Radio Free Europe,” chosen as the Village Voice’s “best independent single of the year.” In 1982, R.E.M. released a self-produced mini-LP Chronic Town on Miles Copeland’s I.R.S. label.
R.E.M.’s first two full albums, Murmur (1983) and Reckoning (1984), became immediate college radio favourites. In 1985, the group travelled to England to record the darkly atmospheric Fables of the Reconstruction. The harder-edged, but more accessible, Life’s Rich Pageant (1985) was R.E.M.’s first gold album. Document, their first Top 10 album, in 1987, yielded the hit single “The One I Love,” a typically misinterpreted song about betrayal.
In 1988, Green, the band’s first album for Warner Bros., produced another hit song, “Stand,” and other radio-friendly tunes such as “Pop Song 89” and “Orange Crush.” Many of the songs from the albums Document and Green demonstrated clearly the band’s increasing political orientation, with pertinent lyrics commenting, however obscurely, on some of the current issues of the environment and society.
In 1991, after a three-year stretch during which they toured and pursued side-projects, R.E.M. resurfaced with their first No. 1 album. The eclectic Out of Time featured the hit singles “Losing My Religion” and “Shiny Happy People.” The album won three Grammys, including best alternative album, and the haunting Losing My Religion video won six awards at the MTV Video Music Awards. Automatic for the People in 1992 (with the title based on a sign in an Athens soul food diner) also went to No. 1, and boasted such ethereal, heavily atmospheric hits as “Everybody Hurts,” “Drive,” and “Man on the Moon.”
Monster, in 1994, described by Stipe as sounding “like punk rock, but loud,” was dedicated to the late actor, River Phoenix. It featured the hit “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” as well as “Let Me In,” an ode to NIRVANA’S Kurt Cobain. The Monster tour itself was plagued with misfortune—Berry suffered an aneurysm, Stipe had a hernia operation, and Mills underwent abdominal surgery.
The band’s latest album, New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996), was a commercial disappointment. “The secret to R.E.M.’s success over the years has always been its ability to remain focused on the music, regardless of outside pressures,” observed Time magazine critic, Christopher John Farley. “Good bands hit and fade. Great bands, like R.E.M., endure.” In the late 1990s R.E.M. played less frequently but continued to endure.
Michael R. Ross
SEE ALSO:
INDIE BANDS; ROCK MUSIC; ROCK’N’ROLL.
FURTHER READING
Bowler, Dave, and Bryan Dray. R.EM.: From “Chronic Town” to “Monster” (Secausus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1995);
Gray, Marcus. It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M. Companion (London: Guinness Publishing, 1996).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Automatic jor we People-, Document-, Green; Murmur, Out of Time.