Patton Biddle and his wife, Jeannie, live in a ranch house just a few miles outside of Athens. From a front-room office overlooking a panorama of gently sloping hills populated by copses of Georgia pine, Pat spends much of his free time digitizing and mastering the thousands of hours of board recordings he made while running sound at Tyrone’s, the 40 Watt, and other regional clubs. Some of this material gets teased out on the website Jeannie created for him—PatTheWiz.com—and much more of it is given away to interested music fans who write Pat from all over the world. When he’s not working on the archive he enjoys dipping into military history; anything related to the American Civil War gets special attention.
Pat is a big, imposing guy. Diane Loring Aiken recalls being terrified of him in the ’80s due to his mountain-man look and intense manner, but the years, along with a work injury, have softened him considerably. The once fiercely dark beard that would have been appropriate on an Old Testament king is flecked with white now. His brow is deeply lined and crow’s feet stretch out from his eyes, conspiring to give him a look of gentle melancholy when he smiles. Some of that old intensity lingers, though. I can tell that he had a very exacting approach to his work, and even now he is not one to mince words about musicians he feels behaved unprofessionally. (Matthew Sweet draws particularly withering criticism, but Pat is far from being the only Athenian to hold a negative view of him.) On the whole, though, he is warm, affable, and generous with his time and memories.
Pat sits me down in front of his computer and opens up the index page for his archive. “Just let me know which ones you want,” he says.
I am overwhelmed. Alex Chilton, John Cale, 10,000 Maniacs, Love Tractor, Pylon, Warren Zevon—the names go on and on. And there is a run of shows by R.E.M. stretching from 1981 through 1988. Initially, Pat was recording these shows not for posterity but as a means to get even better at what he did. He would take the reels home each night and listen to them intently, jotting down notes on what worked and what he should change in his mixing approach. As a result, some of his live recordings of bands have a better sound balance and fidelity than those artists’ studio recordings. Much of this is subjective, but I’d take the Wiz’s tapes of Pylon and 10,000 Maniacs over their albums.
As we’ve seen, Pat had known the members of R.E.M. since mid-1980, but his first professional work for the band wasn’t until April 1981, when he was asked to work the board for them at the New York, New York nightclub in Augusta. This gig came about because 40 Watt co-owner Paul Scales had worked with a guy in an Athens sandwich shop a few years previously who had graduated, gone back to his hometown of Augusta, and opened a club. There wasn’t a lot going on musically in Augusta, so he got back in touch with Paul and they arranged for some of the Athens bands to start traveling down there to play. And Pat, being a rock-solid sound guy, got recruited to run the board.
The existing recording of this show (“not a soundboard recording,” Pat is quick to point out) captures R.E.M. at a crucial point of transition. They still sound like they’re making it up as they go along, but there is a speed and ferocity to the performance that blasts through the lo-fi muck of the source tape. Jefferson’s comparison of R.E.M. to the early Who may not have been far off; R.E.M. didn’t aspire to be virtuosos like the Who, but they certainly had some of that band’s combustible magic—that sense that the whole thing could run off the rails at any moment.
From the beginning there had been a musical tension at the heart of R.E.M.—a push and pull between the classically trained Mike Mills and the willfully ignorant (in terms of musical theory, at least) Peter Buck.
“Mike Mills at that point was a tremendous musician,” Pat says.
A lot of people didn’t realize, but he did a lot of the arrangement bread-and-butter stuff for the band. He knew so much. Peter was the new kid on the block. He felt that his age justified him having a little bit of influence in the band that he really didn’t have. You could feel that tension back and forth. For example, if you listen real close—I think it was one of the September ’81 shows—at the beginning of “Windout,” you can hear Mike saying, “Are you okay?” And you can hear Peter saying, “Don’t give me shit, will you?”—just real venomous. It would just roll off of Mike’s back. He’s just doing what had to be done. He was really the lead. If they had a baton, he’d be the one wagging them down.
If Mike Mills represented the structured, theoretical approach to composition and performance, Peter Buck represented raw intuition. “When I was going into Wuxtry in those early years, Pete would ask me to show him some chords,” Billy Holmes says,
and I would go, “Well, this is a B minor, and this is a D diminished,” and Pete would go, “No, don’t tell me the names, just show me the finger positions.” His attitude for a long time was, “The less I know about formal music, the more creative I’m going to be, because this is rock ’n’ roll. I won’t know which rules I’m breaking; I will just be doing what I do.” Mike’s attitude, on the other hand, was, you learn music theory, you learn music harmony. You learn the rules, and then you break them.
At the time of the April 1981 Augusta show, Buck’s and Mills’s approaches hadn’t gelled completely, but they crashed up against each other in exciting ways. In the recording you can hear Mills’s melodic bass lines punching through Buck’s insistent riffing. They were developing a style in which both guitar and drums anchored the rhythm, while Mills—out of frustration or a desire to innovate—took on some of the attributes of a lead guitarist. The approach was not dissimilar to what John Entwistle did in the Who, but sparer, more restrained. A lack of extraneous notes distinguished R.E.M.’s music from the very beginning.
Another transition captured on the recording of the Augusta show pertains to the group’s songwriting approach. Because there was no opening band that night, R.E.M. were required to perform three sets, which meant they ended up playing just about every original song in their repertoire along with most of their covers. Rudimentary early songs such as “Baby I,” “Different Girl,” and “Hey Hey Nadine” rubbed shoulders with newer pieces such as “Radio Free Europe,” “9-9,” “Pretty Persuasion,” and “Gardening at Night.” The backbeat remained much the same, but the stylistic and thematic contrast between the newer and older songs couldn’t have been starker. I get a firsthand glimpse of this during my interview with Patton Biddle. He breaks off from our conversation to say, “I’ve got something I’d like to show you.” He disappears into a back room and re-emerges with a carefully folded piece of notebook paper bearing Michael Stipe’s handwriting. “I asked him to write up these lyrics for me because I loved the song. This came out of my little spiral notebook. He wrote these out in the van on the way to New York.”
Michael Stipe’s handwritten lyrics to “Gardening at Night.” Courtesy of T. Patton Biddle.
At the top of the page are the words Gardening at Night in loose but spirited handwriting, followed by the original lyrics of the song. “That’s some really tremendous lyrical effort in there if you ask me,” Pat says.
You ankled up the garbage sound
But we were busy in the rows
I fell up not to see the sun
Gardening at night
There’s something evocative in these words even if they don’t seem to make much sense. A cynic might take the view that they’re complete gibberish. But I get the feeling that they’re tapping into something deeper than linear thought.
With the exception of “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” all of R.E.M.’s new material was in this vein. Since the strong beat and catchy hooks remained in place, audiences at first hardly noticed the change. But gradually, imperceptibly, R.E.M. performances began to accumulate more weight, to go beyond merely providing a good time.
Stipe’s new writing style was hardly without precedent, even within the limited world of pop music. As we have seen, Patti Smith had been juxtaposing images in unusual ways from her debut album onward, though she had not typically scrambled her words at the sentence level to the degree that Stipe did. Colin Newman, primary lyricist of the British band Wire—a group Stipe listened to frequently—provided a more direct antecedent. Indeed, Wire’s song “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W” provided a template for R.E.M.’s lyrical approach, if not their sound. Some lines—“Common and peaceful, duck flat, lowland / Landscape, canal, canard, water coloured”—would not have been out of place in one of Stipe’s notebooks. “Interrupting my train of thought / Lines of longitude and latitude,” Newman sings over a catchy, danceable rhythm. What does it mean? That we feel compelled to map and chart away all of the mystery and beauty of life? That’s one interpretation, anyway. Similarly, each R.E.M. song conjures an impression in the listener’s mind informed by both the words—alternately enunciated and mumbled—and the music.
But where did this all come from? It seems clear that Stipe was not simply aping Newman. He had specific reasons for doing what he was doing. “He took away that veil of comprehension everyone assumes they have when they hear a song with lyrics,” David Pierce notes.
He took that away and forced people to listen to the style of the voice and how it went with the sound of the guitar. He’d always say that he wanted the vocals to be another instrument, like a saxophone. The words didn’t necessarily go together into a cohesive sentence with an idea behind it, but they were words that sounded good together. It was up to you to interpret it. It was mostly emotion behind it.
“Radio Free Europe” represented the apex of this style. “Gardening at Night,” for all of its obliqueness, still conjures up the image of someone . . . well, gardening at night. My wife thinks specifically of her late grandmother, Dolly Pearson, who used to do much of her gardening at midnight while the rest of the residents of her Wilmington, North Carolina, neighborhood—save, perhaps, the criminals—slept soundly. That conjures up some very specific emotions—peace and solitude, but also darkness—literal, or, if you like, metaphorical.(1)
But what the hell is “Radio Free Europe”? In one sense, that phrase does refer to a specific entity. Radio Free Europe is a still-extant organization that broadcasts news and information (some would say propaganda) into parts of the world deemed by it to be closed off to the free flow of ideas. Currently, that means primarily the Middle East, but at the time the song was written the target audience of Radio Free Europe was Eastern European countries under Communist rule, while its sister station, Radio Liberty, broadcast into the Soviet Union. And, as the name also suggests, there was an activist purpose to the enterprise, a “free” Europe being the desired endgame.
Such a subject is certainly ripe for poetic exploration, but R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe” isn’t out to do that. Stipe either didn’t know or didn’t care much about what the real Radio Free Europe might be; true to what he told David Pierce, he liked the way the words sounded. And beyond the title, there is very little a listener can latch onto. Some have tried to transcribe the lyrics; one online attempt includes the lines “Keep me out of country in the word / Deal the porch is leading us absurd . . .”
To add to the confusion, different live recordings of the song feature what sound like completely different lyrics in some sections (or at least different sets of consonants; they are almost always indecipherable). Stipe himself subsequently described the song as “complete babbling.”
I believe David Pierce provides me with the key I need when he describes Stipe as a trickster. What is “Radio Free Europe” if not a mischievous experiment—not a prank in the normal sense, but an attempt to send out a bunch of nonsense into the world wrapped in a catchy tune and portentous title and see what comes back.(2)
Some writers have commented on the similarity between Stipe’s disjointed writing style and the “cut-up” method of William S. Burroughs. This technique, whose invention Burroughs credited to his friend and collaborator Brion Gysin, involved cutting up pages of linear text and rearranging the fragments at random. In an essay titled simply “The Cut-Up Method,” Burroughs described the impetus for the technique while cleverly working cut-ups into that description: “Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound kinesthetic.”
While that last sentence could pass for an R.E.M. lyric, there were two key differences between Burroughs’s approach and Stipe’s. Most importantly, Stipe’s cut-ups occurred entirely in his head. He needed no scissors and tape—the words tumbled out already scrambled.
The other primary difference was one of subject matter. Burroughs gravitated toward the shocking and disquieting; his prose reveled in death, excrement, sexual violence. As I mentioned earlier, any sexual content in Stipe’s early work was diluted by many layers of random word collage to the point of being almost invisible. Burroughs was going for a kind of horror. Stipe was going for an impressionism born of everyday words and objects, with the occasional colloquialism (“Katy bar the door”) thrown in.
Marcus Gray notes that Stipe initially denied a Burroughs influence but eventually conceded parallels in their views on language—particularly the idea that words could be a virus. “I don’t agree with a lot of what that man says, but I think he’s kinda correct there,” Stipe is quoted as saying. “I appreciate language, and I appreciate the different ways that we can abuse it or use it or twist it around to make beautiful shapes at the end of our fingers. And, y’know, in terms of communicating, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. So it’s a big mystery.” (The fact that this quote only tangentially addresses Burroughs’s “word virus” idea—the subject he was ostensibly being queried on—is illustrative of Stipe’s tendency to drift, in both writing and conversation, from impression to impression.)(3)
It is intriguing that Stipe identified Burroughs’s “word virus” idea as a point of convergence. Burroughs often stated that language and its underlying structure was a system of control, and that in his cut-up experiments he sought to “dynamite” or “short circuit” those calcified patterns. He had an ulterior motive, both in using the cut-ups and in his gravitation toward unpleasant subject matter, and that was to write his way out of the personal hell he had made for himself. (Burroughs had many demons, narcotics addiction being but one.) His ultimate aim was to reach a state of wordless thought—an interesting goal for a writer.
With a few notable exceptions, Stipe’s lyrics never gave the impression that he was trying to exorcise demons. But the idea of chopping up language in order to break free of linear thought patterns seems very much to have been what he was aiming for. What remained, as David Pierce pointed out, was “mostly emotion,” which is the essence of music.
Mike Mills and Bill Berry may not have fully grasped what Stipe was on about in his lyrics, but they gamely sang along. Carefully structured harmonies were another element that distinguished R.E.M. from most of the other Athens bands. Indeed, in this regard R.E.M. seemed to hark back to the dreaded hippie era of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and the (more respectable) Byrds. Given Peter Buck’s taste, it’s likely that the Monkees were in the mix as well.
A crucial element of these harmonies—their anchor, in fact—was Berry’s forceful baritone. Mills always took the high end, which left Stipe to wander the middle. “Pretty Persuasion,” one of the newer songs performed during the Augusta set, essentially took the form of a duet between Mills and Stipe, with Berry joining in for the chorus. This song in particular showcased Stipe’s fondness for unusual melodies. I doubt that any other songwriter, if presented with the chords for “Pretty Persuasion,” would have come up with the careening melody that Stipe did. It’s off-kilter and difficult to hum, but somehow it works. Perhaps with this song in mind, Peter Buck told Spin’s Barry Walters in 1986,
Michael is so unpredictable . . . He never takes the easy way, which can be pretty frustrating. But quite often his left-field suggestions make you question things you took for granted, like how songs are arranged and the distinction between lead and background vocals. When we finally have a pretty good handle on the song, he tears and twists it apart so his lyrics and melody can fit in.
The Augusta recording is also notable in that it captures R.E.M.’s desire to control all aspects of the performance. Stipe routinely breaks from his front-man act to call out sound instructions to Biddle: “A little more in the monitors, Pat,” “Could you bring up the guitar, Pat?” None of this comes across as bossy. One gets the sense of a careful collaboration and mutual respect: a dedicated effort from both parties to ensure the best sound possible. Even if this was just a small club in Augusta, the band treated the gig as an event of great importance—as it was. As was every gig during those first two years. In the incubator of these small clubs, “r.e.m.” were turning into R.E.M.
The band were advancing on several fronts, in fact. In February 1981, they had traveled to Bombay Recording Studios in Smyrna, Georgia, for a whirlwind taping session. Over the course of one day, they recorded live in-studio versions of “Sitting Still,” “Gardening at Night,” “Radio Free Europe,” “Shaking Through,” “Mystery to Me,” “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” “Narrator,” and “White Tornado.” This marked the band’s first time in a proper studio.
Virtually every other early R.E.M. recording has been leaked over the years, so it might seem surprising that these have never surfaced in public. This is entirely down to the discretion and professionalism of Bombay’s owner, Joe Perry, who later told the Athens Banner-Herald, “Even if I could have sold [the recordings] for $25,000 or $50,000, it wouldn’t have been worth it. I’ve always been in the music business, and I didn’t think that was the way to go.”
The band hoped that the Bombay session recordings would yield a demo tape that could be shopped to clubs and promotional outlets. The need for such a tape was reinforced by a radio spot that aired in Augusta prior to R.E.M.’s first show there. Against a backdrop of music by Devo, the B-52’s, and the Police, a pro-wrestler-style voice breathlessly declared, “R.E.M. opened for the Police in Atlanta’s Fox Theatre and brought the house down! R.E.M. plus New York will be playing lots of punk rock music and there will be a punk rock dance contest with $25 going to the winner! Tonight, most drinks at New York will be selling for a dollar. R.E.M.’s gonna be cookin’ and the dance floor packed. Tonight, R.E.M. at New York, New York. Don’t you be the one who missed it!” The ad conveyed the impression that R.E.M. were either the composers of “Whip It,” “Rock Lobster,” and “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” or a covers band that played those and other new wave “punk rock” tunes. Nowhere during those thirty seconds of airtime was any indication given as to what R.E.M. actually sounded like.
So the Bombay session was an essential and overdue step. The problem was that afterwards no one in the band seemed satisfied with the results—and that surely explains why the tracks remain unreleased. Which is a shame. Joe Perry later told Marcus Gray that the recordings “have a tremendous amount of raw energy. To this day, I do not think they [R.E.M.] know how hot those tracks really are.”
The change of heart seems to have occurred when R.E.M. and Jefferson Holt listened to the recordings again after a couple more months of gigging. Peter Buck later stated that the tracks sounded “flat and dull” and repaid Joe Perry’s hard work and professionalism with the comment, “I didn’t know what I was doing. The guy who was running it was a nice guy, but he didn’t know what he was doing either. We mixed it in about two minutes.” (This assessment didn’t stop Buck, Mills, and Stipe from going back to work with Perry on various side projects over the next couple of years.)
Jefferson Holt took charge of selecting the next producer and recording studio for the band to try out. Through his connections in the North Carolina music scene he was given the name of Mitch Easter, a talented songwriter and performer who ran his Drive-In Studio out of his parents’ home in Winston-Salem.
In many ways, Mitch Easter was the perfect person to record R.E.M. He was the same age as Peter Buck, and the two shared an affection for jangly guitar sounds and catchy melodies. Easter had joined his first band as far back as 1970, and released his first album (with his band the Sneakers) in 1978. Easter also shared with Buck and the rest of R.E.M. a small-town sensibility: after graduating from the University of North Carolina in the late ’70s, Easter followed his friends Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple up to New York City, but soon realized that he preferred the perks of being a big fish in a small pond and returned to North Carolina. (Stamey and Holsapple stayed on and formed the influential band the dBs—whom Easter later produced.)
Easter started up Drive-In Studios in 1980, around the time he formed the band Let’s Active with Sara Romweber and Faye Hunter. The group played a form of hypermelodic power pop that was not too far from what R.E.M. were aiming for. Both the band and the studio would become integral parts of R.E.M.’s story.
Easter’s friendly demeanor and boyish appearance—his round cheeks, bashful smile, and shaggy mop-top gave him the look of a fair-haired Paul McCartney—belied an intensely perfectionist streak. He impressed upon R.E.M. the importance of using the studio itself as an instrument. In Easter’s view, studio recordings should not simply be documents of a band’s live sound (as the Bombay session had been); they should be works of art in their own right. Multitrack recording gave bands the ability to add additional textures to their songs. Two of Easter’s favorite techniques were to echo bass lines with the low keys of a piano, and to bolster electric-guitar riffs with delicately plucked acoustic-guitar parts. In many instances, the result was a polished, baroque feel, though by their very nature such embellishments could sometimes dilute the raw power of a hard-rocking song.
R.E.M. made their first trip up to Winston-Salem on April 15, 1981, just 13 days after their Augusta performance. (It says something about R.E.M.’s busy schedule at the time that they played five gigs across three states during those intervening days.)
This first visit to the Drive-In was productive, though not in the same way that the band’s session at Bombay Studios had been. At Bombay, R.E.M. had been prolific, recording eight songs. With Mitch Easter, they focused on two songs: “Sitting Still” and “Radio Free Europe.” They also made a pass at the instrumental “White Tornado,” but that may have been more to let off steam than anything else.
The results of the session were quickly pressed into service via a run of 400 cassettes sent to clubs and journalists. This immediately enhanced the band’s ability to book shows farther afield than their little pocket of the Southeast, where word of mouth had managed to carry them up to this point. Prior to the advent of YouTube, The Cassette Set, as this tape became known, went largely unheard beyond its original 400 recipients, but in 2012 a YouTube user called CollapseN2murmur posted a pristine digital transfer. It’s still not possible for us to compare these recordings to those done by Joe Perry at Bombay, but it’s easy to see that Mitch Easter was an inspired choice to helm the band’s first publicly released material. Both “Sitting Still” and “Radio Free Europe” represent a happy meeting of energized, tight performances with crisp, tasteful sound engineering. The overdubs are minimal but strikingly effective: a whispered backing vocal during a section of “Radio Free Europe,” double-tracked guitars on “Sitting Still,” and nearly subliminal sounds scattered throughout both tracks.
Easter’s most noticeable contribution to the band’s sound at this point is in the realm of vocal effects. Patton Biddle had told me of R.E.M. and Jefferson Holt’s fondness for heavily reverbed vocals during live performances (Holt once approached Wiz after sound check and asked him to “use a lot of echo”); Easter managed to satisfy this desire for vocal otherworldliness while at the same time tempering it. On Biddle’s live recordings from fall 1981, Stipe can sound like he’s singing in a canyon,(4) while on the Drive-in tracks, Stipe sometimes sounds like he’s singing inside a metal-lined phone booth; Easter had a shrewd understanding of just how much of this he could get away with. He’d keep that close echo going during a verse but would then open things up during the chorus, or vice versa. This augmented the tension-release effect inherent in the songs themselves.
Approximately 100 copies of The Cassette Set came with an added surprise: a three-and-a-half-minute “Radio Dub” version of “Radio Free Europe” that Mitch Easter had mixed sometime after the initial sessions. It’s hard to gauge how seriously Easter intended this to be taken, and certainly it’s not too successful. Jamaican dub style involves the deconstruction of an existing song and the isolation of certain elements to create something new. So, for example, a dub track by King Tubby might have begun its life as a finished track by Augustus Pablo, which the dub producer would then slice and dice—isolating the drums and bass, for instance, and applying targeted reverb, and then bringing other instruments in and out of the mix as if he were tuning in new stations on a radio dial. Easter’s dub mix of “Radio Free Europe” does all of these things, but the song itself—with its fast pace and lack of open space—is rather ill-suited to the style. There’s a reason why dub works so well with reggae: that genre’s lazy rhythms lend themselves well to the various punch-ins and echo treatments favored in dub; the overall effect is a hypnotic, chilled-out vibe. The overall effect of introducing dub techniques into “Radio Free Europe,” on the other hand, is one hot mess. At one point Easter’s piled-on manipulations create the impression that the tape is being eaten by the deck—an experience with which any cassette-deck owner in the 1980s would have been all too familiar. Again, it’s difficult to know if this was the intended effect.
Even if it is a failed experiment, though, the dub mix of “Radio Free Europe” holds considerable value: by isolating certain elements of the recording, it highlights both Easter’s meticulous production and the tightness of the band. It’s in this dub mix that we most clearly hear Mills pounding away at the bass, doing his typical up-the-neck runs. We hear Buck’s fast-paced arpeggios, Berry’s insistent beat, and Stipe’s voice pushed in and out of the forefront—the words unintelligible throughout. We also hear Easter’s embellishments: wood blocks to accentuate the percussion, and a triangle or chime of some kind. Overall, the “Radio Dub” is a fascinating bit of sonic archaeology.
The end of April found R.E.M. back in Athens, opening for the British band XTC at the B&L Warehouse. Although not as high-profile as the Police gig, this was definitely a cause for excitement and pride on R.E.M.’s part. XTC had just recently hit their early-career peak with the release of their Black Sea album. The band’s fusion of jittery new-wave rhythms with ’60s-style melodies was hugely popular among R.E.M.’s friends and fans. On paper, R.E.M. and XTC seemed like an excellent fit, perhaps better than R.E.M. and the Police had been. For one thing, Dave Gregory of XTC shared Peter Buck’s love of the jangly guitar sound. The only problem was that Andy Partridge, XTC’s talented but troubled singer and co–lead songwriter, hated touring and suffered from panic attacks. It didn’t take much to disrupt his equilibrium.
Enter R.E.M.
Two flyers for the XTC/R.E.M. show in Athens on April 24, 1981. Note Pat the Wiz’s handwritten correction on the left. Left: courtesy of T. Patton Biddle; right: courtesy of Paul Butchart.
Billy Holmes helped set up the equipment for the show and witnessed the ensuing events firsthand. “I was thrilled to no end to be hired to do this particular show,” he says.
I was a big fan of XTC. They were onstage doing a sound check, and I saw Bill Berry come walking in the back door with a floor tom. And, I mean, this is how small-style R.E.M. was in those days: Bill didn’t even have cases for his drums, and they did not have a road crew. So Bill is lugging in his own drums, and I watched Andy Partridge go nuts and start screaming at everybody: “I said the opening act was not allowed to come in here until we finished our sound check!” And he just cussed everybody out. I do not even know if Bill knew what was going on, but the people working the show certainly did.
This was the first and only time that R.E.M. and XTC played together. The following year, Partridge suffered a complete mental breakdown onstage in Paris and retired from live performance. Thereafter XTC chose to work exclusively as a studio-based band in the manner of the later-period Beatles (and early ’90s R.E.M., for that matter).
By the time of this show, R.E.M. had already established themselves as a headlining band in their own right. Regardless of how they might be seen in relation to a major-label band like XTC, R.E.M. were enough of a draw in their hometown to guarantee Michael Stipe a packed house when he gave a one-off solo performance. On May 6, 1981, he headlined the 40 Watt under the name 1066 Gaggle O’ Sound, pounding away on his Farfisa organ. Stipe has frequently characterized himself as a non-musician, but David Pierce insists he could actually play. “He knew chords and stuff,” Pierce says.
He’d also play guitar. He wasn’t trying to make traditional music [at the Gaggle O’ Sound show]. His guitar would be sitting on a table, and he might walk over and strum it or put a capo on the neck, strum it, put the reverb on and have it sustain for a minute or so while he’d do other effects over it. And he did a dub thing where he’d play a loop of himself and it would come back around and he’d play over that. He’d have a tape recorder which would rewind and play that back and then he’d play along with the recording he’d just made. He also had a bunch of other tape recordings he’d made of instruments, of noise, of him saying things, of chatter. And he would sit there at his Farfisa, and he had a reverb box, and he’d bang on the reverb box and play some chords over it and then turn the tape on.
Pierce reckons that Stipe’s Gaggle O’ Sound gig “might have been the most experimental thing that ever happened in Athens,” but if so, a strong argument could be made that another Stipe-connected project that immediately preceded it—a rotating collective that at various points went under the names Pre-Cave, Nest (adj), and Boat Of—was a close runner-up. This group created punishing sound collages that seemed to blend the essences of Glenn Branca, Yoko Ono, and Lee Scratch Perry. In truth, Stipe was never more than an auxiliary member; Boat Of (if we may go with the one name for simplicity’s sake) was the brainchild of Mike Green, Carol Levy, and a multi-instrumentalist/provocateur with a serious dub fixation named Tom Smith. Still, it seems probable that Stipe’s solo performance drew inspiration from what he’d observed of Smith and Green’s boundary-pushing tape manipulations and Levy’s keyboard-and-voice wall of noise.
Michael Stipe’s handwritten flyer for a Boat Of show at Tyrone’s, 1981. Courtesy of Paul Butchart.
Pierce was on the bill himself that evening, playing drums in the opening act Oh-OK, a trio that also featured Lynda Stipe on bass and Linda Hopper on vocals. While Oh-OK were very much a pop group, their bare-bones instrumentation, combined with Hopper’s unaffected, childlike vocals, gave them an avant-garde edge. This was the primitive music equivalent of Howard Finster’s primitive art. Oh-OK would go on to garner a fair amount of critical praise and local success, but their popularity ceiling was built into their sound: the band’s limitations, which were a huge part of their charm, ensured that Oh-OK would never succeed at the level of R.E.M. or the B-52’s, or even Pylon. And when they later moved beyond those limitations by incorporating singer-guitarist Matthew Sweet into the lineup, they lost some of that charm and uniqueness.
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Linda Hopper, ca. 1980, outside the practice studio at 142 N Jackson St. shared by REM and Side Effects and later used by other bands, including Oh-OK. Photo by Ingrid Schorr.
R.E.M.’s hectic pace, meanwhile, ensured that Stipe would never be able to devote more than a bare minimum of time to his side projects—though he made use of what little he had.
Jonny Hibbert crossed paths with R.E.M. shortly after the release of The Cassette Set. A law student at Atlanta’s Woodrow Wilson School and the dynamic front man of a well-known local band called the Incredible Throbs, Hibbert had recently been approached by two Georgia Tech students, Cliff and Doug Danielson, who were eager to make a record with him before he went off “into the sunset of law school.” Their intention was to record the Incredible Throbs, as the Danielsons were big fans of Hibbert’s band, but Hibbert felt that it made more business sense for them to find “a band that’s on the way up and not on the way out, and record them.” With the Danielson brothers providing seed money, Hibbert set up a record label—Hib-Tone—and a publishing company, and went on the lookout for his flagship band. A conversation with an Athens friend led him to R.E.M.
Since the members of R.E.M. were aware of Hibbert’s music and respected him as something of a musical elder, the pairing initially worked well. Hibbert proposed a one-off contract: he would oversee the release of R.E.M.’s first single on his Hib-Tone label and retain sole publishing rights to the songs featured on it. It was a one-shot deal; R.E.M. would be free either to re-up or to go elsewhere for subsequent projects. The band readily agreed. Not yet aware of their worth as songwriters, they were not overly concerned by Hibbert’s stipulation that he maintain control over publishing rights.
Hibbert accompanied the band when they went back to the Drive-In to record overdubs for “Radio Free Europe” and “Sitting Still,” the designated A and B sides of the single. Drawing on his own musical experience, Jonny had very definite ideas on how the recording should go, which irked Easter—though at this point tensions remained below the surface. As Hibbert remembers it, “They had most of the basics cut.”
At the time Pete Buck wasn’t a very off-the-cuff sort of player [like] he is now. He played very consistently. He would play the same part exactly the same every time, every time. So hearing that, in particular “Sitting Still,” I said, “Pete, that’s close but let’s cut your whole part again.” And then I told Mitch, “Look, save that other one and save that new track and let’s cut another one and see how they stack and let’s stack them way wide like super stereo,” and the result was what I had hoped because he was doing that open picking. And it came out all Roger McGuinn-y. It sounded like a 12-string.(5)
For the backing vocals on “Radio Free Europe,” Hibbert suggested Stipe pinch his nose for a “Rudy Vallee megaphone” effect. He and Stipe sang the chorus together, which did for the vocals what the stereo stacking had done for Buck’s guitar lines: it made the song sound bigger, more anthemic.
The only difficulty arose over the final mix of “Radio Free Europe.” As the label owner and the person footing the bill for the sessions, Hibbert felt he should have final say on how the record sounded. Not only did Easter see this as encroachment into his territory, he also actively disagreed with Hibbert’s production choices, claiming that Hibbert’s mix sounded “murkier than the original mix” (i.e., the Cassette Set version). Peter Buck agreed. It’s unclear if the others cared one way or the other, but Hibbert was to discover that having Peter Buck as a thorn in his side was problem enough.
In June, the band went to the neutral ground of Bombay Studios to do a comparison test between Hibbert’s mix and an alternate mix that Easter had done on his own. R.E.M. came down in favor of the Easter mix, but it made no difference: Hibbert sent his own mix to be mastered. “I put my foot down,” he says. “I was probably the last person to ever do that to them.”
Meanwhile, in mid-June 1981, the band, along with Patton Biddle and Jefferson Holt, piled into the van for their first extended run of gigs outside of the South. The occasion was a plum opening slot for the British band Gang of Four, who had already toured with Pylon and would go on to play with a number of other Athens bands as a result of that association.
It would be difficult to overstate the effect of Gang of Four on R.E.M., yet it’s an influence that is often overlooked: apart from the R.E.M. song “Feeling Gravitys Pull” and some guitar textures on Document, there are few sonic similarities between the bands. But something of the spirit of Gang of Four, whose explosive early singles and Entertainment! album came out in 1978–79, would inform R.E.M.’s work and aesthetic throughout the ’80s. In terms of visual presentation, there were definite parallels. Both bands performed onstage at a level of sustained intensity, and both featured highly animated, almost spastic, front men. If Stipe’s dance moves were unusual, Gang of Four singer Jon King came off as an outright alien. Hardly moving his hips at all, he jerked his limbs violently in time with the beat and bent forward and back from the waist as if he were hinged. Every now and then he would pause to carefully brush his hair back, then return to his simulated epileptic fit. This seems to have had an effect on Stipe; in subsequent years the singer would accentuate a more awkward and angular dance style very much in the King vein.
Similar to R.E.M., Gang of Four featured prominent, accomplished bass playing (courtesy of then-bassist Sara Lee(6)) that underpinned unorthodox guitar lines (courtesy of Andy Gill), though the Gang’s songs were both more firmly in the postpunk mold and funkier than anything R.E.M. were doing. Gang of Four were also explicitly political, as their name—a reference to the four Chinese Communist Party officials who ended up getting blamed for the most extreme aspects of the Cultural Revolution—made clear. King could sometimes come across in interviews as self-serious and overanalytical. He once told Greil Marcus, “Pop songs as false emotional advertising and ideology as everydayness are themselves grounds for inquiry. Unless you have an awareness of your views as political manifestations, you won’t believe you can change them.” He looked askance at what he called “the published agenda of music which limits itself to a very small set of subjects . . . about missing or making up with your girl, driving the car, in some sort of all-white, Midwestern high school.” In other words, he had little time for the sort of music R.E.M. had been writing and celebrating not too many months prior to meeting Gang of Four.
From my (admittedly limited, very much American) perspective, Gang of Four on paper read almost like a caricature of an issue-obsessed punk band as dreamt up by the staff of satirical publication The Onion. But introduce a backbeat and Gill’s slashing guitar and you instantly go from the ultimate buzzkill to a great rock experience. This, too, cannot be overstated: Gang of Four could blow the roof off a club. They rocked, and they were funky. No one walked away from their shows unaffected. I think of R.E.M. and Gang of Four on the road together in 1981, partying together, sharing the stage night after night, partaking in the creative osmosis that can occur between a more established band and a hungry upstart, and I can almost see the wheels turning in Michael Stipe’s head.(7)
This tour marked a rare instance of Pat the Wiz joining R.E.M. on the road. The first show with Gang of Four was to be in New York City—a location the band had deliberately avoided while they built up their chops away from the spotlight. Now that they were finally playing the Big Apple, they wanted to maximize their control over as many variables as possible—chief among them their live sound. Pat had proved his ability to nail down a good mix under difficult circumstances, so despite their very tight budget the band brought him on board for the tour. An illustration of just how tight a budget we’re talking about: the band stopped in North Carolina the first night to play another gig at Fridays, a pizza parlor owned by a friend of Jefferson, in order to make enough gas money for the ride to New York.
They spent all the next day in the van, and made it to the city shortly after midnight. Patton then hopped on a train up to New Haven to visit “a lady friend from Athens who was there visiting her sister.” If this departure caused any trepidation on the part of the band, those worries were alleviated when Pat strode through the doors of the Ritz in the East Village the following afternoon, right on time for sound check. This entrance, seemingly on cue, prompted Bill Berry to yell out, “What a guy!”—a memory Biddle cherishes to this day.
Setlist for the Ritz, New York, show on June 17, 1981. Courtesy of T. Patton Biddle.
The band did a two-night stint at the Ritz, then played a smaller headlining gig at the Left Bank in Mount Vernon, New York, on July 19. “Following that one we were driving back into the city at about 4 a.m. and trying to figure out which way to go,” Biddle says, “when we caught up with a van.”
Jefferson was driving and I was in the jump seat, and he pulled up next to the van at a red light and asked me to ask the guy for directions to the high-rise we were staying at, and I did. When we started forward after the light changed, Jefferson handed me one of those [Cassette Set tapes] and told me to give it to the guy, and I leaned out the window of our van and reached over to hand it to him as we rolled along on a Manhattan expressway. I often wonder if he ever figured out who was on the tape and if he kept it, because it would be quite a collector’s item today if he did.
Biddle describes a number of the venues they played on that tour as “Mafia hangouts.” Of Emerald City, a club in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, he says, “They had emerald velvet upholstery on all of the seats, right out of The Sopranos.”
Needless to say, the venues boasted quality sound systems.
Then it was down to the Bayou in Washington, DC (“I liked that room a lot,” Biddle says), the Agora Ballroom in Atlanta, and, fittingly, a closing show at Tyrone’s O.C. in Athens on June 24. In all, R.E.M. had logged seven shows in eight days.
Shortly thereafter, R.E.M. began a run of shows that in my view represents their performing peak. I have heard good-quality live recordings from all phases of the band’s history, but none of those touches the mad energy of the shows they played at Tyrone’s between July and September 1981, which were captured for posterity on Patton Biddle’s soundboard tapes. This was not R.E.M.’s best period as songwriters or musicians, but to my ears they never sounded better as a live unit, and I’m guessing that few of the attendees of those shows would disagree. Patton says that the September 22 and 23 shows were “two of the most exciting nights I ever worked in my career. The crowds were electric and so was the band. Their performance left an indelible mark on my memory.”
And what made the crowds so electric? R.E.M. were not riding the wave of an album release (though the “Radio Free Europe” single had just been released; more on this later). Nor were they the beneficiaries of any coordinated PR campaign. The specific energy of the audience on those two nights derived from a confluence of two factors: the strong word of mouth that had developed around R.E.M.’s live shows and the sudden surge in Athens’ population of 18-to-22-year-olds due to the start of a new academic year. “It’s fall quarter!” Stipe declared at the September 22 gig. “A show of hands for first-quarter freshmen!”
Freshmen—apparently a not-insignificant portion of the audience—brought with them the exhilaration of being away from home for the first time, plus finding themselves surrounded by hundreds of similarly unsupervised peers. At the same time, these young students may have been feeling some of the trepidation that usually accompanies newfound freedom. The returning students, on the other hand, were likely feeling a mix of excitement at seeing their friends again after the summer break and just a bit of sadness at the passing of summer itself. New classes meant new routines, new ideas, a new start, but also long hours spent hunched over books.
Flyer for two shows at Tyrone’s, September 22/23, 1981. Courtesy of Paul Butchart.
All of these factors contributed to an irresistible urge on the part of many to get blotto and dance the night away. And with alcohol serving as the fuel, R.E.M. were the vehicle that would get them to that destination.
To listen to these recordings is to catch a sonic glimpse of that energy. It’s not a patch on being there, but Biddle’s carefully preserved tapes have ensured that I can hear R.E.M. at least as clearly as the audience did that night, if not more so. The band’s playing is not perfect—Buck, in particular, fumbles his way through certain passages—but the synergy of the four musicians working toward a shared goal makes this perhaps their finest hour (onstage, at least). Rarely have I heard Stipe so locked-in vocally, and never before or since have I heard Bill Berry play so enthusiastically.
There is also a living quality to the performance: a feeling that the show could go in any of several directions. One gets the sense that the set list had not been entirely predetermined, and so, as the performance unfolds, each moment holds the possibility of surprise, impulse, even improvisation. The latter is not a quality that R.E.M. have ever been celebrated for, and Buck tends to give the impression of looking askance at it—at least in a live context (the composition process would prove to be a different matter). But during fall 1981 R.E.M. came as close as they ever would to jamming. This came in the form of a song—and I mean that in the loosest sense—called “Skank” that the band would insert into a different part of the set every evening. They always tacked “Skank” on to the end of another song, giving the impression that they were stretching that song out and going into a free-form bit, and they never played it the same way twice. Sometimes Stipe would sing an actual verse, but more often he spewed unintelligible phrases or simply barked and yelped his way along with the music. At the July 23 performance he took one of his tape machines onstage and created vocal loops on the fly, thus edging R.E.M. closer, if only for a moment, to his Gaggle O’ Sound experiments.
The antecedent for Stipe’s vocal improvisations was an obvious one: Patti Smith’s free-form work on “Gloria” and “Land” on Horses. But tacked on top of the band’s half-assed reggae riffing, it sounded unique; I can only describe it as a mix between Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd (surely an accidental influence) and the Police (more likely a deliberate one).
In all, these recordings of a small-town band playing to a “perfect circle of acquaintances and friends” capture R.E.M. at the tail end of their apprenticeship phase. As a live unit they had fully arrived; as a songwriting entity, they were just getting started.