Chris Edwards stands in the doorway of his Georgia Theatre office, a red baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. He gestures at a framed gold record hanging on the wall. “A gift from the guys,” he says. “That’s the Green album.” He observes the record for a moment, then says, “I never once took it down and snorted cocaine off of it. I respected the work too much.” He gives me a sideways gaze and the right corner of his mouth twitches upward slightly under his mustache.
Edwards leads me out to the main hall and over to the bar, where he presents me with a PBR longneck in a Georgia Theatre holder. “I have a lot of memorabilia from my time with R.E.M.,” he says. “Some of it I had to sell during tough times, but most of it I kept. Like these.” He fishes an overstuffed envelope out of his pocket and empties its contents onto the counter. Arrayed in front of me are dozens of VIP passes for R.E.M.’s 1986 Pageantry tour. They come in a variety of colors, each signifying a different level of access. All are adorned with Michael Stipe’s primitivist artwork. “You can have them,” he says.
This is Chris Edwards in a nutshell: almost comically laid-back (with his facial hair and low-register drawl he reminds me a bit of the actor Sam Elliott), paradoxically private and forthcoming, generous at unexpected moments. I came across Chris completely by chance. The night before, I had been sitting with Paul Butchart at a table outside the Globe. Chris walked by, recognized Paul, and said hello. Paul turned to me and said, “This is the guy you really need to talk to. He was on the road with R.E.M. for most of the ’80s.”
Talking to Edwards now, I discover his association with the band goes back to the very beginning. The New York native arrived in Athens in November 1978, on his way (so he thought) to Austin, where he hoped to enter the orbit of the “outlaw” country scene: Waylon, Willie, and the like. But meanwhile, his friends Bob and Macy Ramsey had moved to this little college town in Georgia, so why not stop by for a visit? It’s sort of on the way, right? It turned out that Athens had everything he was hoping he might find in Austin, and was probably a hell of a lot cheaper, too. He never left.
In January 1979, Chris learned that a club called Tyrone’s would be opening a couple of blocks from Sparky’s, the seafood café where he worked. He interviewed for a bartending job but got turned down. Still, along with seemingly everyone else in town, he made his way over to Tyrone’s on opening night and discovered the club’s owners had completely underestimated demand. “The place was packed,” Edwards says.
There were about eight people behind a bar that was built for two. They were in the weeds, and I said, “You guys need some help?” They said, “Yeah, sure, come on back.” ’Bout ten minutes later about six of them had vacated and gotten out of the way and I went to town and got busy. Made a lot of drinks and right afterwards one of the owners, John Schnell—his nickname was Tyrone—hired me and said, “When do you want to work? Days, nights, whatever?”
In a short period of time, Edwards ascended from bartender to co-owner of the club, and it was in this capacity that he met R.E.M. in spring 1980, when the band played their first full set that was not at a party, opening for Atlanta band the Brains. On the strength of that performance, Chris and Mike Hobbs (who handled much of the booking for Tyrone’s and had been responsible for bringing the band to Chris’s attention in the first place) offered R.E.M. a headlining slot, with a guarantee of 15 dollars apiece. The band members’ eyes went wide in astonishment at such a generous offer. “I think about maybe three, four months later we had lines around the building,” Chris says. Before long, he and Bill Berry had become best friends.
Tyrone’s burned down in January 1982. It was one of the most disruptive events in the early years of the Athens scene; in addition to depriving many local bands of a steady venue, the conflagration consumed much of Pat the Wiz’s sound equipment, derailing his career as a freelance sound man and music producer. Given its widespread impact on the community, it is perhaps not surprising that conspiracy theories about the fire’s cause circulated in subsequent years. But in reality no one benefited from this calamity. The owners of Tyrone’s, perpetually tight on cash, had let their fire insurance lapse four months previously. Over time, the explanation that gained the most traction was that the suspended space heater had come loose from its brackets and crashed to the floor. That seemed more persuasive than the competing idea that someone had gotten careless with a cigarette. At any rate, the loss of the club left Chris Edwards more or less a free agent.
In July 1984, Chris got a call from Bill Berry. R.E.M. were on the final stretch of the first leg of their epic Little America tour, in support of Reckoning. This was the first tour on which R.E.M. traveled in an air-conditioned bus rather than a van. It was the first tour with a name, for that matter, and the first with an official tour manager who was not Jefferson Holt. Bill wanted to see if Chris would like to meet the band in New York and hang out with them for the final week. You know, see the country in style, and partake in the opulent lifestyle of traveling on a real tour bus.
“I started to help out instead of getting in the way,” Chris says.
It seemed simple to me because there’s ten people doing the job I did running the club. It was like, somebody’s on security, somebody else dealing with catering, somebody else, you know, etc., etc. Jeff Trump was the tour manager and we got along really well. On the ride back to Athens, Jeff invited me in the back lounge and said, “Listen, would you be interested in going out on the road with these guys next time and working?” Of course I said yes. He said, “Well, just keep a lid on it. Don’t say anything to anybody because it’s kind of taboo to hire good friends of the band, but you’ve really helped me out a lot, and I really need help because these guys are starting to take off and you seem well suited for it.”
It was the start of a long run. Chris first hit the road with R.E.M. in the official capacity of assistant tour manager in 1985, and re-upped for 1986, 1987, 1989, and 1991.(1) “I started out being as much a gofer as anything,” he says.
My nickname on that first tour was the Iceman, because I think there were 24 people on the road who required 12 cases of beer every day. I took care of all the catering and such. But as the years went on I got to the point where I was in charge of security in front of the house and backstage. I became the press liaison, setting up all interviews, phoners, photo sessions, stuff like that; I did all the guest lists and made out all the passes and such. I think the best year was when we had a production manager that was in charge of everything that plugged into a wall, and Jeff Trump—the “tour manager”—was actually the tour accountant; he was in charge of anything with a dollar sign next to it. I pretty much did everything else. Everything. That seemed to work out good.
This was about as fine an example of someone being in the right place at the right time as there has ever been. The sheer amount of work Edwards found himself tasked with never detracted from his gratitude at having a front-row seat for something truly remarkable: the rise of one of the great American rock bands of the post-’60s era. These were, he says, “the best years of my life.”
In subsequent years he went on the road with other bands. I ask Chris if, in the light of those other experiences, there was anything particularly different about how R.E.M. did things—anything that made them stand out from the pack. “I think the most unique thing about them is how little they asked of anybody,” he says.
They each used to have a little backpack, instead of a whole bunch of luggage, that they carried themselves. Later on, of course, everything changed and they’d have two valets, two carts full of luggage and forty or fifty people sometimes, but the basic needs remained simple. In those years it seemed absolutely natural. Everything was in its place. Everything was right with the world.
Something that was amazing about them in those days: they would stay after the show and talk to everybody that wanted to talk. I remember sitting in a bus all the time, waiting for the crowd to thin out. You could always see after the show who was where, based on the number of people around them. Michael had the biggest crowd around him. Peter would be second. But then Mike and Bill might each have eighty people around them. They would stay there and talk and answer the same stupid questions and listen to everyone and converse until the fans were tired of talking. They were just so gracious with their time.
In time Chris’s assistance to the band extended beyond the road. A 1986 Spin cover story on R.E.M.—one of the few places he has been mentioned in print—describes him as a sort of all-purpose chauffeur, host, and minder who shuttles the article’s bemused author, Barry Walters, from one band member to another. Recounting his meeting with Michael Stipe, Walters notes Edwards’s ruthless efficiency when it came to protecting the singer’s privacy—and calendar. “Chris asks how long I will need [with Stipe],” Walters writes. “Thinking a whole afternoon, I hesitate. ‘An hour?’ he asks.”
There seems to have been a mutual respect between Edwards and Stipe. A lot of that probably stems from just how far back the two go. Edwards worked closely with Stipe not just during his artistic peak but also back when the singer was merely a part-time band front-man, part-time art student who lived next door on Barber Street. Edwards’s blend of admiration and realistic assessment becomes apparent when he talks about Stipe’s lyrics and vocal presentation. “Back then [in the mid-’80s], I think a lot of people wanted to know what Michael was singing,” he says. “Well, the Mona Lisa doesn’t need a little cartoon bubble up there to tell you what she’s thinking.” But then he adds, “Personally, I think in a little way maybe it didn’t serve the band when he decided he wanted to use his voice to be more purposeful. I mean, kudos to him for doing it. But I kind of like the whole ‘art for art’s sake’ thing, you know?”
Edwards does seem genuinely in awe of Stipe’s ability to stay grounded during the band’s wildest road years. “Michael didn’t drink very much,” he says, reinforcing what others have said about the singer’s habits.
In fact, he stopped. He quelled some of our drinking habits along the way without having to be mean or anything. I was responsible for all of the catering most of the time when I was with him, and he used to get the six-pack of Bass and would maybe drink two of them. He never really partied any other way that you might think rock stars should. He’d tend to get to sleep earlier and get up when the bus would hit the city and go see museums and things instead of sleep it off like most of us did.
It’s probably just as well that at least one person in R.E.M. stayed in the slow lane, given that the lifestyle Chris describes—long days on the bus, shows nearly every night, hours spent talking to fans afterwards, hours and days spent talking to journalists when not talking to fans, 12 cases of beer a day plus whatever other recreational substances were on hand, constant plotting of the next move and the move after that—became the only life R.E.M. would know for most of the next two years, as the Little America tour segued into the recording of Fables of the Reconstruction, which led straight into the Pre-Construction tour, which begat the Reconstruction I tour, which begat the Reconstruction II tour, and culminated in Reconstruction III. They would not awake from this fever dream until the dawn of 1986, at which point they would discover that they—and the world—had changed considerably.
November 1984 found the band on their first-ever tour of Japan. A consequence of this overseas engagement was that none of the four members of R.E.M. voted in the US presidential election that year. It might seem astonishing now that one of the most politically oriented rock bands in history couldn’t be bothered to line up absentee ballots in the year Reagan was up for re-election, but the truth is that—with the possible exception of Stipe—the guys still didn’t really care much about politics. Even after the election, as the four band members gradually became more unguarded on the subject during interviews, Peter Buck said, “I don’t ever see us being a band that preaches to anybody. Certainly none of us feel confident enough about our worldview to think that we’re right.”
In retrospect, 1984 was probably not a bad election for those of an even vaguely left-leaning disposition to sit out. Right from the start of the campaign season, Reagan’s victory had been a foregone conclusion. Despite the fact that the Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale, ran a principled, issues-oriented campaign, and despite the excitement generated by his selection of Geraldine Ferraro—the first female vice-presidential candidate in history—as his running mate, the combination of Reagan’s widespread popularity and an economic boom (for which the incumbent naturally took credit) proved an insurmountable hurdle. Mondale won only his home state of Minnesota plus the District of Columbia, making his the largest electoral-college loss by a Democratic candidate in history. Clearly, four pro-Mondale votes in Georgia wouldn’t have made a difference.
While politics remained—for the moment—absent from R.E.M.’s list of concerns, the band found it harder to ignore the upheavals and innovations occurring in their chosen field. The year 1984 turned out to be a monster one for popular music. It was the year two envelope-pushing provocateurs, Prince and Madonna, exploded into the mainstream. The former’s hit “When Doves Cry” sat astride the Billboard top 100 from the beginning of June all the way to the first week of August. The latter’s “Like a Virgin” ruled the final two weeks of the year and the first four weeks of 1985. Van Halen, Culture Club, Tina Turner, and Billy Joel also had huge hits, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller continued to dominate the charts, despite the fact that it had been released back in 1982. An essay on Billboard.com goes so far as to call 1984 “Music’s Best Year.” That is certainly an overstatement, but it was undoubtedly a fine year for pop songs. It was also the year in which the music video solidified its position as the dominant means of music discovery and delivery in the United States. Indeed, Prince’s hits “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy” rode on the back of his movie Purple Rain, which was itself essentially a long-form video—an ambitious answer to the challenge that had been laid down by the cable channel MTV, whose acronym originally stood for “Music Television.” That upstart network had debuted in 1981 with an airing of the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” clip, and in the succeeding three years the channel had made good on the song’s prophecy, creating a new type of image-oriented star. From the network’s debut up through the end of the 1990s, videos were de rigueur accompaniments to single releases, capable of making or breaking any given record. Three hits of the era in particular—Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science,” the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This,” and Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” saw their chart positions (which were based on radio play) significantly bolstered by eye-catching MTV-hyped videos, and it’s difficult to imagine Madonna’s early career having been as successful as it was without MTV. A handful of more homely-looking artists—Phil Collins, Dire Straits, the Cars, Men at Work, for example—also carved out success during this period on the strength of innovative videos, but by and large the pop world of the 1980s belonged to the beautiful people.(2)
R.E.M., not an unphotogenic band by any means, remained defiant of these emerging trends. Sonically, they continued to eschew the synthesizers that featured in nearly all of the material mentioned above. It would have been hard to make an album more out of step with the 1980s zeitgeist than Murmur, and yet the band had managed just that with Reckoning, which was even more austere and less accommodating to current tastes than its predecessor. And once again the gamble had paid off, with strong reviews and respectable sales. Still, there was no way around the video conundrum. The current paradigm dictated that R.E.M. film something that—theoretically, at least—could be played on MTV. Three-fourths of the band (not coincidentally the three-fourths who did not attend art school) were dragged kicking and screaming into the process. Stipe, in contrast, came to see the medium as an additional avenue for artistic expression.
The first R.E.M. video out of the gate, for “Wolves, Lower,” had been a standard mime job, notable mainly for its showcasing of Stipe’s distinctive stage moves. But starting with “Radio Free Europe,” the band began to have some fun. Directed by Arthur Pierson (who shortly afterward directed Madonna in her iconic “Lucky Star” video), the clip contrasts vaguely Kafkaesque imagery of anonymous clerks in a dimly lit room with scenes of the band members strolling through Howard Finster’s elaborate, sculpture-infested garden. The narrative, such as it is, involves Bill Berry retrieving a mysterious object from the clerks and delivering it to Finster. Except that halfway through the video Stipe becomes the messenger. Anyway . . . the object is revealed at the very end to be a half-adorable, half-creepy homemade doll that Stipe sends tumbling down a miniature slide while Finster and the other band members gaze on in rapt attention. The only concession to MTV audiences is the grainy concert footage interspersed throughout. With its whimsy, aloofness, and emphasis on local color, this video was a comprehensive representation of the R.E.M. ethos circa 1983. Not surprisingly, it did not get a huge amount of airplay. But it did make an impression on those who saw it.
The biggest obstacle for the band (and their label) to surmount in this new medium was Michael Stipe’s refusal to lip-sync, a stance he arrived at after filming that initial, perfunctory video for “Wolves, Lower.” He explained the reasoning behind his approach in a 1990 interview with Musician’s Katherine Dieckmann, and in doing so essentially summed up his entire MO:
I guess I’ve tried to alter the idea of commodity, to the extent that I don’t want to see myself in pancake makeup lip-syncing with dancing girls and bears. Although I do like flashing lights. There’s an incredible struggle inside of me that’s been going on since I first stepped onstage, and has applied to everything I’ve ever worked on, and that is: although I do have a certain amount of integrity and won’t do things I think are vile, I also have a great love for the big scam. And to me, for something subversive to move into the mainstream and be accepted by a lot of people is the ultimate victory.
Just as they had done with their “no synthesizers, no 1980s production elements” rule, R.E.M. turned their self-imposed ban on “lip-syncing with dancing girls and bears” into a strength. In the video for “So. Central Rain,” Stipe insisted on singing the song live while the band mimed behind screens. The resulting video makes for a surprisingly powerful viewing experience, despite its near-total lack of dramatic flourish or, for that matter, movement of any kind. Stipe himself spends the entirety of the clip standing stock-still in front of the microphone, holding his headphones and concentrating as he croons his melody. When he lets out his final anguished cries at the end of the song, we, the viewers, feel like we have been given access to an intensely personal experience. “That’s what you do in a studio when you’re actually singing,” he told Dieckmann during their interview. Then, perhaps in an effort to undercut his own boasting, he added, “But it looks like I was about to tear my head off and hurl it across the room.”
Stipe hired his former professor Jim Herbert to film a clip for another Reckoning track. Herbert elected instead to provide visuals for a complete album side, which could be broken up into discrete clips (as MTV did on the rare occasions they screened anything from it) or viewed as one continuous piece. This short film, which became known as Left of Reckoning, features artful footage of the band members wandering around R. A. Miller’s whirligig gardens in Rabbittown, Georgia. Like Howard Finster, Miller was a folk artist whose work was inspired by his religious faith interspersed with elements of popular culture. The whirligigs were painted metal cutouts often depicting farm animals, dinosaurs, or iconic people, mounted on wooden supports. They spun wildly in the wind, often at different speeds depending on their weight and the height of the supporting pole. On a gusty day, the sight of hundreds of these whirligigs spinning around and around could be hypnotic.
As for Herbert’s music video, it’s tempting to think of it as exhibit A in Michael Stipe’s “big scam.” Viewed as individual music clips, Left of Reckoning contains some arresting images. Herbert plays around with speed, freeze-frame, and stop-motion. The picture comes in and out of focus. And somehow, through some primitive film trickery, the whirligigs sometimes continue to spin even as everything else in the frame becomes static. Those are the positives. On the down side, no effort appears to have been made to sync the visuals to the music. Occasionally the action in the film will line up to the beat accidentally, but more often than not, the two elements drift along completely independent of each other, making it hard to focus on either. The biggest strike against Left of Reckoning, however, is that it is simply too long. Three minutes of unshaven musos stumbling around, building sculptures out of bicycle wheels and looking at dogs, is about the maximum anyone should have to endure. Twenty minutes is just daring you to call bullshit on the whole enterprise.
I like to imagine the staff at I.R.S. Records on the fateful day that Left of Reckoning turned up in the mail. Picture for a moment a fresh-faced intern seeing the bulky package from Athens and thinking, Cool, something new from R.E.M.! But might there have been a touch of dread in the minds of some senior executives? I imagine them all crowded around a TV set as the intern ceremoniously pops the videocassette into the top-loading VCR. “Harborcoat” starts up as they all stare impassively. Perhaps someone taps his foot. Someone else begins to fidget. Then, as “7 Chinese Bros.” kicks in and the band is still on the farm and that damned white dog keeps popping up on the screen, the throat-clearing begins. The image of Michael Stipe freezes, and a black frame appears around him. “Oh, that’s interesting,” says the intern. No one else says anything. Now we’re on to “So. Central Rain,” and the band members are in R. A. Miller’s shop building a whirligig in earnest. Bill Berry has changed into a torn, sleeveless sweatshirt. Look at the pipes on that guy! Michael Stipe spray-paints “REM” on the wall. The freaking dog is everywhere. In the I.R.S. viewing room, coughs erupt intermittently like backfiring car motors. Finally, someone speaks—is it Miles Copeland?—saying, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
For all I know, everyone at I.R.S. may actually have loved Left of Reckoning. But it’s true that there wasn’t much to be done with it other than appreciate the gesture. Fortunately, the label did have an outlet on MTV, albeit a tiny one buried in the late-night dead zone of the final Sunday of every month. A year previously, the network had reached out to Miles Copeland for programming ideas, and thus I.R.S. Records Presents the Cutting Edge was born. The show was a freewheeling hour-long showcase for the college rock genre with which Miles and Ian Copeland had become so closely associated. The episodes featured interviews, performance clips, and videos of artists from a variety of labels, but, as the show’s title implied, pretty much anything on I.R.S. made the cut. Consequently, Jim Herbert’s Left of Reckoning segment for “Time After Time (Annelise)” received an airing. On the July 29 episode, R.E.M. played a brief acoustic set in what appeared to be someone’s bedroom. This sleepy performance was very much the opposite of the band’s dynamic stage show, but it had a certain intimacy and homemade spirit that made a welcome change from the increasingly slick, high-budget videos that were beginning to fill up MTV. Perhaps most notably, R.E.M. played a new song titled “Driver 8,” the music of which had been largely written by Bill Berry. Like a number of Stipe’s more recent turns, the lyrics flirted with the idea of narrative before ultimately rejecting it. It’s clear enough that “Driver 8” works on a train that passes through farm country. There’s a wonderful line about children looking up to hear “sky-blue bells ringing,” and a cryptic reference to a “tree house on the outskirts of the farm.” But the lyric that stands out most strongly is the second half of the chorus:
And the train conductor says
“Take a break, Driver 8, Driver 8, take a break
We can reach our destination, but we’re still a ways away”
It’s hard for anyone who knows the band’s history not to read this as a plea to I.R.S.—and also as a declaration of intent: this is to be a gradual ascent, not to be forced; there may be breaks and reasessments; and it will all be conducted according to the band’s timetable. Most listeners at the time would not have known anything about R.E.M.’s circumstances, of course, but like so much of Stipe’s best writing, the lyrics here evoke universal feelings: a mixture of weariness and wistfulness, the desire to sink deeply into one place while simultaneously yearning for some unfixed destination far down the line. “Driver 8” was yet another breakthrough, moving Stipe one step closer to a cohesive literary vision.
“Driver 8” was just one of a whole batch of songs the band wrote while they were on the Little America tour. Since the material seemed to represent a new direction, particularly in the lyrics department, it seemed an appropriate time to think about a new producer for their next recordings. Peter Buck had his eye on Joe Boyd, the American-born, British-based producer best known for having overseen pivotal releases by Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, John Martyn, and Richard and Linda Thompson, among others.(3)
Boyd met up with the band in early 1985 and spent an afternoon recording demos with them in Athens. All went well, and the producer came away impressed with the new material. Arrangements were made to begin work on the new album at Boyd’s London studio in late February.
We now arrive at the First Great Crisis in the history of R.E.M., a period during which the band allegedly came to the brink of breaking up. For many years the explanations the musicians gave for this made little sense. Bill Berry initially chalked this period of discontent up to a combination of homesickness and what sounds like Seasonal Affective Disorder. “Have you ever been to London?” he asked a journalist. “It’s nothing but rain and fog. We had to drive thirty miles to the studio every morning, having had pork and beans for breakfast because that’s all we could get.” He complained that the TV in the hotel only got two stations. “One always had snooker on,” he said, “while the other was showing a sheep-herding contest.” The irony seems to have been entirely lost on Berry that he was making the kind of exaggerated generalizations about London that New York–based journalists often made about Athens. Furthermore, quite a lot of people had been to London and therefore found his comments puzzling. R.E.M. biographer Johnny Black breaks down the discrepancies:
This was something of an exaggeration. Livingstone Studios was a converted church in the North London suburb of Wood Green. The band were staying in a more than acceptable hotel in Mayfair (central London), and the seven-mile trip to the studio took between 45 minutes and an hour, depending on traffic.
David Buckley, another of R.E.M.’s several British biographers, chimes in: “What did they expect to do in early March in the UK, sip caipirinhas beside the pool?”
Clearly something else was going on. Black speculates in his book Reveal that drugs may have played a role. “One of the best-documented side-effects of cocaine is its tendency to induce paranoia in users,” he muses. And yet the crisis had its most visible manifestation in the one member of R.E.M. who was drug-free: Michael Stipe. His ongoing personal issues were readily apparent to the band’s friend and former press officer Kelly Pike, who visited R.E.M. during the sessions. “The first thing I noticed was that Michael had shaved the crown of his head, like a monk, and he was behaving oddly,” she told Black. “They were working on ‘Wendell Gee,’ and he would only listen to it while lying down under the mixing desk. The others made light of it, but it wasn’t right.”
Stipe subsequently admitted that he experienced a breakdown during this period, but it would be decades before he truly acknowledged the causes behind it. Finally, after years of giving pat answers along the lines of “I was just real tired,” he opened up to Christopher Bollen of Interview magazine in 2011.
I went through this difficult time when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That’s when the bulimia kicked in. And that’s when I got really freaky. At that point we were playing our own shows and people liked us, but I was unraveling on the inside. I was also vegetarian, trying to eat from fast-food restaurants without meat. I didn’t know how to eat properly and I was starving. I was adrenalized to the eyeballs from performing. I was afraid that I was sick with AIDS.
In this flurry of explanations, that last sentence may be the key. Stipe had in fact been wrestling with fears about AIDS ever since the first vague reports of the then-unnamed disease began circulating in 1981. “I’m afraid of everything,” he told Bollen.
I’m not a naturally courageous person, but AIDS really brought it home. I mean, it was right when I was 21 years old and came to New York and saw the first billboard about AIDS. It was like, “Holy shit. This is for real.” It was scary. It was right at the time when I was in a band. Suddenly there were all these people who were available to me—men and women—and I was really having fun. But then there came responsibility and feeling afraid and being afraid to get tested, because you couldn’t get tested anonymously. It was so fucked up.
By the time your [his interviewer’s] generation was coming of age sexually, there was already this idea of safe sex. But that didn’t exist for me. I came out of the free-swinging ’60s and ’70s. It was free love, baby. That was it. We had very liberal sex-ed classes in 1973, a yearlong environmental science class, and then Women’s Lib and Gay Liberation. So it’s insane to go from that to Reagan and AIDS. It was like, “What happened? Where’s my future?” Our generation was supposed to be about trying to deal with nuclear concerns and environmental disasters. Suddenly, Reagan is in office, I’m 21 years old, and you can die from fucking. It was like, “I just started. I’m just hitting my stride. Are you kidding me? I don’t want to die.”
By 1985, Stipe’s quite legitimate concerns had reached a peak, exacerbated by the general public’s paranoia about the disease and the Reagan administration’s apparent indifference to it. Indeed, at the time R.E.M. were recording in London, the US president still had not made any public mention of AIDS, despite the fact that the Pentagon was already moving to test all new recruits for the illness’s retrovirus precursor—later to be named human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV—and to reject any applicants found carrying it. There were no commercially available HIV/AIDS tests, and it was impossible for a worried private citizen like Stipe to get tested anonymously. Meanwhile, more and more high-profile cases had been emerging. In 1983, the influential New York–based singer Klaus Nomi had died of AIDS-related complications. The following year, French philosopher Michel Foucault died of the illness in Paris. Closer to home, B-52’s guitarist Ricky Wilson would pass away in October 1985.
In 2014, while introducing civil rights activist John Abdallah Wambere at Logo TV’s “Trailblazers” event, Stipe elaborated on his early fears surrounding AIDS:
In the early ’80s, as a 22-year-old queer man living during the Reagan-Bush administration, I was afraid to get tested for HIV for fear of quarantine, the threat of internment camps, and having my basic civil rights stripped away. I waited five years to get my first anonymous test. I am happy that attitudes have matured and changed, and I feel lucky that I live in a country where acceptance, tolerance, and policy toward HIV-AIDS and LGBTQ issues have advanced as far as they have.
This statement earned the derision of a number of conservative commentators. “You all remember the Reagan-Bush internment camps, right?” wrote Cain TV’s Dan Calabrese. “Gay people with AIDS would be herded up by government agents in hazmat suits, put in the back of black vans and driven to camps with names like Stalag REM. There, they would be held by armed guards and fed porridge and drop biscuits three times a day until they simply wasted away, at which point their bones would be ground up and used to make more porridge for those who were still holding out against the inevitable.”
Calabrese’s sarcastic critique is highly insensitive, but he is correct to note that in fact “there were never any internment camps or government-mandated quarantines.” Furthermore, Stipe’s tendency, since the late 1980s, to blame the Reagan-Bush White House for all manner of societal ills—neatly summarized in R.E.M.’s 1992 track “Ignoreland”—makes it tempting to view his statements at the Wambere event as characteristic hyperbole. But such criticism ignores both the context and the emotional accuracy of Stipe’s words. Whether or not the US government ever actively considered a quarantine program, such measures were openly discussed in the public sphere in the early to mid 1980s. In December 1985, the New York Times reported that, according to a recent national poll, “51 percent of the respondents supported a quarantine of acquired immune deficiency syndrome patients, 48 percent would approve of identity cards for those who have taken tests indicating the presence of AIDS antibodies and 15 percent supported tattooing those with AIDS.” As someone who, like Stipe’s interviewer Christopher Bollen, came of age during those years, I clearly recall the widespread perception, reaching far beyond the gay community, that the quarantine option was at least theoretically on the table. I also remember the discussions of camps, the prevalent AIDS jokes (which went as far up the chain as Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes, who made insensitive cracks about the epidemic during press conferences in 1982, 1983, and 1984), and the nearly ubiquitous paranoia about catching the disease from kissing, or infected toilet seats, or casual skin-to-skin contact.
Is Stipe correct to link so much of his private turmoil from that time to the actions (or inaction) of the Reagan-Bush administration? At a practical level, probably not. The federal government did act quickly to fund AIDS research, and by the time Reagan left office the annual budget allocation for AIDS-related funding was $1.6 billion, having risen from an initial $8 million allotment in 1982. The figure would increase exponentially under his successor, George H. W. Bush. Furthermore, Reagan’s Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, was outspoken and aggressive on the topic even as the president remained silent; in 1988, Koop took the unprecedented step of mailing every household in America an information packet on the disease that advocated the use of condoms as the single best measure for avoiding infection.
However, if we accept the long-standing convention that one of a president’s duties is to reassure and guide the public in a time of crisis, and if we measure this particular president against his reputation as the so-called Great Communicator, it’s hard not to conclude that Reagan failed here and may have done real damage with his silence.
Contrary to popular belief, Reagan did not wait until seven years into his presidency to mention AIDS—he first discussed the epidemic during a press conference in 1985, and a year later called the search for an AIDS cure “one of our highest public health priorities”—but he did wait seven years before delivering a major address on the topic, an omission that seems almost incomprehensible in our current age, when something like swine flu can provoke an immediate response from the executive branch. In an article titled “Reagan’s AIDS Legacy / Silence Equals Death,” Allen White of SFGate writes, “The tragedy lies in what he might have done,” and he laments the lack of a compassionate response from the administration. Such silence, he and other commentators have argued, allowed paranoia and hostility to swell unchecked in the public sphere. Again, anyone who grew up during that period would have a difficult time refuting that argument.
Significantly for Michael Stipe, Reagan’s silence on AIDS seems to have triggered his own political awakening. As David Buckley notes, Stipe had always been of a liberal disposition, but it was not long into Reagan’s second term that Stipe began to consider the idea of public activism. Such impulses would remain mostly private throughout 1985, but finally burst forth the following year when he sang, loudly and clearly, the words “Silence means approval,” followed, in short order, by “Let’s begin again.”
All of this, however, lay well in the future as R.E.M. slogged through the recording of Fables of the Reconstruction in the winter of 1985. Already exhausted, they stood poised at the threshold of one of their toughest years—but also one of their finest.