by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published November 22, 2015
Lifes Rich Pageant
released July 28, 1986 I.R.S. Records
“I don’t think they could have unleashed pinpoint-accurate missiles like ‘These Days’ or ‘I Believe’ before this point.”
Now we're talking. Lifes Rich Pageant isn't the album where I started buying R.E.M. (that was still a couple of years away), but it is where they first arrived on my radar. I was 14 years old by this time, actively seeking to expand my musical palate—both for my own sophistication and to fit in with the music geeks that I'd begun to realize were probably my natural crowd. More accurately, the first R.E.M. that caught my attention was "(All I've Got To Do Is) Dream," their slightly-renamed cover of the classic Everly Brothers hit "All I Have To Do Is Dream." The song appeared on the soundtrack of a 1987 documentary covering the music scene from which they'd emerged, called "Athens, Ga. Inside/Out." Its video started popping up on 120 Minutes, MTV's Sunday late-night program dedicated to underground and alternative music, which I had started watching as part of my musical vision quest. It was not long before I'd connected it to the video for "Fall On Me." That one—with its grainy upside-down black-and-white footage of nothing in particular serving as a backdrop for the lyrics (presented one word at a time, in large orange type)—turned into a 120 Minutes staple, as it showcased the exact brand of outsider inscrutability that the show favored.
My family returned to the states in the summer of 1984, after six years of living in England. I found that I had begun to gravitate toward the edgier side of US Top 40 radio after realizing that the acts that were mainstream in the more adventurous and style-obsessed UK were classified as something else in America. These were bands I had largely scoffed at while actually living in England—the New Romantics, the mopey goths, the ska revivalists that somehow made a Jamaican music form into the sound of working-class Britain—but I found I missed them once they were gone from my radio. Trading Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Adam and the Ants and Madness for Night Ranger, Foreigner and REO Speedwagon felt like a crappy deal. Hacking into the jungle of indie rock for the first time was very intimidating, confronted as I was by acts with names like Throbbing Gristle, Thrashing Doves, Killing Joke, and Swinging Pistons (not to mention a host of bands that didn't have Verb-ing Noun moniker constructions). It felt like trying to scale walls that were specifically put up to keep uncool people like me out, because I wouldn't "get it" anyway. And at first, I didn't get it. The large orange type in the "Fall On Me" video may as well have been flashing KEEP and OUT over and over. Regardless, I was listening primarily to reconnect with the Brits, for the occasional Cure or Depeche Mode track that would crop up. Bands that were peddling American versions of the same discontent, like R.E.M. or the Replacements, did so with stripped-down roots rock that, at the time, held no appeal for me. Thus, that largely-forgotten Everly Brothers cover was actually a significant track in my evolution. As a familiar tune I could pick out amidst the often-overwhelming onslaught of new information, it helped R.E.M. stand out as a specific entity in this new world of music.
(Once again, while I serve as your loyal left-alignment commentator, Tom will continue to man the right-hand margin. And hark! Here he is now.)
I was also a fan of 120 Minutes, pretty much from when it started in 1986, just weeks before R.E.M.'s new album came out, and weeks after I'd graduated college and taken the first steps into my own life. I had my first full-time job ($4 an hour, whoopee!), and some extra cash, as I was still living at home. But I also learned how to be frugal, finally embracing the concept of the used record store (I still didn't have a CD player), opening up worlds of new music I never would have sprung for before. And these stores also tended to have promotional records that weren't actually supposed to be sold, but were like manna to compulsive collectors like me, and one thing R.E.M. knew how to do was feed that promotional machine, knowing they were the darlings of the music industry.
I'm getting slightly ahead of the story, but for now, the band had taken another swerve after the sludgy but still satisfying (to me) Fables Of The Reconstruction. To open things up, they chose the producer of the moment who scored big with a bright, direct approach that had catapulted John Cougar Mellencamp to his highest commercial and critical acclaim with his Scarecrow album. Don Gehman brought these same trebly drums and shimmering tambourines and crisp guitars to R.E.M. and… at first, I thought, "But this isn't R.E.M.'s sound!" and it kind of bothered me. It also bothered me that I knew that a couple of these songs had been bouncing around their live set for years, and then here's a throwaway track, and here's a cover to end the album. Were they out of ideas?
But as the years went by, the answer to that question became irrelevant, because it can't be denied that this album bristles with energy and verve. They took the aggressive guitars of their B-side throwaway "Burning Hell" and fashioned it into probably their most powerful opening track ever, "Begin The Begin." They quite blatantly stole the sonic signature of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" and morphed it into a re-Reconstruction classic, "Swan Swan H." They crafted an idea about the betrayal of American Indians into the towering anthem "Cuyahoga." And in one instance, they even managed to build a song from a rather clunky and awkward couple of verses into a deeply affecting piano-and-electric guitar fueled rocker in "The Flowers Of Guatemala." And then there was "Fall On Me," which, to my ears initially, seemed a bit by-the-numbers R.E.M., but its sheer beauty soon won me over and catapulted it into the upper echelons of their catalogue.
I wouldn't have been aware of this at the time, but with the broader perspective of their entire oeuvre, something gelled with Pageant. They didn't sound like folk-rock or garage rock or art rock, the way they did through their first three records, respectively. They sounded like a rock band. A rock band that could deliver folk-rock like "Swan Swan H," or garage rock like "Just A Touch," or art rock like "Underneath The Bunker" (which, if you switched the guitar lead for a violin, could pass for a Camper Van Beethoven tune from the same era), because they had range. But I don't think they could have unleashed pinpoint-accurate missiles like "These Days" or "I Believe"—two of my very favorite songs in the R.E.M. canon—before this point. "Superman" is a bit of an odd bird, especially as an album closer, but I do like it; it points the way toward the guitar pop of Green, an album I happen to enjoy very much. The experiments of Fables, both sonically and structurally, have been sharpened and focused, and the impeccable production meshes everything into unified, lockstep attack. Sometimes a slick production removes the rough edges, leaving an album pretty-but-lifeless. That's not the case here. "Bristling" is a great description of the sound.
It is an unabashed studio album. Even the squall of feedback that opens the record is controlled and folded tunefully into the mix. But the newly-incorporated studio indulgences make a lot of sense: the organ on "Begin The Begin" and (more subtly) "Fall On Me;" the accordion on "I Believe;" the evaporating haze from around the lead vocal, coinciding with Michael Stipe's willingness to address subjects more directly (though that particular aspect wouldn't make its quantum leap until the next album). They've even decided to use a band photo for the album cover, albeit in their typically abstruse manner: That's drummer Bill Berry's face peering over those washed-out buffalo. Half of his face, anyway.
I can understand how this record might have raised eyebrows amongst the band's earliest fans. One might suspect that Gehman was brought in to help shape R.E.M. into a commercial force, to exploit their innately American sound to become a John Mellencamp or a Tom Petty, capable of working the rock idiom with enough satisfying pop hooks to reliably launch big-selling singles to the upper reaches of Billboard's Hot 100. And hey, they're probably right. However, he also distilled their sound into a fantastic record. It has been settled in as my favorite R.E.M. album for a long while now. The band was firing on all cylinders: spirited performances of great songs poured into 40 cracking minutes. The only thing lacking is an apostrophe for the title.
I do love "These Days" and "I Believe" as well. That one-two punch of "Begin The Begin" and "These Days" to open the album is one of the best sequencing decisions ever. And oh, yes, "Superman" is lots of fun. I'm guessing that it may have been intended for a B-side, but it came out so well that it warranted a place on the album. The other cover that was a B-side, Aerosmith's "Toys In The Attic," is spirited, but I suppose putting an Aerosmith song on the album would have been kind of damaging to their reputation—hidden away on the back of a single, it's charming. Speaking of charming, you mentioned their Everly Brothers cover from the "Athens, Ga. Inside/Out" doc—a great example of how the voices of Michael Stipe and Mike Mills blended so well and helped to define the R.E.M. sound (with Bill Berry's husky tones adding another layer at times). With this album, they continued to stretch their musical and lyrical boundaries, and that tendency would persist through almost every album afterwards, but hearing those two voices complement each other was always close to the core of their essence and always brought you "home," as far as I'm concerned.
In 1986, there was an unmistakable energy welling up, mainly from Thatcher-era British artists, as you mentioned earlier, but that energy was beginning to spill over into Reagan-era American music. The discontent of the Godfathers and The The and Billy Bragg was largely political in nature, but the American version (the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies), added in heaping helpings of boredom and alienation. With Lifes Rich Pageant, R.E.M. aggressively began to bridge that gap, and suddenly it seemed plausible that nerds and geeks could actually lead the charge toward social change. It sounded exciting, at the very least, and R.E.M.'s imminent commercial fortunes would go some distance toward bearing that out.