by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published November 17, 2015
Fables Of The Reconstruction
released June 10, 1985 I.R.S. Records
“This album... had been recorded during particularly dreary weather in London, with an unfamiliar producer, and I think you can sense that unease.”
Whereas their previous album took me by surprise, being released only a few months after I acquired their first album, by June of 1985 I was fully primed for their third album, Fables Of The Reconstruction. During the intervening fourteen months, I had collected nearly every scrap of music that they had released (with the notable exceptions of the original "Radio Free Europe" 45 and the re-recorded version that accompanied Murmur), and I had also made a connection in my junior year at Rutgers with a couple of guys in my dorm named Steve and Joel who also adored the group. These guys had a friend from back home who was even in the fan club—the perks of which sounded cool for $10 a year, but the requirement to mail in a money order to join seemed odd and forbidding and, okay, geeky to me at the time.
R.E.M. had already played Rutgers in the fall of '83, before I was a fan, but in the spring of '85 they returned for a free outdoor concert at the engineering school's campus across the river, performing in a large, flat field. Steve and Joel and I went, and two of my friends from my hometown also came up and joined us. We knew the new album was coming, so it was an Event, and R.E.M. treated it that way: the show started with the sound of an oncoming train and the sight of smoke enveloping the stage. Then came those pealing guitar notes that introduce "Feeling Gravity's Pull" (here's where they started leaving out apostrophes, but I'm including them anyway); it sounded utterly unlike anything they had done before, and I was thrilled that they were branching out. I was also thrilled with the entire concert, and pumped by the new songs they played.
Five or six weeks later, the album appeared, and once again that opening was arresting and invigorating. The single, "Can't Get There From Here," had already come out, but I knew right away it was not destined for chart success—in its way, it was as catchy as a lot of their stuff, but the clunky rhythm, the horn section, and the falsetto screams were completely unsuited to the current chart landscape, and it also confounded people's expectations of what R.E.M. was "supposed" to sound like. Many of the album's tracks did have their signature jangly sound, but now that "heavy blanket" from Murmur seemed to have been thrown over them again. This album, in fact, had been recorded during particularly dreary weather in London, with an unfamiliar producer (Joe Boyd, known for producing Fairport Convention in the '70s), and I think you can sense that unease.
Still, the songs' hidden layers emerged with a few listens, and the magic was still very much there for me. Several songs were character studies of people the band members knew from their home of Athens, Georgia, in portraits that were obliquely rendered, but these carpenters and dog catchers and auctioneers conjured up a world that was fascinating. Most captivating of all to me was the album's final track, "Wendell Gee," with its plaintive banjo and violin and the gorgeous blending of overlapping vocals that bring the proceedings to a satisfying emotional resolution.
I'm curious to hear how this album struck Bryce upon hearing it so many years later, by which time the band had changed drastically.
I'll just tuck right in to the music, then, because I don't have any anecdotal associations with Fables. This is a tough one for me to get behind, due in no small part to the fact that I don't care for the opening track, "Feeling Gravity's Pull." Those "pealing guitar notes" that open the album sound like a radical deconstruction of "Pop Song 89" (yes, I'm reverse engineering here, because in my personal timeline of the band, Green predates Fables). Putting it right up front feels like a bold declaration that this is not your father's—or, more aptly, not your dorm mate's—R.E.M. The song structures of the first two albums are straightforward—the sort where you can envision someone yelling out chord changes on the fly being sufficient for the rest of the band to keep up. By contrast, most of the songs on Fables Of The Reconstruction seem like someone trying their hand at Songwriting (note the capital S). Plus, Peter Buck has either bought some new guitars (and a banjo) or become very interested in the processes available to change a guitar's sound. I agree they were trying to stretch themselves artistically, but it feels self-conscious to me; the pressures of follow-up syndrome finally catching up with them for their third album.
"Maps And Legends" is less of a departure than the opener, but the combined effect makes "Driver 8," at track three, sound positively nostalgic. I'd be curious to learn how much of the new direction was a band decision, and how much could be put down to the new producer and environs—though I might argue that the decision to go with a new production team in the first place indicates they were explicitly seeking something different. It's always commendable for an artist to strive to stay one step beyond their comfort zone, and I think this strategy would bear fruit on Lifes Rich Pageant and Document. Here, it feels forced.
The most successful synthesis of old and new, to my ears, is the next track, ambitiously entitled "Life And How To Live It." The 20-second intro almost tricks me into skipping it, but once the song proper kicks in, it's a natural groove, Stipe really cuts loose on the vocal, and it sounds like they're having an unabashed good time. The final standout for me is "Auctioneer (Another Engine)," another one with a driving tick-tock beat for the verses, but with a steep drop-off in the chorus into heavy dissonance both in the vocals and the chiming guitar. It's nearly a disaster, but I think that it's just hypnotic (and brief) enough that they pull it off. I could see "Wendell Gee" growing on me, but it's a bit of a slog for me to get all the way to the end of this album, so it hasn't gotten the exposure necessary for that to happen.
Once upon a time, I had a strong preference for "Can't Get There From Here" over "Driver 8"—the two US singles from the album. I like horn sections; I like choruses I can holler along with; I like Mills's melodic bass line through the verses. Still, that opinion may now have flipped. "Can't Get There" was probably, as you suggest, a little oddball even in its day, yet it still has aged poorly for me. "Driver 8," on the other hand, now slides on like broken-in shoes. It's the one song on the record that would not have felt out of place on one of the first two R.E.M. albums, and its ambiguous melancholy is comforting.
I certainly never noticed the similarity between "Feeling Gravity's Pull" and "Pop Song 89," but you're absolutely right. For me, though, it's the opposite impression and, not to get too far ahead of the story, I found much of Green to be derivative of their earlier work. (More on that later.) Funny you should say that about Songwriting with a capital S, since one of the B-sides from this era, "Bandwagon," is described derisively by Peter Buck as a song they tried to jam as many weird chord changes into as possible, just for the sake of it. "Driver 8" had, in fact, been around since at least the tour for the last album (as evidenced by its live B-side version), but that is another favorite of mine, definitely in their comfort zone in a good way.
Since you bring up "Life And How To Live It," I might as well mention here that after seeing the band for the first time in the spring of '85, on their "Preconstruction" tour, I saw them for the second time only a few months later, on the "Reconstruction" tour. My dorm friends Steve and Joel became my roommates for my senior year; my previous roommate Rich had moved into his fraternity and the rest of us got locked out of the housing lottery, so the three of us got an apartment together. It so happened that R.E.M. was playing Radio City Music Hall just a few days before the fall semester began, so Joel and I moved in early and made the trip to New York. "Life And How To Live It" really came alive onstage there, with bright flashes of light punctuating those beats after "barking in the street" and all of those similar lines.
I'll also mention that it occurs to me now that "Can't Get There From Here" kind of takes elements from Prince's catalogue and recombines them, albeit awkwardly.
R.E.M. and Prince, heh. There's two artists that don't overlap in the music genome project too often.
They appear to be playing with notions of circularity. They've trumped the pliant song titles of Reckoning by not even committing to a firm title for this album, which the world agrees is called Fables Of The Reconstruction yet is listed on the spine of my CD as Reconstruction Of The Fables, and whose booklet can be flipped—with one side emblazoned with Fables Of The, the reverse with Reconstruction Of The—to create a choose-your-own front cover. I don't know if the original vinyl release similarly kept it in the air by having those two images be the front and back (or back and front?) of the sleeve. I wonder if there was deep meaning to the Möbius strip of the title, or it was just something someone thought was clever.
And I may be way off-base on this last thing, but a realization has been gradually dawning on me while listening to these early albums. Did they take a page from the Ramones songbook and jettison the solos? I've tried to specifically listen for guitar solos, but I can't keep my mind from wandering (or just getting drawn into the music) for long enough that I can definitively answer the question. I just know one hasn't caught my ear yet. I've been so deeply immersed in each record, trying to triangulate an opinion, that I have no time to look ahead; I'm trying to think of Buck solos from later albums, and I can't do it.
Yes, the vinyl LP was just as confusing with its cover and title. Whichever way you turned the cover, it didn't really make sense: if you lined up the spine text with other albums in your collection, the Fables Of The (or front) side was upside down and the Reconstruction Of The side was sideways. And then of course the list of song titles inside shows a song with the title "When I Was Young," a song which does not appear on the album but possibly was the working title of the next album's "I Believe."
And it's true, R.E.M. had very few solos in their songs. Probably another reason I was drawn to them (same with Elvis Costello). Peter Buck was as likely to slip a solo of sorts into the bridge of a song ("Bang And Blame," "Walk Unafraid") as anywhere. Truly, he's always had a love for big, dumb, grungy chords, as in another Fables-era B-side, the faux heavy metal "Burning Hell." And on the subject of B-sides, I should interject here that their cover of Pylon's "Crazy" is certainly one of their most sublime outtakes, largely due to Buck's guitar, which rings out much more fluidly than in the original. Also, I totally forgot to mention "Pale Blue Eyes," from the Reckoning sessions, which is a bit sloppy in the guitar department, but it's quite a tender and affecting rendition, drastically stripped down lyrically from the Velvet Underground original.
Both Murmur and Reckoning saw a big uptick in my esteem for them as the result of this undertaking, the reconsideration of their catalogue. Fables is a case where a closer look reaffirms my previously-held opinion. This may be sacrilege, but I'd put it down as their weakest album of the 1980s, and maybe a bottom three overall. A significant evolutionary step for them, perhaps, but that doesn't make it any more fun for me to listen to.