Re-examining R.E.M., part four: "Lifes Rich Pageant"

by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published November 22, 2015

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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.”
— Bryce


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.
    

 

Re-examining R.E.M., part three: "Fables Of The Reconstruction"

by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published November 17, 2015

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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.”
— Tom


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.

 

Re-examining R.E.M., part one: "Murmur"

by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published November 10th, 2015.

R.E.M. was an institution for nearly 30 years, through a career that ran the classic arc of underground adulation to commercial mega-success to audience ambivalence to being re-embraced as elder statesmen. They announced their retirement as a recording band following the release of their 15th studio album, 2011's Collapse Into Now. As a collector, I bought all of the albums. As a listener, however, I was a laissez-faire sort of R.E.M. fan: I liked them, but they were never my favorite band. They did their thing, and either it appealed to me or it didn't. My own reasons and circumstances dictated whether I made time for newly-acquired material (and I did not follow them from the outset, so that acquisition process was not strictly chronological). If I'm honest, my initial impressions of the albums have gone mostly unchallenged, and the ones that didn't resonate with me right away have never been afforded the opportunity for re-assessment. Until now, anyway.

We fired up the Sirius satellite radio in the Mazda a few months ago. As a child of the '80s, the First Wave station (featuring the alternative music of that decade) became a staple. For whatever reason, they seemed to have a proclivity for the lesser tracks in the R.E.M. catalog (defining "lesser," for my purposes, as "not appearing on the Eponymous collection," which is what stood in for their earliest works in my collection until the early 1990s). Out driving one afternoon, one of these songs caught my attention in a pleasant way. The car's radio display informed me it was "7 Chinese Bros," from 1984's Reckoning. I began to mull over, in equal parts wonder and dismay, how this was a song I'd had immediate access to for more than two decades, yet it was almost completely unfamiliar to me. I was already aware how I'd purchased-then-ignored their latter-day records. Now that their body of work has reached its presumptive conclusion, I thought it might be interesting to re-evaluate the output of R.E.M. with fresh ears. To that end, I have invited Tom to travel through their discography with me. He is also an avid music fan, but, unlike me, has been following the band from the beginning. I thought that the differing perspectives of an early and a late adopter—and the manner in which our ages and circumstances have informed our individual experiences of the music of R.E.M.—would make for an entertaining dialogue. This is not an attempt to definitively rank their albums, though comparisons are likely inevitable. Nor is it an attempt to define their legacy, nor to argue whose opinion is "correct." Each album will get its own post to be the primary object of discussion.

It seems to me that, as the one who was there from the get-go, Tom should introduce their debut, so I'll turn it over to him. (And we'll right-align his text to help keep the authors clear.) Are we ready? Okay, let’s do this thing.

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Murmur

released April 12, 1983   I.R.S. records

“...the album quickly cast a spell: the ringing guitars, the brief snatches of meaning discernible in Michael Stipe’s vocals, the hints of dark humor...”
— Tom

I'm sure the first time I ever heard of R.E.M. must have been during my freshman year at college ('82-'83). Having been born in 1964, I was at just the right age to be bombarded with the rush of punk and new wave in the late '70s and early '80s. I had close friends who got deeper into the aggressive stuff (Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Stiff Little Fingers, Ramones) than I did. As a Beatles freak, I leaned toward the more melodic and experimental end of the spectrum: Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, XTC, and the Clash, when they started to branch out stylistically.

The only magazine I subscribed to at the time was Rolling Stone, and I devoured their record reviews with every issue, also keeping up with whatever hip new music they saw fit to mention. Certainly by early 1983, R.E.M. had to have been mentioned, but it's also quite likely that my first exposure to them was via the video for "Radio Free Europe" on MTV. I was intrigued by the song and the video, and by the fall of 1983, they dominated discussion in music circles. They even came to play at our student center at Rutgers, and a friend in my dorm asked me to go, but I just wasn't ready.

Then for Christmas, a friend of mine back home gave me the Murmur LP, completely unsolicited. He said he was torn between that album and Aztec Camera's current one, and kind of chose at random. The first time I listened to it, I thought it was cool but thought that nothing really stood out. So I listened again, and the album quickly cast a spell: the ringing guitars, the brief snatches of meaning discernible in Michael Stipe's vocals, the hints of dark humor, and the layers of instrumentation that revealed themselves further with each listen.

Various editions, from vinyl to deluxe CD. ©Tom Demi

My favorite track early on was "Shaking Through," with Stipe's slow, keening vocals stretching over that jaunty country-ish rhythm, reaching a fever pitch in the nearly wordless bridge underscored by bright piano chords (an R.E.M. trademark they would return to many times). I was captivated by the way the vocals built up in layers only to suddenly disintegrate and drop you perfectly back into the verse structure again. It's hard to pick out other standouts, because I came to love every song unconditionally except perhaps "9-9" and "West Of The Fields," but I think only because they featured an aggressiveness that seemed out of character at the time (though that would certainly change!).

So in early '84, I was listening to this album nearly every day, only vaguely aware that they had released an EP in 1982, not to mention the original "Radio Free Europe" single from 1981. Full immersion lay ahead in the very near future for me, but it wouldn’t happen until their next new album came out and sealed the deal.

Rolling Stone named it their album of the year in '83, I believe. I was in elementary school (not to mention living in England) when the record came out, so it flew nowhere near my cultural radar. By the time I got around to listening to Murmur, it was already considered a sacred text, the jumping-off point for the alternative radio of the 1980s. As such, it didn't occur to me to approach it as simply an album's worth of music. The baggage brought by "importance"—which operates on a different plane than a straightforward assessment of whether or not a piece of music is an enjoyable listen—usually weakens my experience of a recording. I feel primed to be blown away; to learn a whole new language; to have my life course-corrected by wisdom and insight I'd never be capable of on my own. When it inevitably fails to clear that ridiculously high bar, there's a letdown that is incommensurate with the quality of the music, and I seldom return to it. I suppose it's easy to forget that if there was a new language being invented, being introduced to that album after that language had been learned and incorporated by subsequent bands dilutes the impact.

Maybe the most surprising thing, listening to it now, is that it's pop music. Pop music with a heavy blanket thrown over it, perhaps, but pop music nonetheless. I found that the simple act of turning it up brightens it considerably. In my reductive memory, it was a downbeat record, but that's not really the case at all. It's downcast, certainly—it's insular, as it appears to pay no attention to the trends of the era (which is probably why it’s so easy to describe as "timeless"); musically, however, it's quite sprightly. Rootsy. "Shaking Through" has emerged as a gem for me as well, 32 years later. The sore thumb for me, stylistically, is "We Walk," which sounds like a cover of a Lesley Gore song. Not that it's a bad thing for a song to conjure mental images of a teenage girl in a poodle skirt and saddle shoes clasping her wrist behind her back as she wistfully remembers that unrequited summer love; it just doesn't seem to fit in with the other songs to my ear.

You've already alluded to the most notorious thing about this record: Michael Stipe's murky, enigmatic vocals. There are dual layers of opacity there. First comes the struggle to discern the actual words he's singing, followed by the struggle to interpret what those words are about. Even when his voice is relatively clear in the mix, what it sounds like to me makes me doubt I'm hearing it right. "Eleven gallows on your sleeve" (from "Perfect Circle")—is that right, Michael? For how many years did I say "Call me in to talk" while singing along with "Talk About The Passion" before I found out it was "Combien de temps"? And those were the easy ones. I have my doubts he's singing about a "…sieve we could gather throw-up in" (early on in "Sitting Still"), yet I could explicate that into something (a sieve would be an inadequate container for vomit, as some of it would leak through; just as we can't completely contain unpleasantness in our lives, because it will always seep into our worldview, or something like that) that I can't with the gallows line. I'm pretty sure he's not singing love songs, not visualizing dystopian robot futures, not exhorting us to dance. There's a sense that he is singing about profound concepts that can only be presented in puzzle form, because one has to piece these great truths together for himself to fully appreciate their depths. Which is probably nonsense, but another aspect of my expectations while taking on a work where "masterpiece" is the consensus.

What's your take on the difficult nature of the lyrics?

I certainly put myself through some mental gymnastics trying to figure out those lyrics. I did find out about that French phrase in "Talk About The Passion" while I was still a college student, because I remember writing an English class paper about rock lyrics and using that as an example. As for "Sitting Still," I always imagined those two lines as something like, "We could find a nemesis / We could gather, throw a fit." In the end, it doesn't really matter, I think, partially because Stipe has admitted that some of those early lyrics weren't necessarily real words anyway, but also because the mystery and the varying interpretations are what give the songs deeper resonance, every listener bringing a unique perspective that can't fully be put into words.

Tracklisting on the vinyl inner sleeve. ©Tom Demi

That’s funny what you say about "We Walk." I suspect that your impression of that song's atmosphere may have its roots in those woozy Julee Cruise retro-'50s tunes from Twin Peaks (maybe?). From that perspective, I can see that, but for me, hearing it in 1983, I just found it playful and joyous and childlike in the best possible way (and it's also cool that those thunderclap-like noises were actually the sounds of colliding billiard balls being recorded from another room in the building).

And yes, Rolling Stone and many other magazines picked Murmur as their top album of the year. Interesting that the U.K. had such little exposure to them at the time, and that didn't really change until the Warner Brothers record deal and Green in 1988, but that's another story! Meanwhile, Murmur remains my favorite album of theirs… except for one that was released many, many years later.

John Mellencamp (as John Cougar) had a chart hit in the UK with "Jack And Diane" in 1982, but it was almost viewed as a novelty record by British audiences. The UK was waist-deep in the New Romantics at the time, and not remotely interested in Americana. And there's something deeply American about Murmur. Not flag-waving American, or self-conscious pastiche of American musical styles, but it sounds like the Georgia swamp from which it hails (aided, no doubt, by that cover art). Going back to it for this project has raised my estimation of it considerably. Instead of feeling like a dose of medicine that needs swallowing to bolster my understanding of music history (which is where I started, and where I've been for 20 years), I can appreciate it for itself. Ironic that it takes unburdening the album of its towering stature to allow me to enjoy it as a great record, but there you have it. It probably won't break into the ranks of my established R.E.M. favorites, but it has asserted itself as something I might choose to put on, not as homework, but as music. That's something.

It looks like we're all wrapped up here, so let's move on to Reckoning.