R.E.M. ON BROADWAY

I. A Band Grows in Georgia

R.E.M., whose chiming, soaring guitar and vocal harmonies and rhythmic drive have not yet made them a household word, might have been called Cans Of Piss. "We couldn't think of a name at first. I liked Twisted Kites," guitarist Peter Buck confided. "Then we thought maybe we should have a name that was real offensive, like Cans Of Piss. That was right up there at the top. Then we thought we didn't want to be called something that we couldn't tell our parents or have to mumble. R.E.M. just popped out of the dictionary one night. We needed something that wouldn't typecast us because, hell, we didn't even know what we were gonna do. So R.E.M. was nice—it didn't lock us into anything.

"In a way it's a pain because for three years everyone has wanted tp know what R.E.M stands for. Our joke is that R.E.M. stands for nothing, but we'll lie down for most anything. It turned out by accident to be an appropriate name for the band, the way we approached non-linearity in song structure and lyrics."

It's the very epicenter of a New York business day and Pete and I sit comfortably ensconced (physically, not spiritually) in the A&M conference room. The Lonely Bull and Frampton Comes Alive long ago paid for the mighty mahogany table which now holds my tape recorder, Buck's breakfast of chocolate milk and Sno-Caps and, a bit later, the liverwurst sandwich of drummer Bill Berry. Do record companies actually have conferences from time to time or do they just keep these plush facilities available for drifters like us? Whatever the case, R.E.M.'s four members have come north from their homes in Athens, Georgia to do some interviews in support of their second album, Reckoning. Lead singer Michael Stipe and bassist Mike Mills are elsewhere at the moment and the amiable Berry, like most drummers of taste and discretion, seems content with his chow. Pete, however, keeps me and my Sony fully occupied with his rapidfire wit, insight and recollections. Disarmingly modest and straightforward, he talks at length and in detail about America's most opaque band.

"We were all at the University of Georgia at one time or another. I was in night school and then, somehow, I lost interest. Michael and I met at the record store I worked at to support myself. He had pretty good taste musically and he always came in with his two sisters and they were pretty. I thought: God, this guy's got two great looking girlfriends. He must be pretty hip. So, from that mistaken impression we introduced ourselves and started talking. I used to save the good records for him.

"There were always guitars at my house but I never really bothered to play them. Then, when I went to college I thought it would be fun to be in a band, but everyone I knew thought the kind of music to play was free-form jazz or Little Feat or (God forbid!) the Grateful Dead. I kind of liked Little Feat but my friends all liked their late stuff with eight-minute jams and contrapuntal guitar parts. So I'd go and watch all the bands I might have been in—nobody could sing...they'd just stand there and jam and I hated it! When they'd ask what I wanted to play I'd say rock 'n' roll, Chuck Berry, the Velvet Underground. When Patti Smith's first album came out I said I'd play stuff like this. Everybody thought I was crazy.

"After I met Michael he said: let's get in a band. Finally I said why not? I'd made a fool of myself at everything else, I might as well try this—the last frontier. We started living together in this big church with apartments in it that my boss used to rent. There were pews and a stage and 40-foot ceilings and the old preachers were buried under the floor. It was like something out of weird Tennessee Williams...this big pink decrepit church. I met Bill at a party. He was the drummer in his high school marching band in Macon and Mike was the bass player. They went to a black high school and most of them have an electric bass on the sidelines.

"Then we thought, if you're in a band you should write songs. So we wrote about 15 songs in two weeks. A lot of them were real crap, but a couple were decent. We worked real fast, we -liked one another, we wrote together and we were pretty much pleased with the way things were going. We played a party and people liked us—probably because there was free beer and we played for free. That's always an inducement to like the band. Someone saw us and offered us $200 to open for the Brains. That was $50 apiece! So we started to play dates like that, without thinking that this was some permanent organization, and we just got more and more gigs. Two months after we started we were headlining clubs in Athens and 300 or 400 people were coming to see us. We thought an extra $25 was a king's ransom, so we decided to tour on weekends to North Carolina, South Carolina...Nashville, Memphis, Atlanta. We just kept spreading out. We'd take any date that anyone offered for any amount of money. Within a year we had written 40-50 songs and we were pretty pleased with them, so we decided to make a tape and someone approached us to make a single."

The rest, like they say, is history.

II. History?

Well, history of a sort. The single, of course, was "Radio Free Europe," perhaps the most celebrated independent record of 1981. I know I called R.E.M. opaque before, but let me underline that now. I have listened to "Radio Free.Europe" loud and long for three years now, with undiminished pleasure, but I haven't a clue as to what the song is about. Critical gush and hard touring got them a contract with I.R.S. and they have since delivered an EP, 1982's Chronic Town and two LP's, last year's poll-topping Murmur and the brand new Reckoning. I must confess that I am more in love and less enlightened than ever. I've never been hung up on what q song means, but I was starting to wonder if they were. Mr. Buck responds:

"People have accused us of not saying anything at all, of just throwing things together to try and look or sound important. Part of it is that Michael is a weird singer, he enunciates strangely.

He does it when he talks, too. He sings like he talks. But part of it is that as we went along we realized that we didn't want to be a straight narrative band that has stories in our songs that began and ended. You can put meaning in there—you can write a song about something without ever really referring to what you’re writing about—by using evocative phrases, by association of words that you wouldn’t normally associate, by repetition, by the power of the music itself and the melodies. You can get the feeling from that experience without ever actually referring to the experience itself.”

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 41

Intrigued, I suggest that as long as Pete is evoking experiences he should tell me about “Radio Free Europe.” “Michael and I were talking about weird commercials and we remembered the spot they used to run for Radio Free Europe where they had that Czech disc jockey talking and then he introduced1...de Drivters...On Broadvay.’ When I was a kid I thought that stuff was perfectly natural, but as I got older I thought, isn’t that strange—America is spreading cultural imperialism through pop music. We should send money so that they can listen to the Drifters. Now, I’d rather have them listen to the Drifters than have cruise missiles, but we thought that was really strange. So the song was related to that, to uncomprehending outsiders listening to rock ’n’ roll and not having a clue as to anything about it. I can’t imagine someone behind the Iron Curtain figuring out what ‘On Broadway’ means. So it’s an evocation of that without referring to the commercial.”

I have listened to the song many times since he revealed its “meaning” and it doesn’t make the slightest difference. I still love it and find it ultimately impenetrable—but I don’t worry about it any more. There is a straight-ahead country song on Reckoning and I wondered what it augured for the future. “We’re not necessarily getting more clear or more direct or more specific. Sometimes we back away from saying things—I don’t want people to think that this is some dumb love song. And words do tend to trivialize things. That sounds horrible coming from someone who writes songs to someone who writes stories—we both use words—but they tend to trivialize things. The most moving and emotional thing you could ever experience looks silly in writing unless you’re Proust. And Proust doesn’t talk about the things that move him, either. He talks about the orange cakes that remind him of those things.”

III. History Again

We moved on to important influences, of whom the Velvet Underground probably loom largest. “They were the first band—other than the Beatles when I was 6—that made me think, ‘I can’t believe this...this is so great!’ The stuff that we really love is the stuff from the third album (The Velvet Underground), especially the ballads, these beautiful songs of transcendance. You can almost see this progression from album to album: from sin to salvation.”

Yet, though there are wonderful intimations of music they obviously love, R.E.M. sound more like themselves than most “unashamed pop bands” I can think of. “Still,” Buck says, “you can’t escape history. That was the only thing that I thought was wrong with the punk thing that excited everybody in ’76-’77. It basically backed itself into a corner because it was so nihilistic. ‘OK, all the past is gone. We’re starting over fresh.’ Well, really, there’s not much you can do that hasn’t been at least hinted in rock ’n’ roll. At one time or another rock ’n’ roll has probably synthesized every other type of music known on the earth.

“It’s gone through so many changes that you can’t really do anything brand new, so the punks really backed themselves into a corner. ‘We will never sound like these old farts! We will never do the things that they do!’ That leaves PIL climbing higher and higher up a tree and sawing the limbs as they go.

“But I certainly don’t want to sound like 1965...or 1972, for that matter. The past has gone by, and it’s influential, but we don’t go in and try to copy a sound or dress like an era. You use what’s gone past to try to go forward in whatever way you can. We’re kind of a pop band without being ashamed of that phrase—it was so shameful for a while to be a pop band. You can thank the Knack for that. No kidding! When we started, if we said we were a pop band, anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence would go, ‘A pop band.. .Yechh!’

“It’s safe to be a pop band now. Four years have gone by and the Knack are all back in Los Angeles doing whatever they do and we’re a pop band in 1984. As much as people say they hear the ’60s in what we do, we just couldn’t have survived in the ’60s. People, would have just gone.. .WHAT??? I guess we’re working on common assumptions that the audience has as to what popular music can be. Even though we have a few things that are similar to 1966, they wouldn’t have been understood as logical then.”

IV. Teenage Wasteland

If R.E.M. seems clearer about what it doesn’t do than what it does, Pete has his reasons. “So much rock ’n’ roll now is just bland mediocrity, as if it was made by computer testing to see what the market would bear. It’s all so sad—rock ’n’ roll used to be this amazing thing and it’s been by and large turned into a series of empty gestures. It’s so incredibly self-referential. Bands come on stage and act out a part rather than do something that they feel or take a chance. They also refer to the whole history of rock ’n’ roll in shorthand—things that the audience will understand that don’t even make any real sense—cues and stuff. It’s sad and so empty. I can’t imagine Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis doing that.

“Most music is so stereotyped and cliched now that we have to avoid the dumb cliches and avoid the emptiness that’s at the heart of a whole lot of it—where there should be a heart there isn’t any. We think of ourselves, more than anything else, as an emotional band, as a band that will move you individually. You don’t have to know the titles of the songs^—if we put a record out with a white cover with no writing on it and it was plopped into people’s homes, every person sitting home by themselves could be moved by it.

“It seems like things that people will pass off now as inspirational are just empty rhetoric. We don’t write songs about nuclear pollution—we put our money in those kinds of causes and we work for them. But songs that say war isn’t good...I’ll bet you could get every single person in the world, including General Westmoreland, to agree with the Alarm and U2 and the Clash. It hasn’t ever stopped war, though. Now I live in a world where people aren’t very interested in being nice to each other, even on a superficial level, where there’s not a lot of emotion expressed, where there aren’t a whole lot of legitimate things that aren’t lachrymose bullshit to move you.. .so to move someone to pleasure, happiness, sadness, whatever, doesn’t seem to be a bad goal. I don’t know if it changes people’s lives, but I don’t know if anything changes people’s lives anymore. Maybe Dylan and the Beatles had the power to change people’s lives. I just don’t think anyone has that anymore.”

This sounded unrelievedly bleak to me, and since Pete writes and plays beautiful, often buoyant songs (pop songs, we agree) that I love to listen to, I told him so. Almost everything he’s said was constrained by how he didn’t want to appear and rock ’n’ roll, to me, has always meant declaring where your heart was. Even if the declaration was painted with a broad brush and there was some asshole showing, the coming out was thrilling—rock ’n’ roll, for me, was about the transcendent power of that act. Pete was sympathetic but stood firm. “Yeah, l understand that. Times were different then. I love a lot of stuff from the ’50s. Chuck Berry’s my favorite quote/unquote poet of all time. Again, though, through the years the whole idea of what rock ’n’ roll is has been perverted. The whole idea of a youth culture which reached popularity in the ’60s— from our perspective, that’s nothing but a sham. It’s been co-opted. Any youth culture you can be part of now is a joke. Probably any youth culture you could be part of anytime was a joke but you didn’t know it.

“There used to be the illusion of unity. When I was 15 I figured that anyone who was really into rock ’n’ roll like I was probably wouldn’t vote for a man like Ronald Reagan, wouldn’t use the word ‘nigger’...and I find that not to be true. I know people who make music who are racists, who are egotistical assholes, who vote for Reagan because he takes care of people with money. It’s hard to feel any great unity with people who have nothing in common with you at all—other than the fact that they believe in the passion...the power and the glory...”

Pete Buck is, of course, absolutely correct. As another influential southerner with a philosophical bent, Jerry Lee Lewis (internationally known as a racist, egotistical asshole and probable Reagan Republican) says, “Think about it, darling!”