Athens, Georgia, is a fascinating place. They’ve got a bakery called “Bakery” on Lumpkin, just south of Broad Street. There’s a lot of farmers in the area and, if they need hardware, there’s a store called “Farmer’s Hardware” towards the west end of town. And a decrepit, grayishgreen building in the middle of the town boldly advertises “Bus.”

In addition, of course, they’ve got R.E.M., who—at the very end of July— were working on six or seven songs for their next album. Not Lifes Rich Pageant, that was released the day after I got to Athens. The album after that.

It was a strange day, that day I went to Athens. The killer heat wave that’d gripped the South all summer was in full force. It was 99° that day; a couple of girls on the street told me it was pretty nice because there was a breeze. Yeah, a breeze out of hell. A shipment of hay from Colorado had arrived in town that very day, along with me. The hay was for starving cattle in the area; I was for R.E.M.

I don’t know about those starving cattle, but R.E.M.’s had an interesting time over the last five or six years. Many credit them with initiating the “American rock renaissance,” which we’ll talk about shortly. But, after a much-ballyhooed start (their “Radio Free Europe” single* Chronic Town EP, and the Murmur and Reckoning albums), last year’s Fables Of The Reconstruction fared poorly—and people began observing that much of R.E.M.’s material had a certain sameness about it. Which is why Pageant was expected to be a “comeback”—in the sense that makes those quotes necessary. Fables was by no means hideous, it just wasn’t that good.

“See, the thing about that is that Fables is the only record that we walked into not really knowing exactly what we wanted to do,” said guitarist Peter Buck, over a twice-baked potato. “I think that if we hadn’t been on the road so long, and had a little bit more time, that the record would’ve pulled together a bit more. I still think some of the songs are the best we’ve ever written.”

“In retrospect, it was probably not the best idea to go to London to do it,” noted bassist Mike Mills, over an order of redfish. “Unless you’re a world traveler, it’s very disorienting to be in another country.”

“Or even another state,” I said, over zesty boiled shrimp. Sadly, none of us had opted for the shrimp creole...a strange day, as I said earlier. I asked them if they’d felt bad about the critical reaction to Fables.

“No!” said Buck. “We sold a lot of them and most of the reviews were really good.” He pondered a bit. “You know, at that point I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be in a band. We were just getting to the point where we were beginning to be professional: show up on time, make a record. And we talked about what we wanted to do. Did we want to break up the band? We could’ve gone any of eight different directions and we went none of those directions; it was kind of scattershot.

“You know, some of the songs I liked didn’t make the record, and I’d go in there and erase Mike’s mix and do my mix and then we’d mix one and Michael would hate it—y’know, it was just one of those weird times.” We ordered more beer.

Lifes Rich Pageant is definitely a change of pace: many producers, including Van Dyke Parks, were considered, but the band settled on Don Gehman, wellknown for his work with John Cougar Mellencamp...and the album was recorded at Mellencamp’s Belmont Mall studios in Bloomington, Indiana. Possibly you’re wondering if they feel it’s the best record they’ve ever done, and if it recaptures the mood of Murmur.

“It’s probably the best one we’ve done,” said Mills. “This one has a lot of mood, like Murmur, but this one has more strength, more power, behind it.”

“I like Murmur a lot,” added Buck, “just because I like the way it feels. But I think this one came out more like we wanted it to, song-wise and production-wise.” He reminisced about the writing of Pageant, which is an equal opportunity thing in R.E.M., according to both.

“ ‘Begin The Begin’ was written with all of us on acoustic guitar in Michael’s living room. We had 20° weather”—it wasn’t that month, I’ll tell you that—“and we were huddled up in our jackets, trying to write songs for the album. I had that one little riff and that was it. We just kind of sat and made it up, and we went: ‘Let’s change this; let’s make it so it never repeats.’ The original version was about a minute longer and nothing is the same all the way through except the riff.”

“We couldn’t even remember it,” Mills added.

“There were five different choruses, no bridge, no melody—see, it was really good,” enthused Buck. Indeed. “I was going ‘It should be eight minutes long and do each bit twice, all the way through.’ Who did that? The Beach Boys?” Almost certainly.

“What else?” Buck asked. “‘Swan Swan H’—we wrote that on the bus. I had a lot of those chords; it’s just kind of fake Irish music.”

And, yes, “Superman,” the first cover to appear on an R.E.M. album. The song’s an absolute rave-up, although both Buck and Mills expressed considerable astonishment when I suggested it sounded much like the early BeeGees... this when even a child can hear the similarities. Well, maybe not Gene Simmons’s child.

The weird thing about “Superman” is just where they get it? The song was done by the Clique in the ’60s; but who in the hell were the Clique?

“Nobody you would ever know,” said Mills.

“The only reason I got it is because I worked at a record store—I managed it— and they had piles of these shit singles and I’d go through and pick out things that looked interesting,” Buck said. “Picked out one: Professor Morrison’s Lollipop Shop—I figured it had to be a cock-rock song, but it wasn’t. So I got that and I got ‘Superman’—and when I played that I couldn’t believe it.” Buck, in fact, may well be the world’s foremost rock critic/rock musician—his knowledge isn’t encyclopediac, but is formidable. Yet even he claimed he “hasn’t a clue” as to who the Clique were.

“I think it’s a great song and I like the way we did it,” he said. ’’And I just wanted—I wish I could see those guys’ (in the Clique’s) faces—in a garage somewhere...” The concept pleased everyone. Talk about manna from heaven.

“‘Superman’ does stand out on this album,” Buck continued. “It’s two real simple chords, it’s real straightforward. But I think that one of the misconceptions about us is that we’re ‘serious artistes’ or something...sit around and do these mystic-type things.” Which brings us, at last, to the great American rock renaissance swindle, and why R.E.M. aren’t buying.

“We ushered in something that doesn’t exactly exist and you can’t define it,” Buck quipped. “I kind of like that. Put it on my tombstone.”

“ ‘We ushered it in, but we don’t know what it was,’ ” added Mills over laughter.

“I don’t think we did,” Buck rejoined. “We were maybe the first-known of all these bands they lump together, but I dunno. We worked real hard on the road and got known first but, y’know, we didn’t invent anything. I wouldn’t want to take the responsibility for it if we did.”

The responsibility lies with people that write about musicians...an odd lot, surely no one I’d care to know. And how does R.E.M. feel about the state of rock criticism?

“I think the state should be Idaho,” cracked Mills.

“I read ’em all,” Buck said. “It’s like this American rock renaissance—what the fuck’s that mean?? A lot of people write about it; a lot of people don’t know what they’re talking about.”

A case in point: People magazine, which has been unfailingly unkind to R.E.M. When I asked what set off this tragedy of almost Biblical proportions, Buck was puzzled, yet chipper: “I don’t know what it is. I think that one of us must’ve done something real bad to one of those writers—like, I dunno, stole his girlfriend or insulted him at a party and didn’t know it. Now, there’s a vendetta coming back.”

“I know what it is,” said Mills, and he did. “It seems to me that they write for Middle America. And for them, music for Middle America means, I guess—real poppy stuff or ballads that you can understand all the words the first time through, without trying. They don’t find that and they think, ‘Well, this is not for Mr. & Mrs. Middle America.’ I don’t think it’s the writer, necessarily, I just think it’s who they think they’re writing for.” Say you, say me, Mike.

As far as other critics go, Buck is reasonable and undaunted: “Robert Christgau has been more than fair to us. He doesn’t particularly like us and he recognizes that we’re pretty good. He gives us—the lowest he’s ever given us is a B +. I can’t fault that; he’s been more than fair. He’s never said anything where I didn’t see his point, although he’s not my favorite rock critic.” And— when we talked about those who review music in your daily papers—he posed this one to me: “Do you think it’s a mired cesspool of no-talent hacks just kissing ass for career advancement?”

It’s a good question.

One part of some critics’ problem has always been that, in general, you simply can’t understand Michael Stipe’s lyrics.

This has never been a problem for me—I find it useful to sing “73 men sailed up from the San Francisco Bay/Got off of their ship and here’s what they had to say” to any R.E.M. song. It works in a big way; you might want to try it yourself.

For others, I know, it’s not so easy. A much-celebrated element of Lifes Rich Pageant is that, for once, the words are understandable. Not that they make any literal sense, you understand; but you can actually hear them. A cause celebre.

“Wait till you see the video (of ‘Fall On Me’),” Mills warned.

“The video has the words all the way through it,” Buck helpfully added.

“It’s unbelievable,” Mills insisted.

“The lyrics are right side up, everything else is upside-down,” Buck said. “Michael (who’s the only R.E.M.-er much interested in the artform) has a very subtle sense of humor, and—with this video— it’s a fuck you to the record company that says, ‘Oh, lyric sheet with the records.’ It’s a fuck you to MTV and their videos.”

Mills said that, initially, I.R.S. couldn’t understand why the band wasn’t enthralled at having the chance to immortalize their lyrics by including them with their albums. “They didn’t understand it: ‘What do you mean, you don’t want to put out a lyric sheet?’ ‘Well, why not?’ ‘That’s how people know what the words are.’”

Buck added: “The best thing that Michael did—they were insisting on a lyric sheet for Murmur. So Michael took—we wrote about 20 songs in the space of that year that were gonna be on Murmur, ended up playing 15—he took all his favorite phrases from all of these songs, some that weren’t on the record, some that were deleted from the songs. He arranged them as a short story and gave them one paragraph. It almost made sense. And they said, ‘Well, I guess we won’t put out a lyric sheet this time.’ We don’t get much pressure from them now.”

And, even though Stipe was busy working on their video that very day, Buck waxed as forthright on the video problem as on the lyric problem. I posed the following: “Will you go on record as saying videos suck?” His response:

“Sure. Everyone with a brain knows that. The whole idea is despicable. I mean, they do suck; I’ve never seen a video that made me like a song, but I’ve seen lots of videos that’ve made me hate songs.

“Sometimes I’ll have MTV with the sound off, just to see what the Stones are up to, or whatever—and have you ever seen one that makes you go, ‘Oh, man, I have to hear this song’?” They all suck. It’s all so stupid, and I resent it because when I started playing music you didn’t have to be an actor, too. I can’t act. I think it’s just a horrible thing that I’m forced to do that shit.

“I hate to see videos; I really do. Most of the reasons that they’re really horrible is the way that they’re done. You can’t do interesting things like the Beatles did for ‘Strawberry Fields’ or the Stones did for ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash.’ In those days it was conceptual; you could do that kind of shit. Now, it’s too glitzy. Ours, I think, are half| dumb and half-intelligent. I give so little thought to it that I don’t really care. Michael likes to do it; he likes the physical process of filming and thinking up ideas, editing them down. And if he gets a kick 1 out of it, why not? He represents the band as well as anything on film and nobody sees them anyway, so why not?”

One gets the impression that R.E.M. aren’t incredibly fascinated by the music business in general, rich as it’s made them. (They all own houses now—gone are Buck’s days of living in “a 5 x 8 hallway”; gone are Mills’s $120 monthly rent payments.) And, although they also all own cool cars—Buck has a ’57 Chevy he bought for two grand (the interior’s ripped to shit), Mills has a turquoise ’66 T-Bird, Bill Berry (recently married, the only R.E.M.-er to go that route thus far) has a lavender-and-white ’64 Galaxy, and the inimitable Michael Stipe is the proud owner of a 1978 Checker Cab—they’re really not all that rich, financially speaking. Unlike many other bands, most of them their decided inferiors.

Peter Buck’s mom, for example, heard Quiet Riot’s cover of “Mama Weer All Crazee Now,” and rather liked it. Liked it so much, in fact, that she suggested to her son that R.E.M. should do a song “like that.” “She has the greatest taste,” Buck noted.

“Can we agree that heavy metal is truly, truly abysmal, strictly a matter of principle, then?” I queried.

“It really bites the big wiener,” Buck answered. “Most of those guys don’t even understand why they’re so bad, you know?” Do / know? Why, it’s a matter of public record that I’ve interviewed the following: Motley Crue, Judas Priest, AC/DC, W.A.S.P., Quiet Riot, Krokus, Van Halen, Ronnie James Dio, Ozzy Osbourne and many, many more. It’s like I was born to know. For the record, I asked them to name the absolute worst acts in all of metaldom.

Mills: “Motley Crue. That version of ‘Smokin’ In The Boys’ Room’ couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag.”

Buck: “Iron Maiden. Who—in this day and age—would do a 15-minute version of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner’? I mean, that’s an idea whose time has come and gone and come and gone once again. But I do think that Motley Crue are the biggest wimps in the world, because that is not heavy music. It’s got that fuzzed-out Tom Scholz guitar that’s fake heavy. We can play ‘Smokin’ In The Boys Room’ better than they do. We have, as a matter of fact.”

It’s true, they have. I pressed it further, though, by asking which of these notably odious acts they’d actually play in, were they given the usual imaginary million bucks to do so.

“It depends on the band,” said Buck. “If I could join, say, AC/DC or Judas Priest, yes. Because AC/DC do it with intelligence. If I had to join Iron Maiden, no.” As for the almighty Crue, Buck “wouldn’t join them for nothin’,” and Mills would seem to be in agreement. “Those guys suck,” he offered. And Buck demanded to know which year he’d have to join Kiss—were it the present day, his response was, “Oh, no, no. When Peter Criss was there I would’ve played.”

I asked them about a few other bands —groups who’ve made some pretty good music of their own.

“I’ll talk about the Smiths first,” said Buck. “Everyone I know likes their new record, and I can’t tell the songs apart at all. Everyone always says that about us, but I like two songs.” He allowed that Johnny Marr is “OK, real tasteful, but it doesn’t do anything for me,” addinglater on in the evening—that the Smiths have “written, like, five songs in their career.” Well, so much for you, Morrissey, even though Buck does think your lyrics are funny.

The Replacements, who’ve played countless dates with R.E.M., are better, in their estimation. According to Mills, ‘They’re great live—when they’re in the mood, they’re as good as anybody.” Buck agreed they’re wowser, but warned: ‘They’re living up to the myth they’ve kind of created as they go. And I think they’re tired of it but they don’t know how to get out of it. A lot of it’s fear and a lot of it—they think they’re making a statement sometimes by saying ‘Fuck you,’ and they are. But it’s not something you need to say every night.”

Faring best in this discussion was Robyn Hitchcock. ‘‘Boy, that live album (Gotta Let This Hen Out\) is the best live album I’ve ever heard,” Mills sanguinely noted. Good for him. Buck added: “He writes a ton of songs; he’s really great— y’know, I respect him highly. The thing I’ve always liked about his stuff is there is that vision. He’s one of the most selfdeprecating people I know without being falsely modest.”

Not that the mention of these three is to take anything away from R.E.M.—far from it. As I mentioned at the beginning of this story, the band was working on new songs that day—for their next album. It turned out that they’d screwed it off, and Buck criticized himself (and his band) as being lazy. Frankly, I was astonished, but Buck clarified matters:

“I hate those people like the Eagles— The Long Run, did you ever hear that? Three-and-a-half years, seven fucking songs and Joe Walsh co-wrote one of them. Now that’s my idea of lazy.”

Aye. R.E.M. figure to be around awhile, though—Buck sees them being as big as Neil Young eventually. We kicked around the idea that there was something strange about people who want to get out and perform in front of others. “That’s not why we got together,” said Mike Mills. “We got together so we could play, literally. It didn’t necessarily have to be in front of other people to be worthwhile.”

To which Buck added: “I’m of two minds about it. I walk in and I see 50 people who are working to set up this thing that I’m gonna do, and I feel like a real jerk because of that. I really do. I look around and I see bands that make more money than us, sell out more shows—I think they’re even more worthless than myself. I feel embarrassed completely by making a lot of money. I don’t feel guilty about it, I just feel completely ridiculous.”

Not many would admit to that feeling. But it’d been awfully hot throughout the South all summer. And, like I said, Athens, Georgia, is a fascinating place, S