BERETS FROM MARS! R.E.M. EAT THE DOCUMENT

BERETS FROM MARS! R.E.M. EAT THE DOCUMENT

FEATURES

Karen Schlosberg

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It’s dangerous to write about R.E.M. without falling into the Larger-Than-Life trap. Perhaps it’s because so few “Rock Stars” (and that term is used loosely) define themselves not only by music but by principles. That the band tends to come off looking like, well, um, folk heroes, just by being decent human beings, is a rather ironic reflection not only on the music business but on celebrities in general.

ironic reflection not only on the music business but on celebrities in general. Dylan said to live outside the law you must be honest, but even that can backfire, as it could be seen as a sort of canonization-by-default of Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe, who would wince in their beers over things like this. But the seven-year-old band’s career has exemplified the best kind of American D.I.Y. success story and warms the heart by proving that you can be intelligent and still be popular. And that

Dylan said to live outside the law you must be honest, but even that can backfire, as it could be seen as a sort of canonization-by-default of Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe, who would wince in their beers over things like this. But the seven-year-old band’s career has exemplified the best kind of American D.I.Y. success story and warms the heart by proving that you can be intelligent and still be popular. And that you can be popular by appealing to the heart rather than the wallet. Another problem with all this is that it sounds soooo serious. Yes and no. And “yes” and “no” kind of sums up R.E.M. anyway, as the band is always balancing opposing ideas and ideals. This is particularly clear on their fifth and latest album, Document, where familiar musical/lyrical tensions come across more powerfully and more directly than ever.

“The whole album is about chaos,” says singer Stipe. “I’ve become very interested in chaos and tho hypothesis that there is order within chaos, so I guess that kind of carried over into the recording. Chaos enters into every song, thematically speaking, as does fire.

“I had a real clear idea of what I wanted the record to sound like,” Stipe continues, “just from the way that I have moved musically and personally, but then I mixed that up with all the other guys, who had differing ideas, but a lot of them kind of crossed over. So what we got was this kind of wild grafting of what everybody thought it should sound like. A lot of that was just real kind of heavy and bombastic, more so than before—and I say that with tongue firmly in cheek.”

Those opposing forces of chaos and control come through not only in the (audible!) lyrics, but in the on-the-edge playing, which has the rough dynamics of a live show. It sounds like a rollercoaster on a steep decline with brakes that haven’t been tested. So there go two R.E.M. trademarks: Stipe’s mumbled vocals and the jangly, folkish wash of sound.

“I’m proud of it,” guitarist Buck says, “and I think that it’s a challenging work, especially after our more or less ‘hit’ record. Those are the records I like the best—the ones that challenge me and make me rethink the way I look at an album or a group or rock ’n’ roll, make me rethink my perceptions of what the group is trying to do. One of the things that’s fun about being successful is that you can do all kinds of stuff. You can pull in things from left field that no one else can do.”

“You need to challenge yourself before you can challenge others,” says Stipe, quietly.

“If you took out all the records between Murmur and this one,” says Buck, “it would sound like a radical, startling change. But we’re probably never going to do anything like Neil Young or the Talking Heads, where they just all of a sudden go 90 degrees the other way and make a record that’s totally incomprehensible as far as their past work. We write songs, they have more or less a basic structure somehow relating to rock ’n’ roll. We just pointed them in a different direction this time, and it is a little bit noisier.

“It seems like every record’s been a reaction to the prior record,” he adds. “I really like Murmur, but then Reckoning was a lot more stripped-down, real cleansounding, because we wanted to make a very clean record as opposed to something real thick and murky. And Lifes Rich Pageant was definitely a reaction to Fables Of The Reconstruction. We made this kind of strange, weird, folk record, and then Pageant was more or less a Bryan Adams record—I mean in a good way, guitars, drums, keyboards, percussion— for us it was pretty slick.”

On Document, Buck says, “we wanted to make a more powerful record as far as modern sounds, but also kind of diverse and chaotic. We’d have a straightforward basic track and then add on the entire world, whether it be the strange sax on ‘Fireplace’ (provided by Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin), or the dulcimer on ‘King Of Birds,’ or all the feedback and backwards guitars. And lyrically it’s an album about chaos, too,” he adds, echoing Stipe. “It’s a very Orwell-type record.”

After working with various and sundry producers (Mitch Easter, Don Dixon, Joe Boyd, Don Gehman), R.E.M. decided to co-produce this project, and brought in New York producer/engineer Scott Litt (Katrina & The Waves, the dB’s, Beat Rodeo, the new Woodentops LP) to work with them.

“I just felt this confidence from having put out a number of records; that same confidence is what gave us the wherewithal to go ahead and co-produce the record,” Stipe says, “and Scott was perfect for that. He was really willing to work alongside of us and give us everything that he knew, everything that he could put into it and still go along with the vision that we had.”

Litt, for his part, calls the session “probably the most fun I’ve had making a record. I didn’t want it to end.”

“Every record we’ve ever done has been more or less a co-production, anyway. We just got kind of greedy and decided we wanted part of the spotlight,” Buck says cheerfully. “We also had a real serious idea of what we wanted to do. Well, every record we’ve known what we wanted to do and we went in and did it, but particularly this time. I mean, if you ask Don Gehman, he thinks that Lifes Rich Pageant was a failure ’cause he didn’t accomplish what he wanted to accomplish—which was eight million sales, real clear vocals, straightforward themes, that kind of thing. He was getting real frustrated. See, we got exactly what we wanted, and I’d like to work with him again, but, you know, he thinks of it as a failure.

“This time we said, ‘OK, we’re gonna go in, and we’re gonna be the bosses. We’re gonna co-produce.’ Because I think at one point or another every producer we’ve worked with has kind of gone, ‘Well, I don’t know what to do with you guys. You do what you want to, anyway.’ This time we just figured, let’s have it up front. We’re real fun to work with as

long as you aren’t trying to make us do something we don’t want to do.”

One thing Stipe wanted to do was to push his by-now trademarked buried vocals out front—partly due to the songs, and partly due to his feeling more confident in getting his voice to sound the way he wanted it to in the studio, “not artificial or false or having been wrestled to the ground by modern technology.”

“He wanted the lyrics right out there,” adds Buck. “He wanted people to hear them. Because of the concept of the way it was recorded, with the big sound and all, it wouldn’t have made sense to have a murky vocal or a vocal that’s less than understandable out front. I thought it was kind of cool, actually. It kind of shows that whatever the folkie strengths people see as our main thing with the band are not necessarily what the band’s all about.”

“I used to always sing along and I didn’t know the words,” bassist Mills says, laughing. “There were things I was singing, I didn’t know what they were. But it is a different approach. I like it. It’s not to say that we won’t go back to burying the vocals on the next one and end up with Exile On Main Street or something, but it was a good idea for this record.”

The title Document, says Stipe, “came out of the word documentary,” and adds that his interest in film has been growing over the past couple of years (he’s directing the third video off the LP, for “Finest Worksong”). “To me, the album is very filmic, it’s very visual—although I’m a little disturbed at the idea of presenting someone with a prepackaged image or a visual presentation to go along with a song, because I think that people should be able to form that vision, that visual side, along with listening. I think that most of the stuff that we’ve done leaves a lot of room open for interpretation.”

The clarity of the lyrics doesn’t prevent individual interpretation, since Stipe often writes in oblique cultural shorthand and quick-image metaphors. Even songs that sound straightforward at first listen, like the first single, “The One I Love,” are not necessarily what they seem.

“It’s a very brutal song,” Stipe says. “I felt kind of bad about putting that one out. To me, it’s perhaps the most despondent song I’ve ever written, but I didn’t really want to censor myself. I gave it a good deal of thought and discussed it with some friends of mine and just decided that it was something that I felt, perhaps had not experienced, but it’s something that I have felt, and to try to change or dilute it would be to deny that.”

Something else that the vocal clarity brings out has often been missing is the band’s sense of humor, frequently expressed by the opposing interplay of upbeat melodies with ironic, bleak or sharp lyrics, as in the surf soul of “Exhuming McCarthy” and the breakneck subterranean globalvillage blues of “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

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Being able to decipher the lyrics doesn’t take any of the mystique away from the songs. In fact, knowing the lyrics doesn’t mean understanding them, since everyone’s aural and emotional pictures are different. And R.E.M. is the kind of band with whom people feel a deep emotional connection that goes way beyond “Great beat, and I can dance to it.”

“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” says Buck. “And there are a lot of groups I feel the same way about. The records that make sense to you emotionally are the ones that you play, and I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it has something to do with writing songs in certain keys, whether it be melodic ideas, who knows? It’s something there. I think that’s part of the strength of the band, it’s something that I don’t even like to think about, ’cause it’s one of those things that’s just kind of there, and someday it could just kind of not be there,” he says, laughing.

Producer Litt recounts a night he, Mills and Stipe went out to dinner while recording in Nashville, and people brought a note to their table with a $20 bill in it, requesting to buy the band’s dinner in return for, Litt says of the note, “ ‘all the joy and pleasure you’ve brought to us over the years.’ The guys, of course, gave the money back and said thank you very much. I’ve been with bands that people would ask for autographs and clamor over and stuff, but for people to want to buy dinner for these guys really made an impression on me. You don’t elicit that sort of response from people on the street without being true to yourself.”

For R.E.M., being true to their identity requires more and more monitoring, for as the band’s popularity grows, so do the pressures.

“Someone like Springsteen, who is really great, made a conscious, calculated concession to have a really huge hit with Bom In The U.S.A.” says Buck. “And that’s fine—an artist of that type sometimes only makes sense in front of a million people. I don’t think that’s necessarily the way with us. We’re probably q little bit more insular, a little bit more personal. To make these concessions to sell that many records, I think, would be just totally the wrong thing to do with this band. It would take away what the heart of this band is, and I think it would kill us. I don’t think we’re going to be Prince or Springsteen, and I don’t really want it.

“We’re seen as very serious, and we are, but we’re not serious serious. And we’re not someone like U2—and I like U2— where you have this feeling that they never think that they could ever be funny in their lives. So we always try to go out of our way to do silly things, things that are whimsical and out there, because that’s the way we are as people. Why shouldn’t it be reflected

in what we do? But we have to be so serious to protect what’s good about this band from the people in offices that will tell you what to do.

“So basically we make decisions not to do things, things that would actually be pretty painless but morally we think are wrong. You have to think, every day, why are we doing this, and what does it mean to shake this person’s hand. And so many people do it, and so many people that don’t need to do it, do it. You open any music magazine in the world and see really rich, famous people endorsing beer or cigarettes, and it’s like ‘Why?’ You can’t need the money. There’s that whole thing that you can’t lay down with pigs and smell like shit,” he says, laughing.

“We know what’s best for the band,” he continues. “We just have to be careful to not let other people talk us into things. So we’re real bad about not taking any advice whatsoever, and sometimes probably do dumb things. But if anyone has to be talked into anything and convinced—if it smells like spinach then blow it off. It’s real intuitive. We’re doing better than most bands that follow the rules,” he adds, “so we must be doing something right.”

All that talk about the future of American rock ’n’ roll and the near-mythos created around the group was not, for once, a publicity gimmick, nor was it perpetuated by the bemused but wary band.

“I don’t say any of that shit,” Buck snorts good-naturedly. “Nobody at the record company was even saying that stuff. It was like, when (Murmur) came out, well, here’s a record from these guys from Georgia who played in a church and now they’re playing in bars near you. That was all that was said. I guess people make up mythology if there isn’t one there. And that’s OK. I’m sure there’s enough Syd Barrett mythology to fill books.” He pauses. “R.E.M.: Men, myth or marketing scheme?” He laughs.

“All I want is that when I’m done with this, I can think about what I’ve done in the past and go, ‘Yup, we did good. We did a good job.’ That’s it. And other than that, it just doesn’t matter.” ®