HOT FIVE: R.E.M. I.R.S.

05: Murmur [1983]

Featuring..."Radio Free Europe", "Talk About The Passion", "Perfect Circle", "Catapult", "Sitting Still", "9-9"

Discounting their debut EP Chronic Town, this is where my love affair with R.E.M. started. What else can I call it but a "love affair"? They were my favorite band from 1983, until 1996, when drummer Bill Berry left the band after suffering a brain aneurysm onstage in Switzerland...Because I'm a 88% purist when it comes to rock bands, believing that the original line-up is the only one that counts (one exception would be Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones, for example), when Bill left the band to take up farming, well, it was time for me to move on...Like I always say, R.E.M. will forever be my all-time sentimental favorite, but nowadays, there are several bands I like better (The Kinks, for example)...But my love affair with Berry Buck Mills Stipe began with this album...I was sixteen, seventeen, and I read more than one rock music rag, and they all said Murmur was something kinda fresh and exciting, a melding of retro-jangle guitars with a pulsing New Wave rhythm section, and the enigmatic Michael Stipe with his slurring and mumbling and howling buried in the mix...WTF is he singing? Is he really a poet, or only some sort of scam artist, like his idol Patti Smith? Stipe played a shaman of sorts onstage, and they're really nothing more than salesmen too...Well, I bought into the myth, and my memories of Murmur include driving my '73 Chevy Nova out to Rabbit Ridge one night with Chauncy and Grits, and we passed around the pipe and a bottle of pineapple wine, and played this tape...It really was music custom-made for me and my friends, our generation...Caught halfway between the geezer mold music of the 1960's and '70's that we grew up on, and the fresh Punk and New Wave sounds of 1983...In a 350 Nova SS Coupe parked out at Rabbit Ridge, under the moonlight, the trees all around us, like a rustling wall, the glowing eyes of raccoons and rabbits...Sooo many rabbits, which is how the place got it's name..."Lots of scandals in the twilight..." We called 'em "Buzz Runs", and it was cool. Anyways, Murmur is number 5 on this list because it sounds a little dated and a bit quaint to my ears nowadays, compared to their subsequent I.R.S. LPs...The songs got better, and so did the recordings...

04: Document [1987]
Featuring..."Finest Worksong", "Exhuming McCarthy", "Strange", "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", "The One I Love", "King Of Birds"


This was R.E.M.'s last recording for I.R.S., and it finds them beefing up their sound a bit, working with producer Scott Litt for the first time...The big, polished sound of this recording signaled a play towards a major label deal, which they accomplished the very next year when they signed with Warner Brothers, but despite this "sell-out" the songs themselves were a daring and eclectic mix of styles, incorporating more horns, funky backbeats, weird time signatures, an edgy cover version of Wire's "Strange", and the exotic and beautiful "King Of Birds"...It also contains "It's the End Of The World As We Know It" and what can only be described as Stipe "rapping", and the band's first Top Ten single, "The One I Love". Document was also their first platinum album. Yeah, it was time to leave the College Rock world behind...

03: Reckoning [1984]
Featuring..."7 Chinese Brothers", "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)", "Pretty Persuasion", "Time After Time (Annelise)", "Camera", "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville"


The first R.E.M. concert I attended was at Merlin's in Madison, on their Reckoning tour...I was a newly-minted freshman at the University Of Wisconsin, and I was wild and I was free for the first time in my life...My memories of Reckoning are intertwined with those of casual dorm-room hook-ups, passing a huge bong called "The Purple People Eater" around a perfect circle of smoking acquaintances and friends, and other times listening to this album and Murmur on headphones while doing my Introduction to Folklore reading assignments...It was the best of times, nowhere near the worst of times, even though I did plenty of foolish things when I was eighteen and still minty...I was making some mistakes, and gaining some wisdom, and doing some new and exciting kinds of living, and R.E.M. were the biggest part of the soundtrack.

02: Lifes Rich Pageant [1986]
Featuring..."Begin The Begin", "These Days", "Fall On Me", "The Flowers Of Guatamala", "I Believe", "Swan Swan H", "Superman"


By 1986 I was living in Milwaukee, laying low on the "fashionable east side" in a spacious loft hovering near the UW-Milwaukee campus...I spent most of my time outside of class writing awful poetry alone in that loft, to the muffled sounds of heated, booze-fueled sex coming from the loft on the other side of the northern wall...That was Irene and her part-time boyfriend Bill. She called him "Little Willie", and so did I. I wanted to have heated, rum-soaked sex with Irene on this side of the northern wall, but we were only ever part-time friends. Her and I did see R.E.M. on their Pageantry Tour stop at the Oriental Theater in November of that year, and it was a good-sized venue (1200-1500 capacity) for that point in their career, when they were transitioning from a more intimate College Rock band into something more powerful and compelling. Songs like "Fall On Me", "Flowers Of Guatamala" and "Swan Swan H" were in their more "classic" jangly style, but they were also getting a bit heavier, with bigger-sounding songs like "Begin The Begin", "These Days" and "Just A Touch"...At that Oriental show, the stage was crafted to look like the inside of a country church, with a huge spotlight in the back corner of the stage acting as a full moon, shining through a "window" in the backdrop down upon the middle of the stage...Which just so happened to be where Michael Stipe was proselytizing. The band was growing, and Stipe was turning into a larger-than-life and undeniable performer. He had 1000+ people in the palm of his hand for two hours. This was my fourth R.E.M. show. I was already a convert. As far as their five I.R.S. LPs are concerned, I believe Lifes Rich Pageant is perhaps the strongest and most cohesive of the bunch, and sounds the least dated and quaint to my ears. It strikes a great balance between their earlier, janglier sound, and the big rock band they were on the verge of becoming. This was the last tour the band would do during their I.R.S. years, deciding not to tour behind 1987's Document LP...By 1988 they were doing a bonafide WORLD tour behind the Green LP, and nothing would ever be quite the same...A pageant, indeed...

01: Fables Of The Reconstruction [1985]
Featuring..."Feeling Gravitys Pull", "Driver 8", "Life & How To Live It", "Cant Get There From Here", "Green Grow The Rushes", "Auctioneer (Another Engine)", "Wendell Gee"


I saw two R.E.M. shows in 1985. The first was in May, on the Pre-Construction Tour, at the fucking Stock Pavilion on the UW-Madison campus! The Stock Pavilion was nothing more and nothing less than a large indoor rodeo ring - an open dirt floor dotted with cow and horse and bull shit. It was hot and it was dusty and full of life's richest aromas, and somehow the rural, southern-fried gothic storytelling of the new Fables Of The Reconstruction songs were stunningly perfect for that night...I was floating around on shrooms, lost in an older time and a different place... "Read the scene where gravity is pulling me around...Peel back the mountains peel back the sky...Stomp gravity into the floor...It's a Man Ray kind of sky...Let me show you what I can do with it..." They opened that show with "Feeling Gravitys Pull", and it quickly became my favorite R.E.M. song of all time. When I saw them again on their Reconstruction Tour, it was late August at a skeevy club in Jacksonville, and when they opened the show again with that song, I swear I smelled manure. "Holding my head straight (looking down)...This is the easiest task I've ever had to do..." Fables Of The Reconstruction remains my favorite R.E.M. album, a perfectly realized collection of songs that best represents the "classic" R.E.M. sound, when they were still decidedly Southern, and still completely Independent.


Hotcha! Hank