Alternative Energy
What would happen if a foursome of nonconformist, arty college kids started a band, made music that sounded like nothing on the radio, ground it out on the road in club after grimy club, sat for interviews on radio station after college radio station, remained committed to their musical vision but outworked every other indie group? They might become the biggest band in the world, reshaping popular music in their image for a generation. They might be drummer Bill Berry, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills, and singer Michael Stipe. They might be R.E.M.
If there is a singular takeaway from The Name of This Band is R.E.M., the new biography of the group from Peter Ames Carlin, it’s that R.E.M. really did earn the fame, the money, and the legacy—all while preserving their musical vision and doing it pretty much exactly as they wanted.
To paraphrase Bart Simpson, R.E.M. is a band of contrasts. Early set lists included covers of both the uber-cool Velvet Underground and the very uncool Monkees. The lyrics on their first records, replete with transgressive political messages, were mixed low, sung with Stipe’s signature mumble, and usually indecipherable. Later hits like "Stand" and "Shiny Happy People" were brighter and poppier, but delivered with a sardonic wink. Or were they? Maybe R.E.M. really were just shiny, happy people, holding hands on their way to making platinum records. Their band’s image of arty intellectuals coexisted, somehow, with their unabashed desire to be rock stars. Carlin describes them as a "young band whose outsider vision was in no way opposed to appealing to a large-scale audience."
And, for the most part, they kept true to both ambitions for artistic integrity and commercial appeal. Their following in college towns across the country, which began in their own hometown of Athens, Georgia, was built on energetic live performances. Their jangly but powerful brand of rock—built on the foundation of a driving rhythm section, punctuated with guitar arpeggios and Stipe’s idiosyncratic voice—birthed an entire genre known as "alternative" that within a decade was the mainstream. By the time they released Out of Time in 1991, R.E.M. had become a stadium act, a mainstay on MTV, and a household name. It was all thanks to a combination of confidence, professionalism, and the fact that they were genuinely good at it.
"They really knew what they were doing," Carlin quotes Kurt Munkacsi, a producer who recorded a demo for the then-unsigned R.E.M. in between show dates in New York in 1981. Munkacsi recalled to Carlin that the band were "exceptionally prepared and easy to deal with." That’s a quality that producers, record executives, promoters, and fellow musicians note over and over again about R.E.M. in this lengthy volume: They were professional. They showed up on time. They were never too blitzed to play onstage, were always polite and generous with fans, and seemed to actually get along and like each other.
This all set them apart from the dozens of bands that had grown out of the emergence of the B-52s, the art-dance-rock group that put the Athens music scene on the map at the turn of the 1980s. The names of forgotten bands like Pylon, the Side Effects, and Love Tractor flit in and out of Carlin’s narrative, their relative obscurity a suggestion of what might have happened to R.E.M. if it, well, hadn’t. Instead, what happened is this: Since R.E.M.’s first show—a birthday party for a friend at a decommissioned church in Athens in 1980—the band got better, got more well known, made more accessible records, played bigger venues, and worked, worked, worked.
Their major-label debut for Warner Bros. Records, 1988’s Green, was R.E.M.’s sixth album, a testament to how prolific the group had been in the studio as well as on the road before they hit it big. Over the next eight years, R.E.M. toured and recorded and kept growing in ways that are astounding to contemplate today. "Indeed, the vastness of R.E.M.’s success in the mid-1990s was breathtaking," Carlin writes, tallying up the $95 million in ticket sales and uncounted merchandise sales from the world tour supporting 1994’s Monster album (which, by the way, went platinum on the day it was released on pre-orders alone). And that’s not to mention the $80 million deal R.E.M. signed in 1996 to re-up with Warner Bros.
This is a story—a straightforward trajectory of success on top of success with minimal internal or external conflict—that shouldn’t work. Carlin does his best to keep it compelling throughout, long before the tension piles up near the end with the departure of Berry in 1998 and the string of critically acclaimed but commercially unsatisfying releases by the remaining trio over the next 13 years. Some of Carlin’s attempts to enliven the account don’t hang together. His tracking of R.E.M’s career with domestic political developments, from Ronald Reagan’s supposedly draconian administration that the band was rebelling against to the rise in R.E.M.’s fortunes with those of Bill Clinton’s in the early 1990s, is distracting.
More smartly, however, Carlin strategically drops within the linear narrative of the band mini-biographies of all four bandmates, which fill in the blanks about the individual members and demonstrate why they were so different from their peers. In brief, though Carlin does not say as much, Berry-Buck-Mills-Stipe all came from stable, middle-class families that seemed to have instilled a workman’s ethic that is sometimes lacking in the artistic, creative community from which R.E.M. sprang.
R.E.M. supplanting the hair metal and synth-pop of the 1980s with the new thing—alternative rock—is a familiar tale in pop music. "It happens over and over again, each new wave of artists subverting whatever came before them," Carlin writes. "Elvis undid Sinatra; the Beatles supplanted Elvis; the Sex Pistols rode over the horizon to gun down the increasingly fat and happy hippie generation." R.E.M. eventually became "the dominant culture" of rock music, setting the stage for the alternative explosion of the 1990s that influenced and prepared the music industry for Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Counting Crows, Hootie and the Blowfish, and a wide swath of rock that was mainstream in all but name.
That rock has seen a steep decline in popularity after the many descendants of R.E.M. had their moment is perhaps a reflection that the genre had nothing new left to say or do. Or maybe, nobody since then has worked as hard as those four arty kids from Athens.
The Name of This Band is R.E.M.: A Biography
by Peter Ames Carlin
Doubleday, 464 pp., $32
Michael Warren is a senior editor at the Dispatch.
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