Will You Live to 83? Will You Ever Welcome Me?
On R.E.M.'s strange masterpiece, New Adventures in Hi-Fi
I love R.E.M. My “best-of R.E.M.” Spotify playlist has 46 songs. Gems like “Near Wild Heaven,” “Texarkana,” “Kohoutek” and “All The Way To Reno.” I’ve always preferred the jangly, hazy, atmospheric R.E.M. to the muscular, rock 'n’ roll R.E.M.
Two R.E.M. albums tower over the rest of their discography for me, like the twin towers that once shrouded the surrounding New York City streets in shadow. These two might like seem like odd picks because one of them the band disliked and the other the critics disliked, but I’m neither in the band nor a music critic, so I’m free to hear the albums for the timeless documents (or documents of timelessness) they are. Those two albums are 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction (also known as Reconstruction of the Fables, the title is up to the listener, which is fitting for such a wispy, slippery, hard-to-define album). Widely considered the last album of R.E.M.’s early, hazy and atmospheric Southern Gothic period, Fables of the Reconstruction is a surreal train-ride through a post-Reconstruction Southern United States, a region bepopulate with chimerical characters (“Old Man Kensey”) shrouded in mystery. But Fables is a topic for another day. Today I want to write about my other favourite R.E.M. album, 1996’s critically crucified New Adventures in Hi-Fi.
Inspired by the live sound of Neil Young’s Time Fades Away and impressed by their tourmate Radiohead’s industry in bringing along a 8-track recorder in order to lay down basic tracks for their album The Bends, R.E.M. decided to make their 10th album while on a gruelling, 11-month tour for their 9th album, the self-consciously “rock n roll” Monster. Contrary to the charges of critics, this method wasn’t a symptom of laziness, of R.E.M. cheating by trying to churn out yet another record without going into the studio. It was a deliberate attempt to capture the strange dreamlike unreality of life on the road. And there are studio tracks on this album, recorded at Bad Animals, the same studio where Soundgarden made Down on the Upside, another deeply misunderstood, knotty, overlong, self-produced record from a band whose early 90s heyday was far behind them.
Monster was R.E.M.’s “back to basics” record. After the guest-spot heavy Out of Time and the downbeat, largely acoustic guitar-driven Automatic for the People, fans were grumbling that R.E.M. had become an adult contemporary band. R.E.M.’s response is a cautionary tale about giving fans what they want, not what they need. Monster isn’t terrible, but it is easily the weakest collection of R.E.M. songs(at least until 2004’s Around the Sun). There’s an amusing article about a writer who drove all over like ten different states trying to sell his CD copy of Monster. It’s apparently the most re-sold album in the history of second-hand music stores. Every single store the writer goes to, the clerk behind the counter says “oh get the fuck out of here with that. We’ve got like…twenty of those things in the back. Nobody wants it.” I think the writer was from Georgia or something, or maybe I just think that because that’s R.E.M.’s home state. Either way he had to put some serious mileage on his car until he finally found a used-CD store that offered to buy his copy of Monster for a few bucks. It’s a great article. I recommend it unreservedly.
Problem is, after Monster, R.E.M. were overexposed. They were one of the biggest bands in the world, but alternative rock had taken a serious hit by 1996. All of its major figureheads were seen as crybabies or ungrateful pricks. Think about it. Kurt Cobain takes himself out. Pearl Jam decides to stop making videos and devotes all their time and energy toward becoming a less important, less popular rock band (a task they fulfilled with surprising aplomb. Turns out, if you want less people to like your band, all you must do is release some shitty material, stop making videos, and refuse all interviews. Who would have thought such activity would result in a band beingless famous? (I’m being sarcastic. I just hate Pearl Jam. Sorry.) Billy Corgan becomes a whiny little bastard and makes an unlistenable trip-hop album. Courtney Love releases one great album and then leaves music to be an actress. Layne Staley can’t stop doing heroin so he can’t tour anymore. He agrees to perform an MTV Unplugged and he’s so strung out he can’t even open his eyes. It’s so sad to watch. By the time they play their penultimate song, one that Jerry, not Layne, sings, the heartbreaking power ballad “Over Now,” you can see in the bandmembers faces that they know Alice in Chains is doomed. It’s over. Layne didn’t die til 2002 but he dropped out of sight in 1996, got himself a condo with high security and stopped answering the phone. By the time they found his corpse he’d been dead for two weeks. On the carpet between the couch and the bathroom was a trail of feces. The guy had been so sick he was living in his own shit. The only reason they knew he was dead is because his accountant noticed that he hadn’t spent any money for two weeks. That’s how few friends Staley had left at the end.
So R.E.M. didn’t have drug issues, nor did they decided to stop making videos. They just weren’t all that hip anymore by the time they released New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which is too band because it’s nothing less than a modern American masterpiece. It’s Stipe’s favourite R.E.M. album, and it’s easy to see why.
The patchwork quality of the album serves the songs rather than detracts from them. The album’s centerpiece is the seven-minute plus “Leave.” The intro, which consists of a sad organ and a bare acoustic guitar, was recorded in a motel room. The song itself was recorded in one live take from a soundcheck at the Omni Theatre in Atlanta. Stipe’s been on tour for the better part of a year and his vocal is sublime. It’s one of the greatest live vocal takes I’ve ever heard. His voice trembles with emotion. It really is something special.
All the best songs on the record deal with movement and travel. “Departure.” “Leave.” “So Fast, So Numb.” “Low Desert.” Rather than just singing about the road from the comforts of a studio, R.E.M. recorded an album’s worth of songs about the road while actually on the road. The original recording of “Be Mine” was done on a tour bus, and you can hear the highway rumbling beneath the band. Stipe’s singing is a lot softer on the original version, as if Mike Mills is asleep in a bunk beside him and Stipe doesn’t want to wake him. “E-Bow the Letter” is a road song with Patti Smith. The single features an instrumental called “Tricycle” recorded during soundcheck at the Riverport Amphitheater, St. Louis. “Tricycle” is the virtual definition of a b-side. There’s an alternate version of “Departure,” almost identical to the album version except for the chorus. And there’s a cover of the Richard and Linda Thompson song “Wall of Death.”
The songs consist of lyrical fragments, half-finished thoughts and sentences meant to convey the sheer disorientation of what it is like to walk through the blizzard of fame while trying to maintain one’s sanity. “Where is the road I followed?” Stipe wonders at one point, sounding like he’s begging. It’s so fantastic.
The opener “How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us” initially struck me as the worst song I’d ever heard. Drummer Bill Berry plays a pensive and repetitive tom roll, while a few plinky-sounding piano notes ring out. An obnoxious high-pitched keyboard drones, sounding almost Indian, as guitarist Peter Buck strums a few lazy surf guitar lines.
Stipe’s vocals seem to concern the destruction of the American Indian while also seeming to convey something more personal but no less apocalyptic. Honestly, I hated that song for years and I would always skip it…until one day I didn’t. One day I just got it. And now I can’t even fathom my life without it.
Just like Fables of the Reconstruction’s opener “Feeling Gravitys Pull”, there’s an undeniably turgid free jazz feel to “How The West Was Won” until it comes in properly. It’s like they wrote the same album but from an older perspective. Just like Reconstruction, there is a sense of high winds and powerlines humming through a harsh desert landscape, and fragments of the traveling or touring lifestyle. In the bare, black-and-white liner notes, as if the world has been drained of all its color, the band sits in a booth in a vacant desert diner. I love that photograph of the band. I remember reading a profile on Radiohead. The journalist had followed them to their Saturday Night Live performance of “The National Anthem.” After the show Radiohead was waiting in the underground parking lot at 30 Rock when a limousine and a small Jeep arrived. The journalist made a big deal out of the fact that the guys from Radiohead all piled into the cramped Jeep instead of the limo. “They’re just like us,” the writer seems to be trying to say. “They’d rather ride in a jeep than an ostensible symbol of wealth. Isn’t that something?”
Not really. Not to me. Radiohead’s disavowal of the capitalist process that popular music must inevitably come into contact with always smacked of insincere performativity to me. I think Radiohead got into that Jeep because they knew a writer from Rolling Stone was watching. I think their whole “we want to be famous but not too famous” is a cop out.[1] R.E.M. were criticized in the late 1980s for signing a massive deal with Warner Bros. TIME put them on the cover, not to talk about their music but because they’d signed what was at the time the richest record contract ever handed out.
But then what did they do? They went home and wrote “Losing My Religion.” It was the biggest hit of their career but they’d been on tour since 1982 and they were exhausted, so they stayed home, a decision that led to the music press spreading a rumour that singer Michael Stipe had HIV. Rumors that he was gay had been bouncing around for years and music journalists had decided to keep their mouths shut about, but now that R.E.M. were taking a much deserved year off they cast aside their loyalty. That’s a shitty thing to do. Peter Buck indignantly told the press that “there’s this idea in America that if there’s money to be made and you’re not out there making it, either something is wrong with you or you’re sick.”
Out of Time, the album with “Losing My Religion” on it, sold 4 million copies in the United States and 18 million worldwide. They followed it up with Automatic for the People in 1992. Released at the absolute height of grunge mania, R.E.M. released an all acoustic album full of tranquil numbers like “Drive” and “Nightswimming.” The former featured a really cool onomatopoeia wherein Stipe, who is singing about a clock, starts to sing the words “tick tock” just as Bill Berry comes in and plays the drums like a metronome in perfect time with Stipe’s singing. R.E.M. could pull brilliant musical moments like that out of their asses. R.E.M. were what music journalists like to say Radiohead are. They are a band that follows their muse wherever it takes them. They have never compromised. They are maybe one-tenth as popular as they once were, but they didn’t throw in the towel, all sad that they’re not on MTV anymore. They’re still touring, they’re still making great records. Nothing as great as New Adventures in Hi-Fi, but that would be impossible.
What I love about that photo of R.E.M. crammed into the booth in the diner in the liner notes is that they are doing what that Rolling Stone journalist claimed Radiohead were doing when they all crammed into the Jeep. I mean, here you have one of the biggest bands of the decade. They could have sent their manager into the diner to get the food to go, or had the manager bring it to the hotel, but they didn’t. They chose to remain a part of America. They chose to keep touring, to keep heading down the endless highway. Which lends the frenetic sensation that New Adventures gives off all the more compelling and authentic. It is a fever dream snapshot of a band trying to continue doing what they do, write songs together, as they hurtle through the world on airplanes and buses. One song has a bassline recorded in a motel in Tallahassee. The guitar is overdubbed during a soundcheck in Salt Lake City a month later. And Stipe added his vocals a full calendar year later at Bad Animals in Seattle, the recording studio owned by the band Heart. The lyrics tell of bus stations and airport terminals. Of long desert highways, hallucinatory colors on the horizon. Latitudes and longitudes. Arrivals and departures. Takeoffs and landings. A different day, a different state. Sometimes a different country. How weird must that be, to ask your tour manager for your per diem (per diem is the allotted daily spending money a musician is given while on tour) and you look down and you don’t even know what country you’re in? I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that’s how the got the song title “Strange Currencies.”
“How the West Was Won And Where It Got Us,” like all my favourite R.E.M. songs, just reminds me of Simon and the death trip he is on. He may have become an opiate addict but his first love was and always will be alcohol. Simon is a garden variety boozer and he always will be. So whenever the chorus hits, I see Simon in my mind, waving goodbye the way he always did, in that silly limp-wristed manner he always had, sort of like the way Mr. Burns has that forward leaning posture with the hands out and down. Like a cross between Mr. Burns and a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The story is a sad one, told many times
The story of my life in trying times
Just add water, stir in lime…
The Patti Smith song is roundly considered, even by the album’s detractors, to be one of R.E.M. high water marks. Again, Stipe’s gutter poetry and his trembling voice suits Smith’s gorgeous lower soprano. It makes for such a poignant piece. “Will you live to 83?” Stipe wonders. “Will you ever welcome me?”
Look up, what do you see?
All of you and all of me
Fluorescent and starry
Some of them, they surprise
The bus ride I went to write this (4 a.m.) this letter
Fields of poppies, little pearls
All the boys and all the girls
Sweet-toothed each and every one a little scary
I said your name
I wore it like a badge of teenage film stars
Hash bars, cherry mash and tinfoil tiaras
Dreaming of Maria Callas
Wherever she is…
The heartbreaking yearning with which Stipe sings those last few lines led me to once believe that Maria Callas was a high school sweetheart or perhaps a prom date he never had the guts to ask out,[2] I was pretty disappointed when I learned that Maria Callas is a famous Greek opera singer. It still makes the line cool, but it makes it less personal. And what I always loved about Stipe was his utter willingness to try and work out his obsessions in real time and in public. He seems to have a preoccupation with Kerouac-esque highway iconography, of a long lost America. I don’t mean he wishes for the old days of intolerance, I believe he is more obsessed with a more personal vision of the past. Like me. I miss the childhood that evaporated on me one day. I miss the days that fell through my fingers like a handful of sand. I don’t miss a time when gay people couldn’t get married or serve openly in the military. I feel like this is an important distinction to make. And it makes the yearning even more poignant because you have to recognize the fact that you are celebrating and missing the past not as it was but as you remember it. You are admitting the inaccuracy of your own memories. Which seems to disqualify them somehow.
I’m about to shut up now. I’m sorry. R.E.M. does this to me. Years ago, back in 2005 I bought a copy of their greatest hits. It was titled In Time. It was actually one of the last CD’s I ever bought in a store. It was worth the money for the liner notes alone. Guitarist Peter Buck wrote them.
Some dreams can live only in half-formed versions of themselves. You know what I mean? Some ideas live on only because they cannot be articulated. When you wrench something sylvan and mysterious out into the harsh light, it can kill it. I’m far from the only romantic loner to feel this way. The writer William T. Vollmann released a book in 2008 called Riding Toward Everywhere, which was a chronicle of his days spent jumping freight trains. He did this as an older man. He had to bring an orange bucket with him to sit on in the boxcars because he’d recently had a stroke. Simon loves Vollmann and I can see why. More than any other writer he is the true heir to Kerouac’s restless and holy wanderings. Anyway I came across a passage in Vollmann’s train book that struck me, just something he thought as he watched the lush California summer landscape roll by out the boxcar window and realized he recognized the town from a visit he’d made there in his youth:
I hope never to see this place at night because it was so perfect in its night-incarnation, being not merely my past but the vanished American West itself where I would have homesteaded with my pioneer bride; I would have planted orchards and drunk from the artesian well of dreams.
Anyway, Buck wrote a paragraph about each R.E.M. hit, from the early college radio hits like “Fall On Me” to the latter-day mega international hits like “The One I Love” and the godawful “Shiny Happy People.” But an interesting thing happens when Buck gets to “Orange Crush.” He finds himself at a loss for words. He writes around the topic because the song means something to him that he can’t or won’t articulate. He finishes by saying “thanks for letting me not talk about a song that will always mean something dark and mysterious to me.”
Alright. I’m nearly finished. I’ll shut the fuck up about R.E.M. after one more anecdote. So I’m a huge fan of the writer Michael Azerrad. He was approached by Kurt Cobain in 1993 to write a biography of the band. That bio turned out to be Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, which is one of the most compelling band biographies I’ve ever read. Azerrad would be criticized for his largely uncritical view of Cobain. When it subsequently came to light that heroin had a lot more to do with Cobain’s erratic behavior in his final years, Azerrad lost a lot of credibility as a journalist. Cobain essentially used him to “clean up” his image because he and Courtney Love had lost custody of their daughter after Love admitted in a Vanity Fair profile that she used heroin after knowing she was pregnant with their daughter Frances. If you ever want to read what actually happened, the best Nirvana bio is probably Charles Cross’ Heavier Than Heaven. Which is not to take anything away from the fantastic job Azerrad did. However blinkered he may have been because of his friendship with Cobain, he knows how to write unputdownable books.
Azerrad’s most celebrated work is a collection of chapter-long biographies of important American underground bands from the 1980s called Our Band Could Be Your Life. He nicked the title from a Minutemen song. It’s a great title actually. It doesn’t mean “you could join our band.” It means “if you get into our music you will become so obsessed with us that our band will essentially be your life. Your sole purpose.” Now, I’ve fallen for bands that hard before. Many people have. You never fall in love with a band later in life the way you fall in love when you’re a teenager. It’s just one of those immutable natural laws, I guess.
Now, recording engineer Steve Albini was a principal figure in the 1980s American underground, having founded the punk band Big Black and having recorded many of the other bands in that scene. He would later go on to record albums like The Pixies Surfer Rosa, Nirvana’s In Utero, and Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase. He’s also known as rock music’s angriest curmudgeon. But even Albini, who didn’t relish the idea of a journalist going around and asking all his old buddies questions in order to write an overarching biographical story about days Albini himself actually lived, even Albini admits that Azerrad writes extremely compelling narratives. The following is a comment Albini posted on his studio’s message board about Our Band Could Be Your Life:
“That book is always going to be weird for me. I lived through everything Azerrad describes in the book, and his descriptions generally sound at least a little off. That's to be expected of course, since I was there and he wasn’t, but it seemed like he had an agenda or a thematic arc he wanted to follow that was only glancingly associated with the reality of the times. It’s basically impossible for an outsider to write a book about a bunch of my closest friends and comrades having their formative experiences without it seeming stupid or ignorant sometimes. That said, I devoured the Minutemen chapter.”
I love it. “That said, I devoured the Minutemen chapter.” Of course you did. Azerrad is one of the best music writers I’ve ever come across. Anyway, this is an entry about R.E.M. so I better get on with it. In a chapter about the Boston post-punk band Mission of Burma. To this day, I’m not completely sure what the fuck “post-punk” is supposed to be. I think it’s simply a more honed and cleaned up version of punk. The Ramones are a band and they had a fairly rudimentary grasp of their instruments and they wore long hair. The post-punk crop like Television or Mission of Burma tended to wear short, cropped hair, dress a little cleaner, and they were far better instrumentalists. Also, they all came out just after the first wave of punk, so they tended to hit in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mission of Burma’s lone radio hit is a danceable little number called “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” released on 1981’s Signals, Calls and Marches.
Mission of Burma were never very popular, and their chapter in Our Band Could Be Your Life is rife with professional disappointment and humiliation. At one point, after a low turnout at the Paradise, a club in their very own hometown of Boston, “the club’s manager told Burma they couldn’t play there anymore because not enough people came.”
The chapter ends with a heartbreaking anecdote that may not have even happened, but emphasizes the heartbreak of putting all one’s artistic effort and energy into a project that nobody but the participants seems to care about:
At one point they played a sparsely attended show in Atlanta the same night R.E.M. had sold out a big college theater. R.E.M. had quickly become college darlings while Burma, who had started before them, toiled in obscurity. [Bass player Clint] Conley says it may have been a dream, but he thinks that late that night, long after the gig, the two bands’ vans passed each other in a parking lot. He saw R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills looking out the window.
“He was just peering out, looking at us from another world,” Conley says, still wistful after all these years, “a world of privilege and packed houses and upward mobility…and nice vans.”
Even though I much prefer R.E.M. to Mission of Burma, this little anecdote broke my heart. The fact that it might have been a dream doesn’t diminish its power. It only makes it more cruel for this Conley guy. Think about it. Two bass players from completely different ends of the commercial spectrum. For Conley, who had developed tinnitus, which is a permanent ringing in the ears, his future was one of tempered expectations and working some white-collar job in Boston. For R.E.M., the $80-million dollar deal R.E.M. would sign with Warner Bros loomed in the future. I wonder if the two musician’s eyes met. It’s always weird to me when that happens on the subway, when you look out and see some stranger staring back at you. Why do they always look so sad? Is sadness just the default emotion of our species? Or have we done something wrong, done something to ourselves that is unnatural? Did we make a decision somewhere long ago that wasn’t the right one, and now we’re doomed to stare balefully at each other from different subway cars, that strange moment where, as Denis Johnson writes, “you inhabit a frame for them, and they inhabit a frame for you.”
But I don’t want to live in a frame. I want to enter the picture itself.[3] I want to participate, not observe. I want to live, not merely survive.
Secondary Source: https://www.popmatters.com/117936-strange-currency-one-staff-writers-seven-year-journey-to-sell-the-mo-2496142640.html “Strange Currency: One Staff Writer’s Seven-Year Journey to Sell the Most Toxic Used CD of All-Time
[1] If you know your Radiohead, you may already know that Kid A’s “How To Disappear Completely” is based on some advice Michael Stipe gave to Thom Yorke when the two bands were on tour in 1997. Yorke confided in Stipe that he felt like he was losing his mind and asked him for advice on how to handle the stress of fame and touring. Stipe told Yorke to simply put his mind elsewhere. “Just say ‘I’m not here. This isn’t happening.’” Stipe said. “I’m not here. This isn’t happening” is one of the central lyrics in “How To Disappear Completely.”
[2] The middle school all three of us attended, Beatty Fleming, consisted of Grades 6-8. In Grade 6 Simon fell in love with a girl named Tanya Wheeler. She was easily the most beautiful girl at school. I loved her too but I was too shy back then to speak to anybody, let alone beautiful girls. Beatty Fleming used to hold monthly dances in the gymnasium. Everybody went. And for almost 3 full school years Simon tried to work up the courage to ask Tanya to dance with him. Finally, at the very last dance, our 8th Grade graduation, Simon finally asked her and she said yes. Guess what happened next? The dance ended. They turned up the house lights and told everybody to go home. I thought Simon would be crushed because he missed his opportunity but he wasn’t. He was elated. “She said yes!” he shouted happily. That taught me that sometimes you can be happy about an experience you didn’t even get to have. Just the fact that it was going to happen, or could have happened, is enough.
[3] “Yes, I live in a frame! How can I enter the picture itself? But as soon as I do, or not long after, it loses its magic, which is why I want to travel again.” – William T Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere