Thank You, R.E.M.

They weren’t my first favorite band—that honor goes to Queen, and next, the Police—but R.E.M. certainly had the biggest impact on me, from high school into adulthood. How did I find out about them? Rolling Stone magazine, probably. I know I bought the second album, Reckoning, first. I was 15 years old and music was playing a bigger, deeper role in my life. I was slowly opening up to different voices and different sounds. A few albums represent that “transition era” for me: How Will the Wolf Survive? by Los Lobos, the Replacements’ Tim, but maybe Reckoning most of all. Don’t go back to Rockville. I’m sorry. Seven Chinese brothers swallowing the ocean. She’s got… pretty persuasion.

I started spreading the gospel. Told a kid on the school bus that they sounded a little like the Eagles. The comparison seems funny to me now—I had a limited frame of reference—but I guess I picked up on a sort of strummy, country-tinged element that appealed to me.

Fables of the Reconstruction was their first album that I got as a brand-new release, end of sophomore year. The LP sleeve felt funny in my hands (what I would later understand to be a matte finish) and that was cool. I remember talking in amazement with my friend Rob in science class that on one side, the album’s title was Fables of the Reconstruction, but on the other side, it said Reconstruction of the Fables. That was the most clever thing we’d ever seen in our lives.

I had no money whatsoever, but I had to own all the records. Not just the previous albums (Murmur, and the debut EP Chronic Town). There were also these British 12″ singles—not the dorky dance-version 12-inches we had over here. These had, like, other songs on the back. B-sides. Outtakes and live versions. I needed to have every one.

And what was this I.R.S. Records label the band was on? The logo was cool, a guy with a suit and hat; I bought a sweatshirt with him on it. Also picked up a double-album label compilation. The guy who ran I.R.S. Records was the brother of Stewart Copeland from the Police, which was my other favorite band, even though they were kind of broken up and anyway, not as cool and mysterious as R.E.M. Also, I.R.S. had a show on MTV, The Cutting Edge, so I watched that and learned about more bands (Beat Rodeo, the Fleshtones, whose singer Peter Zaremba was the host, and so on).

And there was this place, Athens, Georgia, that R.E.M. was from. A college town. The 40 Watt Club. And there are other bands from there, you say? It’s a… music scene. A new concept to me.

The summer before my senior year, Lifes Rich Pageant came out and that had more weird cool lyrics (“Swan swan hummingbird, hurrah, we are all free now….,” “I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract….”). But also it kind of… rocked, with, like… power, and that was new and it sounded good. Real good.

On what the Internet says was November 6 or 7, 1986, my friend Jeff and I took the train into New York City (!) and—my god, did we buy the tickets from a scalper on the street? I think maybe we did!—and saw R.E.M. at the Felt Forum (these days known as The Theater at Madison Square Garden). The Feelies opened—Peter Buck from R.E.M. had produced their recent album—and they were cool too, and R.E.M. was awesome, and there were clips from old movies on the back wall, and a girl in front of me had long blonde hair that was strangely sticky and that was kind of a weird turn-on, and I bought a “What Noisy Cats Are We” t-shirt which I wore a lot.

In the spring of my senior year, the rarities collection Dead Letter Office came out and hey this has a lot of those B sides that I spent so much money and time finding and I don’t have any money so that kind of stinks. It was a hard but important lesson to learn about record collecting.

Then I went to college. The beginning of my freshman year coincided with the release of Document. It was weird and cool and also a bit political (“Exhuming McCarthy”)—what a coincidence, as I was feeling more political myself! The album actually became kind of popular and it had a big hit single, “The One I Love.” But the one we really liked? “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” All those words, names, so fast, who were they, what did it mean, Lenny Bruce, Lester Bangs, birthday party, cheesecake. I liked the album so much, I wrote a review for my old high-school newspaper.

And I had an R.E.M. poster on my dorm-room wall (along with the Pogues, my old friends the Police, and what appears to be the Mighty Lemon Drops).

Then my friend Todd and I went to see them in concert. It was less than a year since that Felt Forum show, but they’d graduated to a giant hockey arena. (The lady in the opening band, 10,000 Maniacs, sure liked to twirl her skirt around.) They were becoming pretty big.

And then a contractual-obligation greatest hits album came out, and I already had all the songs, but I still had to buy it because, come on, it included the legendary original Hib-Tone label 7″ version of “Radio Free Europe” and I had to have that, right?

Sophomore year, Green came out. R.E.M. had switched from quaint little I.R.S. Records to big sinister Warner Brothers. I was an experienced college DJ at this point and knew that, to paraphrase Frankenstein’s monster: Indie labels good, major labels bad. Still, I liked the record a lot (if not quite as much as previous releases). The next fall, Todd and I were watching 120 Minutes on MTV late one Sunday night, and the “Stand” video came on. Zany VJ Kevin Seal superimposed himself into the video, standing in the place where he was—now face north!—and, well, that was the funniest thing we had ever seen.

It’s interesting to me that R.E.M. laid low for most of the rest of my college career, while at the same time I was becoming more and more ensconced in truly independent music. The band did sneak back in for the tail end of my senior year with Out of Time. (The first of theirs that I bought on compact disc instead of vinyl. And over the next several years I repurchased all their albums on compact disc, even Dead Letter Office.)

Was I slowly losing my R.E.M. religion? To quote another song title, “just a touch.” As I entered the working world, my relationship with music continued to evolve. I was fully devoted to seeking out new, under-the-radar acts, while simultaneously going backward, retracing music’s history, to the  60’s, 50’s, 40’s, raw country and Delta blues, each liner-notes essay revealing another name to explore. And I had a regular income, which let me purchase much more music (though often at the expense of food and clothing). But since I had more albums, I’d listen to each one less than I would have before. (It’s a situation that has gotten exponentially worse, and I’ve never come to terms with it. The iPod helped a little.)

But I never gave up on R.E.M. I always bought their new record (and I wouldn’t even wait to find a used copy). I always made a point to spend some time with those albums, and I always found a few things to like, songs that stuck in my head. Even after drummer Bill Berry left, and the inevitable critical backlash and commercial indifference increased, I stayed loyal. Daysleeper. Walk Unafraid. Imitation of Life. Horse to Water. Discoverer. Around the Sun did nothing for me—the only one in their catalog to really leave me cold—and yet still its single “Leaving New York” has found its way onto several mixes I’ve made for departing friends.

As I had in the 1980s, I once again saw R.E.M. live in consecutive years of the new millennium. In 2003, they toured in support of a best-of (sure I bought it; there were rare tracks on the bonus disc! And I purchased both live albums last decade even though as a rule I don’t like live albums, and I got the “early years” best-of, and I’ll buy the next best-of coming in November, which will have new songs they were working on recently!!). I went to a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden on October 4, 2003. I had such a good time, I bought tickets when they came around again to the arena the next year. It was November 4, 2004, the day after the Presidential election. George W. Bush had been re-elected, and New York City was a bit somber, a bit shell-shocked. R.E.M. kicked off the show with “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”—the first time they’d ever opened a concert with that song. It was positively cathartic. Right? RIGHT!

In March of 2009, I attended a Carnegie Hall tribute to R.E.M., a fundraiser for school music programs. In retrospect, the evening was a fitting, preemptive wake. On hand were old comrades: the Feelies, the dB’s, Vic Chesnutt (who on Christmas that year would take his own life); contemporaries: Bob Mould, Marshall Crenshaw; and next-generation admirers: Calexico, Throwing Muses, Apples in Stereo. And as happens with these events, the guests of honor made a “surprise” appearance at the end, joining their good friend Patti Smith on “E-Bow the Letter.” So if they’ve now truly broken up for good, I’m glad I got to see them once more: the first-wave college rock darlings feted on one of the world’s great stages.

Me, I’m left with lots and lots (and lots) of recordings. And not just by R.E.M. If a band or artist had even a tangential connection to them, I sought them out as well. There were the influences (the Byrds, Big Star, Pylon), collaborators (the Feelies, dB’s, Let’s Active, Vic Chesnutt, Uncle Tupelo), and even casual mentions (Michael Stipe placed Fugazi on a year-end best-of list; I became a Fugazi fan). I own two books by Lester Bangs. There are so many records in my collection simply because Peter Buck plays guitar on them—and let’s face it, he’s not even that great a guitarist.

The biggest thanks I owe R.E.M. is for being gentle guides into a world beyond the mainstream. They weren’t too out there—a suburban teenager could find them in magazines and on TV and in mall record stores—but at 15 that was perhaps as much as I could handle. It was preparation for a wide world of independent music, film, literature. Independent thinking.

So, in a way, I carry R.E.M. with me wherever I go. Literally too. “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” is the ringtone on my phone.