It was not actually necessary that my friends and I slept overnight in the back of a station wagon outside of a JCPenney so we could be the first in line for R.E.M. tickets at the Ticketmaster counter located near the furniture section, but we did it anyway.
This was late summer 1986, and we were not going to miss the October UIC Pavilion show, and feeling the first flush of independence thanks to our driver’s licenses. We weren’t going to miss it because they were our band.
A comprehensive biography of our band has arrived thanks to writer and journalist Peter Ames Carlin with “The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.” Thanks to Carlin’s thorough walkthrough of the individual personalities and talents who came together to form a group that would become unlikely superstars, those of us who literally grew up with R.E.M. can now have a deeper understanding of where the band came from, and why their music felt so urgent.
Organized essentially chronologically with minor detours to sketch in the origins of each of the individual band members (Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Billy Berry), my recommendation is that my fellow R.E.M. fans listen to the album under discussion as they read Carlin’s text.
Readers may experience what I did, a fresh appreciation for the oddness and originality of the group that truly sounded unlike anyone else when they hit the scene in the early 1980s. I was on the young-ish side of R.E.M. fans, having been introduced through my college-aged older brother’s purchasing of their “Chronic Town” EP, but I was immediately part of the core fan base taken by the strange and jagged emotive quality of their early music.
In Carlin’s telling, the band coming together was simultaneously miraculous and inevitable. A series of strange coincidences ultimately brought them into similar orbits in the college town of Athens, Georgia, a burgeoning underground music that had already birthed the B-52’s. Stipe was singing in a classic rock cover band. Buck was working in a record store, playing his guitar all hours, but determined to never join a band. Mills and Berry were school chums, playing around town as they made a stab at college.
Mutual friends thought these guys should get together, and when they did, the chemistry was apparent. Their first gig at a communal house party electrified the crowd, according to the numerous people Carlin interviewed from the scene.
R.E.M.’s members are baby boomers by age, but Gen X by attitude, suspicious of getting too big, of sacrificing integrity for attention, attitudes that only served to draw more and more people to the music until they became one of the biggest bands in the world.
And the music, lest we forget, was great. Still is. With this band, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, a fact made apparent by the clear shift in sound (and I would argue quality) when drummer Berry left the band in 1997 following the release of “New Adventures in Hi-Fi.” The subsequent albums weren’t bad but they did not have the same magic.
Normally, I would say it was a problem that none of the band members talked with Carlin for the project, but this allows the story to be told from the point of view of the people who loved the band, a book for fans with the voices of fans.
The pleasure is much deeper than simply nostalgia. The story of R.E.M. is a reminder of who we were, and perhaps who we still hope to be.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “The Small and The Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement ” by Sharon McMahon
2. “A Fever in The Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them” by Timothy Egan
3. “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson
4. “James” by Percival Everett
5. “The Distance Between Us” by Reyna Grande
— Lauren B., Arlington Heights
For Lauren, I’m recommending a novel that is rooted in the history of the abolition of slavery, but which also has more than its fair share of entertaining invention, “The Good Lord Bird” by James McBride.
1. “Silver Alert” by Lee Smith
2. “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver
3. “Mercy Street” by Jennifer Haigh
4. “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt
5. “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” by Matthew Desmond
— Sandra P., Lake Forest
This is a good list for introducing the reader to the work of Vendela Vida. The specific pick is “We Run the Tides.”
1. “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig
2. “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt
3. “West with Giraffes” by Lynda Rutledge
4. “The Great Alone” by Kristin Hannah
5. “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles
— Jane T., Glenview
A lot of very widely read books in this list. I want something that Jane wouldn’t have found anywhere else. Here it is, “Perfect Tunes” by Emily Gould.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.
