Huh?
***
I arrived in Athens, Georgia, in 1992, a decade late. I missed all of the events described in this book. But the ghosts of the town’s fabled music scene—the loose collective of college students and sundry misfits that had birthed the B-52’s, Pylon, and R.E.M.—still lingered. Like Ross Shapiro, a wiry, dark-haired guy of indeterminate age who regaled customers at the Gyro Wrap with tales of that seemingly long-ago time. “By 1986 I was already talking about the old days,” he’d say wistfully as he carved thin slices of meat off a rotating spit.(1) And there were the members of R.E.M. themselves—who were not ghosts at all, really, but not exactly corporeal either. In 1992 they all still lived in the Athens area and were striving mightily to hang on to the notion of being a small-town band. They navigated the waters of their recent international fame a little shakily, doing their best, at home, to ignore the dropped jaws and wide-eyed stares of newly arrived University of Georgia (UGA) freshmen who were unschooled in how to handle sudden close proximity with celebrity. R.E.M.’s supposedly reclusive singer, Michael Stipe, hit the town just about every night and could typically be found hovering on the periphery of the audience at the 40 Watt Club—checking out performances by new bands (the Daisy Group) or old friends (Bob Mould, Robyn Hitchcock), or ambling out the front door of the Globe, always unshaven, always wearing a hat, and usually rolling a cigarette. On rare occasions the entire band might be glimpsed ensconced in a booth at this or that bar, their animated discussions of their next move blending into the innocuous chatter all around them.
The unspoken rule around town was to leave them alone, and apart from some of those overeager freshmen, or the frat boys who periodically hassled Stipe, people abided by it. Still, when you’ve got a lot of people in a cramped space, all keenly aware of the identities of the men in the corner, all trying mightily not to look, not to stare, the air itself takes on a nervous energy: the electricity of expectation, of anticipation, the loading up on stories to tell later.
These were the years when Athens pretended to be jaded about its most successful musical export. In 1992 the rest of the world was fawning over the band’s new album, Automatic for the People, many declaring it their best yet. But you wouldn’t have known that in Athens, where the old-timers still talked about the 1981 shows at Tyrone’s and most everyone else seemed to draw a line after the Reconstruction tour of 1985. Even though R.E.M. were still there, ever-present, people spoke mournfully of a vanished era. They spoke of R.E.M. in the past tense because their R.E.M.—Athens’s R.E.M.—was long gone. Perhaps it had been that way ever since the release of the band’s first LP, Murmur, and their first out-of-state tours in the early ’80s. The irony is that during those fabled glory days—particularly during that now legendary run of gigs at Tyrone’s O.C.—these same kind of people (sometimes the exact same people) berated the young band for being too conventional, too conservative . . . You know, they sure as shit weren’t Pylon. “Golden eras” tend to be moving targets, never recognized as such at the time, constructed and mythologized after the fact.
I was one of those University of Georgia freshmen shamelessly gaping at Stipe and company; at the same time, I was largely unaware of the significance of much that surrounded me. When I took up residence in Reed Hall, at the time (1992) virtually unchanged from the late 1970s, I had no idea that I may have been living in the fourth-floor room that R.E.M.’s drummer Bill Berry had inhabited 13 years earlier. And when I hung out with residents of the subbasement—a claustrophobic space full of young bodies with very little adult supervision—I knew nothing of its significance as an incubator for the legendary Athens music scene.
Reed Hall was still a wild, happening place in my day. Friendships were forged there, hearts broken, bodies entwined and decoupled in a feverish waking dream. Most of that was due to the natural, combustible energy of hundreds of young adults gathered under one roof, but perhaps part of it came from the spirits still clinging to the beer-stained walls—the psychic imprints left by some crazed girls raising hell a generation earlier, bursting out of the confines of their suburban lives, parading their outrageousness before the openly longing stares of Bill Berry, Mike Mills, and other soon-to-be movers and shakers in the nascent scene—young adults still growing into their own bodies, thinking, My God, I don’t know if this is heaven or some kind of irresistible hell, but I’m going to throw myself into it.
A few months into my time at UGA, I found myself quite accidentally at a loft party hosted by Michael Lachowski. A girl I was interested in had already managed to insinuate herself among the Athens old guard and had gotten herself invited. I tagged along, though I knew nothing about Lachowski or his band Pylon.
So there I was, a fresh-faced 18-year-old, bobbing my head to the techno music Lachowski spun on his turntables, getting drunk as several of the characters in this book danced around me. There was Michael Stipe, gaunt and wiry, winter cap pulled low over his forehead, throwing his body around the dance floor with unselfconscious abandon; twitching, jerking, shaking his hips almost violently, he was at this moment among perhaps the only people in the world—apart from his family—who truly knew him.
I didn’t know it then, but this book had its inception in that moment. In one sense, this was a group of equals: the inner inner circle of the Athens scene. Pylon had, in fact, exerted a major influence on R.E.M. There appeared to be no hierarchy and no resentment within this group of friends. And yet . . . the following morning they all headed off to their various jobs—one managing a restaurant, one clocking in at a factory, one building houses. Except for Stipe. If he worked that day at all, he did so as a member of a multimillion-dollar-earning, Grammy Award–winning rock band. What was that like for this close-knit group? How did they navigate through, and accommodate, such disparities in fortune? Who remained in the circle and who was left out in the cold? Athens is not like New York City, or Los Angeles, or even Minneapolis. How do you contain something as big as R.E.M. in a place so small? Is it even possible, or was the attempt doomed from the start?
R.E.M.’s gradual takeoff intrigued me. Theirs had not been an overnight success, but rather a slow, seemingly careful ascent, each successive album improving on the sales of the previous one. Perhaps that’s how the band members had managed to hang on to their old friends and community for so long: from day to day the slow walk toward fame may have been barely perceptible to those around them. Everyone knew that R.E.M. were going somewhere, but no one knew where exactly, or when they would be getting there. In the meantime, here’s Mike, Bill, Michael, and Peter. Want to go grab a beer?
An Australian songwriter I profiled in my first book once said of R.E.M., “They’re a bunch of boring people who make boring records.” While that assessment is neither charitable nor true, the first half of his statement plays into a common prejudice about how rock stars should behave. As they ascended to the public stage, the members of R.E.M. appeared to lack the feral, dangerous edge of the early Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin (or, for that matter, the punk bands they admired and sometimes emulated). Even Michael Stipe’s much-ballyhooed “eccentricity” appeared, at times, painfully contrived. Yet this clean image belied a wild and woolly truth: this band that supposedly held itself to a higher standard of ethics (whatever that means) had, in fact, gone through copious amounts of drugs and groupies in its day—a revelation that ought to come as a goddamned relief to everyone.
Yes, in those early years R.E.M. was a raucous and unpredictable band, gloriously ragged onstage and correspondingly unhinged off. Seasoned road warriors, they held their own in just about any crappy venue in any given “flyover” state. On a seemingly never-ending circuit of the blue highways of America, they blew the roof off many a pizza joint and dive bar. They played the places no one else cared to play and won fans—even if only in the single digits at times—at all of them. And no matter how insufferable their singer might have seemed, even to members of his own band, no one could deny that he was one of the most compelling front men to tread the boards in many a year.
The real R.E.M.—the R.E.M. held so dear by those Athens scenesters of yore—drank, popped pills, snorted stuff, got laid, and worked their asses off. This is the story of that band, and of those who loved them and lifted them up.