This version of Stipe—flamboyant, confident, attention-hungry—seems on the face of it to stand in marked contrast to the carefully cultivated image he would present to the world just a few years later: that of the introverted, fame-shy art student who just happened to blunder his way into fronting a major rock band. In truth, all these aspects seemed to coexist in his personality. His attempts at extroversion would always carry the awkwardness of an imperfectly tailored jacket hanging off a diminutive frame. At the same time, the pose of extreme shyness came with an almost imperceptible wink and a slight whiff of bullshit. From an early age, Stipe wanted to be noticed—but he wanted to be noticed on his terms.
Stipe was born in 1960 in Decatur, Georgia. Athens is little more than sixty miles away, but his route to the city in which he would establish himself proved to be a circuitous one. His father was a career military man, and Stipe had the typical childhood of an Army brat: being frequently uprooted and having to reassert himself in a new, not always friendly social environment. Like many children thrust into such a situation, Stipe developed especially close ties to his siblings—Lynda and Cyndy—and his parents. The family was a solid foundation in an ever-shifting outside world. This solidity held even during the long periods when his dad left to pilot helicopters in the Vietnam conflict. Stipe has since characterized this upbringing, which dropped him in Germany, Alabama, Texas, and Illinois, and finally took him back to Georgia, as “enormously happy.”
Of the four members of R.E.M., only Michael Stipe can lay claim to being Southern by birth. Even though he spent almost all his youth about as far from the South as you can get, he came from solidly Southern stock. “My people,” as he has referred to them, were from Georgia. The Stipes were a churchgoing Methodist family complete with a preacher grandfather. And since Michael spent much of his youth in such a tight-knit family, he picked up the Georgia influences, even if they are sometimes only discernible in trace elements: the accent, the religion, the values, the music. But this was a theoretical Southernness, acquired far from actual Southern neighbors, from the Southern landscape—and from the complicated racial negotiations that were and are such a prominent aspect of daily life in the South. It was at once more closely held and less tied to reality than the day-to-day culture of resident Southerners.
This is not to say that the Stipe children sat around mourning the Lost Cause. Rather, Michael Stipe’s “South” consisted of his grandparents’ stories, an accent that set his family apart, a collection of country records, and some books—including, apparently, the fiction of Joel Chandler Harris, whose Brer Rabbit character would later be referenced in a number of Stipe’s songs.
If there is one man whose life illustrates the complexities and contradictions of the post–Civil War South and its refusal to fit neatly into the “black” and “white” categories the rest of the world continually foists upon it, it is Harris. A pale, kindly-looking man with a shock of bright red hair, he became the unlikely ambassador of African American folklore to the world at large. The Brer Rabbit stories, first published in a series of columns in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, were allegedly transcriptions of fables Harris had heard from the slaves at Turnwold Plantation, where he had lived as a teenager in the early 1860s while working as a printer’s apprentice for plantation owner Joseph Turner, who also owned the newspaper the Countryman. Harris made painstaking efforts to render the slaves’ dialect as phonetically accurately as he could, and for several decades the stories, collected in several books, were embraced by white and black readers alike. Harris’s views on race relations were, in the context of his times, progressive verging on radical; in his editorials he enthusiastically cited W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who was a personal friend. Viewed through a modern lens, however, Harris is a problematic figure, not just due to the paternalism that permeates the Remus stories, but also because of his nostalgia for the institution of slavery, the realities of which, he felt, “possess a romantic beauty and tenderness all their own.” He maintained this view even while championing racial reconciliation in the aftermath of Reconstruction.
What did the young Michael Stipe get out of these stories? Most likely he was oblivious to their racial complexity, and at any rate, he probably didn’t encounter a whole lot of racial diversity during his early years. But if his later lyrics are any guide, he was apparently much taken with the crafty, anthropomorphized animals who populated the fables—particularly the trickster Brer Rabbit—and also with the enduring image of the Tar-Baby, derived from one of the most popular Uncle Remus tales, in which Brer Rabbit finds himself physically stuck to a tar-and-turpentine doll that has been cunningly laid in his path by his nemesis, Brer Fox. The harder Brer Rabbit fights to extricate himself, the more deeply stuck he becomes.
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Almost all of the information we have about Michael Stipe’s childhood comes from Stipe himself, and it is not a great deal. As for his young adult years, until very recently those remained largely obscure. For much of the duration of R.E.M.’s existence, no one who knew him prior to his move to Athens surfaced to corroborate or contradict the singer’s recollections, fueling a rumor—perpetuated in print by both Rodger Lyle Brown and Marcus Gray—that Stipe had sworn all of his pre-Athens friends to secrecy. But in the age of the Internet the blanks are slowly being filled in.
If I may break the fourth wall for a moment, let me say that you are going to meet some unusual people in this book. You’ve already met Mr. Cologne, so perhaps you’ve picked up on this. Sometimes the outlandishness of the supporting cast has given me the impression—wrongly, it turns out—that the members of R.E.M. might actually be the least interesting characters in their own story. Certainly they’ve happened to bump up against some pretty colorful individuals. But the freaks and head cases waiting for you in later chapters will have a hard time competing with Mike Doskocil of St. Louis. If this were a novel I would save him until later in the story and give him a more prominent role, but I have to play the nonfiction hand as it is dealt. In truth, Doskocil was never more than a passing acquaintance—barely even that—of the teenaged Michael Stipe, but he happened to be in the right place at the right time, and he has some interesting things to say.
First, some background: Doskocil is remembered in St. Louis for his role in two 1980s bands. White Pride was intended as a parody of white supremacist hardcore groups—the fact that one of the members was part Chinese should perhaps have made this obvious, but the earnest neo-Nazis of the day missed the sarcasm and embraced the group, ensuring that White Pride’s reign was short-lived. Doskocil’s next effort, Drunks with Guns, for which he served as vocalist and primary songwriter, attempted to do the same thing for beer-swilling troglodytes. Songs such as “Dick in One Hand” (featuring the refrain “I got my dick in one hand and a rope in the other”), “Punched in the Head,” “Hell House,” and “Wonderful Subdivision” have an appealing primal energy and purity of intent.
The many rumors surrounding Doskocil suggest the same bad-taste prankster energy that is readily apparent in his music. Many of them imply criminal activity, and I can’t in good conscience print them. But there is one widely circulated story to the effect that he once told all of his acquaintances that he had AIDS—just so he could see how they would react. I have no idea if the story is true, but it would certainly be consistent with his musical MO.
Given the punishing abrasiveness of Doskocil’s singing, the many stories of antisocial behavior, the White Pride thing, and the hints of a criminal past, I was a little nervous going into our interview. But Doskocil is actually an extremely friendly, funny, thoughtful guy, albeit one who sometimes begins sentences with the words, “So, when I got shot during the carjacking” or variations thereof. When I tell him I’ve been listening to Drunks with Guns, he says, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
Mike Doskocil first met Michael Stipe in the late 1970s. Stipe was a few years older and had just begun attending classes at Southern Illinois University, while Doskocil was still in high school. Both men’s music careers lay well ahead of them. They had both drifted into the Rocky Horror Picture Show