'REM: 'We have a healthy contempt for what now passes for rock'n'roll' – a classic interview from the vaults
In November 1983, REM came to Britain for the first time, amid music press hysteria. Trouserpress magazine met them earlier that year, in this classic piece taken from Rock's Backpages, the home of online
REM … Could they get there from here? They certainly could.
Are you tired of constantly being told how this or that band is the new greatest wonder? Of course you are. Unfortunately, superlatives have a way of spreading like germs.But if you will, suspend disbelief for a moment. Here's a band truly deserving of the most elaborate praise: REM.
Anyone who's heard this Athens, Georgia quartet knows their attention to melodic detail and punk-derived enthusiasm make for a pretty exciting combination. REM's Radio Free Europe single and Chronic Town EP showed a group with impressive songwriting abilities and much technical promise. Murmur, their first LP, fulfills that promise on one well-executed track after another.
Enough gushing! It's hard not to go overboard when describing this band, so on with the interview. I met with REM's Peter Buck (guitar), Michael Stipe (vocals) and Mike Mills (bass, vocals) in their Manhattan hotel (drummer Bill Berry was out shopping) and came away marvelling that such unreasonably good music could be made by such reasonable people. They're frank but civilised, matter-of-fact but very confident. No wimps Here's what Buck, Stipe and Mills (good name for a law firm!) had to say about …
Army brat Michael Stipe recalls: "I accidentally got a subscription to the Village Voice when I was 15 and living in Illinois. I read about what was going on at CBGB's, bought the first Television and Patti Smith albums, and then picked up on all the people that influenced them: the Velvets, Stooges, Dolls and so on. Before that time, I had virtually no musical background. My parents listened to Gershwin, Mancini, Wanda Jackson and the soundtrack to Dr. Zhivago. That's all I heard."
Buck and Stipe met at the University of Georgia in Athens when musical winds were beginning to shift — even in Georgia. Atlanta's Fans and the Brains, and later Athens' B-52s and Pylon, made the mid-to-late 70s a hot time for the hip South. The late Fans, best known for a recording of the Tornadoes' Telstar, were a special favourite of Buck's. "They were one of the all-time great bands as far as I'm concerned. They were everything a band should be: great songwriting, unpredictable stage shows, and different types of music. I saw maybe 50 dates they did over a two-year period. If I ever get a lot of money, I'm going to have a label and put out a Fans LP. A&M owns a live album that they never released."
Reading on mobile? Watch here
Stipe and Buck first played together in an Athens cover band. As other members drifted away, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry entered the fold. "We'd all been at school in Athens for four or five years, more or less," Buck recalls. "In 1980 we started playing for fun at parties, then at benefits; then people started offering us money to play. We got $250 to open for the Brains on our first professional date, and I was thrilled. Then Pylon cancelled a date in North Carolina and we played that. Pretty soon we were playing every weekend.
"For the first year and a half we made our living as a bar band that played originals. We'd play three sets a night at bars or pizza parlours, and just hope that some of the people who showed up would have a handle on what we were doing. It was weird.
"All the nice subtleties were lost," Stipe adds.
Radio Free Europe garnered REM a lot of first-time attention, despite spotty distribution. "The single was only marginally available," Buck says. "It did well for an independent record, but only in three cities: Atlanta, Athens and New York. Sales totalled 5,000. It sold 4,000 initially, and then went out of print for eight months."
Like Radio Free Europe, 1982's five-song Chronic Town was recorded with producer Mitch Easter at his Drive-In Studio in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They don't like this record much. "We just did it for our own pleasure, as a learning process," Buck notes. "We used lots of backwards guitars and weird sound ideas. We tried anything we'd ever wanted to try, so a lot of things on there are too busy. We didn't edit ourselves the way we did on the album.
"The instruments were recorded on Friday, vocals on Saturday, and it was mixed on Sunday. We didn't have the money to take any longer. The EP was mastered and the cover ready to go while we were negotiating to sign with IRS, and it didn't come out until six months later. So it wasn't very representative of us."
Murmur, produced by Easter and Don Dixon, is hallmarked by a very dense yet easy-to-follow sound. "Most of the basic instrumental and vocal tracks are very simple," Stipe says. "Then there's a lot of other stuff buried in the background that occasionally surfaces."
Reading on mobile? Watch here
"Little things are added on to distinguish one song from another," Mills adds. "We like that the more you listen to it, the more you hear things that didn't pop up the first few times, especially on headphones. It'd be horrible to hear a record once and pick up everything on it. That wouldn't be any fun."
One of the more exotic buried sounds occurs on We Walk: pool balls colliding, slowed down to half-speed. Stipe explains the album title came about because "murmur" is "one of the six easiest words in the English language to say". He doesn't cite a source.
"People think that everyone from the South is a racist hick," he says wearily. "We go to big cities elsewhere and people say, 'How can you be from the South? Isn't everyone stupid there?' It does gall me sometimes that people have such a backward image of the South. Our best audiences are there, because they have no preconceptions."
"There isn't the musical segregation you find in Los Angeles or New York," Stipe says, "where you get the ska crowd, the hardcore crowd, the technopop crowd, the art crowd. If a band is halfway decent, it doesn't matter what tag they have. People will go see them."
"I like New York," Buck appends, "but the South is one of the last places where you can live as a human being. People in Atlanta still nod to each other on the street and say 'Excuse me' if they bump into each other."
As for frequent comparisons to the Byrds, he declares, "I probably listen to people that stole from the Byrds more often than the Byrds. I've got one Byrds album, and it's the one that doesn't sound anything like them – Sweetheart of the Rodeo – because I love Gram Parsons. The Byrds are OK, but none of us ever paid much attention to them.
"Early reviews compared us to the Cure, so I bought their first album to try to figure that out. I can see the comparison a little bit on Boys Don't Cry and Jumping Someone Else's Train. But then I got their second album, Seventeen Seconds. We don't sound like that a bit – a nihilist in a leather jacket moaning over a blah tempo!"
You can also discount any Beau Brummels influence. "I don't know if that's a man or a band," Stipe says. "Nobody compares us to the Velvet Underground," he continues, "and that's probably the one group we all love. I think a lot of the things we do sound like the Velvets — not to the extent of the Dream Syndicate, but a lot of my guitar parts are real Velvety — droney but melodic." (The cassette of Murmur contains an extra track: a version of the Velvets' There She Goes Again.)
"No one's picked up on our country thing, either," Stipe says. "My vocals are influenced by early country singers, mostly women: Patsy Cline, Skeeter Davis, Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson." [Insert expression of editorial disbelief.]
"A lot of country guitar playing is really neat," Buck says. "It's melodic and pithy and not chord-oriented, without being jerk-off guitar solos. I stick things in all the time that are real country. That's a country lick right before the chorus in Catapult."
"In one interview a guy asked what I listened to. I said the Ink Spots," Stipe laughs. "So, in a review, he worked in the Ink Spots as one of our main influences, which is pretty weird. We don't sound a thing like the Ink Spots!" No kidding!
Buck: "The music carries the weight of the message. A lot of times it's not what you say but the way that you say it."
Stipe: "The words are written in the context of the song. God help us if someone misconstrues them as poetry. A lyric sheet isn't necessary."
Buck: "I never listen to lyrics unless they're really up front. I couldn't tell you what a single one of the songs on Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece is about, but I think it's one of the greatest albums ever made."
Consequently, "a lot of weird things are slipping in the back door," Buck notes. "Record companies know they're screwed, because people haven't been buying their records. Five years ago Warner Brothers would never have signed Slash [Records]. It's just like 1957, when the big companies were scared by Specialty, Ace, Federal, Chess, Sun, all those little labels.
"It's all very well to sell 20m copies of Led Zeppelin IV, but you're killing off any new music by loading the airways with bullshit. Now the big companies are bending over backwards to let in new stuff, but with a few exceptions all the people in marketing and sales hate it. You can't market something with contempt and do it well. We would never have signed with a bigger label. Companies like Slash, IRS and Twin Tone are going to be the wave of rock'n'roll future."
Home taping
Buck: "REM endorses home taping."
"They're an example of a strong, unique band that didn't try to make it but has nonetheless," Buck says.
The guitarist feels REM has made it, too.
"To me, 'making it' means being able to play and make records, having people appreciate your music, and enjoying what you're doing. Right now, we've made it. If we went on like this forever, I'd be happy."
So would we, pal.'
(If you liked this, here's another great early interview. This time from The Melody Maker)
Anyone who's heard this Athens, Georgia quartet knows their attention to melodic detail and punk-derived enthusiasm make for a pretty exciting combination. REM's Radio Free Europe single and Chronic Town EP showed a group with impressive songwriting abilities and much technical promise. Murmur, their first LP, fulfills that promise on one well-executed track after another.
Enough gushing! It's hard not to go overboard when describing this band, so on with the interview. I met with REM's Peter Buck (guitar), Michael Stipe (vocals) and Mike Mills (bass, vocals) in their Manhattan hotel (drummer Bill Berry was out shopping) and came away marvelling that such unreasonably good music could be made by such reasonable people. They're frank but civilised, matter-of-fact but very confident. No wimps Here's what Buck, Stipe and Mills (good name for a law firm!) had to say about …
The origins of the band
Peter Buck says he was never a musician. "This is the first band I've been in. But I've always been arrogant enough to think that if I was in a band, it wouldn't matter that I couldn't play. If you have good enough taste, you don't have to be a great musician to make great music. When the band started, I knew about five chords and a Chuck Berry lick. I didn't even know bar chords."Army brat Michael Stipe recalls: "I accidentally got a subscription to the Village Voice when I was 15 and living in Illinois. I read about what was going on at CBGB's, bought the first Television and Patti Smith albums, and then picked up on all the people that influenced them: the Velvets, Stooges, Dolls and so on. Before that time, I had virtually no musical background. My parents listened to Gershwin, Mancini, Wanda Jackson and the soundtrack to Dr. Zhivago. That's all I heard."
Buck and Stipe met at the University of Georgia in Athens when musical winds were beginning to shift — even in Georgia. Atlanta's Fans and the Brains, and later Athens' B-52s and Pylon, made the mid-to-late 70s a hot time for the hip South. The late Fans, best known for a recording of the Tornadoes' Telstar, were a special favourite of Buck's. "They were one of the all-time great bands as far as I'm concerned. They were everything a band should be: great songwriting, unpredictable stage shows, and different types of music. I saw maybe 50 dates they did over a two-year period. If I ever get a lot of money, I'm going to have a label and put out a Fans LP. A&M owns a live album that they never released."
Reading on mobile? Watch here
Stipe and Buck first played together in an Athens cover band. As other members drifted away, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry entered the fold. "We'd all been at school in Athens for four or five years, more or less," Buck recalls. "In 1980 we started playing for fun at parties, then at benefits; then people started offering us money to play. We got $250 to open for the Brains on our first professional date, and I was thrilled. Then Pylon cancelled a date in North Carolina and we played that. Pretty soon we were playing every weekend.
"For the first year and a half we made our living as a bar band that played originals. We'd play three sets a night at bars or pizza parlours, and just hope that some of the people who showed up would have a handle on what we were doing. It was weird.
The single
Radio Free Europe/Sitting Still was released in 1981 on Hib-Tone Records. REM doesn't like it much, according to Mills: "It has a muddy quality that isn't very good. It got garbaged up in the transition from the studio to being mastered and pressed. Originally the record was a lot cleaner-sounding.""All the nice subtleties were lost," Stipe adds.
Radio Free Europe garnered REM a lot of first-time attention, despite spotty distribution. "The single was only marginally available," Buck says. "It did well for an independent record, but only in three cities: Atlanta, Athens and New York. Sales totalled 5,000. It sold 4,000 initially, and then went out of print for eight months."
Like Radio Free Europe, 1982's five-song Chronic Town was recorded with producer Mitch Easter at his Drive-In Studio in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They don't like this record much. "We just did it for our own pleasure, as a learning process," Buck notes. "We used lots of backwards guitars and weird sound ideas. We tried anything we'd ever wanted to try, so a lot of things on there are too busy. We didn't edit ourselves the way we did on the album.
"The instruments were recorded on Friday, vocals on Saturday, and it was mixed on Sunday. We didn't have the money to take any longer. The EP was mastered and the cover ready to go while we were negotiating to sign with IRS, and it didn't come out until six months later. So it wasn't very representative of us."
The LP
At last they're happy! "The idea was to make a strong record with no filler," Buck says, "like Aftermath by the Stones, where every song is different but it sounds like a group effort."Murmur, produced by Easter and Don Dixon, is hallmarked by a very dense yet easy-to-follow sound. "Most of the basic instrumental and vocal tracks are very simple," Stipe says. "Then there's a lot of other stuff buried in the background that occasionally surfaces."
Reading on mobile? Watch here
"Little things are added on to distinguish one song from another," Mills adds. "We like that the more you listen to it, the more you hear things that didn't pop up the first few times, especially on headphones. It'd be horrible to hear a record once and pick up everything on it. That wouldn't be any fun."
One of the more exotic buried sounds occurs on We Walk: pool balls colliding, slowed down to half-speed. Stipe explains the album title came about because "murmur" is "one of the six easiest words in the English language to say". He doesn't cite a source.
The South
REM hails from Dixie. If that amazes you non-Southern aesthetes, don't forget that all great American music – blues, jazz, rock'n'roll – has roots below the Mason-Dixon line. Buck is accustomed to the "problem" of being a Southerner. Still, it doesn't make bigotry any easier to take."People think that everyone from the South is a racist hick," he says wearily. "We go to big cities elsewhere and people say, 'How can you be from the South? Isn't everyone stupid there?' It does gall me sometimes that people have such a backward image of the South. Our best audiences are there, because they have no preconceptions."
"There isn't the musical segregation you find in Los Angeles or New York," Stipe says, "where you get the ska crowd, the hardcore crowd, the technopop crowd, the art crowd. If a band is halfway decent, it doesn't matter what tag they have. People will go see them."
"I like New York," Buck appends, "but the South is one of the last places where you can live as a human being. People in Atlanta still nod to each other on the street and say 'Excuse me' if they bump into each other."
Influences
REM is generally regarded as a classic 60s-style pop band, ie descendents of the Beatles, Byrds and that ilk. "That's not invalid, but it's not very valid either," Buck remarks. "There's no conscious 60s influence. The idea that you can do whatever you want with pop songs, and play around with structures, as we do, is more punk to me than anything else – not that we're a punk band. Maybe it's because we're melodic rather than buzzsaw that we come across as a 60s band."As for frequent comparisons to the Byrds, he declares, "I probably listen to people that stole from the Byrds more often than the Byrds. I've got one Byrds album, and it's the one that doesn't sound anything like them – Sweetheart of the Rodeo – because I love Gram Parsons. The Byrds are OK, but none of us ever paid much attention to them.
"Early reviews compared us to the Cure, so I bought their first album to try to figure that out. I can see the comparison a little bit on Boys Don't Cry and Jumping Someone Else's Train. But then I got their second album, Seventeen Seconds. We don't sound like that a bit – a nihilist in a leather jacket moaning over a blah tempo!"
You can also discount any Beau Brummels influence. "I don't know if that's a man or a band," Stipe says. "Nobody compares us to the Velvet Underground," he continues, "and that's probably the one group we all love. I think a lot of the things we do sound like the Velvets — not to the extent of the Dream Syndicate, but a lot of my guitar parts are real Velvety — droney but melodic." (The cassette of Murmur contains an extra track: a version of the Velvets' There She Goes Again.)
"No one's picked up on our country thing, either," Stipe says. "My vocals are influenced by early country singers, mostly women: Patsy Cline, Skeeter Davis, Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson." [Insert expression of editorial disbelief.]
"A lot of country guitar playing is really neat," Buck says. "It's melodic and pithy and not chord-oriented, without being jerk-off guitar solos. I stick things in all the time that are real country. That's a country lick right before the chorus in Catapult."
"In one interview a guy asked what I listened to. I said the Ink Spots," Stipe laughs. "So, in a review, he worked in the Ink Spots as one of our main influences, which is pretty weird. We don't sound a thing like the Ink Spots!" No kidding!
Vocals and lyrics
To my ears it's impossible to figure exactly what Stipe is singing most of the time. He claims that's unintentional. Perhaps his gruff singing style is due to the unfiltered Camels he smokes heavily. Concerning his lyrics he says, "I don't have any great message to give out. Subtlety is a virtue and something you don't see very often these days."Buck: "The music carries the weight of the message. A lot of times it's not what you say but the way that you say it."
Stipe: "The words are written in the context of the song. God help us if someone misconstrues them as poetry. A lyric sheet isn't necessary."
Buck: "I never listen to lyrics unless they're really up front. I couldn't tell you what a single one of the songs on Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece is about, but I think it's one of the greatest albums ever made."
The music industry
Buck observes that in "the last six months, commercial radio has become a lot more open to new bands. Our record has had something like 27 adds [to radio station playlists] in the last five "If we get mass exposure," Stipe says, "it'll be because radio bent to us rather than the other way around. The state of the record industry is such that people are grabbing at straws trying to find something new to play."Consequently, "a lot of weird things are slipping in the back door," Buck notes. "Record companies know they're screwed, because people haven't been buying their records. Five years ago Warner Brothers would never have signed Slash [Records]. It's just like 1957, when the big companies were scared by Specialty, Ace, Federal, Chess, Sun, all those little labels.
"It's all very well to sell 20m copies of Led Zeppelin IV, but you're killing off any new music by loading the airways with bullshit. Now the big companies are bending over backwards to let in new stuff, but with a few exceptions all the people in marketing and sales hate it. You can't market something with contempt and do it well. We would never have signed with a bigger label. Companies like Slash, IRS and Twin Tone are going to be the wave of rock'n'roll future."
Home taping
Buck: "REM endorses home taping."
Other bands
"I'm sick of stuff like Flock of Seagulls," Buck observes. "They don't write a song, they just write a hook. Actually, we've been slagging off other bands far too much. It makes us sound like arrogant assholes, which we're not. We just have a healthy contempt for a huge segment of what now passes for rock'n'roll."Musical philosophy
Buck again: "The greatest music has always been made by individuals from unique standpoints, without commercial considerations. It doesn't matter how good or bad they are as Stipe cites the Cramps as "basically a cover band, but they've made the best records of the last five years.""They're an example of a strong, unique band that didn't try to make it but has nonetheless," Buck says.
The guitarist feels REM has made it, too.
"To me, 'making it' means being able to play and make records, having people appreciate your music, and enjoying what you're doing. Right now, we've made it. If we went on like this forever, I'd be happy."
So would we, pal.'
(If you liked this, here's another great early interview. This time from The Melody Maker)
