FIND THE RIVER
When R.E.M.’s alleged masterpiece Automatic For The People was released, I didn’t even know it was coming. Once the self-proclaimed World’s Biggest R.E.M. Fan, I had lost the magic when “Losing My Religion” went global. While Out Of Time was a great album — yes, even “Shiny Happy People” — the band had lost what made me love them: a sense of cool, mystery, Southern-ness, and an inability to record and/or perform a bad song.
I was somewhere, I don’t remember exactly where, when I saw the video for “Drive” on MTV. It was slow, dark, and sounded like a rip-off of “Rock On,” the seventies song by David Essex that had recently been desecrated via a terrible cover from that guy who was on The Young and the Restless. My only comment upon seeing the video was, “Peter Buck has a big goatee. And he looks high.”
I ended up buying the album and, because it was R.E.M. and in a corner of my mind they could still do no wrong, listened to it repeatedly. I was never comfortable with several songs on the album. In my mind, its popularity was an obvious by-product of its substandard quality. None of it was the R.E.M. that I loved.
“Everybody Hurts” is the one that really pissed me off. Being the armchair-suicide considerer that I was at the time, I thought the lyrics were obvious and oversimplified. I mean, I get it; that’s the point. It’s designed to reach as many people as possible. But that went against everything R.E.M. had meant to me. R.E.M. was not supposed to be for everybody. They were supposed to be for people who took the time to listen repeatedly and pore over lyrics and have specific times and places for each individual song.
For example, the Mississippi River levee by LSU’s campus on a rainy afternoon was the perfect place to ponder “Green Grow The Rushes” and “Good Advices.” If you happened to be suicidal, then look inside the songs and find something to keep you going. No need to get clobbered over the head with a bittersweet “anthem” to choosing life.
And yes, “Nightswimming” is a powerful, poetic, beautiful song. I knew that immediately. But at that stage of life, I didn’t see a place for it. That would change with age. But more on that later. Only one song on Automatic truly grabbed hold of me, and it was the last song on the album, “Find the River.” I don’t recall the first time I heard it, and it doesn’t matter because the first time I heard it was not when it pounced on me.
A year or so after the album had been released, it was playing as part of a five-disc shuffle in my dusty little apartment on Boyd Street as I was attempting to finish a poem for a creative writing workshop class. I was taking a break, trying to figure out what to write, smoking a cigarette, and in the silence of those five hundred square feet, the song presented itself. I don’t think I had ever taken the time to give it my complete attention before then, but the room was still and dark, and the light over my desk and one lamp in the living room/bedroom were all that illuminated the cramped, smoky space.
“Find the River” had my attention. And it was like getting punched in the stomach.
I was old for an underclass college student. I was on my third or fourth junior year at that point. I’d watched my peers, as well as several classes that had entered school after I had, graduate and move on. Spring commencements, end-of-summer commencements, fall commencements, the wheel kept going ‘round, yet here I sat, still plugging away at college with no idea where anything was going. I only wanted to stay where I was, in that little apartment, and be a student forever. But I knew inside that eventually that would no longer be possible. And this song illuminated that difficult truth in languid, pastoral verses and an obvious (but no less powerful) water metaphor. A river flowing to the ocean. The narrator unable to find it. Pretty simple stuff, right?
I listened to it again. I picked up the CD case and found the lyrics.
I have got to find the river
Bergamot and vetiver
Run through my head and fall away
Leave the road and memorize
This life that passed before my eyes
And nothing is going my way
Had there ever been a song with the words “bergamot and vetiver” in it? I didn’t know their definitions, spice or vegetation I guessed, but they sounded perfect. I listened to it a third time.
I gave up trying to finish the poem I was working on. I sat on the steps of my apartment and smoked the rest of the pack of cigarettes before listening to the song again then dropping into bed.
I think I skipped my poetry workshop class the next day.
* * *
“Find the River” was not a song to play at the bar or around friends or girls or anybody, ever; when Automatic had come out, I offered measured but derisive criticism of the album to any unfortunate acquaintance within earshot. And I had never even heard anybody mention “Find the River.” It had never come up in conversations with other R.E.M. dorks; I had never heard it outside of my stereo. Or maybe I had just never noticed it anywhere. I don’t know how I’d missed it.
The next day, I rifled through my SPIN magazine stack and found the review for Automatic For The People:
“’Find the River,’ with an earnest strum-strum, plinking piano, and elementary-school-recorder melody, is so lump-in-the-throat hypnotic that the tragically lame poetry achieves a certain inspiring grandeur of lameness.”
(I’d prefer to say that album reviews had very little influence on my own appreciation of a record, but we all have our weaknesses.) It was as I’d suspected: “Find the River” was lame. Nobody needed to know that the song had gotten me in a way that perhaps no other R.E.M. song ever had.
* * *
Like pretty much everything else, experiencing Automatic For The People as a high-mileage adult is quite different than listening from the perspective of a bewildered college student. Guys in their early twenties want certain things to stay static. They want their music heroes to keep doing what they’ve been doing so that the music will continue to fit into the life for which a specific soundtrack has been created. Make another awesome record with cool, murky rockers that the public likes but doesn’t get, or doesn’t like and doesn’t get. Either way is fine, but make sure that your new album fits into the narrative that I want it to fit into. Automatic did not fit.
Age and experience certainly reveal truths that are unavailable to the young; it’s a universal principle that certainly applies to music. For instance, I did not take the time to understand “Sweetness Follows” back in the old days. I thought the guitar part was cool and worked with a buddy to learn it, but I didn’t pay attention to the lyrics; it was just more of Michael Stipe’s new bad habit of revealing his soul in specifics.
But fast-forward a few decades and give it a listen when you are in the process of losing a parent. The song takes on a depth and dimension that approach unbearable. It’s unlike anything else out there, a song about love and grief and sadness and hope that guided me through the tragedy of our family losing our mom, our center. We were like planets losing our sun.
What I also did not seem to understand then was that the album was a retrospective on their generation’s youth. Several songs’ pop culture references weren’t necessarily meant to hook listeners, but to describe a part of Michael Stipe’s life that he’s recalling in memory, a part of history. The atmosphere of the album is heavy and lush because these guys had been to the top of the mountain and were now looking back as they moved forward into some unknown. It’s an honest, vulnerable approach to art that, while attempted regularly in popular music, rarely comes across as genuine. And while “Man On The Moon” and “Sidewinder” will never be my favorite R.E.M. songs, I understand now what I didn’t then about why they exist.
Oh, and about “Nightswimming:”
These things they go away,
Replaced by everyday
If only a kid could understand that.
More years than I care to recall have passed since I discovered “Find the River,” but it still sneaks into my little playlists. Automatic For The People is a winter album. It is made for short, cold, placid days, for grey and rain. It prepares you for the post-holiday onslaught of isolated reflection (if you’re into that). I still click past “Man on The Moon” and “Sidewinder” and “Everybody Hurts,” sometimes, even though my opinions of those tracks have softened considerably with the years. And at the end of the album, when the first picked chord of “Find the River” begins, it still punches me in the gut.
* * *
It’s a Saturday morning in August 2021. I come downstairs, let my dog Carmine out the kitchen door, and make coffee. I bring Carmine in, sit down on the couch, and turn on the TV. The Olympics are still going. The US and Spain are playing women’s water polo. I look down at Carmine and tell him the same thing I tell him every Saturday:
“You know the deal. Two cups of coffee and then we’ll go for a walk.”
He crouches at my feet. Remote in hand, I scroll through the menu. The Dan Rather Interview is on AXS. I enjoy his interviews; he usually has some crusty old rocker on talking about the good old days. Robert Plant, Greg Allman, Ann & Nancy Wilson, etc.; they’ve all fought the wars. They sit down with Dan to look back on their charmed, tumultuous lives, and every so often they offer an illuminating truth. The interviews are always friendly, respectful, and easy to watch. I hit the “info” button on the remote.
“R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and Mike Mills sit down with Dan to discuss the lasting influence of their band.”
Hmmm…I don’t think I’ve seen this one. I take a sip of coffee and decide to check it out.
They look old, but not unhealthy old. Typical of these Dan Rather interviews, the banter is light and mellow. Michael is surprisingly revealing and unpretentious with his answers. Mike is direct, introspective, and cerebral. It is a typically pleasant Dan Rather interview.
As the interview winds down, Dan asks a question that I’ve seen him ask Billy Gibbons, Sammy Hagar, Robert Plant, everybody. It’s a question that rarely gets a straight answer.
“What song would you like to be played at your funeral?”
Mike Mills answers before the question is complete.
“Find the River.”
Michael looks at him in surprise. He puts his hand to his chest; he is genuinely touched. He had no idea, he says.
It is a magical, unrehearsed moment between two men who have spent most of their lives writing, recording, and performing together.
Mike says (paraphrasing) that it’s one of the most beautiful lyrics that Michael has ever written, and one their songs that he’s most proud of. He loves the pastoral imagery and the theme of searching, finding. He says that he never listens to R.E.M. music, but occasionally, late at night, he listens to the last few songs of Automatic.
It’s Saturday morning; I have my coffee in one hand and the remote in the other. The sun is out, I’m getting ready to walk the dog, and I find myself on the verge of tears. I don’t know why. I do know that this behavior is unbecoming of a man of my age; I’m punched in the stomach just like all those years ago in my little apartment on Boyd Street.
In my mind, this song never belonged to anybody but me. I’ve never had a conversation with a single person about what a beautiful song it is, much less its ongoing impact on my life. I’ve never told anybody that it is, and this verges on heresy, one of the best songs R.E.M. recorded. And here is Mike Mills talking about how much it means to him. It’s not a castoff. It’s not a filler. He sees it as the wonderous and powerful song that I’ve always known it to be.
It wasn’t until this moment that I realize I’ve held it close for over a quarter-century. With time flowing onward, I suppose I’m still trying to find the river.
JOSEPH TRUSSELL is a writer, VW Vanagon builder, backroad traveler, and semi-retired music snob living in Denver, Colorado.
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