R.E.M. Inside Out

CRAIG ROSEN is a longtime music writer and author of
R.E.M. Inside Out: The Stories Behind Every Song.
Following are selected excerpts from his book, used with permission:

CHRONIC TOWN:

Buck confirmed that the band was ready to experiment during the sessions. “I was basically asking Mitch [Easter], ‘What’s this?’ One day I asked what a tape loop was so he made a tape loop and we made a track and it took, like, an hour.” Stipe, too, was a novice in the studio. “The first year-and-a-half we were a band and playing, I didn’t know the difference between the bass guitar and the guitar,” he said in a radio interview. “And then someone finally told me that the bass guitar has four strings on it. Then it took me another year to figure out that the bass guitar was the one that was doing the low sounds.”

Perhaps that naiveté led the band to experiment in the studio and outdoors, as Easter occasionally chose to move the proceedings outside. “Because my studio was in a place where you could go outside and do things, I said, ‘Hey it’s nice outside, let’s do this outside.’ It was just goofiness,” Easter recalled. “It was just a way to make the session less formal and make the band feel like they were skipping school. It was really just for fun. We got some great things that way.”

MURMUR:

The production by Easter and [Don] Dixon was a great influence on the sound of the album, but Buck said that he pretty much had the album plotted out in his head before the band entered the studio. “I knew which songs were going to be on the record and had a good idea of what order they were going to be in,” Buck explained. “Mitch and Don did a great job. They had never really heard many of the songs before. Some of them were brand-new. We would go in and record them. I had pretty much in mind what I wanted. An acoustic guitar, a load of electric guitars, a soft electric guitar, and a 12-string, and Mitch and Don would find ways to make it all sound interesting. We didn’t know enough to know what we were doing. The arrangement ideas were all ours, but then Mitch would say, ‘Why don’t you record a 12-string like this and mike the strings, as opposed to miking the amp.’ A lot of what kind of makes that record sound the way it does was making all the weird instrumental ideas we had work together.”

Quite frankly, “Perfect Circle” is one of the most beautiful songs R.E.M. has ever recorded. It was also an early sign that the band had great potential to write moving ballads. The song developed from a Buck observation that was possibly filtered through Stipe, while Berry came up with the music. “People don’t have to know the story or the genesis of the song to get what it means to us,” Buck told David Fricke. “For example, the most moving moment I’ve had in the last couple of years was at the end of one of our tours. I hadn’t slept in days. I was tired as I could possibly be and we were doing a concert that night for a live radio show. And I was standing in the City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey, at the back door and it was just getting dark. These kids were playing touch football, the last game before dark came, and for some reason I was so moved I cried for 20 minutes. It sounds so trivial. But that’s more or less what ‘Perfect Circle’ on Murmur is about. I told Michael to try and capture that feeling. There’s no football in there, no kids, not twilight, but it’s all there.”

RECKONING:

“7 Chinese Bros.” is as mysterious as “Harborcoat,” but at least there is a reference point. The song’s title, as well as the lyric about “swallowing the ocean,” were lifted from the children’s book Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese, published in 1938. In the story, each of the five brothers has a unique talent. One of the brothers can “swallow the sea.” “I think it was suggested by something he saw,” Easter confirmed. “I think he saw a phrase that was like that and turned it into the song.” Although Stipe may have used the children’s book as a starting point, there is very little else in the song related to Five Chinese Brothers. In fact, the haunting lyric, “she will return,” could possibly be a reference to the band’s late friend Carol Levy, whose death inspired the song “Camera.”

Initially, Stipe had a hard time putting down his vocals on “7 Chinese Bros.,” so Dixon suggested that he attempt the song again. “He did two takes and couldn’t get the vocals, so he just walked in, grabbed this album off the shelf and was looking at the liner notes and said, ‘Run the tape’ and did it in one take,” Buck told John Platt in Bucketful Of Brains. That version was released as the B-side “Voice Of Harold,” and subsequently turned up on Dead Letter Office. It was only after cutting “Voice Of Harold” that Stipe found the inspiration to lay down a suitable vocal track on “7 Chinese Bros.” Still, Stipe was never quite satisfied with the track. “There was a bit of a fight with Michael over the mix,” Easter recalled. “It wasn’t like an ugly fight, but he never thought the mix was right. He always thought the drums were too loud.”

Even if Stipe was never fully satisfied with the song, “7 Chinese Bros.” was embraced by fans. “That was another classic modal-sounding R.E.M. song where the guitar had this familiar and yet slightly odd quality about it,” Easter said. “It had that sort of simple but real memorable guitar line that they were real good at.”

FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION:

Talking With The Taxman About Poetry, the 1986 album by British punk-folk troubadour and friend of R.E.M. Billy Bragg, was subtitled The Difficult Third Album. The back cover featured Bragg slogging through the London snow, guitar case in hand. Had R.E.M. been more straightforward and literal, that subtitle and photo — with the members of R.E.M. in Bragg’s shoes — would have been appropriate for Fables Of The Reconstruction, the band’s difficult third album, recorded in snowy London during February and March of 1985.

“You can’t really describe London in February,” Buck explained. “If it didn’t snow, there was sleet and rain. I hate to complain, but I had to walk almost a mile carrying my guitar to the tube and then take a 40-minute tube ride out to where we were, then walk another half-a-mile, sometimes with the wind blowing. When you get to the studio, the last thing you want to do is play guitar. You want to sit down and have a Coke or a beer or something.” But it wasn’t just the weather that was getting R.E.M. down. Despite the tremendous critical acclaim and growing cult following the band had garnered with Murmur and Reckoning, R.E.M. found themselves at a crossroads of sorts. “At the time, I don’t think any of us were really happy,” Buck recalled. “It was just to the point where it seemed like everything was picking up and we felt like things were out of control a little bit. We hadn’t made up our minds that we were going to be in a big band. In a lot of ways we were trying to figure out what we were doing.” Stipe had similar concerns. “Records always reflect the mindset of a band at the time,” he told Eric Flaum in Goldmine, “and during Reconstruction we were all on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And we weren’t sure if we really liked each other or not, and that was really reflected in the record.”

That confusion, dread, and despair is quite apparent in the grooves of the album. What isn’t apparent is exactly what the album is called. The cover had the words Fables Of The, printed on one side, and Reconstruction Of The, on the other, leaving it unclear what the correct title was, although Fables Of The Reconstruction is used most often. “I maintain that the name of the record is Reconstruction Of The Fables, because everybody has decided it’s Fables… and that really bothers me,” Stipe told Andy Gill. “The cyclical title, to me, really defined the whole identity that the band was taking on at the time. It seemed to make a lot of sense to me at the time.”

[When asked in Rolling Stone what the then-forthcoming Fables sounded like, Stipe made this off-handed remark: “It reminds me of two oranges being stuck together with a nail.” Years later, Stipe would explain that he made the comment after a full day’s work and it was just a flip answer.]

LIFES RICH PAGEANT:

[After Fables,] R.E.M. decided to hire Don Gehman, best known for his work with American mainstream rocker John Cougar Mellencamp, to produce their next album. After a demo session at John Keane’s studio in Athens, the band and Gehman reconvened at Mellencamp’s Bellmont Mall recording studio in Bloomington, Indiana. The new facility had only been used for one prior album — Mellencamp’s 1985 effort, Scarecrow. The pairing of still-underground R.E.M. with the established hit-making Gehman was mocked by some, with Musician magazine wondering if the harder-rocking approach should be called “R.O.C.K. In The R.E.M.,” a reference to Mellencamp’s hokey 1986 No. 2 American hit “R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A.”

“It wasn’t like we were trying to sound like John Cougar or anything, but we wanted to pick someone who had a different background than us, and he did,” Buck explained. “He had a hit record background. Don’s whole idea was to go for the gold — why put out a song that doesn’t have a chance of being a top 10 single? I can understand that. In a lot of ways he really focused us. We just wanted to try something different. I think Don was good because he really did push us. In a way, he feels that the record wasn’t what it should have been, because apparently John Mellencamp really wants to have hits and he will cut the record and rewrite them to make them clearer. I was like, ‘I don’t really care, I think this is the record we want to go with. I think it represents us really well.’ “

DOCUMENT:

[On Document,] R.E.M. chose to co-produce the album with [Scott] Litt. “I think the reason that we got credit as co-producing is that we just got greedy in our old-age,” Buck quipped. “I don’t think we did anything any more on this record than we did on the last couple. We had the songs, arrangements, and ideas. We had a real specific idea of what we wanted to try to accomplish and we wanted to try to work with someone who was willing to work toward those goals.” However, Buck subsequently explained, along with the co-producing credit the band had to take on additional responsibilities. “I think we struggled with more of the mixes that we co-produced. We had real specific ways that we wanted the songs to be. Before we would say, ‘We’re going to eat lunch and you guys start the mix.’ This time we were there from the word go, so we were there when they were bringing up the kick drum and when they were starting a drum mix that takes two hours. That’s the last thing I’m interested in, but I felt kind of obligated to be here for that. All in all, co-producing is rewarding and we will do it again. It just means we have to sacrifice a little bit of sleeping late.”

“I think this is the textbook example of true artist development,” explained Jay Boberg, president of I.R.S. Records. “The band grows, and the audience grows under terms that the band, the audience, and the record company are all happy with.” Boberg called R.E.M.’s long-awaited commercial breakthrough “a culmination of six years of work,” and noted that [Document] was the label’s biggest hit since the first two albums by the Go-Go’s, which both reached the top 10 in America.

Even with the newly found mainstream success, R.E.M.’s faithful fans from its days as college radio staples continued to support the band. “It’s almost like family,” explained Bobby Haber, editor of the College Media Journal, which tracks college radio airplay. “You are real happy that your brother is a star, but no matter how successful he is, he is still family. I don’t think that bond will ever be broken.”