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Toward the end of one of R.E.M.'s more uncertain years, Michael Stipe can be found onstage in Vienna, performing with his band mates in a small club. They reinterpret much of Up, their first album without drummer Bill Berry ("He's growing hay," Stipe says), then let their hair down. Stipe is given a pair of socks by a fan; the power cuts out twice; they play songs they haven't touched in a decade ("Pretty Persuasion," "Strange") and then wonderfully fall apart in an endless version of Iggy Pop's "The Passenger." "Are we still on live radio?" Stipe inquires. He's told that they are. "Good. Fuck 'em." Before and after the show, he offers these thoughts.
Up has inspired bafflingly schizophrenic reviews . . .
Ain't that great?
. . . from people suggesting that it's your best record to Billboard's damning it as "a record that sounds as if the group was sulking all the way through it."
Somebody had a bad year, and it wasn't us. I'm not going to be defensive about this, because that just looks bad on everyone, but I know when we've done something that kind of stinks. And this is a great record. You read stuff [criticizing it] -- they either didn't give it enough time or they came with so much baggage already. If this record dropped out of the sky by a three-piece band that nobody had ever heard of before, people would be in the street shouting at the top of their lungs, naked, about it.
Which is the stuff that you now think did stink?
It's usually moments. "I Believe" [from 1986's Life's Rich Pageant]: My participation and contribution to that song was not what it should have been. What else? Moments of Monster, I think. There were songs, and parts of songs, where it was a sonic experiment but it wasn't fully realized, and thus you wind up with some kind of mediocre, sludgy-sounding stuff.
What have you learned about Up from going around the world talking about it?
There were songs that I thought were really, really clear. There was a key line in one song, and someone said something to me, and I realized that what I thought was clear about what I intended was, to some people, not at all.
Which line?
I don't know if I want to say. Oh, I'll tell you the two interpretations and I won't say which one I intended. It's a line from the song "Hope": "You want to go out Friday, and you want to go forever." And some people took that as: You want to go out and have a beer with your friends and not think about all the problems that are present in the rest of the song. The other interpretation is that you're planning the moment of your death, and you want it to be on a particular day.
I was like, "Wow." I maintain there's one moment on this record that is totally autobiographical, and the rest is a creation of, I think, a very overactive mind.
So which is the autobiographical moment?
Well, that would be giving it away, wouldn't it?
There's always that hope.
[Pause] "I'm Not Over You" -- that little, tiny song. There was a whole song -- it was really over the top, just this idea of a relationship gone bad. Typical R.E.M. stuff, which I didn't really want on this record; there's too much of that stuff on the past couple of records. It ends with an atomic explosion that nullifies the world as we know it. And the song sucked. But what started it was the little part that made the record -- that was the immediate and beautiful part.
And that was, in some sense, an expression of something in your life?
Yeah. Not "in some sense." Directly. The title of the song is what it is.
Did the person involved hear the song?
For about three records, anybody who's really close to me -- my family, my lover . . . or lovers -- knows that if they enter into a song, I'm going to tell them.
So this was an ex-lover?
That's going way too deep.
How did they react?
Fine. Honored.
Did you really consider calling this album Do You Want the Truck . . .
I wish we had.
Or Bridge Over Bottled Water or Alone in My Urine?
Alone in My Urine -- that was a really good one. That is not pretty. But I really thought that I Am the Answer Grape was the name of this record. It's a commercial from the Seventies, when one of the California wineries was introducing to the U.S. the notion of drinking wine with dinner; they had a cartoon of a grape -- with the voice, I believe, of Orson Welles -- who would answer questions on TV. He was very erudite; he would walk out and sit down and say, "I am the answer grape," and answer questions. That, for me, was it. If I ever do a solo record, I'd like to put on record now that that will be the name of it.
You're going to appear on Sesame Street soon. Had they asked you before now?
I don't think so. I was really excited about it. We're doing a remake of "Shiny Happy People" called "Happy Furry Monsters," I think. [The lyrics] are brilliant. The monsters get really happy and then they get really sad and then they get happy. And, presumably, I'm going to be happy and sad with them, singing along. You know how the Muppets flop when they're not happy? I can't wait for that.
Will you flop along with them?
I flop without even trying. I don't need a hand up my back to help me.