In the Real World

After the show, Buck grabs a six-pack from the tour bus and heads toward his room. Like the other members of the band, he isn't sure that when it comes to venues, bigger is better. He for one isn't interested in having R.E.M. become an arena band. "People have been trying to convince me for a long time that we could play bigger places and enjoy it," says the lanky, fidgety, garrulous Buck. "And tonight proved, if nothing else, that there's no fucking way I can. If we ever did a stadium tour, I would imagine it would be about the last thing we'd ever do together."

Some longtime fans have already accused R.E.M. of selling out, of courting mainstream success. The band doesn't agree. "If you look at the album charts, the only thing up there on the charts that's weirder than we are is Prince," says Buck. "I mean, this record seems to me to be pretty uncommercial."

But one of the songs from that uncommercial record put R.E.M. over the top, hitting the upper reaches of the singles charts when no previous single — from "Radio Free Europe" to "So. Central Rain" to "Can't Get There from Here" to "Fall on Me" — had even made the Top Seventy-five. And typically enough for this band, "The One I Love" succeeded at least partly because a lot of the audience doesn't know what it's about. Listeners hear the opening lines — "This one goes out to the one I love/This one goes out to the one I left behind" — and miss it when what begins as a rueful love song turns hard; "A simple prop to occupy my time" and, in the last verse, "Another prop has occupied my time."

"It's a brutal kind of song, and I don't know if a lot of people pick up on that," says Michael Stipe. "But I've always left myself pretty open to interpretation. It's probably better that they just think it's a love song at this point." A shrug. "I don't know. That song just came up from somewhere, and I recognized it as being real violent and awful. But it wasn't directed at any one person. I would never, ever write a song like that. Even if there was one person in the world thinking, 'This song is about me,' I could never sing it or put it out."

Now, though, R.E.M. has got to figure out what kind of follow-up record to make, what kind of tour to do, what size halls to play, what kind of lyrics to write. "There's a little bit more weight on my shoulders as far as what I say," says Stipe, who long ago won a reputation for singing his lyrics in an often indecipherable mumble. (The band thinks it's a bad rap: "One lives in a world where things are not what they seem, and I see no reason not to reflect that," says Buck.)

Stipe says that his new visibility means he ought to write clearer lyrics. "I guess I've figured out that I can't just blabber anything I want to anymore, which I've done before, though not a great deal. On some of the earlier songs, whatever I happened to be singing, we recorded it. Some had very distinct ideas: '9-9' has a very distinct idea, but, you know, it was purposely recorded so you could never be able to decipher any of the words except the very last phrase, which was 'conversation fear,' which is what the song was about."

Certainly it's easier to listen to the last two records and hear Stipe's personal distaste for much of modern living, or to hear the concerns of a band some of whose members belong to Greenpeace and quietly donate to selected causes. And while Document is a quirky, thorny record, there's enough clarity on it to help put R.E.M. in unaccustomed company.

"We're Top Twenty now, which is unbelievable," says Stipe. "I can't believe that we're up there with Springsteen or whatever. It doesn't really mean that much, but it does to the industry, and I guess to kids that read.

"And my mom got kinda weepy," he says, grinning, then stops himself. "No, she didn't. But she couldn't believe it, either."

It started with a Macon, Georgia, high-school band that by all rights should never have existed. Bill Berry played drums, Mike Mills played bass, and the combination was unlikely — because Mills and Berry openly and unequivocally hated each other's guts.

At the time, Berry was a budding hoodlum who'd just moved to Macon from the Midwest (he was born in Bob Dylan's home town of Hibbing, Minnesota); Mills was a Georgia native and a self-described "goody-goody." "I hated him from the first time I saw him," Berry says with a laugh, "cause he had that same kind of nerd appeal that he has now, and I was just starting to experiment with drugs and stuff. He was everything I despised: great student, got along with teachers, didn't smoke cigarettes or smoke pot...."

But an unknowing mutual friend invited Berry to sit in with a band that included Mills. Berry wanted to storm out but couldn't because his drums were too heavy for effective storming, instead, he decided to endure Mills, and before long the two were best friends. Together, they moved to Athens to attend the university, where Berry wanted to study law and become a music-industry lawyer — and manager. They'd all but given up music by then — but heartened by the first wave of Seventies punk bands, they took instruments with them to Athens.

Before long they met Peter Buck and another Georgia student, Michael Stipe, who had met each other in the record store Buck managed. Both had spent their childhoods traveling extensively; army brat Stipe, the youngest R.E.M. member (now twenty-seven), developed a keen interest in painting, photography and medieval manuscripts, while Buck, the oldest at thirty, grew up spending all his free money on records (the Velvet Underground, the Move, the Raspberries, the Kinks) and books (Jack Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe).

"My parents were pleased that I was well read," Buck says. "But the fact that I was well read and also listened to Iggy and the Stooges was kinda, well, they ended up being supportive. Much later."