In the Real World

Athens was full of new rock & roll bands, from the B-52's to Pylon to the Method Actors. R.E.M. wasn't looking to be the next big thing; the four formed a band to have fun and play a few frat parties. They also moved in together, taking up residence in an abandoned church that, says Buck, "has been romanticized beyond belief. It was just a rotten, dumpy little shit hole where college kids, only college kids, could be convinced to live."

Their early shows were mostly covers: "Needles and Pins," "God Save the Queen," "Secret Agent Man," "California Sun." "We just tended to play everything loud and fast," says Mills. They made $343 at one of their first shows; Berry still remembers standing under the stage counting the money, which seemed like a fortune.

They began writing their own songs: "Gardening at Night" came very quickly, and "Radio Free Europe" followed shortly thereafter. And when they did their first out-of-town show in North Carolina, part-time booker Jefferson Holt was impressed. "They'll hate me for this," he says, "but to me the first time I saw them was like what I would have imagined of seeing the Who when they first started. They blitzkrieged through some incredibly pop covers, then they had some of their own songs that were real pop but also some stuff that wasn't pop."

Jefferson Holt soon became their manager. Another friend from Athens, a young lawyer named Bertis Downs IV, helped them handle the legal side of things: he persuaded them to incorporate, even though their only asset was a $1250 van, to form their own publishing company and to trademark the band's name — a precaution Downs says he took because two other R.E.M.'s, one REM and one Rapid Eye Movement had already come and gone. (Downs is still the band's lawyer.)

It wasn't long before gigs got in the way of classes, and Berry was asked to leave the university; the rest of the band decided to drop out, made an independent single ("Radio Free Europe"/"Sitting Still"), toured incessantly and began to pick up college airplay, critical raves and major-label interest. "The thing is," says Holt, laughing, "the great reviews and the Top Ten lists didn't change the fact that we were in a '75 Dodge Tradesman lugging all our gear ourselves and still showing up and playing to eight or nine people."

I.R.S signed the band and agreed to release the already-recorded EP Chronic Town, provided the band re-record "Radio Free Europe" and "Sitting Still" for their first full-fledged album. Chronic Town got some attention; the album, Murmur, was an instant college radio and underground rock classic.

Reckoning, in 1984, was more of the same — and suddenly it seemed as if the regional American rock scene was full of jangling, guitar-based bands that sounded like R.E.M. and toured like R.E.M. "I think maybe what we did," says Mills, "was give people a touchstone. As an alternative to the synthesizer-dominated electronic music that was being made, we were the most visible sign that something else was going on. It doesn't mean that we were the best, and we certainly weren't the first. But perhaps we were the most accessible and the most visible."

Visible and accessible and influential as they were, the members of the band went through one of their periodic dark spells when they went to London to record their third album, 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction. "A lot of things were catching up to us," says Mills. "We didn't realize we were going to be asked to do certain commercial kinds of things, and we thought, 'Is this what we really want to do?' It was, maybe, a crisis period, just an overall feeling of unease."

"Fables sucked," says Berry bluntly — though others in the band are somewhat happier with the moody, atmospheric record.

"It wasn't the best time in my life, either," says Fables producer Joe Boyd, who adds that despite R.E.M.'s inner turmoil at the time, "they seemed to get along better than most groups I've worked with." He also found mixing the record to be a singular experience. "When you mix a record, traditionally the singer wants his voice louder, and the guitar player says, 'Turn up the guitar,' and the bass player says, 'Can't you make the bass parts punchier?' With R.E.M., everyone wanted themselves turned down."

But the next time around, the band turned it up: Lifes Rich Pageant was clearly designed as a hard-edged response to Fables. By then, though, another complaint sometimes crept into R.E.M.'s once unanimously positive reviews: the idea that the band mapped out their musical territory on the early albums and wasn't changing it or challenging its audience.

"We're not so versatile that there's not going to be something in common in all our records," says Berry. "I think we've developed a little more now, to where we can get away with doing a 'King of Birds' on a record, and break it up a little bit. But that's still not going to stop 'Heron House' from sounding a little bit like 'Gardening at Night' slowed down. We try to diversify as much as possible, but a lot of our stuff does tend to sound the same. That's one of our weak points, I'll admit it."

And their strong points?

"I think we've kept our integrity intact pretty much," Berry says. "I'm not doing anything today that I'll be ashamed of in ten years. And we've all aged pretty well. I think we all weigh the same as we did. And we get along, which is pretty rare. I'm not saying we haven't had our flare-ups, but I've had more fights with my wife in the last two years than I have with any of these guys in the last seven years." He shrugs. "Amazingly, our chemistry hasn't broken down yet."

"Hi, my name is Michelle, and I'll be your waitress today."