In the Real World

Michael Stipe looks up at the perky Ramada Inn waitress standing above him and grins shyly. "I'm Michael, and I'll be your..." His soft, deep voice trails off "Um...your customer, I guess."

Stipe, certainly, is R.E.M.'s resident oddball, a shambling, simultaneously intense and spacey conversationalist who's apt to interrupt the talk by pulling a couple of pressed leaves out of his pocket or by pointing at an interviewer's hand and saying, "You've got hair on the side of your hand, too." Some of the behavior is clearly due to what Peter Buck calls Stipe's "very weird sense of humor, which is actually two senses of humor. One is very Laurel and Hardy — we can watch Animal House, and he'll laugh at the stuff where I'll think, 'He can't possibly like that.' And then there's the other part of him, where I can barely tell that he's saying something funny, and people around him can't tell at all."

Some of the eccentricities may be inherited. Stipe says his father has been hoarding bottles in his basement for years. "Now he's decided to build this extension onto my parents' house, made out of bottles," says Stipe. "And he's a math wizard. He and I had this discussion about Vietnam, and he went on for two and a half hours explaining a lot of his ideas about it, and about the draft, and about America and American foreign policy, and somehow it wound up working into rock & roll and how I fit into it."

During the discussion Stipe's father covered a sheet of paper with words and mathematical equations. The result, Stipe says, looked like it belonged in the Swiss museum that collects outsiders' art — the work of mental patients convicts and others on the fringes of society. "It's really beautiful," says Stipe affectionately.

And some of the eccentricities seem to be the purposeful designs of a shy person who wants to keep the world at arm's length. "Michael is normal as hell, and as different as anybody you'd want to meet," says Jefferson Holt, who lived with Stipe briefly. "It's an act of will by which he creates his life and the space in which he lives."

But if Stipe is the band's shyest, most private member, he's also the one most often besieged by R.E.M. fanatics. "I think a lot of people get presumptuous, think they're soul mates, think Michael is speaking directly to them," says Mike Mills. "I mean, that's the point of some of his lyrics: to get to someone's insides. But that doesn't mean he wants them to come over to his house, you know?"

When the subject is broached, Stipe grows visibly uncomfortable. "Athens is full of people looking for R.E.M.," he says, shaking his head. "Not all the time, but..." He trails off. "I don't really want to talk about that because I'm still a little bitter about it."

Still, Stipe says he's learning out how to deal with the attention. "Not to be Cartesian," he says, "but, you know, I feel fairly well protected now from people coming up to me and wanting a piece of me. I'm able to dole out what I want, you know. Whereas before I was a lot more accessible for people to reach in and pull out vital organs."

So Stipe stays in more-protected situations, a large, muscular personal aide stands beside him at backstage gatherings, and he rides from show to show in his own bus (accompanied, on the first leg of the tour, by 10,000 Maniacs singer Natalie Merchant, whom he joined onstage every night during the Maniacs' opening set), separate from the rest of the band. The separate buses, says the band, weren't planned — but Stipe, who eats health foods and can't stand to be anywhere where the windows won't open, couldn't tolerate the sealed windows in the band bus.

"I used to really hate touring," says Stipe. "But it's gotten easier for me. It's not that I've relaxed more, it's just that the rest of the world has relaxed a little bit, so it's easier for me to walk the streets and stuff. To find food and find water. And find windows that open occasionally."

But the separate buses also reinforce Stipe's separation from the rest of the band, a separation that already existed to some degree. "There is a difference, and it's always been there," says Bill Berry. "There's no doubt that he's an eccentric individual, that that's the way it should be. He is who he is, and R.E.M. is who they are because of who's in it."

Stipe concedes that there are differences between himself and the musicians in the band for one thing, he prepares for a show by getting quiet and withdrawn, which means the hyperactive Buck has standing orders to stay away for a couple of hours before each concert. Still, Stipe says, "we share so much more in common than most people would ever give us credit for. We're very much a group."

Stipe glances across the room, then shakes his head. "I'm watching TV in a mirror," he says. "I just realized that. I've been focusing in on this, thing, and it's a television set in a mirror." He grimaces. "Nothing really upsets me more, on a really regular basis, than television. And the whole culture that's built up around it is horrifying. The fact that I can sit here and talk to you, and there's a TV in the corner, and I'm attracted to it...The best comparison I can make is moths to a light."