No. 1 With an Attitude

These days, there are R.E.M. fans who think "Stand" — or even "Losing My Religion" — is the first song the band ever wrote. "The people who listen to Top Forty are generally not R.E.M. record buyers — or they weren't until the last year or two," Mike Mills says. "It's kind of surprising to listen to the fourteen-year-old girls call up and go, 'How long have you been together? I like your first record.' And it's like 'No, no. See, the first record came out when you were about one year old.'"

It's ten o'clock on a Wednesday evening, and Peter Buck is sitting on his front porch, trying to make sense of all the above. His house, which is not far from the center of town, is a gorgeous, ornate old mansion. It is full of high-ceilinged rooms liberally strewn with books, records and folk art; it has a widow's walk despite the fact that Athens is hundreds of miles from the sea.

Upstairs, a friend of Buck's, the fine, left-leaning songwriter Billy Bragg, is doing some recording on an eight-track that has been set up in an empty bedroom. Mike Mills, who's scheduled to pitch in some backing vocals, is slumped in a chair in the living room. John Wesley Harding, a young British singer who's in town to play a show at the Georgia Theater, is perched atop a stool in the kitchen. Michael Stipe is up in the studio, lending his voice to a soldier's lament called "My Youngest Son Came Home Today."

As Buck talks, Stipe's and Bragg's voices drift down the massive, wooden staircase and through the screen door. Adding further to the mood, there's the fact that Buck's porch lights keep blinking on and off. The guitarist explains: Members of a local fraternity had been stealing things off his porch ("It must be because it's my house; I mean, you can't fence a plant") so he installed motion-sensitive lights. Now his cat trips them off regularly.

"It's sort of crazy here tonight," Buck says, sitting back in a white wicker chair. "But this is how I live."

Unlike Stipe, of whom one's first impressions are that he is a gentle, solicitous person, Buck seems filled with impatience and nervous energy. R.E.M. recently finished an exhausting promotional tour in Europe. For three weeks the band members hopped from city to city, making the press rounds and playing acoustic sets similar to the remarkably thoughtful performance they turned in on MTV Unplugged a few months back — a quiet, no-frills concert in which the band recast both old and new material.

On top of that, Buck and Mills just spent another couple of weeks doing interviews at radio stations here in the States. On top of that, the band has just learned that the "Losing My Religion" video has been banned in Ireland. Irish promoters were put off in part by what they perceived as the video's "crucifixion" imagery. (Stipe has made it clear the song is not about religion; if there's a crucifixion scene among the video's sixteenth-century tableaux, he says, he can't find it.) Likewise, the Irish weren't prepared for the video's homoeroticism — among the figures seen are an angelic, blond-haired black man and a shirtless, lipsticked young man who has been tied to a tree. ("I didn't think a lot about it," Stipe says of the flap. "If they can't handle it, they don't get to see the video.")

R.E.M. decided to forego a concert tour this year — the tireless, nine-month Green tour dealt a healthy blow to the band's wanderlust — but the lives of its members have not gotten any easier.

Buck bounces his knee incessantly now. He admits to being dead tired of talking about himself. And asked if he's concerned that R.E.M.'s chart-topping success might alienate some of the band's loyal followers, he says flatly, "The people that changed their minds because of 'Losing My Religion' can just kiss my ass."

In general, Buck seems to have a far less romantic view of R.E.M.'s past than many of the band's devotees. "Yeah, I guess I jangled for a while," Buck says. "I can write that kind of stuff in my sleep. I can write 'Driver 8' every day of the week. We all can. In rehearsal it's always easy to fall back on a mid-tempo, minor-key rock thing. And we try not to rely on that. We've got tons of that shit floating around. We'll do it just to get it out of our systems, record it and file it away.

"Every song we used to write in 1982 was really fast, and we'd tear it up," Buck continues. "For me, age brings — if not wisdom — at least a little understanding. I like to play slow songs now. I like to play quiet songs, and I really didn't when I was twenty-one. I don't think I've ever, in the last five years, played the electric guitar for fun. I mean, plugging in and all that. I usually play acoustic or mandolin. I really have no interest in going back to being a rock & roll band."