R.E.M. Unplugged, 1991 & 2001 - Album review

The only act to have appeared on MTV’s Unplugged series twice, the now separated R.E.M. have bowed to pressure to release something, anything, by offering up Unplugged 1991 & 2001, The Complete Sessions to appease fans, 33 tracks across two CDs, ten of which – five from each show – were not included in the original broadcasts. Always a sucker for R.E.M., I’ve been listening to it for a week now and most pleasurable it has been too.

         In 1991 R.E.M. were at their most popular, with Out Of Time racking up the kind of sales they could only dream about when they played that first gig at a party in a disused church 34 years ago last April. Having toured their asses off for years, they were reaping the rewards, graduating from cult to mainstream and becoming slightly reluctant stadium fillers. To avoid overkill they decided not to tour to promote Out Of Time, not that it made any difference as it sold 18 million worldwide. This made the Unplugged appearance significant and, also, appropriate since unlike Green and Document, the albums that preceded it, Out Of Time contained a surfeit of acoustic music, at least by R.E.M.’s standards.

         So the first CD is damn near perfect, the only flaw being Mike Mills’ backing vocals on the lovely ‘Perfect Circle’ which veer alarmingly off pitch. He redeems himself on ‘Fall On Me’, which Stipe describes as his all-time favourite R.E.M. song, and offers up a charming ‘Love Is All Around’ with Stipe on ‘bop bop baa’ back-up. One of the things that most impressed me the first time I saw R.E.M. was their ability to swap instruments on stage and, although without the footage I’m not sure who’s playing what, I can detect an acoustic bass in there, an organ (probably Mills) and bongo drums (Bill Berry) and Peter Buck switching from mandolin to acoustic guitar. There are seven songs from Out Of Time (‘Half A World Away’, ‘Radio Song’, ‘Low’, ‘Losing My Religion’ [which sounds as near as dammit to the recorded version], ‘Endgame’ and ‘Belong’) and two that got away which became B-sides (‘Fretless’ and ‘Rotary Eleven’). ‘It’s The End Of The World…’ doesn’t really benefit from the acoustic treatment and neither does ‘Get Up’ from Green, though the closing ‘World Leader Pretend’ is sublime.

         The second disc, from 2001, comes from a period when R.E.M.’s stock was falling. Like most acts of a certain vintage they’d retained their immense popularity as a live attraction but were finding it difficult to sell new albums. Drummer Bill Berry had left and though the group was augmented on stage by three additional musicians it seemed to me that the quality of the songwriting was suffering. R.E.M. were one of those rare groups whose songs were always credited four ways, and whatever Berry’s contribution may have been, even if just a veto, his absence shows. They were promoting the Reveal album at this time and it is instructive to note that the five songs not broadcast all came from it, leaving us to assume that R.E.M. and the Unplugged folk preferred the oldies. I don’t blame them. ‘Electrolite’, ‘So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)’ and ‘Cuyahoga’ are all lovely, and so is ‘Find The River’, my favourite Automatic song, and there’s a lot to choose from. Although as obtuse as ever, Stipe seems to me to be singing about leaving somewhere, heading off on his travels, while his bandmates create a combination of pathos and fulfillment, sad to see him go but wishing him bon voyage as they wave him on his way. Beautiful backing vocals enshrine the song in an initial well of sadness that by the end of the song somehow seems to have moved from this dark tunnel into bright sunlight, like the night turning into day.

         Elsewhere on disc two, ‘At My Most Beautiful’ retains its Beach Boys aura and ‘Country Feedback’ incorporates several lines from ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ for which Dylan ought to have a sleeve credit but doesn’t. Indeed, if I was Dylan’s manager I’d be angling for a cut in the royalties.  

         Not in the same class as the live album recorded in Dublin then, but still a treat for us R.E.M. fans starved of something new(ish).  

R.E.M. - On The Road

This is an extract from Tony Fletcher’s R.E.M. biography Perfect Circle, which benefited from his long friendship with the group, especially guitarist Peter Buck. I’m envious of Tony. He saw all three of their shows on first visit to the UK in 1983 and at least once on every one of their five subsequent trips up to and including 1987.

         The book wasn’t ‘authorised’ in the sense that it was ‘official product’ or that R.E.M. profited from it, and the fact that they helped Tony without asking for anything in return endeared me to this group all the more. Actually that’s not strictly true. When a Japanese edition was published Peter Buck was so delighted he asked for several copies to send to his friends as Christmas presents. I was happy to oblige and I got a limited edition R.E.M. Christmas single in return.

         We’re in 1982, the Chronic Town EP and ‘Radio Free Europe’ are spreading the word but life on the road is far from a cakewalk.  

R.E.M.’s following grew steadily, but there was always a badly advertised or ill-arranged show to bring them back down to earth. In May 1982, living on the road to make the most of ‘Radio Free Europe’’s surprising success, they followed up a couple of prestigious New York dates with a midweek trip to Detroit on a night that the venue rarely even opened.

“There were five people there who happened to be driving by who were all on mescaline,” recalls Peter Buck. “They enjoyed the hell out of it, they all had a great time. They asked us for an encore, and we came back out and said, ‘Listen, this is ridiculous, there’s as many of us as there are of you. We’ll just take you to dinner.’ We made $300 that night, so we took them to this Greek restaurant.”

Such occasions did nothing to dampen R.E.M.’s collective spirit. “I remember playing at The Antenna Club in Memphis,” says Buck, “and we were playing really well. But there were only about eight people there, and two of them were this old wino man and woman, and they were dancing in front of us, like waltzing, and slobbering on each other, and groping. Some people would think that’s humiliating, but I thought ‘We’re playing really well; I don’t care if there’s old winos having a good time and six people at the bar.’ Even if you only had three people, those three people would be saying ‘God, they’re pretty good’.”

On signing to I.R.S., and with the backing of [booking agency] F.B.I., R.E.M. might have assumed those days were over. Their two most sublime shows were yet to occur.

Driving out to the west coast in August 1982 for that first month in California involved a 1,400-mile, week-long void between Austin and San Diego. With no ‘new wave Mondays’ or progressive pizza restaurants in this neck of the woods, F.B.I. could come up with just one date, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The band drove into town only to find they were opening for a Hot Legs contest.

“These professional strippers were coming and doing obscene dances,” says Peter Buck, whose memory of the club is a drunken audience a thousand strong chanting for ‘tits and ass’. The promoter looked at the oddly-dressed bunch of Athens ex-college boys, at his raucous crowd of cowboys, and back again.

If you go on before these naked women, he told the group, I’m worried that these guys are going to kill you. Better I pay you your $500 and you go on your way. A flabbergasted R.E.M. took the cash and hurried off on the next 700 miles of their journey before the promoter could change his mind.

More than a year later, with their début album causing a noticeable stir and a considerable following in much of America, F.B.I. booked them and Mitch Easter’s new group Let’s Active into an Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas. Michael Stipe’s sense of déjà vu as they drove up to a compound all too familiar from his childhood was enforced when they took the stage to face a sea of rednecks with crewcuts. The music that was winning them critical acclaim across America did not score points with the men of the USAF.

“There were oranges flying out of the audience,” recalls Peter Buck. “They were passing notes: ‘If you play one more song like this, you DIE, faggots!’”

“These guys would not get really violent, because they’d be arrested by the MPs,” said Michael Stipe a year later. “But they had this mock violence and mock threatening and that was more frustrating to me than just having them come up and smash our heads in.”

Not even the group’s repertoire of Rolling Stones songs could appease a crowd hungry for ZZ Top and Van Halen. Finally, Bill Berry stormed offstage, leaving Sara Romweber from Let’s Active to take his place and finish the show to thunderous booing.

“I remember Peter demanding the band break up over that, (because) it was so unprofessional,” recalls [record producer] Mitch Easter of Bill’s abrupt departure. “It was actually sort of funny. Everybody got mad with everybody, and everybody was gonna quit, and so and so wasn’t ever going to play in a band with so and so again. There were varying degrees of temper within the band. It takes a long time for it to sink in just why you have to put all of that aside.”

A night straight out of the celebrated rock ’n’ roll satire documentary This Is Spinal Tap, the events of Wichita Falls were matched only by the drive from New Jersey to Michigan for that ill attended Detroit show.

High up in the mountains of Pennsylvania in the still of night, Bill and Peter pull the van over at the Howard Johnsons to get coffee and relieve themselves. They ask if anyone needs anything, but are greeted by silence. Everyone is asleep.

Almost a full hour after resuming the long journey north, Mike Mills wakes up. He asks what happened to [manager] Jefferson [Hope]. Peter tells him he’s asleep in the back. Mike insists he’s not. Michael Stipe wakes up and confirms it: Jefferson is not there. Realisation sinks in. Their manager had got out at the service stop without telling anyone, and the group had driven off without him.

With Jefferson carrying the tour float, they must turn around. But on this winding mountain road with a fence running along the central reservation, there is nowhere to do so. It’s a further twenty miles before they find an exit, another hour and a half before they return to the Howard Johnsons. There, a despondent Jefferson Holt sits by the kerbside, waiting patiently. No one says a word as he gets back in and the group resume their journey, almost 200 miles and two and a half hours behind schedule.

Years later, travelling in luxury coaches with bunk beds. VCRs and stereos, to towns where their equipment would already be set up and five-star hotel bookings under individual pseudonyms had been pre-paid, where the shows were already sold out and the strippers were confined to the local go-go bars, they would look back on those days in the faithful Dodge van, on the sleepless nights, the endless drinking, the disasters, the triumphs and the pocket-sized crowds they knew by name, and think, We wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

R.E.M. - In My Eyes

No new band gave me greater pleasure in the eighties than R.E.M.. I went to see them a couple of times (and was utterly charmed when they all swapped instruments for one song) but I was quite late discovering them really. It was my Omnibus colleague Andy King who turned me on to them around the time of their fourth album in 1986. He’d been banging on about them at work and very kindly made me a cassette of Murmur which sat around my flat for a week or two until I got around to listening to it one Saturday night when I’d got back from the pub and skinned one up, on my own and in the mood for some music I’d never heard before, loud through cans, before I called it a night.

          Mmmm, what have I been missing, I remember thinking, as ‘Radio Free Europe’ and ‘Pilgrimage’ filled my head. When ‘Perfect Circle’ came on I realised that Andy was right. One of the things I came to learn about R.E.M., something that either fascinated or annoyed in equal measure, was that you never knew what Michael Stipe was singing about, not until much later in their career anyway. It wasn’t that his voice was low in the mix (like Mick Jagger on most Stones’ records) but his words were oblique, ethereal, strung together like tone poems, and not designed to convey a message or tell a story but simply to sound pleasing to the ear regardless of whether they made any sense or not. “Put your hair back, we get to leave/Eleven gallows on your sleeve… Standing too soon, shoulders high in the room.” Don’t ask me what he’s on about but it doesn’t matter a jot because these meaningless words float above such a gorgeous melody that R.E.M. seemed to me to have invented a kind of music wherein the vocals were simply part of the instrumental wash, projecting a strange, haunting quality that was shrouded in a blanket of deep harmony.

          Back in the flat I was nicely mellow by the time ‘Shaking Through’ came on and it was at the moment towards the end when Michael Stipe sings the words “in my eyes” and repeats them as the vocals all fold together in a deluge of harmony that I really got it. I got R.E.M. for the first time and it was a great moment. I stopped the tape, rewound it and listened to that 30 seconds again. It was like being immersed in a warm bath. (Lyrics on the internet, unavailable when I first heard it, state Stipe is singing “In my life” here, but I don’t think it matters what he sings. With R.E.M. it’s what you hear that counts.)

          The next week I bought all R.E.M.’s CDs up to that point, the first four albums, and the Chronic Town EP, and of course they sounded much superior to Andy’s cassette. To digress for a moment… this was around the time that the record industry was making a big fuss about home taping, but the fact is that it was thanks to a ‘home tape’ that I discovered R.E.M. and went out and spent £50 or so on their official recordings which I might not have done otherwise. Before long, because no ‘best of R.E.M.’ album had been released, I made up my own cassette of R.E.M. favourites to play on my Walkman and in cars and, like Andy, banged on about them to everyone I met, and even gave cassettes away. Maybe they did for others what Andy’s cassette did for me. Either way, I went on to buy every single CD they ever released, and they’re all on my iPod, some 274 songs now. And it all began with a home tape.

          Like many others I was seduced by Out Of Time and Automatic For The People, at which point they became huge. There’s so much R.E.M. to choose from now that I find it hard to pick later favourites but ‘Nightswimming’ always gets to me, as does ‘Find The River’, which closed Automatic. Although the lyrics on albums from Green onwards tended to be easier to interpret, it’s never straightforward to decode what Michael Stipe is singing about but, as always, the melody on their slower songs sucks you in so that it doesn’t matter, and on ‘Find The River’ it seems to me that Michael is singing about leaving somewhere, heading off on his travels, while his bandmates create a combination of pathos and fulfillment, sad to see him go but wishing him bon voyage as they wave him on his way. Beautiful backing vocals enshrine the song in an initial well of sadness that by the end of the song has somehow moved from a dark tunnel into bright sunlight, like the night turning into day.

          Somehow I wasn’t all that surprised when R.E.M. called it a day. They’d always seemed to me to have integrity to spare and in this regard were never the kind of band that would hang in for the money, which they didn’t need anyway. Like others I was frustrated by some stuff after … Hi-Fi, though I think they ended on a high with the live album recorded in Dublin, Accelerate and Collapse Into Now.

          But whatever else, my love for this great band really goes back to hearing Murmur for the first time on Andy’s home tape that Saturday night in Hammersmith, lying back on my couch at around 1am, listening to ‘Perfect Circle’ and ‘Shaking Through’… “Yellow like a geisha gown… In my eyes”.

          Tomorrow I’ll post an extract from Tony Fletcher’s R.E.M. biography Perfect Circle, originally published as REMarks in 1989, and subsequently updated several times until retitled Perfect Circle in 2013, this final edition covering the dissolution of the group in September 2011.