CRITICAL MASS

Is R.E.M. still important as rock 'n' roll?

Album cover for R.E.M.’s "Automatic for the People"
Album cover for R.E.M.’s "Automatic for the People"

"Just for the sake of provocation ... let's say this: If R.E.M. isn't the most important rock 'n' roll band this country has produced, it is at least the most consistently interesting and serious rock 'n' roll band this country has produced since the Velvet Underground. Adults can listen to R.E.M. without feeling embarrassed or making excuses. The music they make is emotionally complex and open-ended, artfully indirect and intellectually rich. While people who write about rock 'n' roll are always slipping into hyperbole and cant in an effort to make what is basically meaningless mean something, R.E.M. is the rare rock 'n' roll band genuinely worth thinking about."

I wrote those sentences a little over 21 years ago and, weirdly enough, I stand by it. R.E.M. probably isn't the best rock 'n' roll band this country has ever produced and they certainly aren't the most popular, but you can make the case that they embodied the spirit of the cultural practice for 31 years. And they were a band, not a vehicle for an individual sensibility. When I think of Wilco, fair or not, I think of it as a kind of augmentation of Jeff Tweedy. The Heartbreakers were more than Tom Petty's backing group, but his was the guiding intelligence. The Eagles were a league of singer-songwriters begrudgingly helping one another out. The Replacements were a mess; they flew apart just as they were beginning to cohere.

Maybe you can make a case for other bands -- Creedence Clearwater Revival? Aerosmith? Somebody say NRBQ? Little Feat? Maybe. But by my criteria, R.E.M. looks like a good choice.

Yet the whole idea of an "important" rock band seems a little wobbly. It wasn't supposed to be like this; there was a time when the idea of a rock 'n' roll career would have been received as absurd, as oxymoronic. It was just hype, glory and nihilistic noise-making.

Rock 'n' roll was only made possible by a post-war boom in America that created a marketing demographic known as teenagers, who had a surfeit of leisure time and a little spending money. (In England, it came from kids who grew up playing in the rubble of bombed-out cities.) It was a fad that got out of hand. Paul Westerberg once said it all got easier when he realized it was more about the shirt and shoes he wore onstage than the simple music (if you could call it music) he played.

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To really live out the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, you had to tie it off early, follow Rimbaud into Ethiopia. Maybe you didn't have to go the full Buddy Holly route, but you had to get out while you were still young, leaving behind a couple of records and an indelible image. It's better to burn out than fade away.

Even before the mythology of the 27 Club was established by the deaths of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, rock 'n' rollers didn't expect lengthy careers. For all the "rock 'n' roll will never die" rhetoric, most of them probably believed they'd eventually have to grow up and get a real job.

Most did. Dale Hawkins went to work for Nestle, Jerry Allison of the Crickets joined the Air Force and Elvis Presley fretted that his success might not last more than a few years. If you take that sad tour at Graceland, you can see footage of the young Elvis promising a reporter that he'll hang on to the property for "as long as I can."

The young King had no faith in rock 'n' roll's durability, so he set his sights on becoming a movie star, dyeing his hair black because he thought that movie stars with black hair lasted longer and eventually turned to cabaret music. That he still managed to die young is just a trick of perspective.

Somehow that changed. Rock 'n' roll got professionalized. It grew up into a weird amalgamation of show business and art. You can blame some of that on Bob Dylan; some of that on the Beatles, who had nearly a full nine years at the top of the charts and have never receded from the public consciousness. Or like Kris Kristofferson, you can blame it on the Rolling Stones, whose 1981 compilation album Sucking in the Seventies seems presciently titled today.

Maybe it's because the guys in R.E.M. are roughly my contemporaries that I feel such an affinity for them; there have been times when I would have sworn they were my favorite American band. Officially, they lasted 31 years, from 1980 until 2011. But like a lot of their fans, I consider their records after drummer Bill Berry collapsed on tour (brain tumor) and left the band in 1997 differently, as a long coda. As many good things as there are to say about Up (1998), the poppy headphone album they released in the wake of Berry's departure, and 2001's Reveal's moments of genuine golden loveliness, I found myself paying scant attention to each subsequent new release.

R.E.M. mattered greatly between 1983 (after the release of Murmur, I rooted around for a couple of years before I was able to score a copy of the 1981 Chronic Town EP) and 1996 when New Adventures in Hi-Fi (which I've come to regard as my favorite) jumped out of my speakers with a visceral punch that compared to the Stones' Exile on Main Street. It's shocking to realize that it has been 20 years since R.E.M. felt urgent.

That has more to do with me than them. I don't get excited about records anymore, in part because records as I knew them have ceased to exist. As the business model has changed (it has reverted back to the way things were before Dylan and the Beatles made pop music a respectable calling for adults who wanted to critique the world), the way those of us who grew up thinking of albums as potentially durable statements of artistic intent has changed as well. Most of us have retreated into the music of our youth, even if we avail ourselves of up-to-date streaming services.

There's still great music out there and there was plenty of cruddy stuff in the olden days. A band like R.E.M. was never built for an age in which pop music is treated as a disposable utility, as something that you can get out of a tap without caring or wondering too much about its provenance. They hyped their mystery, they had a story, they invented myths and legends about themselves. (I remember reading that Michael Stipe, their lead singer, lived in a house without electricity, without a refrigerator and recorded most of his vocals while lying down; some of that may be true.)

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So I'm susceptible to products like the 25th anniversary edition of R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People (Craft/Concord), a record that took its title from the slogan of an Athens, Ga., soul food restaurant -- Weaver D's Delicious Fine Foods -- the band frequented. (The photograph of the star ornament on the cover, taken by Stipe, was part of a motel sign near the Miami studio where the band recorded most of the album.)

As is the custom, this new edition is augmented by extras and is available in different configurations ranging in price from $28 to $500; the four-disc version ($74.99) includes the original album, a show recorded live at Athens' 40 Watt Club, and 20 previously unheard demos including the long-rumored never-heard "Devil Rides Backwards." A Blu-ray disc contains Automatic in high-res audio and remastered in Dolby ATMOS, a new surround-sound technology, and the album's seven promotional videos, including a never-released R-rated version of the impressionistic "Nightswimming."

Until the last couple of years, when our cars lost their CD players and we began to rely on iPod playlists and satellite radio for our traveling music, the disc was a mainstay in the road rotation. Now, individual songs -- "Nightswimming," 'Everybody Hurts," "Ignoreland," etc. -- tend to come to us out of context, loosed from the album's mindful sequencing. Something is lost in that, and it's good to get them back together in order, to hear the band regain its cadence, to ride the flow of the 48-minute experience of the original product.

Automatic for the People favors the sonic over the verbal, with Stipe's characteristically elliptical lyrics more understandable than on their early records, but hardly more parsable. Mostly midtempo, it runs toward solemnity, relieved a bit in the midtempo Andy Kaufman tribute "Man on the Moon," the goofy carnality of "Star Me Kitten" and the angry political jeremiad "Ignoreland." (Which includes the self-aware lyric: I know that this is vitriol/No solution, spleen-venting/But I feel better having screamed, don't you?)

Hearing it together again, it sounds like an album made by young men coming into full adulthood, attaining their 30s and understanding their limitations while acknowledging the great fortune that allowed them their position. It's a grown-up album about mortality and suicide, and the then-current rumors that Stipe was dying (of AIDS, of cancer). While obviously wrong, the rumors lent the album additional ballast. It felt like an anomaly at the time as it ran counterpoint to the power chord-driven sturm und drang of the ascendant grunge movement. There was a delicacy and statesman-like sobriety to Automatic for the People.

From the opening track "Drive," where the then-32-year-old Stipe goofs on David Essex, singing "Hey, kids, rock-and-roll, nobody tells you where to go," in a sort of interpolation of "Rock On," it's clear the band members understand they aren't the kids they're addressing anymore. It's the quandary faced by every rocker -- every one of us -- who doesn't die before they get old.

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photo

Michael Stipe of R.E.M., in 1999 concert

Style on 11/26/2017

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