R.E.M.

“I think headphones are the trip on this record,” says Mike Mills in describing how best to listen to the extraordinary new R.E.M. album, Up. “It seems like that kind of record. More than any of our other ones, this could be a really good late-night, by-yourself, in-the-dark kind of record to listen to.”

“There isn’t a lot of the feel of four guys in a room playing straight through,” adds Peter Buck. “It’s got a more baroque, arranged sensibility.”

The main reason, of course, that Up lacks that feel of “four guys in a room playing” is that R.E.M. no longer has four members. When drummer Bill Berry abruptly left in the fall of 1997, just as the group was beginning to rehearse new songs for the album, Buck, Mills and singer Michael Stipe were stunned, completely thrown for a loop. They considered breaking up, according to Stipe, but just “for about three minutes.” Then they decided to make a virtue of adversity and go forward. There was still great work to be done. Or, as “Airport Man,” Up’s luminous opening track, puts it, “great opportunity awaits.”

“We had 40 or so songs that we’d been living with for six or eight months that Peter, Mike and I were really excited about working on,” Stipe says. “We want to continue making music. That’s what I love.”

Buck, characteristically, is even more emphatic on this point. “I was so excited about starting to work on the album that I couldn’t sleep the week beforehand,” he recalls. “And if I did sleep, I was dreaming about the songs and what the record was going to be like. So I was on a real upswing. Then Bill left, and that took the wind out of our sails. But, on a purely selfish level, I just felt, ‘We’ve got a great record inside of us right now. A lot of the work is done. A lot of the songs are written. We’ve got demos that are album quality. We’ll go ahead.’”

Of course, going ahead was not so simple, since “all our previous road maps were destroyed,” as Mills says. Losing a founding member of 18 years’ standing, who’s also a close friend, will do that. On the other hand, Berry’s departure was strangely liberating. As Mills puts it, “We were given this opportunity to totally do anything we wanted to.” And that’s exactly what they did. The band collaborated with a new co-producer, Pat McCarthy, who had engineered the two R.E.M. albums that immediately preceded Up, Monster (1994) and New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996). Mills, whose job description typically reads “bassist,” mostly played keyboards and guitar on the album. Buck played guitar as well, but he also played many of the bass parts.

Beck’s drummer Joey Waronker played on some tracks. Barrett Martin, the drummer with Screaming Trees and Buck’s bandmate in Tuatara, added an array of exotic percussion effects. And a panoply of old-fashioned rhythm machines and analog synthesizers from Buck’s private collection amiably gurgle, chug, blip, whoop and clack through the entire album. Stipe even plays guitar on two tracks, adding a screeching coda to “Why Not Smile” (“It was a little paean to ‘Radio Ethiopia,’” he says, smiling) and strumming through the brief sketch “I’m Not Over You.” Whatever you may think of it, it’s not the R.E.M. you thought you knew.

But reinventing itself wasn’t the only challenge facing the band on Up. “For me, the biggest pressure was to make a record that was as good as New Adventures in Hi-Fi, if not better,” says Stipe. “Up to this one, that was my favorite record in our entire catalogue. Lyrically and thematically, I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to go this time I knew I wanted to take off from songs like ‘Country Feedback,’ ‘E-bow the Letter,’ ‘New Test Leper’ and ‘Undertow.’ There were places that I went to in those songs, whether it was the loose, thematic style of writing or the subject matter, that I wanted to take off from to make this record.”

So what are the topics Stipe hoped to plumb on Up? “I was real excited about exploring the place where the two big bullies in the opposite corners, religion/spirituality and science/technology, come clashing together,” he says. “That was something I’d been thinking about a lot. That’s pretty evident in several of the songs the song ‘Hope’ is the most obvious place. And then the usual R.E.M. territory of identity and memory and dreams and where the real world and the fantastic world come together and overlap.

“At the same time, some of the stuff on this record is the most blatantly romantic I’ve ever been,” Stipe continues, “which I’m really proud of that I was able to pull that off and not be really sentimental and cheese-ball about it. ‘At My Most Beautiful’ is an example of that.”

R.E.M. will not be touring in support of Up . “It certainly doesn’t mean we’ll never tour again,” Mills hastens to add. “It has nothing to do with the future. Right now, it just didn’t feel like the right thing to do.” And the band does intend to perform in a variety of somewhat improvised contexts after the album’s release. “In the process of reinventing ourselves, we’ll be doing some things this fall,” Buck says. “We’ll be doing spontaneous performances. Or at least they’ll appear spontaneous we will have rehearsed! We’ll do some television things, some invitation-only shows. We’ll pop in and do eight songs somewhere. Odd stuff. We’ll go around the world doing that.”

And are they concerned about their fans’ reaction to the dramatic sonic departure that Up represents? “As far as what people will think when they hear it,” Mills says, “I guess it depends on how long you’ve been a fan of the band. If you came in on Murmur or Reckoning or any of those early albums, then you’ll know that we veer left and we veer right and that’s what you should expect. I think it’s good to show people that, whatever you expect from us, it’s probably not what you’re going to get.”

“I think it will surprise people,” Buck says of the album. “I’d love whoever gets this album to go, ‘My God, what were those guys thinking? I can’t believe this is R.E.M.’ I think it’s great to have been around as long as we have and to be throwing people such a curve. The people I’ve played this album for have been blown away by the fact that it doesn’t sound like us and it’s a really puzzling record. I like that. It’s very rich a wash of sound.”

Best of all, making the album only tightened the ties that bind one of the most significant and influential bands of the past two decades. “We’ve been through a lot of intense stuff,” Stipe says, “but ultimately it’s brought us closer than ever before. And not for the wrong reasons for all the right reasons. That, I can say, honestly really feels great.”

Anthony DeCurtis
New York City
Fall 1998