Birdie in the hand

Today is as good a day as any to take the tarp off of an ongoing project. I was lucky enough to live through REMs career, and here is the first of a series of essays about my life and how I lived it.

Here’s a trick. First, get in a bad mood. Feel that mood. Meet everything that comes upon you in that bad mood. Get right up to the edge of depression and refuse to listen to reason. Soon, the fog will overtake you and your mind starts to go. Answer me a question. You can’t itemize. You can’t think clearly.

OK. Are you in it? Are you feeling stuck, stupid, alone, angry and hopeless?

Put on Lifes Rich Pageant. Try staying in that mood. By the time the tambourine kicks in during the bridge of Begin the Begin, you’re done. Congratulate me.

All the people gathered...

I was 17 in the summer of 1986, an age that feels way too young and a little too old all at the same time. I used to spend a week each summer with my grandmother in Richmond, Virginia. She lived in the unfashionable area south of the James in a neighborhood that had steadily declined, and didn’t start at a high perch, since the 50s. This yearly ritual was a remnant of late childhood, and represented my first steps of independence out from under my parent’s roof. By the time I was 17, and able to drive, this yearly trip felt more like holding on to something from my past, a way to delay adulthood. When I started these yearly trips at about age 10, my grandmother’s indulgences felt special. In 1986, they still felt special, but with an undercurrent of my own restlessness and fear.

The 1986 Richmond trip fell on the same late July week at the release of REM’s 4th full-length album, the aforementioned soul-cleaner Lifes Rich Pageant, complete without the apostrophe in full Stipean idiosyncratic linguistic glory. This was the second album I consciously remember waiting for (the first being Seven and the Ragged Tiger), counting the days and weeks down in way that would soon become a familiar, and sometimes completely dominant, mode of relating to the world. I’m not necessarily proud of my musical obsessions, but they are an elemental part of me. And a big brick in that particular wall was built that hot week in Richmond in 1986.

So here I was, in the shitty part of Richmond during a hot summer in a house without central air, waiting. There were two record stores nearby that I knew about, and I began pestering them both on the Monday of that week. Naive, right? I mean, pretty much everyone knows that records come out on Tuesday, not Monday, right? Like I said above, I was way too young. I’m going to say the next part with some delicacy, especially given Richmond’s unique role in what is colloquially known as the War Between the States. Let’s just say that the record stores I found near my grandmother’s house south of the James River were not the, um, type that would be predisposed to carry a record by four such pale gentlemen who were yet to have their first major hit.

Surely, some of you are thinking about the Peaches that used to be across from Cloverleaf Mall. Of course, you’re right, and that’s where I eventually found it. On Wednesday. I know. To quote Mike Birbiglia, “I’m in the future, too.” What I cannot know is why it took me a whole extra day to access something that simple and obvious. Like I said above, I was way too young.

So I finally found myself a vinyl copy, which I opened and played post haste in the room down two stairs between the living room and the carport on the Fisher stereo that usually played Caruso and Humperdink records. What did it sound like in the summer of 1986? It sounded pretty much exactly how it sounds today. Like the least disappointing album ever made.

Look up “1-2 punch” in the dictionary. The third definition in my copy, right after Citizen Kane/The Magnificent Ambersons and Woodford on the rocks/proscioutto, reads Begin the Begin/These Days. Begin the Begin sounds like the first shots in the most beautiful battle ever, and serves as that soul sponge I started with. It also tops one of the best lists ever made, the list of Awesome Tambourine Parts That Make Your Heart Beat Faster. And these days kicks right in, ratcheting up the tempo and the optimism. At the show I saw at Smith Auditorium on the campus of the George Washington University later that summer, REM began with These Days and there was a screen behind them that I didn’t see until the fast film of a roller coaster cresting a hill illuminated and my head briefly exploded.

And then we get to Fall On Me, which is quite simply the most beautiful song in the REM catalog, not least because of Bill Berry’s indelible “it’s gonna fall”s in the right channel during the later choruses. There. Are. No. Words for that bridge, are there? “Ask the sky.” And then there’s Cuyahoga, which I’ve always liked better than anyone else’s national anthem, save maybe Canada’s. There’s some really lovely and subtle organ work in the verses here, but the whole effect is just sparkling, isn’t it? And let’s just say that on an album full of amazing bass and backing vocal work from Mike Mills, he’s on a summit here. Hyena, much like the similarly-placed-on-side-two’s Just A Touch, serves as a fun burst of noisy rock, mostly because the record just can’t keep ascending, right? There’s some nice, Murmur-ish piano on Hyena, and the chorus is just as dumb fun in its way as Louie Louie. (Underneath the Bunker is next, which is as much as need be said.)

(Now is as good as place as any to say the thing that everyone says about this album, but isn’t really that important to me. This is the first REM album to put vocals (not just Stipe’s, but everyone’s) front and center, in the traditional rock sonic space. While I think that it certainly helps this album to be as joyous and celebratory as it is, it’s not like it makes a bit of difference in understanding the lyrics. While “understandable” lyrics are pretty low on my personal totem pole, I would be be skeptical of anyone who says they like the words on any REM record above the rest of what’s going on. One of my favorite things about REM is how they subvert so many things about rock bands. While this is not quite as true today, back in the IRS days, REM presented themselves as a totally united front, minus the personality templates that had served the first three generations of rock bands. Even punk bands used the Almost Famous template of outsized lead singer/guitarist with mystery. Not REM. Everyone had mystery. Again, this is not true of their latter period, but Lifes Rich Pageant was the first time you could clearly hear the words, and they were neither great enough to stand on their own, or distractingly terrible. They are good enough to sing along to, and that’s pretty much the most important thing that good lyrics need to do.)

I used to list things like My Favorite Guitar solo, and Peter Buck’s work on The Flowers of Guatemala was neck-in-neck with George Harrison’s in the (the album version, NOT the single version of) Let It Be. But really, all of the guitar on this song is just amazing, from the arpeggio/feedback duet at the start all the way through. But it’s really that solo and it’s brief squeal of introductory noise during the bridge that continue to kill. Oh, and there’s another amazing chorus on an album bursting with amazing choruses. I Believe works wonderfully in the “let’s do These Days again with a banjo!” slot that almost every album would be improved by remembering to include. What If We Give It Away? is the closest this album ever gets to mediocrity, but it serves as a little breather before the wild ride of the end of the album.

Why REM chose to bookend one of the most beguiling songs in its catalog with one burst of punky original garage rock and a fun cover, I’ll never figure out. But there Swan Swan H sits. Look I don’t know where I’d put it either, and I’m very happy to have it, but it only works where it is by totally not fitting in. It’s kind of like a swan between two hummingbirds, but Stipe certainly performs its nonsense admirably. There is something vaguely Civil War-ish about it, but other than the reference to Johnny Reb, I couldn’t say why. And we’re at the end with some insane-sounding German string-pull doll falling right into REM’s most light-hearted moment on record to date. I knew that REM was no longer my own secret special thing when I heard the Drill Team practicing to this one after school as I made my way to the theater to rehearse Thorton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth. This made me mad and happy the way most girls did in high school, but who can deny Mikey Mills his moment in the lead singer spotlight? I’ve never heard the original, by the Clique, and I never need to.

So what does all of this mean? This is many people’s favorite REM record, and while it’s not mine, I can certainly understand why it is. It’s out there in front like no other record they’d ever made to that point, surely thanks to the wide-open sound they got in Don Gehman’s Indiana studio (a welcome change from Joe Boyd’s beautiful muddy London sound). As I said above, there are miles and miles of the most wonderful choruses you’ll ever hear. And yet there is something underneath, too. Both sides end with something vaguely German and sinister. What does Michael Stipe believe? Among other things that, “my throat hurts.” The record sounds too young to be 25 years old, and yet feels much older than anyone’s fourth album. Or 17th summer. The title is a bit of Stipean sarcasm, used whenever something went wrong in the studio. But none of it sounds like anything that’s gone wrong. To be more precise, it sounds like the putting right of things gone wrong. And that’s why it still works both as music, and as a floor-cleaner.