Tag: R.E.M.

Thirty years ago today, R.E.M. released New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

I’ve listened to it twice today. I love this album so much. The songs are great, and I loved many of them at the time. I’ll vouch for Bittersweet Me any day of the week and twice on Sunday. One of many songs where Mike Mills conveys so much in a background vocal without saying a word.

But at this point in my life the album is a time machine, and its power comes in part from its ability to connect me to my 21-year-old self, to close my eyes and be back in my dorm room.

I can feel that terrifying and exhilarating combination of knowing my place in the world, and knowing that it would all go away in a couple of months. That the future was wide open, but I didn’t have the faintest clue what to do with it. (The number of career possibilities I cycled through that year must have exhausted everyone around me.)

No wonder I listened to Leave so many times.

1996 was the year Pattie and I got together. Our first official date as a couple was to go out for dinner, 30 years ago tonight, and stop by a record store to pick up New Adventures before returning to campus. I’ve told that story before, but heck, even that post was 15 years ago.

God, the band retired 15 years ago this month. So much time. So many memories. Isn’t amazing how music keeps the memories alive, and allows time to give them even more depth and meaning and perspective?

1996 isn’t in the running for the best year of my life. But it’s probably the winner in the “Years Before I Became a Dad” category. And when I mind-meld with that college senior sitting in the Bronx, I cry and I laugh because he has no idea – he’s barely brave enough to hope – that thirty years down the line, he’s going to have a daughter who trades R.E.M. references with him.

Such a long road since 1996. So many bumps and twists and turns and disappointments and triumphs. I doubt R.E.M. had any idea what was ahead of them. I know I didn’t know what was ahead of me.

But I’m so glad I’ve had this album along for the ride.

This story of R.E.M. begins in 1988. Sure, the band had formed in Athens, GA more than eight years earlier. Absolutely, by 1988 they had already helped to usher in the age of college rock, built a large fan base through years of near-constant touring, and even had a Top 40 hit with “The One I Love.” But in my grade-school years in Northeast Philadelphia, I missed all of that. So this story has to begin when R.E.M. left its independent label and signed with Warner Brothers Records.

If they hadn’t “sold out” I never could have bought in. And what a shame that would have been.

One winter morning, school was canceled because we were supposed to get snow. The snow never really came, so my mother took us out bowling instead. Car rides usually involved a protracted sequence of negotiations, because I usually wanted to listen to the Top 40 station and my mother’s tastes were more to the soft-rock side of the spectrum. She was willing to humor me on many occasions, and this was one of them. As we were driving, a somewhat goofy song started playing. It was catchy, and I thought it was a little absurd that the singer was telling me to stand in the place that I was. But I liked absurd things, so the song stuck in the corner of my mind. But that didn’t quite do it.

Some time later, I came upon a Time magazine review of the album with that song on it, an album called Green. The review led off with the fact that the last song on the album had no title, and the reviewer imagined that this could make for a somewhat difficult situation when fans would want to request the song at concerts. The phrase, “Hey, play ” stuck in my head, and I was once again impressed by the quirkiness of this band. I brought up this fact a year later when I saw a friend had the cassette, but that still didn’t do it for me.

In early 1991, I had carved out a little workspace in the family laundry room, with a desk, a computer, and a radio. I was still listening to Top 40 stations, although format changes meant that I wouldn’t necessarily stick with one for any length of time. One night the DJ announced a new song by R.E.M. and played “Losing My Religion.” That first time, even that didn’t do it for me. It took another few months, of hearing the song on the radio and hearing Green and Out of Time when I hung out with my friends. I got more and more into the music, and I finally borrowed both albums and brought them home.

My mother heard one of them – I’m not sure which – and commented that this was a point where her taste and mine diverged sharply. I don’t think she knew how right she was. This was my entry into a new world of music, music that combined melodies with layers of instruments and often-earnest lyrics to create a mood that could surround me and lift me up; a world that featured people that didn’t fit in everywhere but fit in somewhere and were OK with that. It was the perfect world and the perfect music for a teenage me, and R.E.M. was always at the front of it.

Continue reading “20 Years of R.E.M. Fandom – Part 1”