“The Name of This Band Is REM” recaptures the band’s pop artistry

What is REM? It depends on who you are.

Outside of U2, the quartet from Athens, Georgia, was the biggest rock band on the planet in the 1990s. But for those who followed its early career as the most popular indie rock band in the world in the 1990s, America in the 80s, REM’s popularity came as a sort of a culture shocktheir cult heroes now being broadcast in suburban malls and playing in rotation on classic rock radio stations. In the pre-streaming era, when the music landscape was dominated by major labels and a rearguard of small labels scattered across the country, REM’s move from independent IRS to Warner Bros. Records was seen as a betrayal by many who considered the quartet. as outliers in the music industry.

Peter Ames Carlin, author of the new biography “The Name of This Band Is REM,” is having none of that.

“More than any other group, REM symbolized this moment when college radio morphed into something more label-driven, and I understand fans felt betrayed,” Carlin said from the Seattle home that he shares with his partner, the writer Claire Dederer. “But for an artist to progress personally, they have to grow and change, and that’s what REM has done.”

“The Name of This Band Is REM” carefully traces the band’s remarkable trajectory, from kegger parties in the university town of Athens in the early ’80s to its global omnipresence and slow dissolution in 2011. The story unfolds divides perfectly into two distinct eras. The four band members met by chance in the late ’70s: guitarist Peter Buck met art student and singer Michael Stipe at a local record store where Buck worked, bonding over their love of the Monkees . Bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry grew up together in Macon, Georgia, where they played Southern boogie rock, and moved to Athens to attend the University of Georgia. Once they all connected, a scene began to form around an abandoned church in Athens where the group was living cheaply.

“A lot of my friends that I hung out with at the time had ties to REM going back to the ’80s,” Carlin says. “You’d see them playing in the pizzerias of Portland. They were hanging out with fans after the show; they were very accessible.

Original material began to emerge – songs both melodic and oblique, with arpeggiated guitar hooks and Stipe’s lyrics drifting and fuzzy. When the group’s 1981 single “Radio Free Europe” became a regional hit, Berry contacted Ian Copeland, a concert promoter he had worked with, who in turn contacted his brother Miles, owner of the upstart IRS label, who signed the group. .

Over the next five years, REM created and defined American indie rock. The band followed their debut EP with “Murmur,” a 1983 album of unprecedented melancholic mystery that became a model for the generation of guitar bands that followed. REM was now the critics’ darling; “Murmur” was embraced by college radio, becoming the most played album on stations to the left of the radio dial and winning virtually every critical poll for best album of the year. Each subsequent record was more successful than the last, as the group continually traveled the country for concerts. His fifth album, “Document,” sold over a million copies and featured REM’s first mainstream hit, “The One I Love.” REM no longer belonged to the cultists; it was everyone’s group now, even more so when he signed with Warner Bros. in 1988.

At a time when capitulating to the mainstream was considered selling out, REM’s move to a major label stung, as if the band had shed its loyalists for the teeming masses. But as Carlin points out in his book, group members never sacrificed creative autonomy for profit, and never conceded quality control to move units. Even as a young group, REM refused label advances and shared music publishing equally among the four members.

“I understand why someone who discovered the band early on saw them in small bars, heard ‘Murmur’ and internalized those early albums as the pinnacle of their sound,” Carlin says. “It was like they were speaking to you artistically. But an artist can’t be expected to stay in one place forever, lest they limit themselves as an artist.

The sound of REM has changed. Stipe now enunciated his lyrics, which morphed into social commentary, while the arrangements drew on a palette that included string sections, mandolins, and an increasing reliance on Mills’ textured keyboard parts. The group has also moved from clubs to sporting arenas. His music videos, until then so obscure in art schools that MTV barely aired them, were now big-budget fantasies with Stipe front and center, rippling like a Robert Longo painting come to life. The members of the band REM became ubiquitous MTV stars at a time when the music channel was a pop kingmaker.

As ’90s albums like “Out of Time” and “Automatic for the People” sold millions of copies, the band was embraced by a new audience who didn’t care about Athens’ 40 Watt Club , where REM had played so many times. early shows, or that producer Scott Litt had produced Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine,” which became a commercial jingle. And yet, the “before and after” of REM’s career has become for its die-hard fans a cautionary tale about a band gaining the world and losing its soul – an accusation Carlin considers to be entirely unfair and misguided. .

“Even when they were being broadcast on MTV as if they were the Beatles, they were still channeling what people were feeling and thinking in a strangely simple way,” the author explains. “There were a lot of social changes going on at that time, and their fans responded to the way REM addressed those issues in their music. In a sense, the more important they became, the more relevant they became. »

They definitely weren’t on cruise control. A close listen to REM’s albums from the ’90s reveals a band committed to experimentation. “They grew up and became better artists,” Carlin says. Granted, the “Shiny Happy People” earworm from “Out of Time” is awfully banal, but the album also contains spoken-word passages, brooding basslines, and a ghostly steel guitar drone. According to Carlin, the band didn’t have high expectations for 1992’s “Automatic for the People,” an album of mostly quiet, sad ballads that, along with “Out of Time,” remains its most popular album. When Berry implored the band to rock again, the group shifted gears and made 1994’s “Monster,” in which Buck ditches his arpeggios for power chords driven through a distortion pedal. It too sold vigorously and steadily.

With success comes greater scrutiny. The press hounded Stipe and the other band members about their private lives – Stipe’s sexual orientation became an obsession – which they always resolutely kept private. When Berry suffered a brain aneurysm and left the group, exhausted and artistically exhausted, in 1997, REM continued as a trio, but its sales declined, as did its zeitgeist buzz. The group ended it definitively in 2011but his music retains its power, as evidenced by the inclusion of “Oh My Heart” and “Strange Currencies” as source music for the beloved Hulu series “The Bear.”

“REM remains influential,” says Carlin. “Not just in terms of how they structured their careers, but also in terms of consistently creating the art that they wanted to create.”