Can the New R.E.M. Tribute Take You Home?

originally published May 30, 2007

If you live in, say, California, and you mention to people that you went to school in Athens, their first response almost always involves R.E.M. - usually a variation on "So did you ever run into Michael Stipe?" (Yes, one time he was ahead of me in line at Blue Sky.) Some people will throw out a "Go Dawgs"; the hipper folks might bring up Neutral Milk Hotel. But, nine times out of ten, R.E.M. and Athens are synonymous in the public consciousness.

The same is also true for the personal consciousness of those of us whose formative years were defined by both the band and the town, even if the periods of rabid R.E.M. fanaticism (in my case, 1993–1998) and Athens residence (1997–2001) only intersected briefly. To a teenager growing up in small-town Georgia and listening to R.E.M., Athens attained an almost mystical significance as the source of all that potent magic, the crucible in which R.E.M. was forged.

Much has been made of the mystery of early R.E.M. - the cryptic lyrics, the mumbled vocals, the album art and videos designed to obscure rather than illuminate - but there was also a sense that this particular mystery could be solved: Athens wasn't Shangri-La. It was (and still is, last time I checked) a real place. R.E.M. comprised four guys who still hung out in Athens. Hell, my dad had even met them, at Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens in the early '80s. They were practically old family friends! (Not really, but oh, how I wished it were so.) And all you had to do to solve the mystery for yourself was to go to Athens.

What Athens had, and has, that seemed magical to my young mind was "A Scene." My hometown didn't have a scene, unless the Friday-night cruising route from the Piggly Wiggly to the K-mart counted. But Athens had a whole community of musicians and artists who inspired and were inspired by R.E.M., the fulcrum around which the whole town revolved (as young impressionable me thought). The word "scene" carries with it all sorts of negative connotations, many of them true, but at its purest level, it means simply a community of like-minded people, and community was one of the great selling points of R.E.M. for weird-but-not-too-weird young people in the past two decades.

Figure out what Stipe was mumbling about, and you were initiated into the club. Take a trip to Athens and you could maybe even touch the edges of something you had previously only dreamed about.

Performance Homage

On Sept. 12 of last year, the latest luminaries of that Athens scene gathered at the 40 Watt Club to pay tribute to the band. The occasion was the release of And I Feel Fine…, a best-of-the-IRS-years collection, and R.E.M.'s induction into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame a few days later. That concert is now preserved on disc as Finest Worksongs: Athens Bands Play the Music of R.E.M. - released nationally this week on Iron Horse Records - and for those of us who couldn't be at the 40 Watt that night, it's both a jealousy-inducing celebration of R.E.M.'s legacy, and a sobering reminder that simply going to school in a town for four years does not make one part of a scene.

The album kicks off with Liz Durrett's rendition of "The One I Love," recorded a few months after the 40 Watt show at the EARL in Atlanta (she was sick on Sept. 12), and it's one of the highlights. "The One I Love" is one of the great rock songs of the last 25 years, and its relatively simple structure and sharp lyrical misdirection ("This one goes out to the one I love / A simple prop to occupy my time") can stand up to any kind of reinterpretation. Here, Durrett slows the song down a bit, loses the arena-ready drums, and replaces the jangle with languid but prickly electric guitar. This places most of the focus on her voice, and, as a result, the lyrical disparity becomes even more apparent. The weary cynicism takes control - no one's going to mistake this version for an actual love song - but there's now an element of regret and loss that is largely absent from the original. (You could argue that slowing down and softening up an '80s pop hit is one of the oldest indie-rock tricks in the book - cf. Ben Gibbard's version of Michael Jackson's "Thriller," or Sufjan Stevens' own very similar take on "The One I Love" - but when it works this well, it's pointless to quibble.)

Claire Campbell of Hope For Agoldensummer starts the 40 Watt show proper with a vocal-and-banjo take on "Wendell Gee" that sounds, with its haltingly plucked melody and finger-tapped percussion, as if it were being improvised on the spot, rescuing the song somewhat from its status as one of R.E.M.'s slightest ("'Wendell Gee' is corny and saccharine to such a degree that it's actually somewhat surprising that it's actually an R.E.M. original,' writes Matthew Perpetua on his essential R.E.M. blog Pop Songs 07 [http://popsongs.wordpress.com]).

Tin Cup Prophette follows that up with a faithful take on "Leave," one of only three songs on the album to postdate Document. Then Modern Skirts ("Perfect Circle") and Bain Mattox ("Finest Worksong," "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville," "Fall on Me") tear through four of R.E.M.'s best songs with bar-band energy and devotion, only adding a few minor flourishes - accordion on "Finest Worksong," a slower tempo for "Fall on Me." The performances are respectful and enthusiastic, but the songs overpower the performers. With Durrett and Campbell, there was the sense of a new personality shaping the song; here the effect is more of an honest attempt to mimic one's heroes.

A confession: I am unfamiliar with the original work of Modern Skirts and Mattox, but if I had to make a guess based on their performances on Finest Worksongs, I would say that they are probably more directly influenced by R.E.M. than the other artists on the album, and so their faithfulness to the originals is more of a result of that influence being made explicit than of slavish imitation.

Twisting Influences

But R.E.M.'s influence is wide-ranging, which is one reason said influence often goes unnoticed. Echoes of the group's work can be heard in everyone from Billy Joel to Nirvana to Franz Ferdinand, and though critics tend to focus on the less-cool progeny (Hootie & the Blowfish?), the drum/ bass interplay on early R.E.M. records is now the sound of a million British teenagers. R.E.M. has never been merely Byrdsy jangle-rock, and the range of its influence can be heard distinctly on the twin centerpieces of Finest Worksongs: the performances of The Observatory and Patterson Hood. The Observatory is a 13-person collective made up of members of Olivia Tremor Control and a whole crowd of other Elephant 6ers, and they turn "Underneath the Bunker," "Pilgrimage" and "Feeling Gravity's Pull" into circus-band freakouts, all horns and cellos and xylophones. The noise-pop experiments of the Elephant 6 bands can sometimes seem like a repudiation of the more traditional style of R.E.M., but there's no doubt that they took more from R.E.M. than just a hometown.

Underneath the spiky layers of candied noise, Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel songs are just as pure pop as R.E.M.'s, and Stipe's oblique lyrics and rusted imagery are obvious touchstones ("Swan Swan H" is practically a great lost Neutral Milk Hotel song). And R.E.M. was never that traditional to begin with; "Feeling Gravity's Pull" is such an appropriate cover because that song's shifting sonic textures presaged what the E6 bands would do 10 years later.

As noted above, R.E.M.'s mystique was always part arty-farty hoodoo and part old-fashioned Southern charm. Just as The Observatory explores the former, Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers brings the second element to light on his four songs (and one story). In his hands, the snarling b-side "Burning Hell" becomes dirty Southern-fried punk, but the real revelation is that it's not that different from the original - R.E.M. always had the ability to go for the throat like that, just as the band always had the experimental side that would produce a "Feeling Gravity's Pull," and it always had the side that could turn out effortlessly beautiful, socially relevant pop songs like "Fall on Me," which is the only side that many casual listeners and critics seem to remember these days.

Thankless Work

The past year has been kind of an honorary-Oscar one for R.E.M., with the release of And I Feel Fine… and the inductions into both the Georgia Music and Rock And Roll Halls of Fame, and this has prompted a lot of soul-searching and breast-beating from those casual listeners and critics. A few representative quotes from a piece by Steve Hyden on The Onion's AV Club blog [www.avclub.com/content/blog/r_e_m_s_incredible_shrinking]: "Like a lot of rock fans, I haven't cared about R.E.M. for many years now." "So they are first ballot Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame inductees - does anyone really put them up there with the greats? Do they have a single song that ranks among rock's most essential?" "Is it possible this band (gasp!) was never that good to begin with? I once would have shuddered at the thought, but now I'm left with no other conclusion." "As the spiritual godfathers of odious Hootie/ Matchbox 'regular guys in a rock band' shtick, R.E.M. is a profoundly boring band."

While a lot of that sounds like the kind of reactionary adolescent whining that you'd expect from, say, a 16-year-old upset because she saw her boyfriend making out with the quarterback, and not an adult music critic who didn't like a couple of albums, I think it's reflective of the views of a lot of former R.E.M. fans - it's the "what have you done for me lately?" approach. To paraphrase Kurt Cobain's favorite Neil Young lyric, R.E.M. chose to fade away instead of burn out. But an album and a half of less-than-great material (most of Around the Sun and part of Reveal) doesn't mean a band is in a downward spiral, nor does it negate the previous 20 years of greatness. If anything, this kind of vehement "I threw all their records away and now I hate them" rhetoric is an indicator that there was something great and personal - it's a breakup letter, not criticism. And as for R.E.M. not having an essential rock song, well, people are going to be fucking up the lyrics to "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" until it really is the end of the world.

Family Time

Five Eight closes out the show with a four-song set, including "Fiver 8," a version of "Driver 8" with lyrics about Five Eight's trip to California to open for R.E.M. at a few shows, and a group sing-along to "It's the End of the World" that brings everybody back onstage, including Stipe, Mike Mills and Pete Buck. As a couple dozen people stumble through the song Tommy Boy-style, the limitations of this album become evident - no matter how much you enjoy listening to it, the people onstage were having way more fun than you. Like Athens, and maybe even R.E.M. itself, you kind of had to be there.

I no longer live in Athens, and though I still love R.E.M.'s music, I no longer obsess over it the way I used to. Hearing an R.E.M. song on the radio or on iTunes shuffle is like receiving a letter from an old friend still in Athens. It is something familiar and cherished, something that reminds you of earlier, simpler - maybe even better - times, but which can still surprise you with a suddenly revelatory phrase, an instrument hidden in the mix that now sings out clear, or an unexpected emotion that seems obvious in hindsight.

Near the end of the "It's the End of the World" sing-along, Michael Stipe takes over and his voice cuts through the clatter, and all of a sudden he's speaking directly to you again, and you're back where you want to be once more.

Gardner Linn

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column. Interested in contributing a piece? Contact music editor Chris Hassiotis at music@flagpole.com.