Photo credit:Courtesy
of Warner Music

 

By David Peisner

Michael Stipe had fairly modest ambitions when R.E.M. first formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980. "We just wanted to play in clubs," he remembers. "We never even intended to make records."

It's somehow fitting that a band with such an initially non-careerist bent would eventually become the benchmark against which other bands would measure their careers. R.E.M.'s slow growth from an early-'80s cult phenomenon to its mid-'90s run as the biggest band in the world is held up as rock and roll's gold standard of artistic and commercial development. It's also increasingly an anomaly in an industry obsessed with breakout hits, first-week sales and chasing trends.

Stipe, the son of a military man, grew up on army bases around the U.S. and Europe before moving to Athens in the late '70s to study art at the University of Georgia. There, he met budding guitarist Peter Buck, who was a clerk at Stipe's favorite record store. The two bonded over a love of early punk and were soon playing cover songs around town with bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry under the gloriously stupid moniker Twisted Kites. Soon rechristened R.E.M., the band began writing songs that melded the Byrds's jangly, psychedelic folk rock with darker, artier impulses rooted not only in punk but also in the surreal lyricism of Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and William H. Burroughs.

Their murky but quite catchy debut single, "Radio Free Europe," resonated out of college radio transmitters wrapped in Buck's ringing guitar and transported by Stipe's otherworldly mumblings. Subsequent recordings built on this combination and were spread by rabid word-of-mouth raves, tireless touring and through the then-nascent medium of college radio.

The band's first five independently released albums, starting with 1983's Murmur up through 1987's Document, gradually broadened R.E.M.'s appeal without sacrificing the twitchy energy of its first single. After scoring a Top 10 hit with "The One I Love," the band was snatched up by Warner Bros. with a then-obscene multimillion dollar contract. It proved money well spent after the band delivered a pair of multiplatinum records in the early '90s -- the eclectic Out Of Time and the near-flawless Automatic For The People. Their 1994 effort, Monster, was a deliberately back-to-basics rock record that mostly worked, and 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi was a moody travelogue that mostly didn't.

The latter record heralded a troubling time for R.E.M.: Drummer Bill Berry retired in 1997 to work on his farm in rural Georgia, leaving the once unbreakable quartet as a trio. The music since his departure has become a bit more experimental, and the resulting albums have met with a mixed response. The band's 13th album, Around The Sun, sometimes feels like an attempt to address that issue: Its sound hearkens back to Automatic For The People, and while the pace is a little sluggish, some of the songs simmer with political disaffection and bite pretty hard.

R.E.M.'s wiry frontman has long been outspoken, but in conversation he's almost unnervingly soft-spoken: His voice barely rises above a whisper, he pauses frequently to hash out his thoughts and has no fear of a good, hearty, uncomfortable silence. Still, on the eve of the re-issue of R.E.M.'s last eight albums on special-edition CD and DVD, Stipe spoke openly with Playboy.com about the band's early days, his disappointment over last November's elections and why R.E.M. didn't just call it quits after Bill Berry chose farming over drumming.

Playboy.com: The band began working on Around The Sun just after the September 11th attack. How did that affect the album?

Michael Stipe: The major affect would be in the lyrics and in my trying to not write a political record, and finally that was what was coming out of me. What I find interesting in music has changed a lot since I first started writing songs. From going to art school, I had this feeling that timelessness was very important to pop music and art. I don't feel that way anymore. I just feel now that the stuff out there that really reflects the moment is the stuff that really has an impact.

PB: Do you hope to affect any sort of change when you write politically minded songs?

MS: It's really just a reflection of where my head's at. I used to write stuff and think, "Well, nobody is going to understand what this is about, because it's really my thing." And at some point, years ago, I realized if I'm feeling something, there's a good chance a lot of other people are feeling it as well. Not that I'm some sort of barometer of emotion, but it does seem to be the case. [Laughs] I have the same feelings and concerns as everyone else and sometimes these are things that aren't really addressed in music.

PB: A lot of people expected the album to sound angrier.

MS: To me, it is a record that reflects the chaos of right now, although it doesn't do so like [Green Day's] American Idiot, which I think is a great record. The songs that do have a kind of poignant political viewpoint aren't shouting from the top of the tallest building. It's much more of a whisper, and that sometimes can be just as effective if not more effective. The politics aren't simply about policymakers and governments, it also involves the politics of emotion and relationships and things more subtle than that.

PB: You campaigned hard for John Kerry. How did you react after he lost?

MS: I feel disappointed, clearly, that the election didn't go the way that I wished it had, but I'm not going to fold my hands and give up hope.

PB: This past year, progressives were able to get their message out through documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11, the Vote For Change concerts and Al Franken's book, yet conservatives won at the polls pretty convincingly. What went wrong?

MS: For the next four years, we could all pick apart what happened, why it happened, what needs to change and all that stuff. That might be good and that might not be good. The thing I can say is that I feel pretty sure that Kerry didn't lose to Bush, he lost to fear. That was something put forth very strongly through media and through campaigning. Fear is a very potent and very powerful tool, and one that's particularly powerful now in this country after September 11th.
PB: What positives can you take from working for political change despite things not working out as you'd hoped?

MS: Well, I think after September 11th and leading up to the war in Iraq, the country was experiencing what I call the Great Quiet. People felt afraid to raise a voice of dissent against prevailing winds. That shifted, for me quite dramatically, and for a lot of people into a period of great activism. And I don't think that period is over. It didn't change the national political race, but I don't think it's gone away in the blink of an eye. I do believe kind of strongly that all things move in cycles. That's my wise assumption after 44 years on this earth. Everything ebbs and flows, and it's no different with politics. Simplistically dividing the world into us versus them makes me want to wretch, actually, but it's going to go really far one way before it swings back the other way. It saddens me that we don't have Kerry in office but.... [Pause] There's no "but."

PB: Musicians and celebrities who get involved in political activism are frequently dismissed as dilettantes. Has that ever discouraged you from getting involved?

MS: No, because I feel that's an attitude that largely came from the media. I don't think regular people were concerned about it until the media made a big deal out of it, or made people look stupid for doing so. Remember we live in a country that was governed for eight years in the '80s by a former actor -- and not a very good one. He was a much better presidential figure than he was an actor. And there are people who came from entertainment who are in very high offices now, so that argument just falls flat on its face. I've been a citizen of the United States much longer than I've been a public figure. The whole "shut up and sing" attitude really sprang from the media, and that I find really sickening.

PB: In March, Warner Bros. is reissuing eight R.E.M. albums with the usual trove of bonus tracks. What was it like to go back and listen to those old tracks?

MS: Well, to be perfectly frank, it was a job that was divided up between everyone in my office. [Laughs] I couldn't personally sit down and listen to all the old tracks myself. I can say that there's a lot of stuff that's never been heard or that was heard in very limited fashion that's now going to be available on CD.

PB: The musical landscape has changed drastically since R.E.M. started. When you began there wasn't any real commercial outlet for what you were doing. Now, alternative rock is big business. Do you feel any sense of accomplishment for having played an integral part in making that happen?

MS: Well, no. I don't personally sit around and think about that. I think that would be up to other people to say. It's not really my place. We didn't spearhead anything. We were part of a huge movement. We just happened to have the audacity to stay together.

PB: You guys are constantly held up as an example of a band that grew on its own terms, gradually increasing your audience without sacrificing artistic integrity. How much of that was by design?

MS: It wasn't by design. It was just that we were incredibly stubborn about what we wanted and didn't want to be. Mostly, it was a process of negation. We knew exactly the things we felt were compromising to us personally and to the work; those were things we just wouldn't do. So it left a menu of things that fit into our idea of what's acceptable and what isn't humiliating. As late as last week, we went and played a show in Mexico City, refusing to take the sponsorship necessary to have really good promotion down there. Yet we had an incredible, sold-out show. But sponsorship was a good example of something we said we weren't comfortable with.
PB: As R.E.M. grew from a little cult band into a bigger phenomenon, there must've been a point where your audience suddenly looked alien to you. Did you have to get past that struggle of kind of hating your audience?

MS: I wouldn't say I struggled with it, but I would say I kicked against it. There were points in the '80s where I did look out and see people who would kick my face in if they saw me on the sidewalk. And that's pretty disturbing. My reaction was to kick against that. Not so much through the music but through the performance, because that's really where I felt the distance. I feel like music is incredibly inclusive, so I never felt like these people weren't welcome. If anything, I wanted to throw the music in their faces. I didn't want the music to be exclusive to people who like what I like and think the way I think. That's incredibly limiting. Although sometimes it is personally frustrating to look out and see people like that in the audience, the music always felt to me like it rose above all that.

PB: Many people thought when Bill Berry left the band that that would be the end of R.E.M. Has it been harder than you thought it would be to move on without him?

MS: It was difficult. Now that chapter of our history is closed, but it wasn't an easy transition. We thought the band would break up if any one of us left. Yet the day he came and sat us down and said, "I've had enough. I wanna retire," the next thing out of his mouth was if he was going to break up the band up, he would stay and be miserable. None of us wanted that. He didn't want to be the guy who broke up R.E.M. He knew how much we loved doing what we do and yet he'd grown weary -- not so much of making music, but of everything else that's tied to it: the travel, the public eye, interviews, having to spend months away from home. It was a very difficult period for the three of us. The most difficult part was finding the chemistry we had as a four-piece as a three-piece. I feel confident we did.

PB: Was there ever a thought of not calling it R.E.M. as you moved on without Bill?

MS: I wanted to change the band's name every time we made a new record, because I don't like it. [Laughs] I mean I'm okay with it. It is what it is, but I wanted a name that didn't have periods in it and wasn't mispronounced in romance-language countries.

PB: How do they pronounce it?

MS: [Rolling his tongue] Remm-eh. [Laughs] The term R.E.M. is almost impossible to say in certain languages so it just became something else, which is fine. But it's very hard to work with periods, graphically.

PB: When will you know that it's time for R.E.M. to hang it up?

MS: I get this question a lot. I feel like we're pretty solid people, pretty grounded, and not at all fooled by either the good or bad stuff that's written about us. For us, it's always been about the music. We're going to know when we're repeating ourselves or falling back on some formula or punching the...what's it called?

PB: Punching the clock?

MS: Punching the clock, yeah. When that curiosity starts to wane, I feel like we'll be the first ones to realize that. I don't see that happening anytime soon. It feels to me like we're in a very creative period. But we'll know when we start to suck before anyone else. [Laughs]