40 years ago today: R.E.M. released their debut studio album Murmur

"R.E.M. could be in at the birth of a new cool, agents of an elegant rural retreat as urban anger becomes increasingly desperate, soured and pre-sold. They may also be the first American band to undermine – however furtively – the consensus established by the original New York punk mafia, the clan of CBGBs ’75. R.E.M. are certainly leery of rhetoric and bombast on the bandstand; one can’t envisage them preaching on the stadium circuit… Murmur is the most intriguing debut album from an American act I’ve heard this year.”

The above are the edited highlights of Bill Graham’s Hot Press review of Murmur from 1983, and while Bill lived to see himself stand corrected about the Athens quartet’s viability as a stadium act, the rest was about as incisive as anything written about the band that decade – and guitarist Peter Buck knows it.

“Wonderful,” he says, looking over a photocopy of the original piece. “It’s funny, I actually had a conversation last night with this honourable lord who’d known Bill Graham since the ’50s. And he also knew Paddy from The Chieftains, and I said, ‘I spent a week with Paddy in Cuba’. This was a guy I met in the hotel bar.”

As you join us, it’s mid-summer, the afternoon of the first of two R.E.M. shows in Marlay Park, Dublin. Famously tall, southern and gentlemanly, Buck takes a seat in the big house in the grounds, sweat stains under the arms of his pink ruffled shirt attesting to sound check chores just completed in the blazing sun. Not just any old autopilot run-through either; the band had been taking requests via online communiqués, necessitating some intensive revision of songs like ‘Nightswimming’, ‘New Test Leper’, ‘Strange Currencies’ (including a snatch of Sonny & Cher’s ‘I Got You Babe’) and a rough but robust ‘Radio Free Europe’, whose foot-to-the-floor groove they finally nail on the third attempt.

“One person said, ‘That was the first song you ever played in Dublin,’ so we kinda have to put it in the set,” Buck explains, recalling those SFX gigs in 1984 when they were joined by Waterboy Steve Wickham during the encores. Indeed, if it weren’t for the catering tent, this could be a garden party for visiting rock ’n’ roll gentry rekindling Irish connections that include everyone from sound engineer Joe O’Herlihy to musical consultant and High Llama Sean O’Hagan to producer Pat McCarthy. The latter was instrumental in R.E.M. becoming South County Dublin residents during sessions for their last album Reveal, and despite working with everyone from Madonna to Patti Smith, has remained a rather under-celebrated name in his home country.

“He kind of has to base himself in Los Angeles,” Buck explains. “He was the one who suggested that we work in Ireland, we rented a house out in Dalkey. At first they said, ‘Oh no, no musicians, we know about those guys’, but we’re not your typical raise hell band. I had my kids over there, Michael would just sit in the yard and smoke a cigarette and scribble some lyrics.”

Stipe himself is ambling around outside in an old man’s flat cap and pale blue Fred Perry type shirt, attending to press duties with a noticeable lack of ceremony. The reason the band are talking at this juncture is to promote In Time: The Best OF R.E.M. 1988-2003. Both the festival tour and the breaking of radio silence constitute something of a departure from protocol; one might’ve expected R.E.M. to go to ground for a year or two while recording their thirteenth album in Vancouver.

“Yeah, y’know last summer we talked about coming to Europe and we really just wanted to tour,” Buck reasons. “The record company thought, especially ’cos we’ve lost a lot of ground with America, that a Best Of would help. We had a couple of new songs in the set that could go on the Best Of in the fall, but we really wanted to come to Europe in the summer time. We have friends over here and already had the great Irish experience, dinner with musical friends and meeting total strangers who invite you to come stay at their houses. I was doing shots of this thing called The Witch, it’s a liquor, with this guy who was about 75, he invited me and my wife to sit at their table – in America that just never happens.”

Local pleasantries aside, Buck admits that there’s a peculiar fold-over effect at work right now in the band’s back catalogue, with the explicitly political material from Life’s Rich Pageant and Document retaining just as much significance under the current Republican regime as they did at the height of Reaganism. This summer, as the band toured Europe, the resonances in songs like ‘Begin The Begin’, ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ and ‘Finest Worksong’ were hard to ignore.

“Y’know, there’s a hundred songs on our set list we can do, and many of the ones from 1986 and 1987 could’ve been written yesterday,” the guitarist considers. “‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It’… we hadn’t played ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ since the record came out, but all of a sudden it made sense again. The witch hunts? Hey, they’re back! We wrote a new song called ‘Bad Day’ that we wrote some of the music and lyrics of in 1987 and finished to put it on the Best Of, and nothing has changed.”

So has the Bush war machine and Homelands policy paranoia re-engaged R.E.M.’s political instincts?

“Y’know we’re real energised, and I don’t know if it’s because of anxiety or anger about what’s going on in the world or because there are changes in the band or we’ve reached the age where we realise that we have, y’know, how many years left to do it. I respect that the Rolling Stones are out there doing it at 60, and I hope I have the desire to do it, but you’re never sure. It certainly feels like we have something to say musically and lyrically, and part of the new record will be trying to capture what is happening overall. Not Bob Dylan 1962 finger-pointing songs, but certainly our kind of perspective of living in a scary chaotic place which is the United States right now, politically.”

Has it surprised Buck how timid a lot of musicians and artists were in their responses to the Bush administration’s policies, with the exception of someone like Michael Moore?

“Y’know, I did everything I could,” he says, “I signed every petition, got my name in the New York Times, put a song up on our website (‘The Final Straw’) that didn’t necessarily explain our position but was more of a Gandhi-an thought that you can’t drive out hate with hate, you can only drive out hate with love. And hey, guess what, they still had a war that was considered illegal by the United Nations, and in a great Orwellian moment we declare victory and then keep fighting and people keep dying. It’s a very strange time to be a thinking person, and in America at this point, because of a bad economy, there’s a lot of people who just want to be winners. And I don’t think that being a winner by starting an unnecessary war somewhere is correct.

“We’re back in a kind of go-go era where… Americans tend to punish the poor. In Canada for instance everyone has health care and places to live, but in America it seems our government and everyone who’s rich just says, ‘You know what? If you can’t make it like I can make it, then there’s something wrong with you’. And it’s just not true. It seems to be a very cruel time, a sad time. And the thing is, you drive around America, and Americans are good people.”

But there’s now a situation where college lecturers in even the most liberal enclaves are terrified to broach the subject of politics with their students for fear of being painted with the scarlet letter of un-Americanism.

“Absolutely, because there are enough people who have equated dissent, or even questioning, as being anti-patriotic. You know, my feeling is, if we learned anything from Vietnam, what we should’ve learned is if you’re gonna have a war, figure out who you’re fighting and why and what you’re goals are. In Vietnam we never did figure out who the enemy was. Was it the North Vietnamese? Well, I don’t know if it was. It certainly wasn’t the South Vietnamese, but we killed a lot of them. And it didn’t do anything anyway. It just saddens me.”

The irony is that, after years of being the butt of American jokes, the Canadians are starting to look pretty cool.

“You know what? There was a joke on, maybe it was The Onion: ‘Canadians – they have health care, they’re decriminalising pot and they’re against the war: why is it we make fun of them again?’ Same sex marriages, it’s liberal, I like it there. I’ll tell you what – if Canada and Mexico could switch places I would move to Canada. I just don’t like the weather!”

That’s the protest – here’s the songs. R.E.M. have become such a monolith over the last ten years, one can easily forget the evasive, cryptic properties Bill Graham pointed out in their music two decades ago, properties that were still in place on Green, the album that yields the earliest tracks from In Time, and a watershed record that facilitated their graduation from America’s biggest cult band to Top 20 stadium act. This was the last point where the underground network of grass roots promoters, fanzine writers and college radio impresarios could still claim the band as their own.

And yet, just as Peter Buck should’ve been indulging his guiltiest Hollywood Bowl guitar hero pleasures, he discovered the mandolin, while Michael Stipe was switching back from the realpolitik to the impressionistic, invoking stream-of-consciousness Irish writers.

“Green had a lot of bigness on it,” Buck reckons, “but it also had a lot of smallness, like ‘The Wrong Child’, which was written about Christopher Nolan. Michael and I had both read Under The Eye Of The Clock and it wasn’t until years later that Michael mentioned it was about him. And at the same time we were playing the stadiums of the world.”

That 1989 campaign, documented on Tourfilm, was the last extended global trawl the band would subject themselves to for six years, and was the culmination of almost a decade of touring that by all accounts left them frazzled, semi-alcoholic and burnt out. Mind you, Buck reckons R.E.M.’s indulgences were modest by the standards of the time.

“You know, I don’t think anybody ever took drugs on stage – alcohol being the exception of course. We did what every rock band that lives in a van for ten years does. And I think we were a lot more sensible than most people, in the sense that we weren’t there to just get drunk and get laid; we were really focused. But ten years on the road, eating things off plates in dressing rooms, I don’t remember having a meal where you sit down. I don’t remember drinking water in the 80s either! It was nice to take a break and make records where we could be adult people that didn’t depend on destroying themselves on stage each time.”

So it proved with Out Of Time and the single ‘Losing My Religion’, the quintessential R.E.M. tune that by some fluke became a massive worldwide hit. By this time, the band had all but uprooted and moved away from the college town of Athens, Georgia with which they’d always been synonymous. Given that R.E.M. were so closely linked to romantic notions of an old bohemian south, from scratchy folk recordings to William Faulkner and Flannery O’ Connor, did Buck ever fear they would lose something in the translation when they left that behind?

“A lot of the things that informed us as a band and me as a person, you internalise to such a degree that… I never need to read Flannery O’ Connor again, I can quote her, I can think about it, and the folklore I was exposed to, people who would just quote the bible at you – which you don’t really get in Seattle! It’s like the fact that Bill left the band: as far as I’m concerned, he influences us to such a degree that he’s still in the band.”

Drummer Bill Berry’s departure was still a couple of years ahead – before that, the band delivered what was widely regarded as their masterpiece, 1992’s Automatic For The People, released as Bill Clinton was taking office, but infused with anything but new world optimism. Sonically, a song like ‘Drive’ may have been a million miles from the then prevailing we’ve-got-a-fuzzbox-and-we’re-gonna-use-it manifesto of the Pacific North-West, but its refrain of “Hey, kids, rock ’n’ roll/Nobody tells you where to go” nailed the general feeling of discontentment and disenfranchisement abroad in Generation Whatever. In time, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Radiohead would all reference R.E.M. as examples of how an underground band could and should conduct itself in the mainstream.

“I was just immensely flattered,” Buck says. “That happens a lot, especially now we’re the old men of the festivals – even though we don’t comport ourselves necessarily like that on stage – a lot of bands come up and say we influenced them one way or another and to me that’s just amazing.”

After the highs of Automatic followed a couple of years of well documented turmoil. The kohl-black, fuzzy and fucked up Monster was a trial to write and record, and was greeted less than ecstatically on its release, although in retrospect it contains more than its share of nuggets, including ‘I Don’t Sleep (I Dream)’ and ‘Crush With Eyeliner’. In the accompanying promo videos, R.E.M. seemed for the first time to be playing a parody of a rock ‘n’ roll band. Ask Buck if there was ever a point where he was in danger of entering the asshole zone and he says this:

“I made a real good asshole in high school. I am kind of an asshole! I suppose if you took all of this seriously it might give you an inflated sense of worth, but I really don’t. I know I can measure how good our records are against our peer group, against the greats from the past, I know where we stand and anything anyone says just doesn’t… I mean the good stuff I don’t believe it and the bad stuff goes right to the bone, so I try not to read any of it.”

The 1995 Monster world tour was an even more gruelling affair than the Green campaign. Three of the four members fell seriously sick at some point, the worst case being Bill Berry’s on stage aneurysm, a wake-up call that would eventually lead to his retirement from rock ‘n’ roll following the release of New Adventures In Hi-Fi, a sprawling but often superlative piece of work, although Buck challenges this writer’s contention that its sheer density didn’t do it any favours.

“I think it suffers from being a little bit long,” he says, “but y’know, it’s not dense, I was looking at it a couple of days ago and all the songs are basically live tracks with maybe an extra guitar part, and three or four of our favourite songs that we’ve ever written are on there. ‘E-Bow The Letter’ with Patti Smith…”

… which is possibly R.E.M.'s most fever-dreamiest and poetic moment, and to this day sounds like it was beamed down from the ether. So what was it like working with Ms Smith, who had long been a musical – and in Buck’s case, sartorial – role model?

“Well y’know, it’s just odd because you always have pictures of people in your head. I’d met Patti over the years, and it’s hard to become friends with someone that you… I was 17 when her first record came out. By that stage she was a legend. If the record (Horses) came out when I was 30, I’d be, ‘Hey it’s cool’, but because I was 17 it’s still kind of difficult for me. The same with Neil Young. I met Neil several times, he’s a nice guy, and I think he liked me, y’know, he’s a grouch but he’s a good grouch. But I can’t sit down with him because that’s Neil Young… I mean, the first adult album I bought was After The Goldrush when I was 12.”

It’s fair to say Bill Berry’s departure caused a fundamental shift in R.E.M.’s chemistry with which they’ve only recently come to terms. 1998’s Up was a record made in the resulting state of emergency, and while some of it remains gnomic and incomprehensible, songs like ‘Lotus’, ‘At My Most Beautiful’ and most notably ‘Hope’ testified that the remaining three members were still a serious – if irrevocably altered – creative force. Reveal, released two years later, was by contrast an album of open spaces and airy melodies whose jewel was ‘All The Way To Reno’, perhaps the closest they’ll ever come to penning a standard along the lines of ‘Wichita Lineman’.

“We tried to rebuild this band from almost nothing,” Buck remembers. “I like Up a lot, I think it’s another record that may be overlong, but we were trying to cram as many songs in as possible. The next tour helped a lot. I feel like we’re a real strong band right now. I think maybe having Bill leave gave us in our heads something to prove. Reveal is one of my favourite records. One of the criticisms I heard of was that maybe to excess the strings were kind of lush, but that’s what we were aiming for. Where we’re going with the next step, I want to keep it really stripped down and live.”

The ongoing challenge for R.E.M. is the same one that faces any unit that makes it beyond the 15-year mark. Great bands are defined by the times they themselves defined; the Stones in ’68, the Clash in ’78, Radiohead in ’98. R.E.M. can’t reclaim the position of importance that they held when Green was released, and its doubtful they’ll ever return to the days of ten-million selling albums. And yet, they’re way too curious and wilful a unit to go quietly out to pasture. Groping around for a Jerry Springer final thought, one might say the future can only be nailed one song at a time, with as much dignity and integrity as is possible in the dog and pony show of 21st century rock ‘n’ roll.

“I guess when I was fifteen I wanted to be famous and drive around in a big car,” Buck admits, “but by the time I was making records when I was 22 or 23, to me I just wanted to be one of those bands who sells 20,000 records, and they’re cool records and people buy them and it means something to them. I mean, I could show you the request list that we get from people, and every person has a favourite memory of the time that they requested the song from. One guy, his daughter likes to sing ‘The Great Beyond’ because the pushing the elephant up the stairs line is funny. To me that’s why you do it.”

So, does he agree with artists like Neil Young or Nick Cave when it comes to resisting the use of their music in advertising, reasoning that it’s a slap in the face for people to whom those songs mean something more than a radio jingle?

“I don’t think it’s a moral issue, but my feeling is the same. I have friends who are poor who’ve done it and I can understand that aspect of it – do you have to quit the music business to sell insurance or do you sell your song for a car ad? But for me, I dunno, it just cheapens the song itself, and I can’t help it when I hear… I’m trying to think of what commercial I’ve heard a song that I love that I’m kind of, ‘Oh man, I don’t wanna hear that record again.’”

Well, this writer was never the same after Iggy’s ‘The Passenger’ showed up in a car ad.

“There was another one that had an Iggy song, I think it was ‘Loose’. When I stick those records on (now) I just go, ‘Oh, that’s the one from the commercial’. It’s hard to draw the line because in America everything is branded. We play stadiums – we’ve never played there but there’s (even) a Dunkin’ Donuts arena. Clear Channel own a thousand radio stations and they own every venue in America and they organised protests against the Dixie Chicks when they said they were ashamed of President Bush – that’s really scary. But y’know, I’m not scared of Clear Channel; I don’t think the radio stations even play our records. And when we play in their venues they’re still gonna have to pay us!”

Revisit Murmur below: