The Secret History of R.E.M.

In the beginning, R.E.M. would play anywhere that would have them, from pizza parlors to gay bars to frat parties. For all the arty elusiveness of their early music, the band that would end up setting the template for the Nineties alt-rock boom was hungrier and more strategic than it might have seemed — which is just one of many revelations in Peter Ames Carlin’s illuminating new book, The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography. 

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Carlin sits down with host Brian Hiatt to go through the many dismantled myths and unearthed facts from the book. To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play below.Some highlights follow:

Michael Stipe and his high school best friend both assumed they’d become rock stars. “They would sit around in her bedroom and look at copies of Rolling Stone, Creem, and Circus and bet each other who was going to be interviewed first,” says Carlin.

Stipe’s father was a conservative-looking Air Force colonel, but he was completely accepting of his son. When a teenage Stipe headed out one night in full Rocky Horror Picture Show drag, his dad simply told him to have a good time.

Stipe initially hated the Georgia college town that would become synonymous with R.E.M. “He called Athens a hippie cow town — he goes, ‘I hate it, I hate it, I hate it,'” says Carlin.

Stipe’s early performances were so magnetic that his very first band gig ended in violence. “The girls’ boyfriends decided like, well, we better go kick that guy’s ass… and it became a whole street fight and somebody got cut with a bottle,” says Carlin.

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Peter Buck liked to say he didn’t know how to play guitar when R.E.M. formed, but that was pure myth-making. “In Athens, there was something very cool and casual about saying ‘We didn’t even know how to play our instruments till we formed our band.'” says Carlin. “It meant you were truly in it for the art and expression. It just didn’t happen to be true.”

Buck and Stipe first bonded over reading the Village Voice‘s music coverage, dreaming of New York’s punk scene while they were still in Georgia. “The Village Voice was a lifeline, a passport to a whole world that was like, holy shit, this exists,” says Carlin.

The rhythm section of Bill Berry and Mike Mills brought serious musical experience to the band. “They had played together in this quite successful teen cover band in Macon when they were growing up, playing all the FM rock hits of the day,” says Carlin.

Berry pushed the band to leave college and commit fully to music. “He made it very clear that if they didn’t drop out, he would leave the band,” says Carlin.

Their early shows revealed a stark contrast with other Athens bands. “The guys from Pylon or the Love Tractor guys were telling me that when they saw R.E.M. for the first time, the first sense they got was, ‘Oh, wow — these guys can play covers and you can actually hear what song it is,'” says Carlin.

Berry had a unique role in editing the band’s songs. “When it started getting too long or Bill got bored, he’d just throw his sticks in the air and be like, ‘No, no, no, no, no. We got to cut this back,'” says Carlin.

Buck was instrumental in preventing the conflicts that typically destroy bands, convincing everyone to share songwriting credit on every song. “Peter twigged to the fact his reading of the literature of rock & roll proved to him over and over again, that there are always two things that break bands up: one is credit and one is royalties,” says Carlin.

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Buck’s father — who was upset he never finished college — remained unimpressed by his son’s success until the end. “Even as his dad was dying, I think one of the things Peter said was describing how his dad looked at Peter and said, ‘Listen, you better make a million dollars playing rock & roll, because you cannot do anything else,'” says Carlin.

Their refusal to reunite since ending the band in 2011 arguably fits their career-long pattern of defying expectations. “Since basically all the other bands whose members are alive eventually get back together,” says Carlin, “maybe they’ll stick with never reuniting — just to do what all the other bands don’t do.”

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