‘The Name Of This Band Is R.E.M.’ Gives Fans Most of What They Want

The job of the rock biography writer is to make fans happy. Peter Ames Carlin made fans happy when he wrote the New York Times best seller Bruce, which prompted Springsteen enthusiasts to buy the book in droves in 2012. Carlin has now penned The Name of This Band is R.E.M., which promises to cover the broad swath of that seminal band’s 30-year career. As a lover of R.E.M. who’d plowed through previous titles on the band such as Perfect Circle, Party Out of Bounds, and From Chronic Town to Monster, I was on my way to having my day brightened.

And it worked, mostly.

Carlin succeeds in the primary goal of giving readers like me—who thought he knew everything about the foursome—what they want. I didn’t know that Michael Stipe as a teenager in Collinsville, IL, dressed up as Frank-N-Furter and went to the Rocky Horror Picture Show or that Peter Buck made a nervous habit of vomiting before every show. I didn’t know that Mike Mills’s dad came to early R.E.M. shows and sang along to their music, beer in hand or that in 1980 Bill Berry made the same offer to two different Athens bands—he wouldn’t sign on officially to either until everyone in the band quit college and fully committed to the new enterprise. The remaining college goers in R.E.M. acquiesced. Love Tractor’s members did not. Carlin conducted no new interviews of the foursome for his book, but he found tidbits I never knew or had conveniently forgotten since the last time I dove into R.E.M. That’s the kind of thing a fan finds irresistible.

That said, you never get the impression that Carlin is much of an R.E.M. fan. He tends to prefer the distance of a biographer, an approach that allows him to dip into portraiture such as his longer sections on each band member. Drawing from facts to create clearer pictures of Stipe, Buck, Mills, and Berry leads to the strongest parts of the book. As one example, he describes Buck’s early stage fright:

“This was the nightmare that played across Peter’s imagination when he let his mind wander. He’d channel the anxiety into action most days, playing his parts over and over and over, making sure he had every note, pause, and nuance wired down so cold he could play them backward, forward, eyes closed, standing on his head. But somehow that didn’t help on show days. He’d do his best to keep it at bay, slugging down beers, trying to find a place on the inebriation scale that was just on the right side of the line dividing pleasantly numb from completely out of it.”

What musician of a certain vintage can’t relate to trying to achieve the right level of buzz before a show? Rock stars are just like us, only richer.

Carlin allows a peek into his feelings about R.E.M. at opportune moments in the book, such as when discussing the merits of the band’s catalog. He seems to favor the band’s early Warner Bros. albums, which inevitably leads him to push back on the “Murmurers”—or those who contend that the band’s first album Murmur is the pinnacle of their career and everything else is denouement. Despite the relative sales of these albums, I disagree with Carlin’s championing of the band’s Out of Time/Automatic for the People era at the expense of its 80s IRS efforts. The achievement of four college-town roustabouts going from house parties to Murmur is always going to be more impressive than their later jump from Murmur to Automatic for the People. “Fall on Me” is worth ten “Man on the Moon”s any day of the week, but you can find plenty of sources in the 90s that marked Automatic as the highlight of the band’s career. I wonder how many still listen to it.

I didn’t begrudge the band their 90s success. America needs a few happy rock and roll endings, and the trajectory of their ascension is one I always keep in mind when things get dreary. But R.E.M. was inevitably going to be lauded in the post-Nirvana 90s during the meat of their early Warner Bros. years, when contemporary musicians were hugely appreciative of the band’s decade of blazing a path for any national rock act on the sensitive side of Sammy Hagar. The admittedly world-beating “Losing My Religion” aside, R.E.M.’s 90s success was as much a victory lap as anything having to do with what they recorded during that span. This was a band you either already loved or understood you were supposed to love, and most everyone who spent time at MTV from 1991 through 1995 got the message.

Carlin spends an appropriate amount of time chronicling the creation and subsequent success “Losing My Religion,” which marks the band’s best song and their last gesture toward the idea that they might be, as Berry once put it, “gurus of 1980s mysticism.” At the time, there was something weirdly Bible Belt about the foursome, despite their north stars of Patti Smith, the New York Dolls, and anything written about in the Village Voice circa 1977. They’d never pull off that kind of attitude, and instead they found their early raison d’etre in chime-y songs with lots of acoustic guitar that were both gorgeous and vaguely suggestive of the great beyond.

No doubt the rock and roll contingent in the band bristled at having their work confused with anything quasi-religious, but there they all are in the “Losing My Religion” video, each dressed vaguely Amish and Stipe behaving like a church-goer with a healthy dose of the spirit. They would spend much of the rest of their career getting away from any such association. Stipe describes 1994’s Monster as a “dick record.” The band’s early celestial efforts such as “Fall on Me,” “So. Central Rain,” and the grossly underrated “Kohoutek” were gifts. You can tell by how hard they tried to run from them.

The band started losing me during the “dick” era. The world didn’t need another Stone Temple Pilots. It needed a group that embraced life without cool sunglasses and instead doubled down on the soulful aspects of their work. How much more valuable would they have been as a cottage industry of sublime sweetness when compared to their efforts at corporate bombast? In fairness, it no doubt would’ve felt like giving up to turn away from so much material success within their grasp, but you always lose magic in the tradeoff.

As revealed by Carlin, the four members are now the happy recipients of the good life with children and life partners and multiple houses. Like Bob Dylan before them, they didn’t want the kind of attention that came with being the ones with the message, and who can blame them? They were in their twenties, touring the world, the center of attention in any room they occupied. I wouldn’t—and didn’t—trade that for anything that might resemble transcendence, but too bad for all of us now. What’s really left? A great album or three? A handful of genuinely beautiful songs? Thankfully, these still work their magic here and there.