Talk About The Pageant: When R.E.M. Came To Bloomington In 1986
Written by: David Brent Johnson
Originally posted March 17, 2016 - Indiana Public Media
"I Just Saw Michael Stipe In Bloomingfoods!"
Imagine that it‘s 1966, and you‘ve just been told that the Beatles are coming to Bloomington to record their next album, or that Bob Dylan will be setting up camp in this small Midwestern university town to lay down his next masterpiece. Now imagine that while they were here, they mingled with many residents who were fans, and who even operated at times on the creative peripheries of the album in progress.
For one generation of young Bloomingtonians, this sort of story came to pass in the spring of 1986, when the rock band R.E.M. walked among us for a few weeks as they produced Lifes Rich Pageant, the album that served as a bridge for the band‘s journey from college-radio icons to top 40 superstars. In doing so, they also left an indelible stamp on a number of students and town residents who encountered them-people who went on to become artists, business owners, professional musicians, and music promoters, all inspired by a rock band‘s example of aesthetic dedication, independence, and integrity.
I was a 20-year-old English major, at the zenith of my R.E.M. fandom, when a friend in my creative writing class casually informed me of the word-of-mouth news. (There was, of course, no Twitter, no Facebook, no email or cellphone way of distributing this information in 1986, and so people around town learned of it only gradually.) Happily stunned, I went home to my off-campus apartment house, where I lived across the hallway from my on-again, off-again girlfriend. I told her that I’d just heard that R.E.M., the ultimate purveyors of mystic subterranean pop, would soon be in town to make a new record.
My on-again, off-again girlfriend, though she liked the band, was unimpressed. “So what?” she said, blowing smoke out an open window beside the stairs. It was April, and we could feel the air on our arms again. “They’re just people, for God’s sake.”
Three days later she came charging up the stairs and burst into my apartment. "Brent! Brent! I just saw Michael Stipe in Bloomingfoods!" she gasped. She had the awe of one who'd looked up to see Jesus browsing through the bulk goods. . I laughed at her about-face delight, but I also envied her and hoped that I’d somehow cross paths with him as well.
A Call To Arms For A New Musical Counterculture
The first time I saw anybody from R.E.M. was in concert at the IU Auditorium in November 1985, just a few months before their extended visit to make an album in Bloomington. The darkened stage featured a gothic Southern mansion backdrop. A train light and whistle preceded the band members‘ entrance, and when lead singer Michael Stipe walked out, a silhouetted profile with a beret on his head turning to look at us while the opening three-note guitar figure of "Feeling Gravitys Pull" chimed like the tolling of a surrealistic clock, it seemed as if a spellbinding underground religious ceremony had begun.
Such was the mystical, celebratory power of R.E.M. for many college students in the mid-1980s. By then R.E.M. was past their peak of being hip (circa 1982-84); those who were truly cool had Sonic Youth, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and the Butthole Surfers on their turntables now. Somewhere, though, in the great mid-80s divide between the Grateful Dead’s MTV tie-dye revival and the shadow of Joy Division’s legacy, R.E.M. captured and compelled a large, fanatical audience, who listened to their albums over and over, hypnotized by guitarist Peter Buck's sparkly Rickenbacker arpeggios and Michael Stipe's murmurous vocal delivery (making the title of their first full-length record moodily apropos) and Finnegans-Wake-by-way-of-Faulkner lyrics. What the hell was he saying? It must be profound. It was profound, in the sense that people came up with all sorts of interpretations that said far more about them than Michael Stipe. No wonder some scoffed that the band's name stood for Remedial English Majors.
They were ultimately much more successful than that. By the time R.E.M. disbanded in amiable fashion in 2011, they had built a legacy of fifteen full-length albums, a clutch of worldwide hits such as "Stand" and "Losing My Religion," and a genre they had practically invented: alternative rock, a category scarcely imaginable when the band formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980. Guitarist Peter Buck once described their music as "the acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff." Their debut 1981 single "Radio Free Europe," powered by what critic and former Indiana University grad student Anthony DeCurtis describes as "all the energy of punk, but imbued with an incredible optimism," had been a call to arms for a new musical counterculture, fulfilled by the band‘s subsequent LPs Murmur, Reckoning, and Fables Of The Reconstruction.
"That R.E.M. would play an essential role in energizing a new network of underground college radio stations that was supportive of local music and open to new sounds from everywhere was just one of the band‘s foremost contributions to the music scene of its day," says DeCurtis. "Fans had heard their own ‘Radio Free Europe‘ – a blast of revolutionary fervor broadcast behind enemy lines to rally a previously dormant population."
"Those were dark years on the radio, as far as I was concerned," says Jeanne-Marie Grenier, an IU fine arts major at the time of R.E.M.‘s Bloomington sojourn. "It was the Huey Lewis era. R.E.M. was intellectual, referential, and romantic."
"In Reagan‘s America, R.E.M. were alternative before alternative was born, and for closeted art students, anti-jocks, upper middle-class white kids who couldn‘t get into metal because it was too low-class and low-brow, and other outsiders, R.E.M. somehow seemed to open a door to a new way to be," says Lawrence Wells, another fine-arts student at Indiana University when the band came through town in 1986. "They were literary and good-looking. Stipe had a magnetic presence, his smooth moonface with thick James-Dean lips framed by those Roger Daltrey curls; he almost looked like a young Elvis Presley if you look at the early interviews on youtube."
R.E.M.’s 1983 full-length debut Murmur was the record that drew me to them in the autumn of my freshman year; with its ghostly kudzu-shrouded cover, nearly-indecipherable-but-evocative lyrics, and ethereal blend of influences ranging from the Velvet Underground and 1960s folk-rock to late-1970s/early 80s post-punk, it looked and sounded like an album from another realm. “We want our records to be doors to other worlds,” lead singer Michael Stipe had declared, and I listened as if they’d succeeded, buying 1984’s Reckoning and 1985’s Fables Of The Reconstruction on their first day of release. At parties I found fellow fans who offered their various interpretations of Stipe’s lyrics; it was our mid-80s version of combing through the songs of Sgt. Pepper and The White Album for hidden clues and meanings. At one weekend gathering in the late autumn of 1984 a partygoer produced a bootleg cassette from a show that summer featuring several new, not-yet-recorded songs (“Driver 8,” “Old Man Kensey,” and “Hyena”), and we received them as if they were unearthed Gnostic gospels. Their music bore the promise of a transformative encounter, an aesthetic alchemy that could knit your inchoate thoughts and feelings into vibrant interior tapestries, all propelled by a singer with the charisma of a bohemian preacher, an arpeggio-driven, rock-‘n-roll-loving guitarist, and a Stax-steeped melodic bassist and idiosyncratic drummer whose backing vocals added further layers of mystery and beauty to the band’s sound. Yes, I worshipped R.E.M. in those days, and so the revelation that they were coming to walk among us stirred my youthful soul with intimations of divinity made manifest.
The private and passionate aesthetic that R.E.M.‘s music promoted in those years could provoke responses that at times bordered dangerously on solipsism; a fellow fan once told me of going into a room at a party and finding its occupant writhing ecstatically on the bed, all alone, as he listened to the band. It was like a couple of steady drinkers at the Video Saloon talking about some poor sap that got hauled off to rehab. What a loser! But we felt too close to it, to the spell of time-tinged dreams and memories that R.E.M. evoked so adroitly on their early records.
"Their music was the smell of mothballs on old sweaters, front porches at night, lightning bugs in your backyard, and all of the things at your grandmother's house," says Pete Smith, a passionate R.E.M. fan who was working as a cook at the Daily Grind Coffeehouse in Dunnkirk Square during the band‘s springtime stay, and who would go on to buy and operate two landmark downtown cafes in later years before retiring to become a stay-at-home father. "Ray Bradbury meets Carson McCullers, a real magical childhood vibe."
"If You Have Things To Say, Now's The Time To Say It"
Lee Williams, the Bloomington music promoter who founded the Lotus World Music Festival in 1993, now a linchpin of world music culture, was another resident who became a devoted follower of R.E.M. in their up-and-coming years. He was instrumental in forging the band‘s early connection to Bloomington, bringing them here for shows at Second Story in November 1982 and Jake‘s the following spring.
"I think I paid them $350 to play Second Story," he recalls. "I just loved the guitar work, and Michael Stipe‘s voice, and the whole college-rock thing. I was 24 years old and I was living a dream; I‘d never imagined that I could book bands. I kind of bonded with Michael a little; I think he sensed my love for my music. The show was fantastic, it sold out. Everybody was dancing, Michael Stipe was dancing more than you‘d see him later in their career when they got famous. At the very end, on the encore, he brought me up on stage and I got to dance with R.E.M. My favorite memory of the Jakes show was Michael Stipe dedicating a song to me from the stage during the performance--‘Talk About the Passion.‘ I think that song resonated for me, it sounded like he recognized someone who loved the music and had it in his blood and treated the artists well. There‘s no other band for me with personal highlights for me from two different shows."
Why did R.E.M. come back to Bloomington three years later to record their fourth full-length record? They wanted to make an album with Bloomington-based superstar John Mellencamp‘s producer, Don Gehman--a move that caught many of their college-rock-base fans off-guard. "We had just worked with Joe Boyd on Fables of the Reconstruction in London, and it was a tough experience for us," says Mike Mills, the band‘s bassist. "We wanted to get away from the sort of murky feelings and sounds that we got out of Joe in London. The acoustic guitars sounded so good on the Mellencamp records… we just liked that sonic quality that he had, and we decided to give Don Gehman a shot. He really knew how to get a lot of detail and subtle quality and at the same time make it rock."
The band worked at Mellencamp‘s Belmont Mall recording studio a few miles east of Bloomington, and the subsequent album, Lifes Rich Pageant, was only the second record to be made there. (Mellencamp‘s 1985 release Scarecrow was the first.) "The studio itself, the recording space, was larger than what we were used to," says Mills. "It was newer, the technology was more contemporary. Don Gehman of course knew it well, and it had everything he needed, so if the producer‘s comfortable, that helps a lot. But we managed to get a lot of good sounds out of there." One such sound was that of an old pump-organ retrieved from a nearby barn--one of several organic touches added to an album dominated by dynamic guitar textures, an amplified drum presence, and the most surprising new phenomenon of all: relatively intelligible vocals from lead singer Michael Stipe.
"Don really pushed Michael very hard lyrically," says Mills. "He challenged Michael to sing a little more clearly, cause he said I‘m going to turn you up louder, you‘re going to be up more in the mix… if you have things to say, now‘s the time to say it."
What did Mellencamp himself think of the band? Mills, who professes friendship with Mellencamp today, says R.E.M. did not encounter him much during their stay, although he was in town to play a concert at Memorial Stadium for Little 500 weekend. "It was good of him to let some wonky band he probably didn‘t know about come in and use his studio."
Of Taxis, Tribes, And Pith Helmets
As work on Lifes Rich Pageant progressed, band members became a highly visible presence around town, often eating at the Runcible Spoon in the morning before heading out to work at Belmont Studio and hitting the downtown bars at night. On Sunday, April 20, the very first CultureShock, a sort of campus-alternative-Woodstock event, took place in Dunn Meadow, and Michael Stipe showed up at it. He wandered among the tie-dyed hippies and goth-black punks wearing a brown wool suit and cap, looking unseasonably dressed and rather weathered for his age of 26. People besieged him, asking him to sign petitions, asking him about his lyrics, asking him if the band was going to play later that day, until he finally took refuge behind a billboard. There my girlfriend who'd seen him in Bloomingfoods engaged him in a discussion about how tasty the co-op's deli offerings were. When he saw her again at a party later that night, he said, "Thanks, that was the only intelligent conversation I had all day long."
In spite of such incidents of Michaelmania, the band‘s encounters with students and town residents were, by all parties‘ accounts, almost overwhelmingly positive. "In my experience as a woman playing music, Peter was one of the few guitarists who bothered to teach me anything," says Hilary McDaniel Douglas, who spent time with Buck and other members of the band during their Bloomington stay. "We used to sit around and jam. Peter would play with anyone and record with anyone, but we spent hours noodling. We both had a passion for country blues like Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Peetie Wheatstraw. I believe all of them actively wanted to help local music and absorb local tastes."
Hilary McDaniel-Douglas walking across Dunn Meadow with Peter Buck
Photo by Beth Jones, Courtesy of Hilary McDaniel-Douglas
That certainly proved true for musician James Combs, who would go on to form the successful Bloomington indie-rock group Arson Garden, and artist Lawrence Wells, who played in a band with Combs called the Figments. Michael Stipe came to see them play at Second Story on Friday, April 25, and Peter Buck sat in on a recording session with them.
"I always felt we kind of learned the secret of their success when they came and spent time in Bloomington," says Combs, now a professional composer and musician who lives in Los Angeles. "They went everywhere, they saw every band and most of the time said something nice about your performance, they hung out with everyone… They could have just stayed holed up out in the studio, but they were curious and friendly and engaged with our town-and really nice people, too-smart and down to earth. They seemed to like Bloomington, and Bloomington loved them in return "
Fellow Figments member Wells, who now lives in the Czech Republic where he works as an artist and English instructor, got to spend some time with Michael Stipe. "I was walking down the street with my friend Karen when Stipe drove by in his taxi and stopped because he knew Karen," Wells remembers. "He invited us to their condo to watch a video. Karen declined but I jumped into the back of the cab. So I hung out there with R.E.M, tried on Stipe‘s glasses in the bathroom, and that inspired me to write this song ‘Wearing Your Glasses‘ for the Figments,. Basically I was thinking the whole time what it must be like to be Michael Stipe; his job seemed to be being an interesting personality. He was my hero because he was a rock star and an artist. I also bumped into Stipe a few other times around the IU art department and exchanged a few words with him."
A small circle of young Bloomingtonians kept more constant company with Stipe and other members of the band, hanging out at the Daily Grind coffeehouse in Dunnkirk Square and going out to the quarries. Hilary McDaniel-Douglas, who‘s now the artistic director of the Project In Motion Aerial Dance Company, remembers "the Tribe," as she calls this group of people, helping to write lyrics on these occasions. A fellow "tribe" member's facsimile of a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence inspired the lines "Our fathers' fathers' fathers tried/erased the parts they didn't like" in "Cuyahoga"; he says, "Stipe was fascinated by it, particularly because you could see Jefferson's original words scratched out."
Another companion of Stipe‘s recalled singing songs from the album-in-progress with the vocalist while they drove around Bloomington in a black taxi that Stipe bought from Yellow Cab (Stipe had smuggled the tracks out of the studio). After R.E.M. left Bloomington, Stipe called his companion to tell him that the cab had been struck by lightning as Stipe drove it in the Georgia countryside. The story fit his haunted, charismatic-preacher personality that seemed reminiscent of a character from a Flannery O'Connor story.
There was one uncomfortable moment for Stipe when he went to see blues legends Buddy Guy and Junior Wells perform at Jake‘s. "Buddy had probably had a little too much to drink, and he started this rant about white blues guitarists taking all the licks from black guitarists," says Lee Williams, who was sitting with Stipe. "It was pretty harsh to listen to. And so Michael at some point said, ‘This is too much, I‘m out of here,‘ and just walked away. And that was the last time I saw Michael Stipe."
Mike Mills recalls a more amusing Bloomington bar-going experience: " Peter and I, we used to go around and catch all the bands we could. There were a lot of people doing cover songs. We saw three different bands in one night do ‘Jungle Love‘ by Steve Miller, and at least two of them were wearing pith helmets at the time. We were kind of impressed with that."
"It Reminds Me Of Home"
Bloomington‘s lovely springtime weather also figures in Mills‘ memory of the bands‘ stay-a dramatic contrast from the cold, wet conditions that had helped to make their London sojourn while recording Fables the year before such an unhappy experience. "We were comfortable in our surroundings; that leads to making a better record. Bloomington was a really cool town at the time; still is." (He recently dropped in to hear a Bloomington friend‘s band play at the local bar Serendipity, and expressed pleasant surprise when he learned that it was the same space--the former Second Story-where R.E.M. made its Bloomington debut in 1982.)
One reason the band felt at ease was Bloomington‘s similarity to their Athens, Georgia hometown, another university city. "That's one thing I liked about it here," Peter Buck told a Los Angeles Times writer in 1986 shortly after wrapping up the album. "It reminds me of home, but there are all the benefits of not being at home. The problem with trying to do any work at home is that you're so comfortable. . . . You wake up in your own home, have all your records handy, go to the same familiar restaurants—it's hard to get in the mood to work and feel creative. It's good to go away because you're a bit on the edge."
Lifes Rich Pageant came out near the end of the summer, its title taken from a Pink Panther movie that the band had rented from the Top Ten Video store on South Walnut Street. The album received what was by now the usual round of positive R.E.M. reviews. Anthony DeCurtis, writing in Rolling Stone, proclaimed that "For R.E.M., the underground ends here… (It) is the most outward-looking record R.E.M. has ever made, a worthy companion to R.E.M.'s bracing live shows and its earned status as a do-it-your-way model for young American bands…. Suffused with a love of nature and a desire for mankind's survival, the LP paints a swirling, impressionistic portrait of a country at the moral crossroads, at once imperiled by its own self-destructive impulses and poised for a hopeful new beginning."
The album is suffused with anthemic standing-forth energy, bursting out of the gate with “Begin The Begin” and “These Days,” the latter with its rallying chorus of “We are young despite the years/we are concern/we are hope despite the times.” In its wide range of references, it invokes the American Civil War (“Swan Swan H” a folk-dirge first played at the 1985 Bloomington Fables show), Native American history and ecological destruction (“Cuyahoga”), the threat of nuclear war (“Hyena”), murderous regimes in Central America (“The Flowers Of Guatemala”), acid rain (“Fall On Me”) and the death of Elvis Presley (“Just A Touch”). Reformation rebel Martin Luther, Plymouth Colony militia commander Miles Standish, and Italian scientist Galileo Galilei all make cameo appearances in Stipe’s lyrics, which, despite the singer’s much-ballyhooed increased clarity of delivery, often remain inscrutably intriguing. It includes spirited romps of free-associative optimism (“I Believe”) and an obscure bubblegum-pop cover that carries Nietzschean weight (“Superman”). It is a jubilant countercultural homecoming record, a renewed and assertive band moving on from the murky slog of making Fables as they started the second half of their first decade.
R.E.M. played the IU Auditorium again that September, and Michael Stipe's sole stage allusion to his time in Bloomington was, well, Stipean: he took a drink from his glass of water and said simply, "PCBs" (an ongoing environmental issue in the city during the 1980s). "Fall On Me" was released as a single and managed to nose into the bottom ranks of the Hot 100, with an accompanying video that Stipe had shot at a Bloomington quarry, while the album rose all the way to number 21 on Billboard‘s album charts-the highest ranking yet for an R.E.M. LP-and became the band‘s first record to go gold, taking the band one step further towards mass popularity.
Heartened by Pageant‘s aesthetic and relative commercial success, the band very nearly came back to Bloomington the next year to record its followup, Document, hoping to work once more with Gehman at Belmont Studios. "The Bloomington session had gone so well," says Mills, "but in fact Don didn‘t see us as wanting to have hit records. We were more interested in making good records, good LPs. He wanted a band that was really ambitious, a band that wanted to be on the top 40. That was not us, so he moved on to something else."
Instead, R.E.M. decamped to Nashville, Tennessee with producer Scott Litt, and the resulting album generated the very thing Gehman thought the band was unlikely to create-a hit single, "The One I Love," which landed in Billboard‘s top 10, garnering extensive airplay and video rotation on MTV. Document became R.E.M.‘s first platinum album and landed them on the cover of Rolling Stone with the headline, "R.E.M.: America‘s Best Rock And Roll Band." The article proclaimed that R.E.M. had "graduated," and as the band began to play ever-larger venues for more mainstream audiences, their college-roots fans found the notion to be true.
When Document came out R.E.M. were only a fourth of the way into what would prove to be a 31-year run, poised to enjoy global success and record sales ten times the number of their early/mid-1980s releases. But when they were inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, they opened their brief awards-ceremony set with “Begin The Begin.” It seemed like a nod to the seminal importance of the record that consecrated their underground legend and at the same time primed the band’s progression to a wider audience. Somehow they did it without invalidating their artistic credibility or dissolving in the face of pressure and fatigue, unlike counterparts such as the Replacements, Husker Du, and the Smiths.
It’s easy to forget just how remarkable R.E.M.’s ascendance to the mainstream was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, or how they forged their career in the Internet-less wilds of Reagan-era America. Their early albums were particularly resonant in that cultural context, an age dominated by the embrace of hyper-capitalist ideology, jingoism, and a general rebuke of the values of the 1960s. “The insurgency began and we missed it,” Michael Stipe sings on Lifes Rich Pageant’s opening song “Begin The Begin.” He next tells us that “I looked for it and I found it/Miles Standish proud/congratulate me.” For many young music fans in the 1980s, college-radio and alternative rock was the insurgency, was the home, or so it seemed, of art and life that breathed with invention and authenticity. It was the soundtrack to another America, and for many the leaders of that alternative land were R.E.M. When Stipe sang “Let’s put our heads together/and start a new country up” on Pageant’s “Cuyahoga,” a song haunted by the literal and metaphorical landscape of American history, it sounded like a line from an inaugural address or a manifesto. The declaration had been made in a small southern Indiana college town.
Several decades later, Lifes Rich Pageant strikes me as R.E.M.'s last magical album, although some of the magic comes from knowing that they recorded it here. It has the sound and feel of a Bloomington spring, a sunny, introspective lyricism underpinned by a defiantly youthful vitality. It is R.E.M.'s most successful convergence of the public and the private, a shimmering testament to the beauty of life and the necessity of change. The message is both bright and dark, with warnings of all sorts embedded in the songs, and ultimately a celebration of art, history, passion, community, protest, and hope-all values that seem quintessentially Bloomingtonian--even as it reflects deeper currents of countercultural art and the American past.
"I think that album was special because it felt like it was something they had made for us, " says Pete Smith, "for everyone who lived in Bloomington, whether they had heard of them or not. It was like some sister city cultural exchange program love letter between Athens and us." All these years on, that love letter still reminds all of us--artists, business owners, parents, and citizens--to make an insurgency of our pageant, and a pageant of our insurgency. Life is rich indeed, once we learn how to live it.
-David Brent Johnson
(Special thanks to James Combs, Anthony DeCurtis, Jeanne-Marie Grenier, Steve Llewellyn, Hilary McDaniel-Douglas, Mike Mills, Kevin O'Neill, Pete Smith, Lawrence Wells, and Lee Williams.)