My favourite album by R.E.M, is ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’, their 3rd album , which was released in the Summer of 1985. It sounded different to the Byrdsian -jangly- psychedelia of their first two albums, maybe a tad darker, with strings being brought into the mix and a new producer, Joe Boyd, famed for his production of such folk rock bands as Fairport Convention, and folk legends such as Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny and Nick Drake. I have always thought that R.E.M were in essence an American equivalent to The Smiths, with Michael Stipe, a similarly enigmatic frontman with obscure lyrical phrases, a musical cousin to the Smiths’ Morrissey, and Peter Buck , the consummate guitarist, ready to hop genres at a moment’s notice, not unlike Johnny Marr.
I saw them live in October 1985 – Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow with support from the Faith Brothers, who I recall doing a memorable cover of Peter Gabriel’s ‘Biko’.
R.E.M’s set that night gave us songs from the first three albums with highlights including, the Television -esque ‘Feeling Gravitys Pull’ ‘, ‘7 Chinese Brothers’ , the Byrdsian ‘Talk About the Passion’ , and many many more. The encores were awesome, covers of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, Aerosmith’s ‘Toys in the Attic’, and Television’s ‘See No Evil’, with Buck’s Verlainesque guitar solos at the forefront. They had a flair for cover versions, and seemed to drink from a fountain of eclectic musical influences which was very ‘hip’ at the time , in music weeklies like N.M.E, and Sounds : The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, the spiky guitars of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd in Television, the country rock of the Byrds, and Gram Parsons ( I would cite ‘Don’t Go Back to Rockville’ as evidence for this) and the likes of Big Star, and U.K punk era bands such as Wire. Their cover of Wire’s ‘Strange’ on their ‘Document ‘ album was great, and put me in mind of when I sung it, taking vocals in a band with a few schoolmates back in the day. I use the term ‘band’ loosely, some us us recorded some songs on a cassette in the ’80s, never gigged or anything like that, but someone somewhere has a copy of that cassette tape, with me on ‘vocals’, anyway, moving swiftly on….
Its a thing for music fans of my (certain) age group, to say that ‘I liked their early stuff‘, when talking about rock bands, or authors, it still holds a certain coolness in some quarters, but R.E.M’s early stuff was to me excellent, especially their first four albums, as I said, my absolute favourite is ‘Fables..’,with their subsequent album’ Life’s Rich Pageant ‘coming in at a close second. In the mid-eighties, I was discovering, my ‘USA of the mind’ , basically my imagined, or mythical version of the United States which I had gleaned through reading authors like Jack Keroauc, Stephen King, Raymond Carver, and Ray Bradbury, and listening to the music of the new wave of American ‘roots rock’ with bands, like The Blasters, Green On Red, Husker Du, The Long Ryders and Giant Sand, while older stuff was never far from my turntable at that time ( Dylan, Springsteen, Neil Young, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Velvets, Doors, Television etc.) R.E.M fitted nicely into this vision. ‘Life’s Rich Pageant ‘ was produced by Don Gehman, who had produced The Blasters’ ‘Hard Line’, and John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp’s ‘Scarecrow’, so I reckoned on a harder guitar sound for R.E.M, and the first track ‘Begin the Begin’, is a great opener, with its juddering distorted riffing.
‘Begin ‘ is hands down my favourite track of the album, and I must admit its something of an earworm , ‘These Days’ comes a close second with its jangly, almost indie feel, and ‘Fall on Me’, which was one of the singles released from the album at the time, and a great pop tune with excellent harmonies, the lyrics are about acid rain, and environmentalism, something I was not aware of at the time, but something I recently read online. Anyway, that’s my two favourite albums by R.E.M, certainly worth a listen, and closer investigation.
The Eclectic Audio Lab 