The wisdom of Michael Stipe is put to the test, as REM retire from touring and expand their sound on Out Of Time. Gavin Martin takes the Athens heritage tour… “I’ve never written upfront love songs," says Stipe, I’ve never lip-synched in videos…” Originally published in NME's 23/03/91 is...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGXVyDsOV2w
The sun is going down over Athens and we’re sat in a downtown bar with Peter Buck drinking beer and whiskey, chomping on the gratis barbecue chicken and mustard dip. Buck is REM’s wildcard, noted for volatile outbursts onstage and in interview.
In the early days when REM were getting together and Buck was fleshing out his encyclopedic, Anglophile record collection, he used to wear a dress and carry a knife, a dress code which soon gets you a reputation in redneck bars. That was before he met his match in his wife, Barrie, who manages a club two doors down from the group’s office.
One thing’s for sure – with Peter Buck in the engine room REM will never want for lust and fury. He’s the restless hungry heart of the band with no end of ideas and future plans.
He knows there’s lots more for REM to do. He’s convinced they have yet to make a brilliant album backing their heroine Patti Smith, a blues album, “though I feel such a honky saying that”, a country album, an album that they write, record and mix in a week, and an EP of Troggs cover versions. He’s also well aware that they are the last survivors of their era, that the road they’ve travelled is littered with corpses.
“I think it’s kind of sad, I was friends with those bands: X, Hüsker Dü, The Dream Syndicate… all I can say is we’re friends and we were friends before we were in a band. Some people put together a band then try to figure out if they’re friends or not. It’s like getting married to a stranger. It’s been done and we can make it work, but I wouldn’t like to do it.
“We are a good band, there’s no taking away from that. But we have been lucky, we’ve met the right people. To be honest, I don’t think we’ve ever made a mistake. We came close – we were on the road for six years straight, we were totally worn out. But none of us got into smoking cocaine. There was a lot of horrible stuff we could have done. It was never hard times… hard times is when you’ve got no job and kids to worry about.”
Your band has been called the greatest band in the world.
“Yeah, but you know rock’n’roll isn’t a foot race. If somebody says The Monkees are the greatest band in the world I’ll go, ‘OK, maybe today they are. Tomorrow, who knows?’ It just depends. That’s the great thing about rock’n’roll: anyone can do it. I’ve seen the worst bands in the world, bands that I despise, turn out a great song or play great one night. I never liked The Dead Kennedys but ‘Holiday In Cambodia’ is a masterpiece… we still play that at soundchecks, the single version, not the album version. Michael doesn’t know any of the words, but we always go into it. We play Kool And The Gang, Freddie King, that Fleetwood Mac song, ‘The Chain’, we play
that a lot…”
He runs through some of his listening habits – today it was Nick Drake, African hi-life, yesterday it was orchestral stuff. He can’t wait for the Dylan bootleg material, right now another favourite, Neil Young’s Freedom LP, is playing on the bar sound system. Surprisingly an era which he is still catching up with is the ’60s; he’s never heard Love’s Forever Changes. That’s kind of weird, I say, because its atmosphere and worldview is very close to that of Green.
During the making of Out Of Time he bought a load of the excellent Beach Boys CD reissues. He left them around the studio and Mike Mills picked up on them. Their harmonies, or rather REM’s interpretation of them, are to be found all over the record. That gives him a clue but it still doesn’t solve the big mystery; sometimes Buck can’t help wondering how REM songs get written.
It can start with Michael trying to tell the band what sort of music he wants to accompany his lyrics, but his instructions are usually too vague, too abstract for the others to understand. Other times, the group will try to tell him what they want from his lyrics but Stipe is always onto something else. Somehow it all comes right in the end, he still hasn’t figured out how or why; he probably never will.
Buck’s stories could go on all night. Stories about the Masonic Lodge, Japanese transvestite bars and the group’s political involvement.
“Basically that stuff is a pain in the ass. I didn’t get into music to shake politicians’ hands. But because this is a small town, you can make a difference. You can sit in a room and talk to 50 people and change the country. It would be different if we lived in Los Angeles. How can you change Los Angeles?”
We wind up talking about his other grand passion – movies. John Ford’s The Searchers is discussed in detail. Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves gets the high sign, The Godfather III is dismissed and the slavering anticipation that began earlier in the day when he and Stipe discussed Jodie Foster’s Silence Of The Lambs continues.
REM’s own movie company is still in its fledgling stage. Stipe says that, for him, in the great cauldron of the senses, it’s always been the visual that has risen to the top. He even says he visualises his songs before he writes them. With TourFilm, some of the group’s promos, videos and information films, he’s made the first steps into visual media. In years to come it may be movies and videos that fill the time REM formerly spent trekking round auditoriums and backroad bars.
Buck recalls that once, but only once, it was his passion for cinema that brought them close to doing something silly and superstar extravagant.
“The original shooting script from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane was for sale. We saw this thing, it had instructions by Welles and the cinematographer written in the margins. I was looking at Michael, I said, ‘Can you imagine the vibes that would be coming off that! We’ll split the cost – you can have it in your house for a week, I’ll have it at mine for the next.’ We came close, but we got a hold of ourselves just in time.
“We could have afforded it, but we’d have ended up eating cheese for the rest of our lives.”
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