Hope despite the times

Paul Revere and the Raiders attempt a comeback, and Mike Mills inspires some thoughts on my generation's collective history with R.E.M.

What do Paul Revere and the Raiders have in common with R.E.M.?

I promise, there’s a payoff.

Paul Revere and the Raiders’ Collage LP is a recent find, a reminder that there are always amazing new discoveries if you’re willing to dig through the dusty bins on the floor of your local record store.

I was reasonably sure I’d never get around to writing about R.E.M. here, but spending time with Mike Mills and Rick Beato when they filmed a video for Rick’s YouTube channel got me thinking about my generation’s collective history with the band. I’m not sure I would have fallen into a life in music if I hadn’t seen them play around the same time I left home for college.

Thinking about R.E.M. and the music community that we all created inevitably means taking stock of my own path. I’m more comfortable telling stories about other people, talking about records or audio gear or the history of the business. This time, it’s a story about the impact the band had on me and my friends.

“You afraid I’m going to tell Jim Morrison you were dancing to Paul Revere and the Raiders?”

Paul Revere and the Raiders had an incredible 18-month streak from late 1965 until mid 1967, with a run of hits that included “Just Like Me” (#11), “Kicks” (#4), “Hungry” (#6), “Good Thing” (#4), and “Him or Me - What’s It Gonna Be?” (#s5). The middle three songs were released in 1966, the year that’s arguably the greatest and most competitive in U.S. pop music history.

The band released three albums in 1966: Just Like Us!, Midnight Ride, and the Spirit of ’67. All three landed in the Top 10 album charts and were all certified gold. Paul Revere and the Raiders were huge.

And then it stopped. The band kept releasing albums at a furious pace (two each in 1967, 1968, and 1969), but nothing really connected. A handful of singles scraped the bottom of the Top 20, but the band’s career at the top of the charts seemed to be over.

One of the A&R geniuses at Columbia Records thought lead singer Mark Lindsay might have some potential as a solo act, so they started cutting solo singles on Mark at the same time he had taken over production and most of the songwriting duties for the Raiders.

Mark had a Top Ten single in 1969 with “Arizona,” so the suits at CBS likely thought there was some momentum for the band at the turn of the decade. Someone decided that changing the band’s name to Raiders would send a message that this was going to be a more mature band that had outgrown its teenage fan base.

Mark Lindsay set out to write and produce Collage, an LP that would slot right in with all the other progressive sounds on FM radio stations. He used the entire trick bag: fuzz tone guitars, plenty of swinging horn charts that manage to evoke both Chicago Transit Authority and Chips Moman-produced Elvis Presley singles like “Suspicious Minds,” and a full array of trippy studio effects.

Like most rock guys in 1970, Lindsay is concerned about his prescription drug supplier (“Dr. Fine”), the vagaries of the music business and the crazy amount of taxes he has to pay (“Think Twice”), how to make a graceful exit from a one-night stand (“Interlude (to Be Forgotten),” and the advanced pleasures that await a rock star who decides to spend time with a complicated adult woman instead of a doe-eyed fan (“Sorceress with Blue Eyes”). There’s also “The Boys in the Band,” an excellent ripoff of Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul.” The album opens with a cover of Laura Nyro’s “Save the Country,” a move that should have proved the Raiders were serious about their new direction.

Unfortunately, the first single was “Just Seventeen,” a tale of an encounter between a rock star and a young woman in Missoula who tells him that she’s “just seventeen.” She knocks on his door and he lets her in. Later in the morning a cop bangs on the door, arrests the narrator and says “she’s just seventeen and that’s a crime.”

The record sounds great, like a roadmap for bands like Sweet or a slightly less hip version of T. Rex. The track was too heavy for AM radio and FM radio wasn’t going to give this band a break. The single was a total stiff.

1970 is smack in the middle of a terrible era for band/fan relations, and there’s really no good way to talk about the fact that a girl who was “already seventeen” would have been way too old for Led Zeppelin and their British friends hanging out at the Continental Hyatt House.

Mark’s trying to display a conscience here, and the guys working the record probably all thought that he was displaying some good character for a rock star in 1970. Hey, at least she wasn’t 13 like Jimmy Page’s girlfriend Lori Mattix. The fact that the girl in the song is close to the legal age of consent doesn’t make the power dynamics any less of a problem.

The truly unfortunate thing is that there’s a real hit on the album. The next single was a new arrangement of “Gone Movin’ On,” a song that was originally an album track on the band’s 1967 LP Revolution! Written by Lindsay and producer Terry Melcher, the song sounded like a potential single in its original version, but the reimagined version on Collage is fantastic and seems like a completely missed opportunity for everyone involved. The first single had already stiffed, so radio wasn’t going to waste any effort on the followup, no matter how good it was.

Collage was a late-career Hail Mary that could have redefined the band’s sound and given them a career well into the next decade, but it was either too late or the band had been the wrong kind of popular for the dope-smoking gatekeepers who were determined to define what was cool enough for the ’70s. They fucked up, but this mistake is just one among countless others happening at the time.

This album has never been reissued except for what seems to be a limited run of CDs manufactured for Mark Lindsay’s website. If you shop for LPs at thrift stores, you’ve likely seen dozens (if not hundreds) of copies of the band’s hit albums, but it’s not likely you’ve run into Collage.

Irony is cruel, and so is the record business. You’d think that’s the end of the story before the band would later resurface on the oldies circuit, but you’d be wrong. At a moment when things were at their lowest for the Raiders, they released a John D. Loudermilk song called “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian).” Somehow, it became a smash hit and the band’s first and only #1 single on the Billboard Hot 100.

This is all deeply strange. J.D. was a first cousin of the Louvin Brothers and had been kicking around as a songwriter since the mid-1950s, writing the garage rock staple “Tobacco Road,” which became a hit for the Nashville Teens. “Indian Reservation” dates from 1959, when it was recorded by Marvin Rainwater under its original title, “The Pale Faced Indian.”

Marvin claimed to be 1/4 Cherokee Indian, so I’m sure he thought it was okay to speak up for the Native American population. The song reemerged in 1968 when the English singer Don Fardon had his first hit with an arrangement that became the blueprint for the future Raiders version. He also introduced the new, longer title.

Don’s version was a #20 hit in 1968, so any plan to record a new version just three years later seems like a terrible idea. Mark Lindsay figured out a way to punch up the hook in the chorus, and the song charted again and became a far bigger hit.

I can’t imagine what the actual Cherokee people would have to say about this song, and a hit with “Gone Movin’ On” might have offered the Raiders a better shot at a future than the one they got after scaling the charts with a protest song that recycled all the Hollywood clichés about Native Americans.

There were no more hits.

I hear rumors of a complete catalog reissue program, so I’m hoping someone gives this album the attention it deserves. For now, you can listen to Collage on Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, or Spotify.

Paul Revere and the Raiders probably had just as much impact as the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, or the Beatles did on the kids who were picking up guitars and forming bands in 1966. They’ve never been seriously mentioned as candidates for any of the music halls of fame, and they’ve mostly been written out of the history of the era.

Quentin Tarantino didn’t forget them. Paul Revere and the Raiders music runs throughout his 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with three different songs getting very identifiable music cues. One of the centerpiece scenes features Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie) having some trouble finding the groove on her record player before dropping the needle on “Good Thing” from The Spirit of ’67 album and dancing around her bedroom before heading out to the movies.

“Good Thing was co-written and produced by Terry Melcher, the same guy who produced the Byrds’ early hits and who also happened to be Doris Day’s only child. Quentin can’t let stuff like this go by, so let’s also note that Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate’s home on Cielo Drive had previously been rented by Terry Melcher. And it was Melcher that Charles Manson was looking to kill when he sent his followers to the house in August 1969. Tarantino fashioned his own ending to that story, one that makes all of this slightly less uncomfortable.

Later, Jay Sebring (played by Emile Hirsch) gets teased by Sharon after she catches him dancing along to “Hungry.” “What the matter?,” she taunts. “Are you afraid I’ll tell Jim Morrison you were dancing to Paul Revere and the Raiders? Are they not cool enough for you?”

Tarantino’s message is clear: If the band is cool enough for Sharon Tate, who cares what a poseur like Jim Morrison thinks?

It’s got a good beat, and you can dance to it.

Before you decide that Columbia must have pulled the plug on Collage after “Just Seventeen” stiffed, there’s evidence on YouTube that someone at the label was still trying and managed to get “Gone Movin’ On” a slot on American Bandstand’s Rate-a-Record segment.

“If it came on the radio, I wouldn’t turn it off.”

Chuck Berry’s “Tulane” was the other record rated on this show. Even the kids gave it an astronomically high rating, it wasn’t a hit either. No worries, though, because Chuck was just two years away from his crowning commercial moment when “My Ding-a-Ling” went to #1 in both the USA and the UK. Hard to believe, but the smutty joke record is somehow even worse than “Indian Reservation.”

They are real, they mean it!

The alt-rock ’90s were brought to you by a generation of American musicians, managers, and record company executives who got into the game because they fell hard for R.E.M. and followed the band into the wilds of the music business.

I’m one of those people. I saw dozens of shows in the early ’80s. R.E.M. worked out its new material on the road, so their most enthusiastic followers always had a good idea of what the next album would sound like before the band actually made it. They were also a band that used all the instruments they could find at the studio and made records that were much more than just an in-studio recreation of their live shows.

R.E.M. is the band that got me interested in how records were made and the mechanics of how record companies and touring organizations actually worked. I wasn’t alone. There were dozens of people I knew from R.E.M. shows in the early ’80s who ended up in high-profile bands or working big time jobs just over a decade later.

Another reason we loved the band was that they belonged to us. R.E.M. was happening right now as opposed to the Rolling Stone-approved boomer bands who were then running on fumes and that we had been too young to see when they were good.

Of course, the boomers tried to co-opt R.E.M. for themselves. Rolling Stone named Murmur the 1983 Album of the Year over Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Fortunately for the fans, the band continued to go its own way and never really followed that boomer blueprint for success. Once they realized that R.E.M. was never going to follow their script, the old folks turned their attention to U2, a band that was more than happy to write updated arena anthems for the Springsteen set.

R.E.M. felt like the biggest band in the world to us, but Murmur only sold 200K in the United States in the year after release, and the band didn’t have a platinum album until 1987’s Document got certified in 1988. Each of the first four albums (1983’s Murmur, 1984’s Reckoning, 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction, and 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant) all eventually went gold after the band broke worldwide but none of them has ever been certified platinum.

I’m going to stop right there for a moment. I never paid attention the band’s RIAA hardware count before I started writing this and I would have insisted that at least of couple of those had sold over 2 million in the U.S. and that all of them were platinum.

The band eventually scaled some massive commercial heights with the three-LP run of 1991’s Out of Time, 1992’s Automatic for the People, and 1994’s Monster, but R.E.M.’s worldwide sales didn’t really come close to the numbers racked up by Metallica, Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, U2, Pearl Jam, Green Day, Hootie and the Blowfish, No Doubt, Matchbox 20, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and even the first Counting Crows album.

Many of the bands on that list (as well as the people who worked with them) would name R.E.M. as a huge influence on either their music or their approach to handling the business of their careers.

I have seen things that you’ll never see

I promised Rick Beato that I’d try to introduce him to R.E.M. a couple of years ago, and it took a while for the timing to be right. Mike Mills (bass player, pianist, backing and sometimes lead vocalist) was doing some very rare post-breakup press interviews before the band got inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame on June 13th.

I don’t think break up is an accurate description for what R.E.M. did. They stopped recording and playing live shows, but the group still has an office in Athens and longtime manager Bertis Downs and Kevin O’Neil are still involved in the day-to-day of managing the catalog and dealing with each member’s various touring and recording projects. They’re still a band, just one that no longer records or plays shows.

After Bertis watched the live stream from December 2022 where Rick counted down his favorite R.E.M. songs, he had me set things up with Rick. I met up with Mike and Rick at the studio to watch as they filmed.

If you’ve got 80 minutes to spare, watch the video before you read about the things I found most interesting from their conversation.

One thing that drives me crazy about R.E.M. biographies is that the writers (usually British) don’t know anything about playing or recording music and gloss over significant details about the songwriting (R.E.M. makes a lot of counterintuitive choices!) and the recordings themselves. In these books it’s as if the band visits a studio and somehow a finished LP coagulates onto magnetic tape because the rock stars are hanging out in the lounge.

In the interview, Rick got Mike to share a lot of new details about how he came to be a musician and how the band made its records. There’s a lot of new intel there, but I’ve got approximately 658 more questions if those guys decide to make a sequel.

I know Rick was surprised by how much Mike wanted to talk about the band’s legacy as businessmen, and I think that legacy is a very important one in both very positive and possibly negative ways.

Consider this the hint of the century

R.E.M. is a band that split everything four ways, most importantly the songwriting royalties. They were determined to never be in debt to their record label, so they limited their early I.R.S. Records recording budgets to make sure they recouped their advances with the royalties from each new release.

It’s an ideal of how a creative organization should work, but most bands I’ve known would never be able to pull this off. A band that’s an equal partnership requires a significant contribution from every member of the band. Those contributions might not be the same for each member, but the collective has to believe that each individual is carrying his or her weight in the overall enterprise.

There’s a lot of business in that paragraph, far more capitalism than a lot of musicians I’ve known could ever stomach. Not everyone is wired to be a member of a creative collective; some musicians just want to show up and play and want to stay as far away from the grimy details as possible.

R.E.M. have always implied that everyone can do things the Athens way, making the choice to split the publishing equally between members and deciding to keep their costs down so the group never feels like its was in debt to the record company.

Unfortunately, not everyone who plays in a band is as talented as the individual musicians in R.E.M., and most of them never figure out how to make the individual sacrifices and compromises that allow a rock group to operate as a united and cohesive unit. Other musicians have families to support, and there’s added pressure for managers and lawyers to rope in as much cash as possible without much regard for the long-term consequences of those advances.

I can think of at least one other band whose lead singer wanted to use R.E.M. as a template for his own career. Once his band blew up, he found himself in a situation where he was writing almost all of the songs and, after the world decided he was the main talent in his group, was required to shoulder the burden of business decisions and act as the public face of the band.

In that situation, an equal split wasn’t going to work. There was really unfortunate personal and career fallout once the singer/songwriter decided the band had to redo its publishing splits to better reflect who was actually writing the songs.

Most successful bands are more like the Rolling Stones, where Mick and Keith run the show or the Eagles, where Don Henley and Glenn Frey steered the ship for decades. The benevolent (or not-so-benevolent) dictatorship model is a far more common one than the R.E.M./U2/Radiohead model.

Speaking it tongues, it’s worth a broken lip

People always ask me if I think that R.E.M. will ever tour again, as if I have some special insight because I’m from Georgia and have been around the band members from time to time over the years. Don’t look at me, I have no idea.

My reckless speculation is that the band members will always value the fact that they succeeded in pursuing a career on their own terms. They chose to stop for reasons that they’re under no obligation to share with any of us, and the group has repeatedly said they’re done and can’t imagine a situation where they’ll change their minds.

That means at least one member doesn’t want to do it. Or maybe it’s all three (or four if they’d only reunite with Bill back behind the drums). The great thing is that they’ve set boundaries that make it clear that the specifics of their decision are none of our business.

Whatever happens during the conversations this band has as it makes decisions, those details stay with the members of the group. I’ve known hundreds of bands in my life, and almost every one of them has constantly leaked stories of intra-band conflict.

R.E.M.’s business operations success shouldn’t be compared to its creative contributions, but I do think the band’s commitment to a collective enterprise is a big part of why they managed to make great music for such a long time. Their business structure created the conditions that allowed the band members to chase their muses and make the music they did.

When Mike Mills talks about how important the band’s power structure and approach to business is to R.E.M.’s legacy, he’s 100% correct. I’ve heard Mike, Peter, and Michael all talk about this topic over the years, and none of them have never really let on just how hard it can be to make the compromises that allow a band to stay together when they work this way.

I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract

Back when all of use were kids, it was the music that intoxicated us all. A few decades later, the music is as great as it ever was. I’ve acquired a lot of experience and perspective over the years, and that allows me to fully appreciate of the level of maturity, loyalty, and commitment required for a band to operate the way R.E.M. has for the past 40 years.

Here’s what a young band could learn from all this: Make sure each member recognizes everyone else’s talents and that all members have the work ethic required to make an equal-split band structure succeed. Every member has to know when to compromise and how to save their powder for that very rare life-or-death creative battle that they just have to win.

Accept that the creative will of the collective will yield better albums than the ones that are a collection of songs where each member gets his or her way on a couple of tracks. You may not be happy with exactly how everyone turns out, but you have to believe that the band (i.e. the hive mind of all its members) knows what it needs to do.

R.E.M. also had its own moment in the American Bandstand Rate-a-Record spotlight, with the Murmur version of “Radio Free Europe” getting raves from the kids in June 1983.

“Sure, why not?”

I did some searching to see if anyone had created a database of all the songs that had ever appeared on Rate-a-Record and didn’t have any luck. One of you data analysis people should track down all the records rated, the scores they got on American Bandstand, and the record’s eventual chart performance. Did a good rating from the kids predict a hit? Were any eventual #1 songs ever reviewed on Rate-a-Record? I’ll be first in line for a paid subscription.

Rating R.E.M. records

I decided to make my own list of top R.E.M. songs, partially in response to Rick’s video and partially because I’m writing an article for a tech website that explains how to leave Spotify and transfer your playlists to your new streaming service. One of the services I’m testing is called SongShift, so I used that to transfer an Apple Music playlist to Spotify Qobuz, YouTube Music, and Tidal. I get intel for my post, you get a playlist.

SongShift isn’t free, but it worked so well that I’m now motivated to make more playlists to go with my posts because it’s so easy to publish them on the four major streaming platforms. The software did choke when it replaced all the original mixes of Monster songs with the recently remixed versions during the transfer to Qobuz, but I learned how to fix that issue.

This is a list made up of songs from the original four-man band, so it goes up to the 1996 release of New Adventures in Hi-Fi. I could make a compelling playlist of songs that the three-man R.E.M. recorded after Bill Berry left the group, but that’s not happening today. This is already my longest post ever.

My Top Five Original Recipe R.E.M. 12” records in order: Lifes Rich Pageant, Automatic for the People, Reckoning, Monster, Chronic Town.

I have different taste in R.E.M. songs than you do.

Links to this playlist: Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify

1. These Days

One of the band’s best live songs from 1986-1989, the song then disappeared from their set before making a return in the early ’00s. Over the past decade our so, its “We are young despite the years/We are concern, we are hope despite the times” chorus has been constant shelter as we’ve endured a rising contempt for the creative class threat from people who really do hate us for who we are.

2. Losing My Religion

I love that a record company agreed to release a song without a chorus as a first single, and I love that this song came about after Peter Buck decided that the band should learn to play new and surprising instruments to keep their creative process from going stale after a decade of making records. The result was a Top 5 hit in the U.S. and a smash all over the world. 1991 was the year when it felt like all the barriers came down for all of us who grew up in the U.S. underground, and our future seemed limitless.

3. Voice of Harold

My favorite moment of Mike’s interview with Rick was the revelation that he also grew up watching the Gospel Singing Jubilee television show on Sundays. You’d have to be familiar with the raucous intersection of country music and shape-note singing to come up with a song like this one.

“Voice of Harold” is a B-side that’s an alternate version of the Reckoning track “Seven Chinese Brothers.” Michael is singing liner notes from the back of the Revelaires’ gospel LP The Joy of Knowing Jesus over the original instrumental track. It’s my favorite Michael Stipe vocal, especially the first chorus where he sings about “the pure tenor quality of the voice of Harold Montgomery.”

This never fails to move me.

My friend Todd Ploharski and I have been buying private-press white gospel records by the dozens over the past few years with the vague notion of someday going through them all and making a Harry Smith-style compilation of the weirdest and most rocking white gospel tunes we can find. Pro tip: buy anything where a band member is holding a Mosrite guitar on the cover.

Neither of us has ever located a copy of the Revelaires LP, which sells for stupid money as an R.E.M. collectible when it does turn up. Anyone up there in the Carolinas who finds one should get in touch.

4. Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)

Still the apex of the band’s early tension-and-release style. This always killed live, so much so that there was a guy in Boston who went to all the early club shows and stood by the stage yelling “BAHKSCAHS” after every song until they finally played this one. When Peter hit his first chord, the guy and his friends would explode into a mosh pit that rivaled anything you’d see at a Sunday hardcore matinee at the Channel.

5. Radio Free Europe

The Bill Berry drum fill that launches us into the second of the song’s two final choruses is rock music’s all-time peak moment. Original Hib-Tone 45 version only.

6. Crush with Eyeliner

More like 300 miles of bad road.

7. Pretty Persuasion

In 1983, I would have tried to convince you that “Pretty Persuasion” was a going to be both the first single from the next album and a massive worldwide hit. We’ll never know if I was right because I.R.S. Records didn’t see it that way.

8. Bittersweet Me

I’m not sure why New Adventures in Hi-Fi sounds so flat and brittle to me. I don’t know if that’s related to the fact that the band recorded a lot of this album at soundchecks during their final arena tour with Bill Berry or if it’s just me failing to hear whatever it is that the band was aiming for with the sound on this LP.

If the rhythm track had a bit more space and air in it, I’m pretty sure this would be my all-time favorite R.E.M. track. Every time I saw the 21st century lineup play “Bittersweet Me,” it was the highlight of the set.

9. Try Not to Breathe

Here’s another song that I wouldn’t have imagined that R.E.M. would ever write back when we were all following the band around in 1983. There’s a discipline and patience to the performance, which sits very comfortably in the back of the pocket. Less than a decade later, major label functionaries would tell a young band who recorded something like this that they needed to quantize these drums and lock everything to the grid. Those hacks would never understand that it’s that lope in the beat that creates the sense that the song itself is breathing.

10. Strange Currencies

What’s the best R.E.M. song in 6/8 time? This one, not that other one that you’re thinking about. “Strange Currencies” was a Top 10 hit in the U.K., but the novelty hit virus had already started to decimate commercial alternative radio here in the states, and this soul ballad never got the traction it needed to cross over to Top 40 in the U.S.

11. I Believe

“I believe my throat hurts.” This was the first one where Michael’s lyrics made me laugh. Bonus points for that accordion in the bridge.

12. Camera

R.E.M.’s love of the Velvet Underground introduced the band to a lot of us who grew up outside of the big cities, and “Camera” was the most VU ballad they ever recorded. It’s also an elegy for Carol Levy, a photographer who took the band photo on the back of the Hib-Tone “Radio Free Europe” 45.

13. Sitting Still

You’ll never convince me that he’s not singing “We can find it at the Sears” and “Sitting round at Burger King/Wasting time, sitting still” because both of those lines so perfectly capture those aimless conversations we had out in the sticks as we plotted our escapes to the big city. Once again, original Hib-Tone version only.

14. Gardening at Night

I could not possible count the number of bands from the late ’70s/early ’80s who put out a killer 45 and then ran out of gas. I’d been disappointed enough times by August 1982 that I was terrified to play Chronic Town for the first time once I finally tracked down a copy.

I was living with my parents and working a summer job to pay for college. There was no independent record store in their town that year, and the guys at the mall’s Camelot Records chain store had no fucking idea who this band I kept asking about could be. No one seemed to have access to a release schedule, so I was just guessing about a release date as I went back every week to ask them.

I’m pretty sure my friends drove to Nashville and brought back my copy from Cats Records. Relief came quickly, as 4 out of 5 songs were as good as both songs on the 45.

15. Let Me In

I don’t understand why some people insist that Monster represents some kind of creative misstep after Automatic for the People, because it’s a sonic high point in the band’s career. Peter uses feedback in ways the kids from Seattle couldn’t possibly comprehend. This one’s supposed to be a tribute to a fallen comrade, and the simplicity of the track makes it the most haunting song in the band’s career.

16. Pilgrimage

There were quite a few old ’60s people who did not like R.E.M., and their favorite complaint was to attack Michael’s impressionistic lyrics and his emphasis on sound and texture over clarity and enunciation. They hilariously insisted on calling the first LP Mumble.

I always heard a connection in R.E.M.’s music to all the records I was discovering at the same time by other artists who induced a trance state. That’s a long list that includes lots of Krautrock, Bowie, the Velvet Underground, Syd Barrett, 13th Floor Elevators, the Modern Lovers, the Feelies, Arthur Russell’s rock band the Necessaries, Wire, and the trippier side of the Byrds.

R.E.M.’s music evolved and eventually intersected with the mainstream culture, but there’s an enthusiastic embrace of truly underground music in their early years, even if the strong creative personalities in the band members morphed those influences into something quite different from their inspirations.

Old hippies may have been irritated or confused, but the kids understood.

17. Everybody Hurts

And this is where the band fully intersected with that mainstream culture, at least in Europe and Australia, where “Everybody Hurts” was a Top 10 single in almost every country. The U.S. peak was #29 on the Billboard Hot 100, and here’s the moment where the band became far bigger outside their home country than they would ever be here.

Unless you’re an R.E.M. fan who’s traveled the world, it’s hard to understand just how underrated these prophets have been in their home country. For the first decade, they had a moderate following here at home and a minuscule one everywhere else. After “Losing My Religion,” they were one of the biggest American bands everywhere else while still a big cult band at home. Every black cab driver in London knows all the words to every song on Automatic for the People.

18. Fall on Me

The first single from Lifes Rich Pageant went top 5 on commercial alternative radio in the U.S. but barely scraped the bottom of the Hot 100 singles. The album went gold, so things were starting to gain momentum. This song’s all about Mike’s countermelody in the out chorus.

19. (Don’t Go Back to) Rockville

Some members of the band have claimed that the exaggerated country music arrangement (complete with tack piano) was recorded a joke after Bertis Downs begged the band to put this song on a record.

When a band is locked in, sometimes the jokes have as much emotional impact as the really sincere songs. If you put out a record about people going their separate ways as a school year ends and then send the song to a few hundred college radio DJ’s, how could you possibly be surprised your record strikes a chord and you discover that you’ve written an anthem?

20. Perfect Circle

Different LP, same piano sound. There’s almost no guitar in this song, and it’s an early sign that the R.E.M. understands that records can do more than capture a band’s live sound. Eventually they would write so many songs that four people couldn’t play by themselves that they had to add an extra onstage musician for tours. That role has been capably filled by Buren Fowler (later of Drivin’ N’ Cryin’), Peter Holsapple (the dB’s), Scott McCaughey (the Young Fresh Fellows), Nathan December, and Ken Stringfellow (the Posies).

Intersection

You thought this was a random pairing of topics? Well, it actually was before I learned about the upcoming Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise, scheduled for May 2025.

Up there on the poster, you can see that Mark Lindsay from the Paul Revere and the Raiders and Mike Mills’ band the Baseball Project share billing on line 4.

Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey also play with the Baseball Project, and their other band the Minus 5 will be performing on the cruise. You can also see Steve Wynn and Linda Pitmon from the Baseball Project play with their other band Steve Wynn & the Miracle 3.

Social Distortion, X, Rocket from the Crypt, the Chesterfield Kings, the Fleshtones, the Flamin’ Groovies, and the Dictators will also be there. Plus Lenny Kaye’s on the bill, and I’m sure he’ll be playing some songs from his legendary Nuggets compilation alongside a lot of musicians from the other bands on the cruise.

What is Nuggets?

Read this: Have You Heard the Good News About ‘Nuggets’?

I’d love to talk to Mark about the ups and downs of his career, and how he kept his focus in the studio to make Collage when the world was changing around him.

8-Track of the Day