Murmur

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Murmur

J. Niimi

2005

The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc15 East 26 Street, New York, NY 10010

The Continuum International Publishing Group LtdThe Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

Copyright 2005 by J. Niimi

All rights reserved. No part of this book may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmittedin any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the

written permission of the publishers.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Niimi, J.Murmur / J. Niimi.p. cm. (33 1/3)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-5273-21. R.E.M. (Musical group). Murmur.

2. R.E.M. (Musical group)I. Title. II. Series.

ML421.R22N55 2005782.42166'092'2dc22

2005002116

CONTENTS

Preface: deposition / de-positioning ix

MURMUR

I. Athens 1II. Charlotte 24

DREAMS OF ELYSIAN

III. Pueraria lobata, lower 55IV. headwaters / watershed 89

Appendix: version 128

v

Also available in this series:

Dusty in Memphis, by Warren ZanesForever Changes, by Andrew Hultkrans

Harvest, by Sam InglisThe Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society,

by Andy MillerMeat Is Murder, by Joe Pernice

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, by John CavanaghAbba Gold, by Elisabeth Vincentelli

Electric Ladyland, by John PerryUnknown Pleasures, by Chris Ott

Sign O the Times, by Michaelangelo MatosThe Velvet Underground and Nico, by Joe Harvard

Let It Be, by Steve MatteoLive at the Apollo, by Douglas Wolk

Aqualung, by Allan MooreOK Computer, by Dai Griffiths

Let It Be, by Colin MeloyLed Zeppelin IV, by Erik Davis

Armed Forces, by Franklin BrunoExile on Main Street, by Bill Janovitz

Grace, by Daphne BrooksLoveless, by Mike McGonigal

Pet Sounds, by Jim FusilliRamones, by Nicholas Rombes

Forthcoming in this series:

Born in the USA, by Geoff HimesEndtroducing . . . , by Eliot Wilder

In the Aeroplane over the Sea, by Kim CooperLondon Calling, by David Ulin

Low, by Hugo WilckenKick out the Jams, by Don McLeese

The Notorious Byrd Brothers, by Ric Menck

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks go out to Don Dixon and Mitch Easter,who graciously took time out from the business of shapingAmerican pop music to accommodate me when I inducedthem to sit on their laurels for a minute. Im grateful fortheir intelligence, honesty, and generosity. I also want tothank my friend Seth Sanders, who used to write aboutrock music but then got bored, and, looking into hisboredom the way he used to look into rock, he now writesabout God exclusively. Then theres Mike OFlaherty,who continually makes me think he could write a betterbook about almost any idea I come up with, which insteadof making me hate him, makes him the most valuablefriend anyone could hope to havethanks, Mike, for allyour amazing help. I would also like to thank my editor,David Barker, for his enthusiasm and editorial aplomb,andGabriella Page-Fort at Continuum. Last but not least,thanks go out to Jay Williams at Critical Inquiry for help-ing iron out portions of the book, Robert Muhlbock forsupplying crucial research materials, Andy Creighton forhis crafty ears, my cohorts at the University of Chicago

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Library for their patience and understanding, andMelissaMaerz for her ongoing encouragement. And finally, awarm thanks to my family, who have always been therefor me through thick and thin, and a special thanks toTami, who makes me believe everything is possible andgood.

viii

PREFACE

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Plato, Ion

R.E.M. is part lies, part heart, part truth and part garbage.

Peter Buck

Tell all the Truth but tell it slantSuccess in Circuit liesToo bright for our infirm DelightThe Truths superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children easedWith explanation kindThe Truth must dazzle graduallyOr every man be blind

Emily Dickinson

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Dont dissect us in a clinical, linear way;come at it from somewhere else.

Michael Stipe

Poetry is nobodys business except the poets,and everybody else can fuck off.

Philip Larkin

This is a book about a record. But its also a book abouta life that adopted that record as a kind of soundtrack.By which this life discovered some of its narrative, itstrajectory, its set pieces and blocking, its phraseology anddrama, on a stage that made sense when sense itself wastheater. This book is to that record as film is to the stage,as memory is to sound.

The story doesnt get any tidier, unfortunately, be-cause this book is also kind of a soundtrack in and ofitself, a soundtrack to a pretend film about the life thatproduced the book. This is a play that begins when thecurtains close and the orchestra retires, and instead ofcoming up, the lights fade out.

To begin with, one thing this book definitely is not is astraightforward biography of the band. There are alreadyplenty of those out there to choose from, comprehensiveworks which I couldnt improve on or add anything to ifI tried.1 But thats an entirely different imperative anyway,because this book is less contingent on the lives of themembers of the band than it is on the life of its author,and thats a fatal premise for a biography.

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But isnt that how we feel about records we lovethatwithout us, they wouldnt exist? That they continue tomediate your existence, even after you shut off the stereo,shelve the record, outgrow the band? Fandom of thiskind knows that if a tree fell in a forest with no onearound to hear it, not only would it not make a sound,it wouldnt have been there in the first place. A soundtrackinextricable from the life living it. We thought the forestinto existence. As Francisco Varela once wrote, Everyact of knowing brings forth a world. I made Murmur asmuch as it made me.

Such that its hard to tell whats been made, subjectfrom object, the maker from the predicate, the beholderfrom the beholden. When I started writing this book, Iworried that I wouldnt be able to hear this album withselfish fourteen-year-old ears againor worse, that Idhave no choice but to. Then I stopped worrying, sinceboth are impossible.

Varela, a philosopher of science as well as a Buddhist,called it structural driftthe notion that living organismschange over the course of their lifespan to the degreethat they are never the same organism they were even ashort while earlier. The cells are different, the skeletonregenerates itself every ten years, the ear cells and thebrain cell colonies that heard a song for the first time nolonger exist, just a shaky continuity floating along a chainof moments. We jeopardize our grasp on something asconcrete as a rock albuma record, i.e., a document todefeat timethrough our own ongoing self-production.We can also call it autopoeisis, as Varela did: that growingrift between us and fourteen-year-old ears.

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That teenager is gone, but his thoughts still driftaround. His ears are here too, but now theyre mine. Hisfeelings have become my notions, his battered copy ofMurmur shines dull and black on my turntable. Whosefavorite album is being written about here?We cant evenagree on our favorite songs, a jury of two hung by anythingbut lack of evidence. The jury is excused. The life thatonce needed the soundtrack has gone to the same placeas the ears that delivered the one to the other and theair that first animated them all in sound.

* * *

In researching the reference to Laocoon, the Hellenicfigure Michael Stipe mentions in the song Laughing,I happened across Richard Brilliants My Laocoon. Hisbook is essentially about how a personal experience of awork of art can become tainted by what history has tosay about it. Brilliant argues that history divorced thefamous statue of Laocoon in the Vatican Museumknown to antiquarians by the shorthand of The Laocoonfrom the mythological event its supposed to portray:

The babble of tonguesGreek, Latin, German, Ital-ian, and even Englishseeming to emanate from theLaocoon and its abundant historiographic and criticaltexts not only compounds the difficulty of decipheringthe statue for whatever it is, or was, but also bringsto the fore the necessity of understanding my prede-cessors understanding of the work prior to attemptingto understand the sculpture myself.

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He continues:

To my great consternation, I found that among arthistorians who constantly engage in the interpretationof artworks, there seemed to be little appreciationeither of the complexity of the interpretive act or ofthe ability of earlier interpretations to restrain theimagination of subsequent generations, evenwhen theconceptual or factual basis of those interpretations nolonger obtained.

The strategy that Brilliant develops is to triangulateseveral different versions of the Laocoon statue in orderto arrive at a dehistoricized understanding of both thework and the myth, which he calls My Laocoon. Brilliantseffort to reconcile public history with personal experiencemirrored my process in trying to capture Murmur.

Although this is a recordi.e., a document to defeattimeits not made of stone. Its not a statue in a park thatyou can walk around and touch and register its shiftingshadows on your skin. If its problematic to think abouta solid thing of marble, existing in real space as a textto be read, as Brilliant points out in My Laocoon, Murmurpresents an even greater conundrum. Murmur is partobject (the sleeve, the vinyl), part text (the lyrics, whichare indeterminate), and part performancea thing, butalso a document of that thing. Unlike Michelangelo, whosaw a finished sculpture in a block of marble and onlyclaimed to free it, in the course of writing this book Ifelt I was trying to free My Murmur from a block ofmarble that is already The Murmur, not knowing howdifferent those two things are or how similar. Just where

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do the boundaries of Murmur lie, or for that matter,anything that seems to be more that it is? How do youfind its surfaces, much less read whats written on them?Murmur is indisputably mythological, like the Laocoon.How meaningful is it to fix that mythology in the marbleof the written word?

Questions like these lead to a host of potential prob-lems.One is that this book is implicitly supposed to explainsomething, which is very nearly the opposite of whatMurmurs worth is to me. Murmur was, and is, about notunderstanding things too quickly or too assuredly. Anartist wants his or her work to be understood, but bya particular means also inscribed as a part of that work.Therefore, it would be as equally disheartening to me forone of the band to read this and feel I had succeeded inexplaining away the records mystery as it would if he feltI utterly misunderstood it and glossed the whole damnthing.

Another problem is that every idea along the way hasalso beenwritten about in its own book, each twice the sizeof this one and at least that many times more competentlyexplained. I can only try to document how some of theseideas first found purchase in my head through the soundson Murmur before I had an inkling that these ideas wereeven anything like ideas. And as we emerge from thefeeling that records are all about us, we move into anothercommon feeling, which is to want to know why theyrenot.

So heres how its going to go down. The first chapterbegins with a quick thumbnail sketch of the early historyof the band leading up to the recording of Murmur, andthen what follows is a portrait of the studio environment

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and how it was important in the making of the album.This sets the stage for chapter two, where I move throughthe album track-by-track and note-by-note. Youll proba-bly need a break after this much detail, so I shift gearsfor the second half of the book. Chapter three beginswith my initial experience of the record and a dose ofhistorical context, and then I step through the lookingglass, so to speak, for an analysis of the album cover. Thisleads into a discussion of Gothic, which eventually beginsto fold in some of the musical detail from the first halfof the book. Then I step back out of the looking glassonto Georgia soil again with some observations about80s culture, Southern Gothic, and my experiences livingin the South. In the fourth and final chapter, a lot of thestuff Ive covered up to that point is brought to bearin my analysis of Murmurs vocals and language. Theappendix contains my interpretations of the albums lyr-ics, and is the source from which Ill be quoting through-out the book.

One thing you may notice as you read through thebook is that the writing style morphs a bit from sectionto section or even from passage-to-passage. Dont let itthrow youthis is a complex record, and I think a varietyof approaches are warranted in sussing out its variousaspects. Some parts are densely technical, others are moreprose-like; some are more journalistic, others like diaryentries. This is my personal soundtrack, my mix tape, butI welcome you to fast-forward through any parts youmay find difficult or less interesting and move on to theother sections.

I want to conclude here by saying that this book isnot entirely meant to bridge art and audience, but to exist

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as something parallel to both art and audience, which isthe netherland from which I first heard Murmur. I hopedto render it as such, and I hope youll enjoy it as such.Above all, I hope youll discover a few things about Mur-mur that you might not have thought about before, as Idefinitely did while writing this book. This goes for youtoo, R.E.M., because your right to spectatorship of yourown art is at least as sacred as anyone elses. This neth-erland is claimed on your behalf.

J. NiimiChicago, Thanksgiving 2004

jniimi@uchicago.edu

NOTES

1. For a more detailed account of the bands early daysand the band members personal histories, I recom-mend the following excellent biographies: It Crawledfrom the South: An R.E.M. Companion by Marcus Gray,Adventures in Hi-Fi: The Complete R.E.M. by Rob Jova-novic and Tim Abbott, and R.E.M. Fiction: An Alterna-tive Biography by David Buckley. Theres also R.E.M.:From Chronic Town to Monster by Dave Bowler andBryan Dray and Denise Sullivans Talk About the Pas-sion: An Oral History, which are both worth checkingout. For an interesting if slightly discombobulatedfirst-person history of the early Athens scene, see Rod-ger Lyle Browns book Party Out of Bounds: The B-52s, R.E.M., and the Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia.And for a detailed, if wildly conjectural, interpretationof R.E.M.s early lyrics, see John A. Platts book Mur-mur in the now-defunct Classic Rock Albums series.

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The four members of R.E.M. loaded their guitars anddrums into a decrepit van in mid-January of 1983 andleft their home of Athens, Georgia, heading north on I-85. The 200-mile drive took them to Charlotte, NorthCarolina, where they would begin work on their as-yet-untitled full-length debut album. Vocalist Michael Stipewould later give it the title of Murmur, picking it froma list he read somewhere of the seven easiest words tosay in the English language.

It was a drive theyd made many times already. Asidefrom numerous road trips there for club showstheirreputation as a great live act was already spreadingthroughout the Southern Atlantic states with an un-checked momentumtheyd also recorded a seven-inchsingle and anEPwithNorth Carolina nativeMitch Easterat his Drive-In Studio in Winston-Salem, so named be-cause it was located in his parents converted garage space.Easter had recorded the bands Radio Free Europesingle there in April 1981, and the Chronic Town EP sixmonths after that. The band had also met their manager

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Jefferson Holt after a July 1980 gig in nearby Carrborowhere Holt was working the doorR.E.M. was filling infor Pylon, who couldnt make the show. At the time, Holtwasmanaging a record store and was starting to book localshows for out-of-town bands, with a particular interest inthe burgeoning Athens scene. It was through Holt thatthe band decided to work with Easter at Drive-In, afterHolt had asked his friend Peter Holsapple for some sug-gestions about cheap recording studios. The R.E.M. guyswere already big fans of Holsapples band, the dBs, whichhelped clinch the decision.

Easters home studio was primitive, but its relaxedatmosphere (guitarist Peter Buck tells stories of Eastersmom bringing the band coffee and donuts), coupled withEasters complementary pop sensibilities, made it an idealplace for R.E.M. to begin addressing the problem everynascent band encounters: how to translate their road-hewn material to vinyl. This wasnt much of a concernfor the band when they recorded their first single withEasterthe Radio Free Europe/Sitting Still seven-inch, released in a tiny initial pressing of about a thousandcopies by their friend Johnny Hibbert on his new label,Hib-Tone Records. It wasnt even so much of a concernafter the band signed to I.R.S. Records and releasedChronic Townthe label was fine with the idea of startingthe band off with an EP release that would break listenersears in, while giving the band time to further hone theirsongs and develop their studio sound. But with the sur-prise buzz created by Radio Free Europe (voted #1single in the Village Voice), as well as the rising cult popu-larity of the Chronic Town EP (especially in England),I.R.S. was now expecting R.E.M. to come up with an

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album that could capitalize on that underground buzzand parlay it into national recognition. At the same time,the band did not want to make a record that panderedto any of the prevailing radio chart trends: Euro-synthpop, hair metal, and light-rock balladry. More important-ly, they simply couldnt even if they had to. Murmur wasa giant gamble in a sense, but it was their only choice,and as far as the band were concerned, they had littleto lose.

Peter Buck was born in California and moved to Ros-well, Georgia in 1971 at the age of fourteen. He attendedEmory University in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur from1975 to 1977, eventually dropping out to take a job atWuxtry Records in Athens the following year (where hecontinued to work off and on until about 1986), teachinghimself guitar in his spare time by playing along withrecords.

It was while working at Wuxtry that Buck struck up afriendship with Michael Stipe. Stipe was born in Decatur,Georgia, but moved around in his childhood due to hisfathers army career, living briefly in Germany and at-tending high school in Southern Illinois, near East St.Louis. Stipe moved to Athens in the late 1970s to studyart at the University of Georgia, and met Buck in early1979. Stipe and his two sisters were regulars at Wuxtry,and he would come in to browse the racks and talk aboutbands with Buck, who often noodled around on his guitarwhile manning the counter. Eventually the conversationcame around to starting a band themselves.

Buck was living in a deconsecrated church on OconeeStreet in Athens, the former St.Marys Episcopal Church,which was sublet by Dan Wall, Bucks employer at Wux-

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try. The dilapidated church was subdivided into crudebedrooms, with a large space in the back perfectly suitedfor band practices (as well as some of the college townsnotoriously raucous parties). Bucks roommate and some-time girlfriend Kathleen OBrien introduced him to herfriend Bill Berry, whom she had met in the UGA dorms.Berry was born inMinnesota andmoved toMacon, Geor-gia with his family in 1972 as a young teen.

It was back in Macon that Berry first encounteredMikeMills, a fellow high school student. Mills is arguablythe bands closest thing to a native Southerner: thoughhe too was born in California, like Buck, Millss parentsmoved to Georgia while he was still a baby. As a teenagerMills was a clean-cut straight-A student, while the teenageBerry was something of a long-haired stoner, and the pairdid not get along well until the day they both happenedto show up at the same band audition and reluctantlydecided to bury the hatchet (as Berry had already set uphis drum kit and thus couldnt bail out of the rehearsal).The two ended up becoming best friends, playing to-gether in a few different bands (including one called theFrustrations, which included a local guitarist by the nameof Ian Copeland). The duo eventually moved to Athenstogether in 1979 to enroll at UGA.

The four futuremembers of R.E.M. were finally intro-duced to one another by Kathleen OBrien in the fall of1979. It was a less than auspicious beginning: Stipe wasput off by Millss falling-down drunkenness, but he didlike Berrys now-famous monobrow, which Stipe creditsfor tipping the scale in his decision to join up with thetwoMaconites. A fewmonths later, OBrien was planninga party at the church on Oconee Street in celebration of

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her birthday, to be held on April 5, 1980. She had gottenthe popular local band the Side Effects to agree to play,but she now needed an opening act. She asked the as-yet-unnamed (in fact, barely formed) R.E.M. to play aswell. The band was thrilled at the prospect and said yes,though they had only a couple of half-hearted, beer-soaked rehearsals under their belt by this point.

Buck and Stipe had written a few tentative songs to-gether before they met Berry and Mills. Together thefour of them worked out a few more originals, as well asa slew of covers, rehearsing in the back of the churchduring the Winter of 197980. After OBriens invitationto play came in February, the band kicked up the pace,cobbling together a sets worth of songs in the weeksbefore the party, deciding at the last minute on the nameTwisted Kites (after discarding such other possibilities asNegro Eyes and Cans of Pissthough some band mem-bers claim that they played the party without any nameat all).

About three hundred people showed up at the churchthat night, surpassing even OBriens expectations: thebirthday gathering was now an Event. After the SideEffects finished their set, Twisted Kites/R.E.M./untitledtook the stage, playing about twenty songs, roughly halfof them originals, to a wildly enthusiastic (and profoundlydrunk) crowd. The band was so well received that night,in fact, that the crowd goaded them into playing theirentire set a second time. Among the covers reportedlyincluded in the set were Honky Tonk Women, GodSave the Queen, Secret Agent Man, the Troggs ICant Control Myself, and the Monkees (Im NotYour) Steppin Stone. Among the bands originals that

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night (also documented on the early bootleg Bodycount atTyrones, recorded about six months after the partyafairly representative cross-section of the bands early ma-terial1) was a nascent version of Just a Touch, whichappeared in final form on Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986.

Their earliest material was fast, brash, and goofy.Mostof the lyrics were first person narratives from Stipe di-rected, interestingly enough, toward women subjects (orpossibly against women subjects, as some R.E.M. histori-ans believe). Theres a liberal use of the rock pronounbaby, and plenty of I dont wannas a la the first Ramonesrecord. The band settled on the name R.E.M., pickedfrom a dictionaryit didnt have any trite punk conno-tations, and Stipe really liked the periods. Plus, like Mur-mur, it was easy to pronounce.

The band was an almost instant hit on the Athens scene.But as they started to venture out of town, they realizedthat maybe they werent just a local beer-party phenome-non.With encouragement from JeffersonHoltwho hadmoved to Athens to manage the bandthey decided totry and record a demo to send out to clubs and recordlabels. The bands first recording session was held onJune 6, 1980, a couple months after their gig at the churchparty, in the back of the Decatur branch of Wuxtry Re-cords, where Buck had worked as a student at Emory. Itwas a stop-off on the afternoon of their first out of towngig at the Warehouse in neighboring Atlanta, essentiallya rehearsal for the show, and they bashed through eightsongs whileWuxtry ownerMarkMethe videotaped them.(While the band never used the tape, which sounded like

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crap, the murky audio track of the session has shown upon various bootlegs over the years as first demos.)

Holt suggested they make a proper recording to show-case their newer songs, so they booked a day at engineerJoe Perrys Bombay Studio, a small eight-track setup innearby Smyrna, in February of 1981. Within a matter ofhours the band laid down eight songs, including skeletalversions of Radio Free Europe, Sitting Still, andShaking Through. Though the tapes have never beenmade public, the results were apparently less than stellarHolt urged the band not to send them around and wentlooking for another studio and engineer. At the suggestionof Peter Holsapple, Holt called Mitch Easter.

Easter recorded the bands seven-inch on April 15,1981, in his garage studio setup. The band wisely decidedto focus on just a few songs, rather than banging out awhole mini-set as they did at Bombay, so they recordedRadio Free Europe and Sitting Still, as well as a thirdsong, White Tornadoa quasi-surf instrumental theyhad just written.The band slapped together a few hundredhandmade cassettes of the three songs (plus a dub mixof Radio Free Europe that Easter had later splicedtogether, half-jokingly) and sent the tape out to clubs,labels, magazines, and just about anyplace else they couldthink of. Hib-Tone released the seven-inch of RadioFree Europe b/w Sitting Still in July 1981; of the initialpressing of 1,000 copies, 600 were sent out as promos,and a total of around 6,000 additional copies were laterpressed by popular demand (amazingly, since the firstpressing mistakenly omitted any contact info for the la-bel). The band was annoyed with the muddy-soundingmastering job (Buck smashed one of his copies and nailed

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it to a wall in his house), but the single spurred a criticalbuzz for the band, garnering wide-spread plaudits andlanding on a number of year-end Top 10 lists. R.E.M.started to get letters from labels, most of whichmade themlaugh. They threw them in the fireplace and kept playing.

* * *

The band played a high-profile show in Atlanta that previ-ous wintertheir biggest yetopening for the Police atthe Fox Theater in December 1980. They landed theprestigious gig through Bill Berrys old friend from Ma-con, Ian Copeland (brother of Police drummer StewartCopeland), to whom Berry had been sending the bandsrehearsal and demo tapes. Ian was now running F.B.I., asuccessful booking agency that handled the Police, amongother I.R.S. acts, and had been bugging his brother, MilesCopeland, the president of I.R.S., to sign R.E.M. Mileshad heard the bands cruddy demo cassette and wasntthat impressed, but he eventually capitulated in the faceof Ians hyperbolic praise, dispatching I.R.S. VP Jay Bo-berg to New Orleans in March of 1982 to check out theband in person. The show that night was at a drug-infested dive called The Beat Exchange, where the toiletsin the bathrooms were clogged with used syringes. Thenight was by all accounts a disasterthe Rastafariansound man wandered off before their set started, and theband, uncharacteristically, suffered from horrible stagefright. But Boberg was sold, and upon returning to LAhe advised Miles Copeland to sign R.E.M. The bandadjourned to the labels New York office in May 1982 to

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sign a five-record deal. I.R.S. bought the master tapesthe band had recorded with Easter and released ChronicTown in August 1982, with plans for a full-length albumrelease the following spring.

* * *

Reflection Sound Studios in Charlotte looks pretty muchlike any recording studio that dates to the early 70s, whenaudio electronics began to enter the consumer marketamarket that included both the people who consumed mu-sic and the people who wanted to make it themselves.Only five years earlier, recording studios were still build-ing their own equipment with solder and sheet metal.Beyond companies with the wherewithal to employ engi-neers (real engineers, with professional training in electri-cal and mechanical engineering), having a viablerecording setup not backed by radio revenues was thedomain of amateur hobbyists, some of whom served inmilitary capacities (like the army signal corps, where un-limited access to cutting-edge technology first whettedthese hobbyists appetites for audio experimentation).

With advancements in the electronic manufacturingindustries (centered around the refinement of the transis-tor), these folks could now buy high-quality, reasonablypriced mass-produced gear in place of their primitivehomebrew inventions or costly, hard-to-come-by Euro-pean products designed for broadcast applications andstate-funded budgets. Now they were able to get downto what they wanted to do in the first place beyond allthe soldering irons and the oscilloscopes, which was to

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make music. In turn some of these people built commer-cial recording studios to subsidize their dual interest inwhat was essentially folk technology and folk art. Thoughits easy to take both for granted today, without indepen-dent studios there would be no independent music.

Not being affiliated with any particular record labelor company, Reflection Sound Studios serviced a widerange of musical genres and clientele. It was outfitted witha modest array of professional grade recording equipmentand musical gear, and could be rented by the hour or bythe day by anyone, with or without the services of oneof its house engineers. Reflections layout was typical ofmany studios at the time, a plan thats still commonlyused today in the construction of studios: A central controlroom contains all the recording equipment, adjacent toa larger studio room where the band plays, with a sound-proofed double-pane glass window connecting the twoand providing a sightline between the engineer and theband. The control room at Reflection is elevated slightlyabove the level of the live room, looking down into it,and is accessible by a small staircase in the hallway outsidethe live room.2

Inside the live studio room, connected by another doorand window, is a smaller, closet-like isolation booth,an enclosed, acoustically treated space where loud thingslike amps or a drum kit can be placed so as not to interferewith the other instruments. Like a lot of studios, Reflec-tion also has a smaller second studio room, althoughR.E.M. did not utilize it on Murmurin fact, there wereother sessions in progress there during the recording ofthe album. The band even dropped in on one Studio Bsession during a lull inMurmur to contribute handclaps to

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another bands record. As far as the studio was concerned,R.E.M. was just one anonymous group out of many thatwere booked at Reflection over the course of January andFebruary 1983probably less notable by virtue of beinga rock band.

Running an independent recording studio in any cityis a treacherous business, but especially so in a small cityoff the mainstream record industrys mapCharlotte isa good seven-hour drive from Nashville and ten hoursfrom New York City. Luckily, Reflections setup wasideally suited to its bread-and-butter clienteleSoutherngospel and soul groups. Reflections main live room, Stu-dio A, is an open thirty- by forty-five-foot wood paneledspace designed in such a way that not only can it accom-modate amodern gospel choir and band (plus its drummerin the isobooth), the rooms acoustical properties areuniquely suited to the genre as well. The room is live, oracoustically reflective, enough for voices to sound naturalsinging in it, but controlled enough to allow engineersto capture their sound with relative ease, without thetechnical problems that often arise when there are a lotof microphones capturing a lot of people producing a lotof sound in one enclosed space. As Murmur engineerDonDixon put it in recording slang, [Reflections StudioA] was just the right combination of live and dead. Themain rooms sonic properties probably lent themselvesto the duality of the studios name: a space designed witha sensitivity for acoustical reflection, as well as the morespiritual kindmuch like a church or a cathedral. In 2003,two Grammy Award-nominated gospel albums weremade at Reflection.

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While anyone would be hard-pressed to describeR.E.M. as a gospel act, its interesting to think about howthe studios legacy might have resonated with the bandduring their stay at Reflection. They were still in theBible Belt, but they were now in a different house ofdevotion, where soul musicians came to make Christianrecords (and vice versa)3, a place that also happened tobe sanctioned by musically like-minded hipsters likeDixon and Easter. Its reasonable to imagine that theband must have thought about their own devotion andausterity in such a place, both in terms of the bandssound and the personal life that each was starting to giveup in the name of music.

Murmur was a new kind of sacrifice for a band thatwas becoming accustomed to sacrificeafter all, beingin a band, as anyone whos ever been in one can attest,is not so much about freedom as it is about the givingup of one kind of burden for another. If the open roadand the creative lifestyle do afford an escape of sorts,going into the studio is an equally profound time of con-frontation, a kind of reckoning. The most intense re-cording sessions are fueled by an energy thats a lot likereligiona concentrated time when individual needs andegos are put aside in the attempt to galvanize a highercollective mind, especially when the stakes are high, asthey were for R.E.M. by 1983. By comparison, themakingof Chronic Town was a sleepover. Here the four of themlived together like monks in the squalor of a cheap hotelroom for three weeks; rock stars dont steal ketchup pack-ets from Burger King just to have something to eat withthe stale tortillas they scavenge from the back of the van.But what they ate and how they slept only defined their

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existencetheir lives during those weeks were defined atReflection. There was penance and ecstasy and catharsis.It sucked, but how much more could it suck otherwise?Which is probably an even better description of whatchurch is for.

It ought to be remembered that R.E.M. wrote mostof their early songs in the pew of a dilapidated church,where skylight angled down on them through holes inthe collapsed ceiling. Birds alighted from their amps whenthey came to practice. Peter Buck even used the phrasespooky gospel to describe the sound of Chronic TownsGardening at Night. Buck lived in a church, but Stipewould have been comfortable there toohe was chris-tened John Michael Stipe, after John Wesleya choiceinformed by his Methodist grandfather who was apreacher in Georgia. A year after the Murmur sessions,during the recording of Reckoning, Stipe jokingly grabbeda gospel album out of a closet at Reflection and sang itsliner notes over the backing track of Seven ChineseBrothers as a warm-up exercise. Beyond the parts whereStipe cracks up and his cadence falls off, its startling howeffortlessly Stipe couldmake lines like the joy of knowingJesus fit the music, as if his vocal delivery had alwaysbeen an arcane kind of preaching masked only by hisusually obtuse lyrics.4 In fact, theres an underlying senseof the grandson-of-a-preacher-man throughout Mur-murs imagery and language. In Pilgrimage, Stipe sings,speaking in tongues / its worth a broken lip, bringingPentecostal notions of authenticity to bear on his owncryptic lyrical style. Talk About the Passion has thequasi-Christian refrain not everyone can carry theweight of the world. And the existential turmoil in Per-

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fect Circle is resolved in its chorus of heaven as-sumeda notion later revisited, in Classical terms, inthe idea of dreams of Elysian from West of the Fields.

But Reflection was also a good choice because it wasgeographically convenient for everyone involved. Theband was already comfortable making the trek from Ath-ens. They set up shop at the nearby Coliseum Motel onIndependence Boulevard, sleeping two to a cot. Theydidnt enjoy the comfort of sympathetic fans and theirbeds this time around, but they also didnt suffer fromthe distraction, or the fatigue of vertical sleep in a smellyvan. Mitch Easter and Don Dixon lived about an hoursdrive away in the Winston-Salem area, and made thedaily commute. On most days they worked from noonto midnight, going their separate ways at the end of theday (except for one detour to a local moviehouse to see themovie Strange Invaders, in which their song 1,000,000makes a brief appearance).

Charlotte was cheap then as it still is today. If theband had opted to make the album in New York or LA,most of their tiny budget probably would have been blownin the first weeknowadays, R.E.M. probably spendsMurmurs budget on a typical albums catering bills. Andthis was one tight budget indeed. Easter and Dixon re-portedly split a $3,000 advance between the two of themin order to make the record, with the total budget forthe record topping out at a paltry $15,000. As Dixontold me:

We were on a very strict budgetboth Mitch and Itook substantial pay cuts to do the recordbut webelieved in the band, and believed that the studio was

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a good value. It was handy to all of our home bases,it was out of the mainstreammusic citiesso the labelcouldnt pop inwhenever theywantedand it allowedfor a certain je ne sais quoi that appealed to the band.

And beyond money and geography, Reflection wasthe obvious choice for more artistic reasons. Although thebandwanted to continueworkingwithEaster as producer,they both knew it was time to move up from the garageto a more versatile and more hi-fi environment. AlthoughEaster was well versed in studio practice and was sympa-thetic to R.E.M.s ideas, he wasnt totally comfortablebringing the band into a new studio as the primary engi-neer. Easter knew and trusted Dixon, who already hadexperience at Reflection as an engineer and as a re-cording artist.

Reflection had a number of technical advantages overMitchs home studio, where Chronic Town and the RadioFree Europe single were recorded. Unlike a lot of inde-pendent studios, Reflection had an inside connection withthe sales reps atMCI, themanufacturers of top-end studioequipmenta relationship that not only ensured privi-leged access to state-of-the-art products, but also thespecialized servicing necessary for the constant mainte-nance of complex and sometimes temperamental proaudio gear. In terms of nuts-and-bolts, Reflections StudioA boasted a 36-input MCI 600 mixing console (Thesnazzy one with the plasma display, as Easter re-counts)an industry workhorse that, beyond its cleancircuitry and well-designed architecture, also allowed forincreased tracking flexibility as compared with Drive-Ins

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smaller Quantum 24-input console. The extra tracks gavethe engineers and the band more elbow room in termsof instrumental tracking, sound treatment, and mixing.Reflection also featured a two-inch 24-track MCI tapedeck, which offered sharper fidelity over Easters one-inch16-track, as well as more room for various engineeringtechniques, such as retaining multiple takes of Stipesvocals in order to edit the best parts of each down to onesuperlative final track.

Still, it would be somewhat simplistic and disingenu-ous to say that R.E.M. was limited by the parameters ofEasters home recording setup on their earlier recordings.The transcendent, organic production on the Easter-pro-duced Chronic Town EP not only makes you doubt thatthe bands vision could ever have been realized had theygone the more conventional route in 1982 (big label/big studio/big producer . . . and they had numerous offersalong these lines), but also that the EP would ever havegarnered a fraction of the oddballmystique that ultimatelygave the band the agency and leverage to make Murmurand make it on their own terms. This was before indierock (and even college rock), so the irony may be lostnow that back then the easiest and most direct way tomake a record was to get a major label contract, not tobe so quixotic and dumb as to try and make one yourself.Yet this is exactly what Easter and the band had succeededin doing, against most odds.

Chronic Town succeeded as a fully realized expression ofR.E.M.s aesthetic because Easter was one of the craftiestengineers in the 80s in terms of being able to thrive withintechnical (and budgetary) limitationsnot to mentionthe fact that Easter was working with an exceptional band

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with exceptional song material. Still, Easters studio spacewas only barely conducive to recording (a twenty-four-by twenty-four-foot ex-garage with extremely hard wallsand a low ceiling, as he describes), and judging fromR.E.M.s earlier abortive attempts at recording (and inwell-appointed places like New Yorks RCA Studios),Easters resourcefulness and attentive ears were the mainthings that made up for what were otherwise extremelymodest circumstances. Reflections equipment, on theother hand, allowed Easter and the band to exercise asimilar creative freedom in the studio but with fewerlogistical worries. The increased fidelity was only a plusnot tomention the fact that Easter was freed up byDixonspresence behind the console, now able to focus more ofhis energies on things like arranging and production, aswell as being able to jump in front of a mic when he feltlike it to lay down an overdub or two on guitar or the vibes.

In terms of its other tech knickknacks, Reflectionsmodest arsenal showed discreet taste, even by 2005 stan-dards. The studio boasted an excellent collection of high-quality vintage microphones (like the vacuum-tube Neu-mann U47, whose globe-like foam windscreen remindedStipe of Angela Davis), as well as choice signal processinggear like compressors (a couple of UREI 1176s, whichare an engineers 65 Mustang), exotic new digital delays(like the LexiconModel 200, at the time the LamborghiniCountach of digital reverbs), and a few cherry perks, suchas the studios tube EMT plate reverb.5 As Easter said,Reflection was essentially comparable to any studio any-where, gear-wise. As such, Dixon and Easter didnt findit necessary to bring any of their own gear, except for afew signature musical instruments. Easter brought along

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his white Fender Electric XII twelve-string guitar (a giftfrom his father when he turned thirteen; Peter Buck didnot own an electric Rickenbacker twelve-string at thispoint, contrary to fan myth), as well as his trusty Danelec-tro electric sitar (which Buck had used in theChronic Townsession, most prominently on Gardening at Night).Easters Electric XII can also be heard on many of LetsActives early recordings.

Peter Bucks workhorse amphis Fender Twinwasbroken at the time, so Easter loaned him his checker-board-grill Ampeg Gemini II for the session, which wasused on most tracks, alongside the studios little solidstate (i.e., transistor rather than tube-driven) Kasino amp.Guitar-wise, Buck had brought his maple-glo Ricken-backer 360, which he had also used on the Chronic Townsession. Mike Mills had been using a Dan Armstrong bassup to the time of Chronic Town, but Easter lent him hisRickenbacker 4001 bass on an early garage session, andby the time of the Murmur sessions Mills had bought hisown. Mills played through the studios trusty Ampeg B-15, which was set up in the hallway outside the live room.Dixon recalls Bill Berry using the studios Sonor drumkit, set up in Studio As isolation booth, which everyonecalled the Tiki Hut for its cedar-shingled conical ceil-ing. Easter remembers wanting to set Bill up in the mainroom, but Berry, in his ratty Steel Pulse T-shirt, likedthe weird little space and was excited to play drums inthereit was how he envisioned a studio session wassupposed to be.

Easter, Dixon, and the band availed themselves of thestudios two pianos (a modern Yamaha and an old uprighttack pianoso called because of the thumbtacks in-

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serted on its hammers to compensate for the dark soundof its enclosed harp), its Hammond B-3 organ, its Wur-litzer, and the somewhat unusual presence of a vintageMusser vibraphone. These instruments played a big partin Murmurs sound, and in resolving the bands aestheticconcerns. Dixon explains:

I wanted to create a Stax-like sound in the balance ofthe overall mix. Vocals as part of a drum-drivengroove. A big reason for this was the desire on thepart of the band for the guitars to be very clean.Guitars were kind of out at the time, and fuzz guitarswere scary to the band and the label. The best modelI could think of to keep a heavy groove was the soundof old Stax records. With [these organic-soundinginstruments] as part of the studios standing arsenal,we had the tools we needed to accomplish that.

As is common studio practice, the band recorded thebasic tracks for most songs playing together livedrums,bass, and guitars, and probably a guide vocal fromStipewith the instruments acoustically isolated fromone another. Bucks guitar amp was set up in the mainroom, Berrys drum kit was in the isolation booth, Millssbass amp was in the outside hallway, and Stipe was in thespace under the stairwell behind the control room (hedidnt want anyone to see him sing). The band monitoredthemselves over headphones. Often in recording sessions,a band might start by recording the basic tracks for allthe songs on the album, then go back and overdub therest of the instruments and the vocals. However, for theMurmur sessions, the band proceeded one song at a time,

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recording all of its tracksthe live tracks as well as theoverdubsbefore moving on to the next song. For themost part, the band would record the basic tracks to-gether, then one person at a time would work with Dixonand Easter on overdubs, while the rest of the band playedpool in the other room or went to get something to eat.Generally the band was able to nail most songs within afew takes, having played most of the albums materialexhaustively over the preceding months on the road.

The majority of Murmurs live tracks were recordedusing standard close miking technique, where a micro-phone is placed directly in front of an instrument in orderto capture a clean and up-front sound. But in terms ofoverdubs, Easter and Dixon sometimes took advantageof Studio As natural acoustics by employing room mik-ing, or placing amicrophone at a distance from an instru-ment.This technique can be used to create a sense of spacein a recording, or to create unusual effects. Reflectionhad a number of sound processing devices that couldelectronically recreate the sound of a roomor a gymna-sium or a dungeon, for that matterbut Dixon and Eas-ters use of room miking was in line with the bandsinsistence on clean, natural sounds and acoustic, organic-sounding instruments. Devices such as digital reverbs anddelay units offer the engineer many options as far asjuicing up the sound of a recorded track, but often theycan sound artificial and obtrusive. On MurmurEaster andDixon strike a harmonious balance between electroniceffects and natural ones.

Going into the Murmur sessions, the band already had afinished version of Pilgrimage in the can, recorded a

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few weeks earlier by Easter and Dixon as a test songover the course of a day or two at Reflection. Thoughthe band was adamant about working with Easter andDixon, I.R.S. had wanted proof that the two were rightfor the job. Reportedly, the label wasnt that excited athow Pilgrimage turned out, but the band stonewalledthem anyway, booking time at Reflection in January 1983to begin work on the album with Easter and Dixon. Thecrew worked on the album on and off for about a monthover the course of January and February. Since the stu-dios log book from this period is missing, accounts ofthe actual amount of time spent in the studio vary: Buckhas said it was as low as about fourteen days, whileother estimates have it at around sixteen or seventeendays total, and one accounting puts it as high as twenty-four days.

By all accounts, the album sessions went smoothlythe band played great; Dixon, Easter, and the band gotalong well (beyond a few heated disagreements aboutarrangement and production details), and despite a gener-ous amount of beer-quaffing the band was all about busi-ness. They disagreed about certain minor decisions, butthe bands democratic philosophy prevailed: one of theirrules was that each member had full veto power aboutany decision, no matter how minor. Easter describes theatmosphere of theMurmur sessions, bothwithin the band,and between the band and Dixon/Easter:

Jeez, it was pretty civilized. Michael may have sort ofbeen a little removed as the most high-falutin Artistein the sense that he had a sort of big-picture view ofthe sound and was not remotely interested in some

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awesome sound if he thought it was overbearing.Probably all the rest of the band (and I) mightve beena little more teenage/rock n roll in our sensibilities.Theyd get a little grumpy, like during the PerfectCircle first-listen, but no big deal.

Overall, they were as respectful of each other asany band I can think of, which was remarkable sincethey really were sort of different types.They seemedto always grasp the importance of their identity as aunit, and protecting that was important, and thatsprobably part of why they could seem stodgy at times.They didnt want the outside world to mess them up!Within the band, those guys would mildly insult eachother, etc. but it was never mean-spirited . . . In gen-eral, they all seemed seriously dedicated to the effort.

Dixon was similarly impressed with the bands sense ofidentity, as well as the tempered confidence they displayedabout their strengths and limitations as a band:

Again, this was an era when you had to be able toplay to record. These guys could all play. Would theycollectively have made a great Steely Dan cover band?No. Were they creative and musical? Yes. Did theyhave one of themost unique (and therefore controver-sial) sounds around? Yes. Were they misunderstoodby many fellow musicians, the kinds of guys whowould go to the music store and play Joe Satriani licksto show off? Yes.

NOTES

1. Its almost comical to listen to the Murmur songs onthe bands early bootlegs. The songs were all there,

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but the playing is so spastic its almost hard to believethese guys had aspirations beyond punk. Live, theytried to perform record-collector kitsch as newwave,and in the confines of the Oconee Street church itmade sense, but on these early boots they sound lostsimply geeks as opposed to record geeks, let alone rockstars or even rockers. But the band was developingconfidence in their songwriting sensibilities muchfaster than confidence in their performative abilities.After Murmur, they could now hear their songs ina way that finally let them perform these songs tosatisfactionyou can hear the difference on post-1983bootlegsand this eventually fed back into their song-writing, enriching it, and they began to have a cleareridea of how to play the songs they wrote, and vice versa.

2. Reflection Sound is still in business: you can viewpictures of its facilities at www.reflectionsound.com.

3. The album Carolina Soul Survey: The Reflection SoundStory (Grapevine, 2002) chronicles the history ofSouthern soul acts that recorded at Reflection in the1970s.

4. This version of the song was eventually released asVoice of Harold on Dead Letter Office (I.R.S., 1987).

5. Mic geeks might be interested to know that Easterand Dixon hated Shure SM57s, and instead used itsred-headed cousin, the SM7, for instrumentaltrackinga dumb analogy would be to say that its abit like preferring RC over Coke. For ambient roommiking, the crew often forsook the sportier AKG C414 in favor of the more proletarian Electro-Voice635A, according to Eastera cheap omni dynamic,and one of our favorites.

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Rad io F ree Europe

The album opens with a rerecorded version of RadioFree Europe, the A-side song off the Hib-Tone single(the new version on Murmur was also released by I.R.S.as the albums first single). The Murmur version differsfrom the Hib-Tone version in a number of significantways. The original was played much faster, and moresloppy and garagey; on the album version, the songstempo has been pulled back a bit, lending it more gravitythan the barnstorming take on the Hib-Tone version,while retaining most of the energy of the original. TheMurmur version is also, needless to say, considerablymorehi-fi, and doesnt suffer from the shoddy mastering jobon the original seven-inch.

Radio Free Europe is an anthem and it isnt: itssing-along chorus is as cathartic sounding as anything U2has ever written, but whats being insisted upon is any-ones guess. Its been said that the song is about radio asa tool of cultural hegemonySpreading cultural imperi-

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alism through pop music, as Buck, who came up withthe songs title, put it. But its also thought to speak tocensorship in the US; critics point to a notorious articleabout Stipes idol Patti Smith in the Village Voice (whichStipe subscribed to) entitled You Cant Say Fuck inRadio Free America. Yet the song also hints at the ideaof radio as revolutionstraight off the boat as a refer-ence to offshore pirate radio in Englandas well as acritique of nationalism, with its seeming double-entendrereference to the plight of boat people (straight off theboat/where to go?), an issue that loomed large in the1980s American public consciousness. The song also con-tains shades of Holidays in the Sun and its imagery ofCold War tourism (RFEs put that up your wall/thatthis is a country at all). Buck had been a fan of the SexPistols, and went to see them in Atlanta on their ill-fated1978 American tourthough he was thrown out aftersneaking in without a ticket and missed most of the show.

Stipes vocal on the Hib-Tone RFE is much morereminiscent of his live performances at the time: growlier,more dynamically wide, and slightly off-key in spots.1

The lyrics on the Hib-Tone single are a bit differentfrom those on the album, and even harder to make out.On the single, Stipe substitutes verse lines for refrainlines and vice versashowing just how seat-of-the-pantsthe songs lyrics in fact were. The choruses are slightlydifferent as wellon the single version, it sounds likeStipe is cupping his hands over the mic during the callingout . . . line, while this phrase is treated as a separate,reverbed-out overdub on the album version, distinct fromthe more upfront . . . in transit.

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The Hib-Tone RFE begins with a synth blurt thatsreminiscent of the staticky noise that starts off the Mur-mur version, but on the single, its more identifiable asan actual instrument of the timesthat is, an early-80selectronic keyboard. The twangy static that begins theMurmur version is a little more difficult to place: It startsoff sounding a bit like a jaw harp, gradually rising in pitchuntil it sounds like water dripping in a cybernetic cave.Its strangeness is the result of an interesting serendipity.This seven-bar-long intro was created by manipulatingsome errant system hum that had been inadvertently re-corded to tape (Filed away for some future use, as Easterdescribed). Easter triggered this recorded hum with anelectronic noise gate that was wired to use Millss basspart on the straight off the boat refrain to open andshut the gate in time with that bass parts attack. Theresulting sound was thenmanually frequency-swept usingan EQ knob on the mixing console. This bit was thenspliced onto the beginning of the song. After a saturninebelch of reverb, the live part of the song begins. Theintro is a sonic rope-a-dope: your ears squint to makesense of this buzzing little noise, only to be pummeledby Bill Berrys thumping tom-tom figure that kicks offthe song.

Berry lays down one of his characteristically solid four-to-the-floor beats, augmented by a chirpy shaker soundin the far right speaker on the downbeat during the ver-ses, mirroring the clock-tick of Berrys hi-hat in the left.Stipes vocal mix during the verse rides a subtle line be-tween loud but incomprehensible and soft but parseable.Buck plays a standard chuggy rock guitar part with a clean

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dry sound, sticking to the dampened lower strings of thechord except for a up-stroke chordal ching on an acousticguitar, which marks the end of each four-bar repetitionthroughout the verse. For the pre-chorus straight offthe boat refrain, Buck then switches to arpeggiosorpicking out the individual notes of a chordand at theend of every four-bar repetition of this is a solid full-chord down-stroke that cleverly makes the refrain alouder mirror of the verse in terms of structure and execu-tion. The last note of the refrain (where Stipe howlswhere to go), Mills hits a low note on the bass thatsdoubled by the same note on a piano, creating a resonantdong. This doubling of instruments is a trick that Easterand Dixon use throughout the course of the record, andit in fact returns later on in the bridge section: a greatone-note ascending piano part thats like a doppelgangerofMillss bass in terms of register and timbre, with a funkyattack similar toMillss slapped E-string. Also featured onthe bridge are Easters glinty, triangle-like vibraphoneaccents, highly compressed to bring out their dissonantovertones.

On the final, doubled chorus, Berry switches dramati-cally to the ride cymbal for the first, but then goes backto hi-hat for the second chorus, an odd but effective bitof drum arranging. In between, he does a full-kit drumfill like something off of the generally more live-soundingChronic Town. The song ends with an electric Buck arpeg-gio borrowed from the refrain, and, in what would beone of the last instances of this in an R.E.M. single, aresolution back to the tonic chordAmajorwith a finalvibe hit from Mitch ringing out dissonantly behind it.

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P i l g r image

BeforeRFEs fade-out has a chance to dissolve into silencewe start to hear Stipes take a turn vocal begin to fadeina ghostly effect created by using just the feed fromthe EMT plate reverb by itself without the source vocaltrack that it would commonly be mixed back in with.This song was recorded in December 1982 in a separatesession from Murmur as a sort of demo for I.R.S., thoughEaster and Dixon encouraged the band to try to make itas much of a finished, releasable song as possible. Theirattention to detail paid off, and rather than rerecordingit, this initial tryout track was ultimately chosen forinclusion on the album.2 Easter credits this songone ofhis favoritesas establishing the mood of the record.At 4:25, its the longest song on the album (the rest clockin at a radio-friendly average of around three-and-a-halfminutes, except for the four-minute-long RFE).

The fade-in suits the songs fugal structure, where onebasic melodic theme is slowly permutated throughout thesongs verse sections. After an ambient-sounding vocal/piano intro, the song snaps into the foreground with theappearance of the drums and bass. In this first verse apiano doubles the bass part, much like the bridge sectionof RFE, the two instruments almost indistinguishableasubtle touch. After a few rounds, Bucks guitar joins in,doubling the same six-note figure. Easter joins in withthe Musser vibes on the second verse, harmonizing thesix notes. The drum tracks on the song are relativelyuntreated, with the only obvious reverb effect showingup on Berrys tom fills as a thunderous accent behind theescape momentum lyric. The acoustic guitar here, and

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throughout Murmur, is Easters 1956 Gibson LG-1,which Buck also used on Chronic Townas Easter says,a small, bottom-of-the-line model which still has thatexcellent projecting midrange that is characteristic ofGibsons. This one is sort of bass-light and hard-sounding,which makes it perfect in the rock band setting. Theending chorus features some tasty percussion accents:tambourine, Berry playing bongos in the background,and what sounds like a drumstick on a metal garbage canlid. The song ends with the fluttering motorized vibratosound from Easters vibes.

Laugh ing

This song about Laocoon and her two sons3 is an exam-ple of extremely skillful production and arranging on thepart of Dixon and Easterit builds to a tangible climaxwithout seeming to get louder or denser in the process.Whatever mechanical punch-ins there are in the song(i.e., sectional overdubs) are executed with subtlety andaplomb: when you finally become aware of a sound, itsbecause it had already been introduced almost sublimi-nally in an earlier part of the song, and only as a variationof a more overt part occurring at the time.

Berrys reggae-inflected rototom intro recalls theirlabelmates the Police, as well as Easters one-time descrip-tion of Berrys early drum parts as weird ska. The roto-tomshigh-pitched drums consisting of a small plasticdrum head mounted on a steel frame, without a reverber-ant shell or bottom head like traditional tomsare playedin the right channel and reverbed across to the left chan-

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nel. The intro continues in faux-reggae mode, with asparse bass drum and hi-hat beat behind Millss snakybass line and more syncopated rototom bursts. Its a jar-ring sound after Pilgrimages languid ending, and aninteresting sequencing choice: After this unstable, musi-cally ambiguous-sounding intro, the song could go any-whereit could burst into a straightforward rocker likeRadio Free Europe, or return to the down-tempo strumof a song like Pilgrimage. Instead it finds a third level,reminiscent of some of the sounds on the earlier twosongs, but with a new kind of mood and feel.

Berry ends the intro with a fill on standard toms andcomes in again with one of his trademark four-to-the-floor kick/snare/hi-hat beats. Hes joined by the bass, andsome pensive acoustic guitar arpeggios played by Buck.The backing vocals are intimate and up-front here, con-trasted with Millss washed-out harmonies on Pilgrim-age. Theres a single-note piano line low in the choruspart, which functions almost like a second bass line. Thesekinds of melodic, single-note piano lines heard through-out Murmur give Mills the space to play the more har-monically complex bass figures hes fond of, and they alsocarry melodic weight during the times when hes playingthe simpler, walking-type bass lines hes also pronetoward.

A strummy acoustic guitar replaces Bucks arpeggiosfor the lighted in a room refrain, continuing into thechorus, when its joined by a veritable orchestra ofstrummed acoustic chords. Easter described this sectionas the campfire part: Dixon and Easter picked up guitarsand joined Buck in the live room, where they gatheredaround one mic to lay down three simultaneous unison

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guitars parts (here Easter availed Dixon of his Gibson B-25-12N, which he had also brought from home). Theythen tracked another campfire overdub, after detuningthe tape decks varispeed by a fraction of a hairan engi-neering trick that creates a wider sound by making thatone track almost imperceptibly out-of-tune with the restof the song, thus differentiating it in the mix from whatwould otherwise be a similar-sounding track.

Easter recalls another trick the crew employed to en-hance the guitar sound on Laughing:

One thing we used a lot on the strummy bits was theNashville tuning, where you borrow the high Gfrom a twelve-string set. This does amazing things,since the G string is often problematic tuning-wisewhen you go from E-position chords to others. Thehigh string (up one octave) lifts this note away fromthe rest and the whole thing gets clear and pretty.Theres another version which replaces all the woundstrings with the twelve-string octave onesI dontthink we ever did that, but that makes a lovely zitherysound over a regular guitar.

Swirling arpeggios then make their entrance on the sec-ond chorusBucks electric guitar run through the mo-torized Leslie 147 speaker cabinet from the studiosHammond B-3 organ. Easter adds: We would have feltlike sissies using [an electronic device like] a flange pedal. . . although we would have been pleased with ourselveshad we done actual tape flanging (referring to the tan-dem-tape-machine technique invented by Les Paul andpopularized by the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, which de-

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rived its name from the playing of the flange of a tapereel to create the swooshing, out-of-phase effect oftenheard in pop songs).

Bills braying background harmony fills out the restof the chorus, taking its laah from the first syllable ofStipes laughing. The rototom accents return again inthe bridge, which expands on the in a room lyric fromthe refrain. Here Buck plays a Leslied riff against aspacey, twangy electric twelve-string riff, also run throughthe Leslie, but low and off to the side margins of the mix.The placement of this electric-sounding effect sets upthe drama for the outro, when it moves triumphantly tothe forefront.

Now the song begins to build, excavating sounds fromthe beginning of the song and moving them up to thefore, and switching around established front-stage soundswith a wry sleight-of-hand. The third chorus becomes ahalf-chorus, in which Bill briefly switches to an open/closed disco hi-hat figure, which deviates from thechorus weve come to expect, abruptly truncating it andprojecting the song into the third verse with a newfoundsense of urgency.On this subsequent verse, a few reverbedStipe backing vocal accents make an entrance, to contrastwith his earlier dry harmoniesa subtle expansion of thesongs space.

The Leslie guitar we remember from the bridge grad-ually rises to the top of the building outro. The campfireguitars also rise in the mix, as do the backing vocals. Inthe last round of lighted lighted laughing in tune, theacoustic guitars seem to fragment and bloom forth. Berryslaps the open hi-hat, plays a stuttering snare fill, andmoves to the ride cymbal for a jazzy improvised figure

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straight from the StewartCopeland drummanual, as Stipeoffers a final, soaringly baroque ornamentation of thethree-note laughing in tune melody. The song endswith a giant strum on the one with a wall of acousticguitar doing a modified Pete Townshend ka-ta-chung,and one final ringing bass note from the piano. Its onlyhere that you might register that the chord hits in theverses were as much piano as guitar and cymbal accent:this piano-hybrid sound was executed like a windmillguitar chord, playing off the unconscious expectation thatthats where one ought to hear something like a windmillpower chord in a rock song. Laughing boils rock bom-bast down to its structure and then takes it in a completelyopposite direction, playing off rock sturm und drang tocreate the same kind of drama in an otherwise carefullycontrolled song.

Ta lk Abou t the Pa s s i on

Talk About the Passion was the second single I.R.S.released from Murmur. It begins simply enough, but aftera minute or so, you discover one of the songs unusualqualities: an inversion of density between the verse and thechorus. The verse is built around a prominently featuredguitar riff, another purposefully ambiguous blend of elec-tric and acoustic fused into onean important quality ofthe records sound, achieved through then-unorthodoxmethods like miking the electric guitars at their stringsrather than at the amp speaker.

The songs chorus, by contrast, almost feels like thefloor dropped away: the electric guitars are replaced by

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acoustic guitars, but theyre not intimate, theyre tenpaces away. Berry switches from rim clicks to snare hits,and Bucks electric riffs arent grounding, as they shouldbe in a chorus, theyre disembodied. The effect of thissudden openness almost casts the chorus vocal (and title)in parentheses, beseeching the listener: (this is where asong would normally talk about the passion. If thats whatyou want, go do it instead of listening to a pop song).Theres also a weird turnabout in the arranging of theinstruments here: Bucks twangy electric figure on thechorus takes its rhythmic and melodic cues from Stipesvocalits almost like a second lead vocalbut it occurson top of Stipes phrases rather than in the spaces between(defeating the call and response idea more commonlyfound in pop songs).

Then things get even stranger. They truncate the sec-ond verse, cutting it in half, and skip over a chorus,movingabruptly to the combien du temps bridge. So insteadof the lightness of another chorus, we now get a verydissonant and heavy sounding bridge (bridges are usuallyfluffy, a place to bide your time as a listener until thechorus comes around again; this songs bridges almostcarry the weight of the world). The cello on the bridge(played by a somewhat baffled member of the CharlotteSymphony Orchestra) emulates the graveness of Bill Ber-rys voice, which is probably one reason the band likeditit fits with the albums synesthesia, where one instru-ment becomes a strange proxy for another. The bridgeis completed by some spacey Leslie arpeggios from Buck.

Then back into the airiness of the chorus . . . and thenanother, different bridge (!), essentially a proxy for a guitarsolo. But instead, Buck plays a very controlled, almost

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labored acoustic lead riffits an austere moment amongthe weight and passion of the songs lyrics, this songbeing the most vocally transparent on Murmur. The songends with a simple but majestic-sounding cello line, whichthe band dictated orally to the game CSO cellist. TalkAbout the Passion was a newer song for the band, onethat hadnt been played in public (its noticeably absentfrom live set lists leading up to the Murmur sessions).The songs arrangement was extensively toyed with byeveryone involved, but according to Easter, its DonDixon who deserves much of the credit for the songsinventive and unorthodox structure.

Mora l K io sk

Moral Kiosk is a much-needed rocker (in the vein ofRFE) after three decidedly moody songs in a row. Thesong was inspired by the so-called moral kiosks on CollegeAvenue in Athens, where students would post photocop-ied announcementsthough others have interpreted thesong as a slam on college towns in general and theirsheltered liberalism. One acquaintance of mine put itcolorfully: he thought the song likened a course selectionwell-stocked with seminars like Lesbian Pygmies withBlack-Market AK-47s with old copies of Z and TheFifth Estate.

The song begins with another electro-acoustic guitarblend like Talk About, but a more full-on, flailing ver-sion of the previous songs restrained strum and twangagain, the face of the electric guitar itself is miked as wellas the amp its running through. The chord that Buck is

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wailing on has a pedigree closer to jazz than rockanEsus4. Buck garnishes the end of every four-bar phrasefrom Stipe with some bendy electric accents that are notquite country and not quite rock, but a kind of hybrid ofthe two. These yawing riffs are coupled with some splashypssh-pssh accents from Berry (the sound of some scrapsof oak flooring, leftover from the construction of thestudio, clapped together and run thru an over-modulatedUrei 1176 compressor, according to Easter). Then intothe so much more attractive refrain, where Buckschoppy guitar sounds a bit like that of Andy Gill fromGang of Four, with whom the band had toured a fewmonths earlier, and of whom the band were big fans.

The songs chorus is a quintessential early R.E.M.vocal arrangement, a problematic matrix of different-sounding voices and textures that somehow gel and con-nect. Stipes staccato inside / cold / dark / fire / twilightplays against Berrys andMillss laconic, almost doo-wop-like backing harmoniesclose and dense where Stipe isairy (his lead vocal heavily treated with reverb and slap-back echo), fluid while Stipe is telegraphic. The back-grounds phonetically collapse the lyrics of Stipes leadvocal, rendering them down to their vowel sounds: co-old,co-old-in, saa-ade, co-oo-oo-old. Bills tumbling tom rhythmsseem to stir all the various syllables together until theyare no longer parts of discrete words and they slam head-long into one another and burst open.

The second so much more attractive refrain nowfeatures some tribal-sounding overdubsDixon seatedthe band around a mic and had them slap their pant legswhile making the huh-huh grunt sounds. A short timelater we come to the melismatic bridge, a striking three-

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part harmony of ohh-ohh-ohhsBerrys moaning voicedominates here, meshing with Stipes high wail, withMillss tapering alto poking through the mix as well. Thebridge is bookended by a terse electric arpeggio fromBuck, a spirited snare fill from Bill, a dramatic descendingbass slide fromMike, and then its back to the lone flailingguitar from the intro (with the ambient room micscranked up a notch or two) and then back into the verseonce again. Its a concise little eight-bar bridge that ac-complishes a lot: The sonic texture of the song slips justenough to telegraph that theres more to the song tofollow than we might expect, and it projects us into therest of the tune with vigorthe following verse is essen-tially the same as the previous ones, but by virtue of thebridge, it sounds fresh again.

After another chorus theres a discordant interludewhere the bass drops out altogether and Bucks guitarspits out splintery, atonal chord fragments a la Andy Gill.Berry borrows the pssh-pssh accent from the verses, thistime synching it with the snare. Stipe is belting out non-sense syllables, climbing higher and higher in pitch (infact, at one point, it sounds like hes singing higher . . .higher), until the song surges into another chorus as thepssh-pssh soundsand Berrys most dynamic drum perfor-mance on the albumdrive the song to its ending.4 Orrather, its para-ending: Kiosk closes with the classicR.E.M. fixturethe weird, non-tonic hanging chord.The chorus is in A, and the song ends on a D (withthe bass line skipping a note to get there), and Stipesdescending vocal line stops one note short, on a Bthesixth of a D chordmaking the last chord a D6, a compo-

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sitionally strange choice. Its a question mark where anexclamation point ought to beor at least a period.

Per f e c t C i r c l e

From the relative bombast of the end of Kiosktherockingest moment on the record between the openingRFE and the closing West of the Fieldscomes theaustere, melancholy piano intro of Perfect Circle. Berrywrote the song in its entirety (with lyrics by Stipe) andused to play it live on a cheap Casio . . . which didntalways work so well. On a recording of a show fromSeptember 24, 1982, in Champaign, Illinois, Bucks andMillss parts are pretty much the same as they wouldend up on the Murmur version, and Stipes melody andemotion are all there, but it sounds like karaoke comparedto the rest of the set. The band were shocked whenthey heard the final version of the song, which had beenpainstakingly assembled for the most part by Easter andDixon while the guys were shopping at the SalvationArmy across the street. Berrys first words were, Yourekidding, right? Easter remembers Dixon fighting aggres-sively to keep the versionthe song is still a favorite ofboth Dixon and Easterand eventually the band camearound. Its one of Bucks favorites now, too. The songcaptures an experience he had a few months before theywrote it:

The most moving moment Ive had in the last coupleof years was at the end of one of our tours. I hadntslept in days. I was as tired as I possibly could be, andwe were doing a concert that night for a live radio

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show. And I was standing in the City Gardens inTrenton, New Jersey, at the back door, and it wasjust getting dark. These kids were playing touch foot-ball, the last game before dark came, and for somereason I was so moved I cried for twenty minutes. Itsounds so trivial, but thats more or less what PerfectCircle on Murmur is about. I told Michael to tryand capture that feeling. Theres no football in there,no kids, no twilight, but its all there.

The opening verse is without percussion or drums.Berry and Mills are playing the studios two pianos live,in stereo unison, allowing for some great, subtle interplayof variation between the two parts. Millss overdubbedbass slides in after a couple lines, like in a soul song. Onthe chorus, Buck enters with some exquisite twelve-stringelectric guitar washes, and Berry picks up the rhythm ofthe pianos with just bass drum and hi-hat, and an expan-sively reverbed snare drum in the left channel that rico-chets languidly across to the right, mirroring how thetack piano part has also become more languid and vampy.

On the second verse, the big snare disappears whilethe hi-hat and bass drum continue, and the ringing guitarsound from the chorus is reintroduced about halfwaythrough, continuing into the second chorus. Then a two-bar pause of just the two reverbed snare hits, with thepianos decaying behind it. The next section is a half-verse; the bass drum quadruple-times to a build with agong-like cymbal splash, and Easters spectral backwardsguitar fades inone of the most breathtaking momentson the record, as well as a clever juxtaposition, as it initiallyhas the brassy overtones of a cymbal. Easters guitarmakes

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some atmospheric sounds before retreating a bit. Thesong resolves into a final chorus repetition, with Stiperepeating standing too soon shoulders high in the room,and a gentle fade-out. But just before the song fadescompletely out, the drums disappear, and Easters guitarpeeks back in as the pianos disengage from one another,and the last audible sound is a smoky curlicue of feedbackthat mixes with the overtones of the pianos before dissolv-ing into silence. Its the albums most beautiful andmyste-rious song. Its also Mitch Easter Cityno wonder itshis favorite. To go from the throbbing insistence of Ra-dio Free Europe to the floaty quietude of Perfect Cir-cle, from the extroverted to the introspective in thecourse of about twenty-three minutes, makes you wonderwhat Side B holds.

Cat apu l t

Catapult was a set staple, a fine early live rocker, butit was probably ruined a bit for the band by the ordealthey went through recording the song as an I.R.S. demowith Stephen Hague (producer of new wave pop bandslike the Human League and New Order). Hague drovethe band through dozens of takes, forced Berry to playwith a click track, and then took the master tape to astudio in Boston, where he slathered the song with cheesysynthesizer overdubs. The band hated the results so muchthat this version of the song is unavailable on any R.E.M.bootleg to this day. Berry was particularly disheartenedby the experience, and Easter mentions trying to accom-modate him (and the rest of the band) as much as possibleduring Murmur:

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I think the important thing about our sessions withthem was the fact that we didnt want to fight withthem; we wanted them to like what was happening.So, any disagreements were mild and subject to per-suasion. We would never have imposed anything onthem on the grounds that we were The ProducersIreally hate that sort of thing. I think they appreciatedthat about us, especially after the unfortunate priorsession, where they felt like they werent respected.Im sure that guy [Hague] thought he was just doinghis job, but its not a style I like, and certainly itrubbed the band the wrong way.

Beyond the exorcising of its bad karma, though, thesong is still probably the albums weakest link; its a littleplodding, but Berry sounds like hes finally for the mostpart at ease.

There is a tiny glitch on the hi-hats behind the firstline of the song, which Id always registered subliminally;in light of Berrys insecurity in relation to the song, maybeMitch andDon let it go instead of invoking badmemoriesby insisting on multiple takes. Its the least-adorned songproduction-wise, which is probably a reaction to theirexperience with the overproduced demo. Thus, its themost characteristic of the bands early songs/showsthough absent are Millss clipped, new wave-soundingcat-ca-cat-ca-cat! background vocals from when the bandfirst started performing the song live in early 1982. Thereare some nice production touches, like the soaring acous-tic strum on the choruses, and Easters buried vibraphoneclinks in the its nine o clock bridge parts. The overallimpression is of a problematic song, positioned somewhat

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pragmatically on the album between its most beautifulmoment and a straightforward rocker with which theband probably felt they could do no wrong. In betweenis Catapult, which more closely represents the bandsearly live sound but ends up falling a bit flat in the unfor-giving environs of the studio.

S i t t i ng S t i l l

Following Catapult is another early R.E.M. stapleitsfade-out is suddenly interrupted with a solitary snare hit,either a flam or a delay-enhanced single hit, launchingyou into Sitting Still, one of the albums high-watermarks. The verses are forged from the symmetry of acall-and-response interplay between Bucks arpeggios andStipes lyrics, leading to some muted guitar chug buildingthrough the refrain before the gorgeous chorus.

Theres a simple, undiluted feeling in the choruseschiming, joyful guitars, and a loud, instantly grokked lyric(I can hear you) that binds the obtuseness of the versesthe same way that calling out in transit is cathartic inrelation to RFEs similarly murky subject matter. Stipesounds passionate, after sounding sad on Circle andmerely there on Catapult. Stipes choruses do a lot ofdifferent things on this album, but here is where he affirmsthat RFE wasnt just a radio-friendly anomaly in termsof energy and passion. As on Kiosk (the last rocker),Mills and Berry find their chorus background vocals bymorphing Stipes words phoneticallythey take the ah ofa standard backing vocal (back to doo-wop and rhythm &blues, and then the Beatles) and wryly make it into the

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/a/ twang of a Southern I (from Stipes I can hear you).Its a subtle twist, until Stipe finally stretches the I into ayawning Georgian /a/ toward the end of the final chorus.5

Mills stays close to the bone throughout the song,laying down punk-rock eighth notes, with no walkinglines or harmonic accents. Stipes sound alternates be-tween withering and forcefulyou can almost see himcontorting himself under the studio stairs. Berrys drumaccents in the otherwise subdued bridge (the talk untilyoure blue/get away fromme part) are a nice program-matic touch: This song is about talking to someone whosdeaf, a metaphor that captures some of the bands anxiety,in spite of their confidence and vision, in choosing tomake such a oddball record. Its as if the tangible longingat the heart of the song is the hope that in Murmur, wecan gather through a fear, the common fear of not beinghearda theme that relates back to the bands albumtitle choice of murmur being one of the easiest wordsto say in the English language.

Theres another sweet drum fill from Berry at theend of the last refrain before the final chorus, like thepunctuation at the end of a paragraph, as hoarseness swal-lows Stipes last a waste of time, sitting stillthump;thump-thump. You can hear the semicolon in there, a tinydrama gone in an instant. Then a double chorus, tiedtogether with a brilliantly subtle passing chordal riff fromBuck that makes the second repetition feel like a necessityrather than just a reiterationits one of Bucks weirdin-between chords, with a trace of hammered-on stringtwang in the middle of it that makes one chord brieflyfunction as another, and it makes the transition work bytelling you its aware of itself, asserting itself in a space

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that could easily be taken for granted, swept over inthe momentum.

A different version of Sitting Still, recorded at Eas-ters Drive-In, was the B-side of the Hib-Tone single(opposite Radio Free Europe, recorded in the sameone-day session). Again, the seven-inch version of thesong is looser and muddier sounding than the albumversion, but unlike the Hib-Tone RFE, Stipe soundsstrained on the seven-inch Sitting Still. This is melodi-cally more demanding of a song than RFE, and on theB-side, he sounds tired, as though hes done one toomanytakes. Here, hes at the top of his game, in completecontrol even when he sounds like hes about to lose it.

Stipes final cryCan you hear me?makes thesongs skeletal production values overt. If Circle is thealbums most private moment, this is its most naked: areyou deaf (like the songs subject), or are you feeling all this?If Easter and Dixon left Catapult alone out of sympathyto the band, they left this one alone only because it didntneed anything. It plays as straight-up rock and roll whileit borrows the mystique of the albums previous songs toadd weight to its off-kilter lyrics and inwardly directedpassion. Stipe stretches the vowel in fear to its breakingpoint, as well as his voice, a performance unmatched onthe rest of the album, and also a foreshadowing of thenext song, which is also about fear.

99

Pronounced nine to nine, this isMurmurs shortest songat 3:02 (not counting the instrumental snippet between

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Shaking Through and We Walk), and hands-downits strangest. The song is an older one, dating back tomid-1981, and it again betrays something of a Gang ofFour influencefrom the syncopated disco beat to thechaotic riffage and clangy guitar harmonics. The songwas a live favorite of Easters, and up to the recording ofMurmur it was the second song in the bands set, afterthe opener, Gardening at Night. It was the audiencescall-to-arms, a dissonant blast, and the lyrics about con-versation fear are the nagging conscience of a chokednightclub. In early live bootlegs, Buck is barely playingany chords at allthis is where the band threw off theirbubblegum/garage/Nuggets influence and embraced thejagged timbres of post-punk. Imagine going into the stu-dio and listening to any one of these instrumental tracksby itself, without the rest of the music. You would haveno idea what the rest of the song must sound like. If youheard each one in a row, youd probably doubt they couldeven fit together as a coherent song. Stipes speeded-out,logorrheic recitation is almost the most comprehensiblething about the song.6

Still, Dixon and Easter found additional ways to gluethe pieces together while retaining the songs kinetic en-ergy. A burbling Hammond B-3 organ part rises throughthe chorus, just loud enough to tickle the ear. The organis employed for its freaky Leslie vibrato and shrill timbrerather than to strengthen chords, which adds to the songsportrait of confusionunlike Sitting Still, its not theconfusion of be