Chasing the long tail of new media
Album: Document
Year: 1987
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File Under Fire
“The One I Love” just might be my favorite R.E.M. song.
At the very least, it’s one of their most important songs, a big-riffed mean as fuck rock ‘n’ roll song that somehow stormed the radio and broke into the top ten, pretty much changing everything for R.E.M.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1724: R.E.M. – “The One I Love”
Album: Document
Year: 1987
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File Under Bernstein
“It’s The End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” just might be my favorite R.E.M. song.
Album: Document
Year: 1987
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File Under Followers
It was the autumn of 1987, and I was going through a pretty tough break-up, which left me drunk and depressed for much of the time, and so at some point, I made a cassette that had the recently-released Document — R.E.M. seemed to be putting out records that coincided with big moments of my love life (which I don’t think was on purpose) — on one side and the dB’s The Sound of Music on the other side.
As you can imagine, I listened to that cassette a lot, and I this memory: I was driving somewhere, listening to this cassette, which just happened to be on side one of Document, and and some point I started singing along with “Disturbance at the Heron House” and realized, for the first time in a long time, that I was going to be OK.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1722: R.E.M. – “Disturbance at the Heron House”
Album: Document
Year: 1987
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File Under Acumen
Hey kids, that sound you hear at the beginning of “Exhuming McCarthy” was made by a thing called a “typewriter,” which basically was a computer keyboard where the monitor was made out of paper instead of pixels.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1721: R.E.M. – “Exhuming McCarthy”
Album: Document
Year: 1987
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File Under Rearrange
In Major League Baseball, there is the concept of the “walk year,” the final year that a player has on a contract prior to becoming a free agent. As a player, what you want in that situation is to have a great year, because it will obviously increase your value on the market.
In 1987, R.E.M. was facing the equivalent of their walk year: the last album on their original contract with I.R.S. records, and while every record they’d made sold better than the previous one, they were still seen primarily as a critics band. Not so much after Document, which landed them their first Rolling Stone cover (a thing I’d been predicting since Reckoning), their first major hit single, and their first platinum record: the equivalent of a .312/.442/.563 slash line in their walk year.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1720: R.E.M. – “Finest Worksong”
Album: Lifes Rich Pageant
Year: 1986
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File Under Pathway
From their very beginnings as an Athens, GA, party band, R.E.M. incorporated covers in their act. Obviously, it was always good to play songs that people were familiar with, and on the other hand, it also connected them to their roots, some obvious and some surprising.
For the most part, the covers were usually relegated to b-sides, and ran the gamut from the expected (the Velvets and their fellow Athenians, Pylon) to the unexpected (fuck yeah, Aerosmith!), and in fact they recorded covers throughout their career, though eventually they stopped being even b-sides and were limited to the Christmas fan club singles.
Album: Life’s Rich Pageant
Year: 1986
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File Under Whoo-hoo-hooo!
The fifth time I saw R.E.M. was supposed to be once again at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley on September 26, 1986, but it got totally short-circuited by a rainstorm that was powerful enough for the band to walk onstage and cancel the show before it started. Unlike the first time I’d gone out of town to see R.E.M., this was a full-blown roadtrip — many people in many cars — we retreated to a cheap-ass hotel and everybody got blind drunk, before heading back to Fresno the next day. Though I do seem to recall that was the night someone I’d previously seen as kind of a nemesis became a lifelong friend.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1718: R.E.M. – “Just A Touch”
Album: Lifes Rich Pageant
Year: 1986
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“I Believe” just might be my favorite R.E.M. song.
At the very least, it let me do a thing on KFSR where I would play it back-to-back with the Buzzcocks “I Believe,” which is also one of the greatest songs ever put to wax, though it’s completely different.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1717: R.E.M. – “I Believe”
Album: Lifes Rich Pageant
Year: 1986
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“Fall On Me” just might be my favorite R.E.M. song.
It might be Michael Stipe’s, too: during the introduction of “Fall on Me” for their first MTV Unplugged performance in 1991, he said just that.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1716: R.E.M. – “Fall On Me”
Album: Lifes Rich Pageant
Year: 1986
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File Under Three
Just in case you were wondering if the big sound of “Begin The Begin” was an anomaly instead of a harbinger all doubts were erased about two seconds after it ended, as a 75 ton snare hit introduced “These Days,” the most unhinged rocker that R.E.M. had yet put to plastic (and yet not even the most unhinged rocker on Lifes Rich Pageant, but we’ll get there in a few days).
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1715: R.E.M. – “These Days”