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Avant garde rock band

As southern regional bands like the B-52s began gaining national recognition in the late 1970s, four University of Georgia students decided to take the musical plunge and formed R.E.M. (for the term used by sleep researchers: rapid eye movement) in April of 1980. Drummer Bill Berry and bassist Mike Mills had already played in various Macon bands, but it would be guitarist Peter Buck's first group, which he described in Rolling Stone as "the acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff." His simple chording allowed the band's rhythm section to stretch out and explore while Michael Stipe's vocals, according to Deborah Feingold in Rolling Stone, "combined vivid imagery with pithy telegraphic phrasing, sacrificing grammar for impact."

In 1981 R.E.M. released an independent single, "Radio Free Europe"/"Sitting Still," which immediately became a favorite of critics; the word on the band began to spread underground. They meanwhile gained valuable experience through grueling club work, playing mostly cover tunes. "We were playing five nights a week, usually three weeks out of the month, doing two or three sets a night," said Buck in Guitar Player. "If anything, that's why we got to be an okay band. We learned to stand up in front of these guys who wanted to hear Allman Brothers, and made them understand it. " The band hooked up with Let's Active's Mitch Easter, who produced their five-song EP Chronic Town at his Drive-In Studios in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. "At the time, it wasn't a bigger project than anything else, but you could tell something was gonna happen with them," Easter said in Musician. "They had the now sound, and they seemed like stars."

But critics and Georgians seemed to be the only ones hip to R.E.M. until their September 1983 release, Murmur, recorded in Charlotte at Reflection Studios with Easter and Don Dixon producing. "We were dealing with a fragile sort of art concept and trying to bring in a little pop sensibility without beating it up," Dixon told Rolling Stone. The LP, which explored new studio ideas and odd overdubs, only made it to Number 136 on the charts but was voted best album of the year by Rolling Stone's critics, who also selected R.E.M. as band of the year. The magazine later recognized Murmur as the eighth-best LP of the 1980s. "We were conscious that we were making a record that really wasn't in step with the times," Buck stated in Rolling Stone. "It was an old-fashioned record that didn't sound too much like what you heard on the radio. We were expecting the record company to say 'Sorry, this isn't even a record, it's a demo tape. Go back and do it again.'"

Easter also produced their 1984 release, Reckoning, which broke the Top 30, but R.E.M. was still radically different from their contemporaries both musically and idealistically. "We could probably do all these multi-media things and be more successful right off the bat, but in the long run, if we keep plugging at it, we'll get to the level of popularity that we deserve," Buck said in Guitar World. "It may take longer but it'll be worth it."

Slowly the band's sales began to build momentum as Fables of the Reconstruction became a big seller in 1985. David Fricke in Rolling Stone called it an "exploratory Smorgasbord," as the group continued on their own path and refused to become another commercial-oriented pop unit. "We made a contract with the world that says, 'We're going to be the best band in the world; you're going to be proud of us,'" Buck stated in Rolling Stone. "But we have to do it our way." R.E.M. conceded slightly on Life's Rich Pageant by recruiting John Cougar Mellancamp's producer, Don Gehman, who added a rock punch to their sound with big drums, organs and pianos, but also incorporated banjos and accordions. The band, however, seemed to be caught between pleasing their loyal following and breaking into new audiences.

"Signing off both sides of an LP as rousing and raucous as Life's Rich Pageant with self-consciously hip jokes is an unfortunate waste," wrote Anthony DeCurtis in Rolling Stone, "an apparent effort to cling to insider status when every other aspect of the album is a lesson in how to assume the responsibilities of mass popularity without smoothing the subterranean edge... . As it is, it's a brilliant and groundbreaking, if modestly flawed, effort by an immensely valuable band whose most profound work is still to come."

After Dead Letter Office, an LP of studio outtakes, B-sides and covers, R.E.M. finally made their crossover statement in 1987: Document. They had aged seven years since their inception and their changing political and world views were evidenced on the album. They also had a hit single on their hands, "The One I Love," as the LP rose to Number 10 thanks to a back-to-basics approach that relied on a big beat and up-front guitars. R.E.M. had finally managed to reach a larger audience without compromising, their priorities still intact. "Without exception," stated Fricke in Rolling Stone, "their records combine a spirit of willful perversity with a healthy restlessness and a steadfast refusal to acknowledge either commercial or critical expectations."

With 1989's platinum-selling Green, the band solidified its reputation as progressive rock's reigning authority, while maintaining the delicate balance between artistic integrity and mass-market appeal. Testifying to this feat, Michael Azerrad wrote in Rolling Stone: "Having made the leap from a small label, I.R.S., to a monolithic major one, Warner Bros., R.E.M. hasn't sold out; rather, the band has taken the opportunity to crack open the shell it's been pecking at since it recorded its first album." People contributor Michael Small elaborated on R.E.M.'s method, explaining, "Not only does Green contain a heaping dose of appealing pop melodies, but each word stands out clearly and fits into phrases that actually make sense. 'It's high time I razed the walls that I've constructed,' sings Stipe in "World Leader Pretend," a pensive number that seems to signal his intention to drop some of the band's studied aloofness."

Rolling Stone featured Stipe and company on an April 1989 cover, dubbing them "America's Hippest Band." Inside, DeCurtis heralded R.E.M.'s full emergence from its shadowy status: "Once the darlings of the underground, they are now solicited by parents' groups to improve the social habits of the young. College-radio perennials, they have now graduated—into high schools. Having signed a five-record deal with Warner Bros, last year for a reported $10 million, the members of R.E.M. are approaching the status of—can it be?—superstars." Although the perhaps unfair, but unfortunately inevitable, cries of "sellout" did eventually surface, R.E.M.'s members—still residents of Athens, Georgia—have tried to remain philosophical about their growing recognition. Buck told DeCurtis: "The influence that I'd like to think we have is that people saw that there's a way to go about doing this on your own terms. The thing is, you have to nor worry about success."

—Calen D. Stone