> Thanks to the person who posted this on the Dylan newsgroup.
>
> D
>
>
> March 30, 2008
> Music
> R.E.M. Tries Picking Up the Pace
> By ALAN LIGHT
>
> ATHENS, Ga.
>
> ON the ground floor of a nondescript building, a few blocks from the
> University of Georgia campus here, sits a little room stuffed with
> instruments and decorated with Christmas lights, lava lamps, old
> concert posters and tacked-up 45s. R.E.M. started rehearsing in this
> space in 1985, and it looks as if nothing has changed.
>
> This is a place to work not hang out, and work is what Michael Stipe,
> Peter Buck and Mike Mills were doing on this March afternoon, blasting
> through 13 songs over the course of a few hours. It was their first
> day of rehearsal for the shows that would introduce their hard-
> charging new album, "Accelerate" (Warner Brothers), and they weren't
> exactly easing back onstage: later in the week they were headliners at
> the Langerado festival in Florida, followed by a date at South by
> Southwest in Austin, Tex.
>
> "We never do much rehearsal," Mr. Buck, 51, the band's guitarist, said
> over a ginger ale later at a dark, empty bar around the corner.
> "Sometimes having that little edge of not feeling comfortable with the
> songs gives it a little bit of energy. Terror will do that."
>
> Despite spending 28 years together, at this moment a touch of fear is
> understandable for the trio. (The fourth member, the drummer, Bill
> Berry, left the band in 1997, following a brain aneurysm.) From its
> debut in 1981 until the mid-1990s R.E.M. was a definitive American
> rock band, but its sales and influence have steadily declined in the
> last decade. "Accelerate" is a very deliberate response to an internal
> crisis that Mr. Stipe, the group's singer, described as major, and
> that they all agreed almost broke up the band.
>
> Its last album, the hazy, somber "Around the Sun" (2004), took nine
> months to make and satisfied neither the musicians nor their fans. It
> didn't crack Billboard's Top 10 and sold less than 250,000 copies. The
> band members realized they needed to find a new way to work together
> or quit, coming to the end of a road that took them from this out-of-
> the-way college town to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
>
> "If you're a music fan who has 15 artists you follow, and one of them
> kind of takes a nose dive -- well, that's disappointing, but you'll
> move on," Mr. Stipe said. "But to us this is everything that we do."
>
> Mr. Buck said he had few commercial expectations and was much more
> concerned about making fans believe in the band again. "Whatever we
> did on the last record didn't work," he said. "I wasn't happy with it,
> and I don't think anyone else was. Michael tends to think that the
> longer you work on something, the better it can be. But it doesn't
> work that way for us. It just kept getting weirder and weirder and
> worse."
>
> "Around the Sun" came after other R.E.M. albums -- "Up" (1998) and
> "Reveal" (2001) -- that also received lukewarm receptions and were more
> atmospheric and keyboard based than the music that established the
> group. The band had fallen from its place as one of the biggest acts
> in the world to being unable to reach gold-record status. This
> downturn followed a record-breaking $80 million contract the band
> signed with Warner Brothers in 1996, a move that recently made Blender
> magazine's list of the "20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All
> Time."
>
> Mr. Stipe said the turmoil started as soon as Mr. Berry left the band.
> "Any 5-year-old can figure out that with four people, you can have two
> very clear sides, but with three people, one person is always left
> out," he said, picking at his lunch in the front room of the rehearsal
> space. Soft-spoken and inquisitive, Mr. Stipe, 48, was nursing a shin
> injury from a recent go-kart accident, and a sore jaw where he had a
> wisdom tooth removed. "The simple mathematics are that someone was
> always being ganged up on by the other two."
>
> Driving around Athens at nightfall Mr. Mills, 49, the group's bass
> player and keyboardist, agreed. "Communication had broken down, and it
> had gotten repaired, and then it broke down again," he said. "And then
> we said: 'O.K., this can't go on. Either we're done, or we've got to
> refocus ourselves in some way.' "
>
> After the tour that followed "Around the Sun" the band members
> gathered to determine their future. "I said, 'Guys, I'm too old to
> spend nine months doing something I don't want to do, making work I'm
> not proud of,' " Mr. Buck said. "We should try something different, or
> else you can do it without me."
>
> Mr. Stipe said: "It was a very important moment for us. We decided to
> do something that was really raw, immediate, unrehearsed -- basically,
> gut and instinctual. And we chose the most obvious thing, which is to
> write really fast songs and record them in a really fast way."
>
> The aptly titled "Accelerate" is an album that should please R.E.M.'s
> old fans. Recorded in a matter of weeks rather than months, with 11
> songs totaling less than 35 minutes, it's a steady blast of short,
> sharp rockers, a breathless tumble of hooks and harmonies. The album
> is reminiscent of R.E.M. favorites like "Lifes Rich Pageant" and
> "Document," from the mid-1980s era when the band managed the Olympian
> feat of being both cool and popular, but it avoids the feel of
> nostalgia.
>
> "Another mistake would have been to try to do exactly what we used to
> do back in 1985 or '86," Mr. Buck said. "Back then we actually didn't
> record as live as this one is."
>
> Mr. Stipe's signature obscure lyrics are more focused and penetrating
> on "Accelerate." In conversation Mr. Stipe, who has devoted as much
> attention to activism as to performing in recent years, retained his
> mysterious aura, veering from pragmatic political analysis to
> elaborate science-fiction metaphors and offhanded remarks about his
> depressions and insecurities. (He can also be pretty funny. When
> recent comments he made to Spin magazine about his life as an out gay
> man were widely discussed in the news media, he responded with a video
> statement on People.com, announcing that his band mates were finally
> coming out as heterosexuals.)
>
> As always, his personality spills into the lyrics, which alternate
> between lamenting the state of American leadership ("The business-
> first flat earthers licking their wounds/The verdict is dire, the
> country's in ruins") and exploring the evocative visions, taken
> directly from his dreams, that have long informed his writing.
>
> R.E.M. is even promoting "Accelerate" with the energy of a young band,
> using strategies like posting a series of 90 one-minute video clips on
> the group's Web site, remhq.com. The official premiere of "Accelerate"
> will take place on Facebook.
>
> "R.E.M. have been pretty savvy about the new music distribution
> model," said Scott Lapatine, founder and editor in chief of the music
> blog Stereogum.com. (Last year Stereogum assembled a tribute album
> commemorating the 15th anniversary of R.E.M.'s "Automatic for the
> People.")
>
> Mr. Buck bristles a bit that "Accelerate" is being widely greeted as a
> comeback album. "I don't feel like this is a return to form so much as
> this is the level we work at generally," he said. "Of the 14 records
> we've made, I think 12 of them are pretty close to this."
>
> A return to R.E.M.'s classic sound may not be enough to attract new
> listeners. Aaron Axelsen, music director of Live 105 in San Francisco,
> said his station played "Supernatural Superserious," the first single
> from "Accelerate," about 50 times before dropping it from rotation. He
> described the reaction it received as "polarizing" for his modern rock
> audience. "We were hoping it would bridge the gap to our younger,
> alternative listeners, but to a lot of them R.E.M. is their dad's
> band."
>
> Much has changed in R.E.M.'s world since the members came together as
> college kids in the early '80s, but a visit to Athens illustrates how
> much has stayed the same. The Wuxtry record shop, where Mr. Buck, then
> the store manager, first met Mr. Stipe is still open; after rehearsal
> Mr. Buck swings by and flips through the new releases. Mr. Mills lives
> in the house he bought in 1986. (Mr. Stipe keeps a house in Athens but
> lives mostly in New York; Mr. Buck moved to Seattle in the mid-'90s.)
> A steeple is the last vestige of the church where the band played its
> first show.
>
> In 1981 R.E.M.'s debut single, "Radio Free Europe," was released on
> the tiny local Hib-Tone label, but its impact was far-reaching.
> R.E.M., with its mix of punk energy and folk lyricism, fronted by the
> enigmatic, sometimes indecipherable vocals of Mr. Stipe, became the
> flagship band of the emerging "college radio" market in the first half
> of the '80s. As the group honed more of a pure rock sound, its members
> grew from cult heroes to arena headliners.
>
> The 1991 release "Out of Time," which featured the acoustic-based
> smash single "Losing My Religion," sold four million copies, and
> established R.E.M.'s members as global superstars. Critics loved the
> next few albums too, but as the band experimented with different
> sounds, and rock lost ground to hip-hop and boy bands, R.E.M.'s fan
> base started to show cracks, even before Mr. Berry's departure.
>
> In separate conversations each band member brought up U2 as a
> comparison. In the '80s and '90s the two groups seemed joined at the
> hip, conquering the pop world while remaining true to their
> principles, blazing a trail for the alternative movement that came in
> their wake. The bands remain friendly, but somewhere along the way
> R.E.M. ceded the spotlight while U2 remained a stadium act.
>
> "We've been the biggest band in the world, and it was great, but it's
> not a career goal for us," Mr. Mills said. "U2 are more able to handle
> that sort of thing. They are made up to do that, and we're not, and
> thank goodness."
>
> In the years since R.E.M.'s breakthrough, Mr. Stipe has often served
> as a mentor to younger rockers. "I don't like being the advice guy,
> but it is part of who I am," he said. "Be it Kurt Cobain or Conor
> Oberst or Chris Martin or Thom Yorke, there is a little club of people
> who do this weird thing as a job. I've just done it longer, so I can
> tell them to expect to go into a depression after a tour, or that
> acupuncture isn't a bad thing."
>
> A band dinner revealed some of the new Athens, where there is now a
> choice between several upscale restaurants, as well as the evolution
> of the band's interaction. The leisurely meal confirmed that R.E.M. is
> made up of three men with very different interests. Mr. Buck compared
> record producers, Mr. Mills discussed his beloved Atlanta Braves, and
> Mr. Stipe talked politics and "Ugly Betty." While they passed plates
> of food and laughed about disastrous travel experiences, though, it
> felt like the unity that propels "Accelerate" isn't something they
> left in the recording studio.
>
> "It's like having blood relatives," Mr. Buck said. "Twenty-eight years
> is a long time."
>
> Mr. Stipe said: "We've been through some dark times together. But
> there's a humor, there's a camaraderie, there's an absurdity to the
> daily ins and outs of what life can throw at you and how well you deal
> with it. And we happen to be in a very good place right now."