Robert Dean Lurie’s biography is the first completely researched and written since R.E.M. disbanded in 2011. It offers by far the most detailed account of their formative years—the early lives of the band members, their first encounters with one another, their legendary debut show, touring out of the back of a van, initial recordings, their shrewdly paced rise to fame. The people and places of ‘the South’ are crucial to the R.E.M. story in ways much more complex and interesting than have been presented thus far, says Lurie, who explores the myriad ways in which the band’s adopted hometown of Athens, Georgia, and the South in general, have shaped its members and the character and style of their art. The South is more than the background to this story; it plays a major role: the creative ferment that erupted in Athens and gripped many of its young inhabitants in the late 70s and early 80s drew on regional traditions of outsider art and general cultural out-thereness, and gave rise to a free-spirited music scene that produced the B-52’s and Pylon, and laid the ground for R.E.M.’s subsequent breakout success. Lurie has tracked down and interviewed numerous figures in the band’s history who were under-represented in or even absent from earlier biographies, and they contribute previously undocumented stories as well as casting a fresh light on the familiar narrative.
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As a lifelong fan of the band (I found their music in 1985, when I was 14), and a visitor to Athens on multiple occasions, the first half of this book was a treasure trove of anecdotes and memories that made late 70's-early 80's Athens, GA, a mecca for young imaginations like mine. When you're a teenager in the era before the internet, growing up in the industrial Midwest, “scenes” and communities like the one described in the book take on a mythological, almost impossible, sense of magic. I will always have the Athens of my imagination, and this book does an incredible job of humanizing that place and time, making it more “real” to me than it ever had been.
The second half of the book, which spends less time in town as the band branches out, tours, records, and gets bigger, does a good job of staying rooted in the changing scene, but its analysis of the albums focuses more on the lyrical approach than the technical side of the songwriting and recording (although there is enough of each for fans to enjoy).
HOWEVER, the book has, for me, a real flaw, and that is its apologist approach to the Reagan-Bush era of national politics, which transformed the band, especially Michael Stipe. This issue comes to the fore in a particularly egregious section on Stipe's manifestation of mental health concerns during the recording of FABLES, which the author attributes to Stipe's confrontation with his sexual history and his legitimate double fear that he could have contracted HIV & that his privacy and rights would possibly be violated if he were tested for the disease. The legitimate terror and panic of this uncertainty at this time in our history is, in Lurie's telling (and possibly true), a galvanizing force in Stipe's political awakening, as it was in reality for an entire generation of HIV/AIDS activists who fought massive battles against government apathy, shame, hatred, and inadequate service for themselves and their friends and lovers, who were dying all around them.
Instead of painting this picture, Lurie instead writes:
“Is Stipe correct to link so much of his private turmoil from that time to the actions (or inaction) of the Reagan-Bush administration? At a practical level, probably not. The federal government did act quickly to fund AIDS research, and by the time Reagan left office, the annual budget for AIDS-related funding was $1.6 billion, having risen from an initial $8 million in 1982. The figure would increase exponentially under his successor, George H.W. Bush.”
This paragraph is unforgivable coming in a section about the possibility of a personal death sentence in early 1985, when the album was recorded, but more than that, it lays credit for this investment at the feet of the very people who refused to act and were forced into confrontation by brave activists who risked everything to make change and find a cure. It is also hard not to think of the illness and death of B-52's guitarist Ricky Wilson from AIDS, which also happened in 1985, and not see how naive and troubling this analysis is. If the story of Stipe's fear of an HIV diagnosis is true, one would only need to look a few weeks down the road from this recording session to see the facts on the ground for what they were.
I am loath to type the next half of that paragraph, which praises C. Evertt Koop for sending a mailer on AIDS to every household in America.
He goes on, in a fashion typical of this book, to give a little both-sides
“However, if we accept the long-standing convention that one of the President's duties is to reassure the public in a time of crisis... its hard not to conclude that Regan failed here, and may have done real damage with his silence.”
I added the periods because I don't think the paragraph could sustain any more qualifiers.
The author goes on later in the book to offer that the Reagan of his youth didn't seem too objectionable, and spends a great deal of time critiquing, sometimes fairly and often using Stipe's own later reflections on his own effectiveness, the political content of the band's performances and albums.
All of which is to say, while this book does a fantastic job with the band as it existed in the Athens bubble, I really feel the author's curiosity and empathy arrives at a dead-end when dealing with the band's larger meaning and how, through a personal, political crisis, one that shaped an entire generation of LGBTQ+ people and their allies, Michael Stipe became an important voice, one of many at the time (see Minor Threat, Public Enemy, Dead Kennedys, The Fall, ad infinitum) that were challenging the systemic fracture between the greed/elites above and people of color/LGBTQ+ people/the poor below. This was the dawn of the great and ongoing era of American economic inequality (well, for white people anyway, for others it has always been thus), and many in Gen X felt (and still feel) that injustice deeply. How the book misses this, misses how the decision to embrace that discontent contributed greatly to the band's ascent, is a big issue for how the second half of this book is framed. R.E.M. may have been nascent in their impact and the way in which they delivered the message through performance in the years covered by the book (GREEN arrives outside of the book's scope, fair enough), but it was transformative for so, so many of their fans at the time, it was incredibly important and brave not to remain silent, and the band should receive praise for that, not retrospective eye-rolls.
Anyway, I really did enjoy the author's conversational style and the ability to elicit so many wonderful stories about a time that is now lost to us, but I really believe a proper context for the times, especially the way the times “felt” to the band members and to so many of us, would have done this book a world of good.
