By Stephen Blackwell
Photos by Ray Lego
This happened: In the late 1970s, Athens, GA, wasn’t exactly hip. How four guys living there got together to form a folky, punk rock band is anyone’s guess, but Michael Stipe, Bill Berry, Mike Mills and Peter Buck did it when they formed R.E.M. They wrote a lot of songs in those early days, some you know, like “One I Love” and “Stand,” and some you don’t (but really should) like “Welcome To The Occupation” and “So. Central Rain” They toured like Black Flag before Black Flag actually went on tour, became critical darlings, and, in 1991, released a song called “Losing My Religion.” From then until 1996 they sold approximately one billion records (give or take) and left an indelible mark on music and pop culture. The following 10 years—not so much. BUT they are back with an electrifying record that sounds like a bunch of teenagers blowing out their garage rather than a group of men approaching 50. Correspondingly, their front man might be more important now than ever.
I don’t have a celebrity “oh-shit” stick. I kind of pride myself on it. But when Michael Stipe walked into Industria Studios for this photo shoot, shook my hand, then started posing dutifully for the camera, I just couldn’t help it. “It’s Michael Stipe,” I said to myself. “Oh shit.”
You know those terrible Garfield dolls that people used to stick on their car windows, where he is spread eagle, suctioned to the glass? That was me to MTV in the early-90s. I wanted my MTV all right, and Michael Stipe was on there once every 50 minutes or so, flanked by the spandex-clad Bon Jovi and Kip Winger and, of course, Axl Rose. At nine years old, you have no idea who the yutzes are, but I did figure it out in a few years. Michael Stipe: not a yutz.
And part of not being a yutz, I guess, means maintaining some shroud of mystery. While it’s pretty easy to sum up the ideological outlook of a Jovi or a Rose with a couple syllables, like “Jersey” or “beer,” R.E.M’s influence was always a little more nebulous, a little more nuanced, and has maybe withheld the test of time better for it.
R.E.M. have a lot of classic songs and a few timeless ones. Their touchstone album, Automatic For The People, is up there as one of the greatest of all time. It’s more than you can ask from any artistic career. But it keeps on going, because it’s not about money or fame or anything else they have plenty of. As far as I could tell from the conversation we had, it’s about not knowing how to stop, and maybe not wanting to know how to in the first place. For Stipe, the music, the melodies, the images—they never stop coming.
I met Michael Stipe for lunch in SoHo on a very wintry day. I was shocked he showed up, as it was a pain in the ass to walk around and he was doing so on crutches because he broke his foot go-kart racing a few weeks before. But when I saw him limping down Rivington Street, hood pulled way over his head to avoid the snow and eye contact, I lit up. That’s conviction.
Although New York is relatively good about this stuff, we sat in a back corner so nobody would bug him. He drank two espressos in an hour, which would have given me a heart attack, but only seemed to fuel the spirited way he explains the depth of his engagement with art, music, film, politics and life. And he didn’t even hog the spinach dip.
R.E.M. is a band that I became very interested in at a young age. As you could probably guess, “Losing My Religion” was the first R.E.M. song I became cognizant of at about nine years old. It’s always been a mystery to me, what that period was like for you between Out of Time & Automatic For The People?
It’s a part of my little corner of history that I went at the age of 15 and bought the Patti Smith album [Horses] the day it was released. And I sat listening to it all night, and it changed my life—I decided to be a singer in a band. What I’ve never told anyone, and this is exclusive, is that I also bought four other albums that day. One of them was Hall & Oates, one of them was Foghat, Fool For the City. I don’t where I got all that cash from—records were kind of expensive at the time—but I think I bought five records altogether that day. I gravitated towards one over all the others. But all the others were still there, and still in my consciousness.
That was the backdrop of me being in high school: Ted Nugent, Foghat, Styx, REO Speedwagon and these were the bands in the Midwest that resonated with regular kids and what was on the radio. It was rock. Pathetic, but there it is.
So that period of your life had an influence on you when you were one of the biggest rock stars in the world?
The period of Out Of Time and Automatic For The People—as a band we had been on the road for a decade, nonstop. It was maybe the first time I truly experienced that thing that happens when you are not in an adrenalized state and you have been for a long time. You crash, and often burn. The whole thing was those records were brought about by Peter [Buck] not wanting to be a guitar hero. I don’t what brought him to that. Maybe it was his way of signing off on performing live for a while. But he drove that period by putting down the guitar and picking up any instrument he didn’t know how to play, including the mandolin. He wrote “Losing My Religion,” and he still has the tape from when he wrote the song. The arrangement is exactly the same as it was when recorded. And that set us off on to a whole other thing.
The other day I was thinking about Monster. I was wondering what might have happened had we done Automatic for the People Pt. II—how the trajectory might have changed. I don’t really know.
In that period of time, to me, you and Axl Rose were the biggest front men in the world—totally larger than life, on MTV all of the time. And I was too young to recognize the bifurcation present between you as people and your bands, especially in terms of what art is, what music is, how to treat women, and so on.
I distinctly remember the Axl Rose Rolling Stone interview. It was the first time he pulled the curtain and you saw what had kind of created him. And that became all too easy for scriptwriters. Psychopathic killers—you go back to Psycho and it is all about some terrible thing that happened to you as a child. It is all too easy. But it was the first time in my memory that a public figure was that open.
You know, I’ve never talked about Axl Rose in an interview before. There was the line about him hating fags and I remember he got a lot of shit for that. And I remember at the time—I don’t think of myself as ever being closeted. I was out to my friends, to my band, to my family, and certainly to the people I was sleeping with. But I remember thinking at that time: That is where he comes from. That is what he understands. And I certainly don’t agree with it; I think it sucks that he is spreading it out there. But it was a genuine voice coming from a genuine place.
There have been several generations of bands that were influenced by R.E.M. and you’ve stuck around through all of them. There is the R.E.M. associated with Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, then The R.E.M associated with Radiohead, and then the R.E.M. associated with Coldplay and Fischerspooner. Now I think of the bands today that have been influenced by you that R.E.M is associated with, maybe Band Of Horses, Arcade Fire—
I can never hear it myself [laughs].
Well, a lot of music today is sleepy and boring, and with Accelerate you’ve come out with this vibrant and loud rock record that sounds like early R.E.M. I understand a Bauhaus professor that equates learning to coming full circle has influenced you—
Paul Klee. He is one of the great artists. As a lyricist, [his ideas] certainly helped me understand my own trajectory as a wildly insecure, wildly inadequate adult with the fucked-up confidence it takes to be a pop singer and a public figure. I somehow find out about these things that help me through my day, and that help explain my trajectory.
In terms of its influence on the music, Accelerate does have a youthful, invigorated sound at its core. It stood out to me, and for someone who gets over a thousand records a year—
Everything becomes wallpaper. That is what I tried to do with Reveal. I tried really hard to make sonic wallpaper with Reveal. That was my intention, to do something like Moby’s Play or Coldplay. It felt like people were listening to music in a really different way. These are people that are not music fans but people for whom music is—as Peter Buck once brilliantly said, “Music is to most people as furniture is to me.” If it works and it doesn’t collapse on me, it is fine. I don’t care what it looks like. For me it was a sonic experiment, that I think was quite successful, but it was not what people wanted to hear from R.E.M. at that point, sadly. I really like that record a good bit.
I have to admit, I would have to go back and listen to Reveal.
To me, the whole record is about this hypnotic summer daydream. You have to pee but you just can’t bother to get off the lawn chair [laughter]. You’re just a fucking lizard in the sun, lying there and totally love it. Something you could just put on repeat.
Whereas Accelerate is a jump-around record for 14-year-old kids.
Well, we’ll see if 14-year-old kids actually get into it.
It must be strange having fans that don’t know who [ex-R.E.M. drummer} Bill Berry is. And that must be especially odd because he was part of the band when it became an American Institution. I don’t know how much you like being considered that—
We became a brand.
Which is kind of the goal?
It gives you a certain freedom to subvert from within—you reach a certain level. And there are multiple examples of people that have done that successfully within music and outside of music. Politics certainly.
It’s like when Dylan mentions that he had the power to influence an entire generation in the 60s, and then it left him. He’ll never get it back, and that is fine. But can you get it back?
He took—and this is from Courtney Love, who presented this to me at not a great time in her life—she said, “Michael, do you realize that Dylan took half of folk music and ran with it, but there is this whole other half that we don’t even know exists anymore, that dried up on the vine and died.” It was like Dylan never turned over the record and only listened to the A-Side over and over and over again, and he went off to become the phenomenon that he is. Courtney was pointing out to me there was this whole other branch of folk music that Dylan never listened to and was never influenced by. But his influence, reaching that pinnacle, resonates still, and it changed the course of pop music. But it is brilliant of him to think that that can happen once, and that is probably it. And let’s hope that you’re aware enough to recognize that point and enjoy it, and not spend the rest of your life looking back on it and hoping for it again. That is certainly not how I have lived my life.
Well, you’ve said you never wanted to make Automatic over and over again.
It would be boring. And money is good and fine, but it’s not that good. Life is too short. That’s not the goal. The goal is to try and push ourselves and do things that are super-interesting, and do things that challenge us over and over and over again. We’re the same as any other group of people . We have limited abilities, vision, and scope—a limited palette to work with. So you take that and you try and turn that on its head as many times as you can. I think there is a freedom in that. One of the things about pop music is that it is very limited, and being able to work within those limitations is thrilling. When you are given all options and no holds barred, it’s a little easy to get lost. It’s a little harder when you are working in the constraints of a particular medium. It’s a little harder to do something that makes you say, “I don’t know where that came from but it is really good. Let’s see if we can do it again. Let’s see if we can repeat it and throw a middle eight into it and turn it into a song.”
[Stipe takes out a photocopied booklet of Accelerate’s artwork and begins to walk me through it.]
This is The City of The Future . My dreams are set in a post-apocalyptic world that’s not scary. So the giant poster is the city. But it kind of goes back to this idealized fanzine past of mine. It represents something about the music, the rawness, the cut and paste collage.
Since music on a physical medium is becoming a product people shy away from buying, I have to ask if having such elaborate artwork is a ploy to try and get people to pay for the record?
I still think in terms of albums, and artwork is crucial to try and understand what a record is about—trying to dig through the layers of it.
So the music is only half the story?
It’s a super different mentality than what we grew up with. It’s a shift, however subtle or profound, in the way that people think about things. When I was growing up you didn’t really have—when we were putting out records, we didn’t really have the opportunity to put out a 64-page booklet with artwork and lyrics. God knows nobody wanted that when I was 26, to read lyrics. Well, they wanted to, but I wasn’t giving it to them.
In terms of your lyrics—activism and having a political mindset have always been key. These things seem to get lost in music as time goes on. As an artist, when you spend so much time thinking with the third eye about politics—which is more or less how we negotiate the material world—you can never actually see things the way a politician does. I’ve often wondered myself if you were an esoteric philosopher or a member of a secret society.
That’s a no. There are no secret societies in my past or in my future, as far as I can tell.
Your infatuation with the sun led me to think that. I don’t want to say you are a “spiritual” person because, to me, spiritual means actually communing with incorporeal bodies—
Well, they are there, whether you want them to be or not. I think they are.
I figured you felt that way. And this city you’ve described in the record and created in the album artwork—just because it doesn’t really exist doesn’t mean it isn’t there.“
Sing In The Submarine,” I’ve never quite written a song from this perspective, but I’m confessing my dreamscape—the world that I exist in when I dream. And it’s post apocalyptic. But, in the live DVD, before I introduce the song “Electron Blue,” I said, “This is a song about the future, but it’s not as frightening as we actually think.” I remember when I said it I thought, “Oh, that was good.” But I was in trance mode so I often don’t remember stuff. But this is a huge part of who I am, my dream world. That it does exist in this place, but that place is not frightening. What feels scary in Blade Runner or Cloverfield, that kind of science fiction movie of the distant future—at least half of who I am exists in that world. At least a third if I sleep 8 hours a day.
And that’s a completely different place altogether?
It’s completely different. And it’s influenced by this world. But what I am trying to say is that this world is influenced by that world, but they still are very different. It’s dystopia, but happy dystopia. And I know there are other people that are like this because of the movies that I’ve seen and the other artists that have been able to perfectly capture this other world. For me, that world is a real place that I tap into when I sleep, and other people may or may not be able to tap into that world or a similar world.
Are you talking about a world—
There is nothing spiritual or woo-woo about this, it just is what it is. And it’s not scary. In fact it’s kind of ordinary, and that’s what I was trying to get across in “Sing In The Submarine.” It’s a song about a submarine that is fueled by melody. The guy is living in this world, the world that we are in right now, you and me, and he is trying to completely and neurotically prepare for the moment that the city is attacked, then find the love of his life, then escape. So he creates a submarine fueled by melody. You go to the shore and hit a particular series of notes and the submarine rises up out of the ruins and carries you off to safety. It’s a ridiculous idea. And god knows there is another song about a submarine—I didn’t need to write a song about a submarine, but there it is.
The R.E.M. sound—the interweaving vocals, Peter Buck’s arpeggiated guitars, the one-word choruses, and your baritone voice—with so many crucial components, I’d imagine R.E.M. is a very argumentative band.Between ourselves?
Yes.
Oh yeah. It takes a lot to get the three of us to see things the same way.
I’ve always thought one of the reasons R.E.M. has survived so long was that teenage “us-against-the-world” bond you guys forged almost 30 years ago.
We have a huge amount of respect for each other. And we do disagree constantly. Everyone thinks that they have the clearest idea of what something should sound like and how it should wind up. Sometimes one person takes over and the other two let it be, though that doesn’t happen often. The kind of great thing about being together as long as we have is the point that we’ve reached now, that’s it taken a lot to get to in the past couple of years. It is utterly transparent. There are no hurt feelings. We know each other enough to say, “I fucking totally disagree with you and I think it is a terrible idea, but you have a vision and I am going to let you run with it. Just bring that one cymbal down in the chorus and I’m fine.” And that’s the compromise. That’s a part of how this record got made.
There must be a lot ego suppression going on?
Every time I say it, it sounds cheesy, but we really love and respect each other, and R.E.M. is bigger than the sum of its parts. And for whatever reason when the four of us came together it was a good thing for all of us. It’s worth all the drama, which, when it comes to other bands, is pretty minimal.
I know over time you have given good counsel to Eddie Vedder, Thom Yorke and Kurt Cobain. The things that gave you guys anxiety, that Nietzschean abyss of looking out into these huge crowds of strangers and saying, “Maybe 10 per cent of the people here I wouldn’t walk across the street to avoid.” I know they are your friends, and I know losing Kurt was crushing, but I think it is something you handled much better than all of them.
I have a very strong constitution. But you weren’t looking at me while I was going through it. Media wasn’t what it is today. By the time those guys were making their first records, I had been through all that stuff, and came out relatively intact. I figured out a few things about it. Now, that didn’t make me the great go-to guy for anxious pop stars, but when you do such a specific job, you are able to communicate with them on an intimate level because of what you do. But in the 80s I went through every kind of awful—I don’t want to sound hyperbolic or self-pitying—but it was awful. And I went through it alone. But it was when we didn’t have the focus or the spotlight of the media. All people paid attention to was what was going on onstage.
And Kurt—the great tragedy of his death is that, as an artist, as someone pushing things forward, he was really pushing himself. And he had reached a point where he was about to push through to something that was so phenomenal and so beautiful. It was all written, it was all right there and it was so obvious where he was going, and then he didn’t make it. I still have trouble—I can’t listen to an entire Nirvana record.
It’s a bit of a double standard, having this feeling where you a stranger, yet writing songs where you speak directly to every person. “Everybody Hurts” in particular, which when performed live is almost like an séance.
I listen to it sometimes and I can’t believe where it came from, and I can’t believe I had anything to do with it. It is just an incredible song.
So how do you channel feelings that are so singular into something plural?
It took me forever to figure out that if I really strongly felt something I didn’t have to edit it out, I could allow it to stay in the work. I figured it out in my twenties, and, as an artist, it just took me a really long time. In the 80s we were out there on our own, and it felt like we were. My charge with this record was that I would show up with songs completed. That never happens. On Up I had half a verse—but I was in shock. I was in shock. And they were tolerant and patient and supportive. Nothing came, nothing came, nothing came, and then it got worse. So my charge was to show up with fully written songs, and I did. I showed up with six or seven fully written. The first day I said, “Peter, Mike, you can tell me if what I am doing sucks. I’m not that guy anymore who goes off into the corner and sulks for four days every time I am insulted. I am a big boy.”
You do have “Until The Day Is Done” on Accelerate, and “I Wanted To Be Wrong” [off Around The Sun] is a meaningful song to me—
Thank you, I love that song.
But as far as political influence on an everyday level goes, you have been a lot less visible in 2008 than you were in 2003…
That was on purpose. I’m Obama all the way: He’s a great question mark. That’s what I think this country is looking for right now. I think he can help us pull ourselves from the mire that we are in.
I’m for Obama, too. The only thing I think is a little dangerous: When your skills are oratory, when you can speak and people listen, and are sometimes even driven to tears, it causes them to project something onto you. And when it is 25,000 people at a concert that is one thing. But when it is 300 million people voting for the leader of the free world, I wonder if that will come back and hurt us—that our projection doesn’t materialize.
It may well not. The system is pretty shut down on itself. Let’s say, symbolically at least, he means a great deal. It might be the salvation this country needs right now. And not even inside the country, outside the country as well. The entire world is waiting for us to prove that we are still the USA. We have lost it in their eyes. I’m overstating the obvious, but we represent something very big in the rest of the world. It’s an idea, it’s a dream, it’s an abstraction, and it’s fucking huge. And that’s been gone since Bush came in. You what? This election was stolen? If something like that happened [anywhere else in the world] people would be in the streets throwing bricks, setting cars on fire—it’s unfathomable that an election would be stolen so flagrantly. Then we sat back and folded our hands. This is before 9/11. This is September 10th. We folded our hands and said, “Well I guess that is how it happened.” And we represent something so massive to the rest of the world. And they are sitting there with bated breaths waiting for us to prove we are what they think we are.
Despite my reservations, I do think Obama is the clearer path, as with Hillary it’s too evidently about power.That projection thing could be very frightening when it is a politician who is a policy maker who is in a position of great power, and not cultural power like a pop star or an actor. That projection is a terrifying thing, but it is a little bit of hope. We are all smart enough to figure it out: It may not turn out how I want it to, but if it offers a possible change. It will be a learning experience for sure.
Speaking of change and experience, as you approach your 30th year as a band, what comes next for R.E.M.?
R.E.M., at this point, is out of my hands. But we talked about how were going to be as brave as possible [with this record], as it felt like sink or swim time for us. And we were determined to not sink.
