Many books have been written about R.E.M., and Robert Dean Lurie knows it. It’s the first thing he mentions in his own new biography of the band, Begin the Begin: R.E.M.’s Early Years. But few tomes have focused closely on R.E.M.’s origins in the burgeoning musical community of Athens, Georgia, in the 1980s. Thus, as Lurie explains, “several local figures who were pivotal in the band’s early history have been underrepresented in previous accounts, even completely omitted in some cases.”
To offset those omissions, Lurie approaches Begin the Begin like a detective as much as a biographer. He tracks down people who had small but important roles in the R.E.M. legend, seeking corroborations (or debunkings) of many myths about the group. In the process, Lurie inserts himself in his narrative, and sometimes in extraneous ways that derail his momentum. But his own story does matter: Inspired by the band, he enrolled at the University of Georgia in Athens (the school its members dropped out of) just as R.E.M. was becoming one of the biggest rock bands in America. So he knows a lot about the town, and that helps him uncover new info about a band whose history has already been well scoured.
Here are some of the things we learned about R.E.M. from Begin the Begin.
In one common legend, R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe was inspired to sing after hearing Patti Smith’s 1975 album Horses. Lurie can’t quite confirm or deny that, but he does find something just as crucial to Stipe’s future as a vocalist: a 1977 battle of the bands at his high school in St. Louis. Stipe’s classmate Craig Franklin asked him to enter and says Stipe replied, “I don’t sing.” But Franklin eventually convinced Stipe to join his group—called simply the Band—on covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and Rush’s “Working Man,” likely his first-ever public performance.
Another R.E.M. legend holds that the group chose its name when Stipe randomly found the acronym for rapid eye movement in a dictionary. But according to Athens scenester William Orten “Ort” Carlton, “That’s not right at all. The band was actually named after Ralph Eugene Meatyard.” As proof, he offers that Meatyard—an obscure, Kentucky-based photographer—signed his prints as “r.e.m.” and that Stipe often asked Ort about his work. Despite heavy digging, Lurie can’t definitively prove that Meatyard inspired the band’s name, but he reasonably concludes that there’s some truth to Ort’s story.
In the early 1980s, Athens was a hotbed of musical creativity, with many bands involving art students from the University of Georgia. Surrounded by pioneers like Pylon, the B-52’s, and Love Tractor, R.E.M. initially seemed pretty square, in part because they played more covers than originals. “I recognized early that they were like the ‘digestible-by-frat-boys’ version of the Athens sound,” says Mike Green of the Fans, a contemporaneous Atlanta band. That didn’t last long: By the release of R.E.M.’s debut Murmur in 1983, the group’s jangly, Byrds-inflected sound stood out not only locally but around the national college radio scene. (And for the record, R.E.M.’s members were always fans of their Athens cohort: They all wanted to be in Love Tractor, and drummer Bill Berry actually was, quitting only when R.E.M. got too busy for him to play in both groups.)
Despite R.E.M.’s rather conventional rock beginnings, Stipe was always interested in experimental music. In 1981, he played solo under the name 1066 Gaggle O’ Sound, which his UGA art school classmate David Pierce describes in the book: “He did a dub thing where he’d play a loop of himself and it would come back around and he’d play over that. He’d have a tape recorder which would rewind and play that back and then he’d play along with the recording he’d just made.” Stipe was also in the experimental band Boat Of with Tom Smith, later a noise legend and leader of To Live and Shave in L.A. And he played organ with Pierce in the “full-bore art rock bordering on prog” group Tanzplagen, which actually toured and released a single.
Lurie hears some charming stories about R.E.M.’s early tours, which got bigger with each record. Jeff Walls of Guadalcanal Diary recalls that when opening for R.E.M. in 1985, his band filled out a questionnaire that included a request for each member’s shoe size. “Next day, there was a package at the front of our hotel room with shoes, T-shirts, all this stuff that was useful on a tour,” he explains. “It was much appreciated.” And according to assistant tour manager Chris Edwards, R.E.M. “would stay after the show and talk to everybody that wanted to talk… until the fans were tired of talking. They were just so gracious with their time.”
During one mid-’80s tour, Stipe started sporting bleach-blonde hair, inspired not by fashion trends but a condiment. According to Edwards, Stipe spotted a bowl of mustard backstage one night and said, “Doesn’t it make you want to stick your head in it?” Edwards said no, but Stipe did it anyway, emerging on stage with a new, rather pungent look. For a few weeks, Stipe wore a different kind of mustard on his head every night (“his favorite was French’s,” says Edwards) until finally taking the easier route and dyeing his hair.
When R.E.M.’s fourth album Lifes Rich Pageant came out in 1986, it seemed more straightforward than its predecessor, 1985’s murkier Fables of the Reconstruction. But Pageant was initially intended as a concept album, as R.E.M. recorded a dozen short instrumental tracks to fit between longer songs. Producer Don Gehman convinced the band to ditch that interstitial material; some of it became proper songs, such as “Underneath the Bunker,” which Stipe quickly wrote words for just before it was recorded.
Berry’s decision to leave R.E.M. in 1997 was surprising, primarily because he decided to become a farmer instead. But in the ’80s, when Berry was dating Kathleen O’Brien—a key figure largely responsible for the band members meeting—he confessed his farming dreams to her during a drive through north Georgia. Encountering a local farmer, “they spent the better part of the afternoon riding a tractor over the man’s fields,” writes Lurie, “and Bill was about the happiest Kathleen had ever seen him.”
