Hall of fame

Normally I don’t care a flip about the annual inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This year was a little different. For the first time this year the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies were broadcast live, and I decided to tune in to watch on VH1. I had an understandable interest this year. One of our local bands, a little group known as R.E.M., was inducted this year. Maybe you’ve heard of them? They’ve had a few hits over the course of their career.

I haven’t really followed them for the better part of the past decade. Since drummer Bill Berry left the band, it seems that the drum machine the remaining members use when writing songs is stuck on mid-tempo and they just haven’t done anything that I want to spend my money on. That wasn’t always the case, though. When I first moved to town twenty-five years ago, there was an afternoon video show on channel 36 in Atlanta hosted by Cousin Bruce Morrow. One day he played a video from some band from Athens. The video sucked but I loved the music. It was the video for “Wolves, Lower” from R.E.M.’s Chronic Town EP. From that time on I was a fan. The following year I bought their excellent “Murmur” album even though some friends thought I wouldn’t like it. I loved it! It was so different from anything I had heard to that point.

I bought each subsequent album they released either on or shortly after the release dates. Of course, living in Athens finding unofficial live recordings is easy to do. The quality of some of these recordings is startling good, soundboard quality even. It really makes me wonder about the source of these recordings.

Though I haven’t followed the band for a while, my interest in them was renewed recently thanks to two coincidental events. My wife entered a raffle at work one day not long ago, and as chance would have it, she won. Her prize pack contained a audio CD and DVD containing R.E.M.’s music from their days with the IRS record label, the band’s 2003 live DVD “Perfect Circle,” a t-shirt (which fits my daughter much better than me or my wife), and a hat.

Knowing I was a fan she gave me the pack, and I was thrilled to receive it. One evening my daughter and I sat and watched the DVD of old IRS-era videos. She knows the band only through one of their songs being featured in the movie Chicken Little. It was a wonderful experience rediscovering the band and their music which played part of my life’s soundtrack during the 1980s and early 1990s. Of all the videos the band made during the 1980s, the one for Can’t Get There From Here stands out amongst the rest. Partially filmed at an abandoned drive-in theater on North Avenue in town, the video shows the silly and irrelevant side of a band known for its social activism. The drive-in has long since been redeveloped into an apartment complex. A few years after the video was shot a girl was raped at the site, leading to a public outcry (probably led by developers) that the site encouraged crime and something should be done about it. It didn’t work. The site’s been redeveloped but police presence in that area is still pretty high, as is the crime rate. But I’m sure the developers got their moneys worth out of the property, being such caring people and all.

About the same time my wife won the raffle it was announced that the band would be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was with this recent awakening that I watched as R.E.M. was inducted into the RRHF. Watching Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, as well as the train wreck formerly known as Van Halen, being inducted, I thought perhaps I had tuned in too late to see the quartet from Athens be inducted. But they came at the end of the program. As the band came out after Eddie Vedder’s introduction, I noticed that Peter Buck was carrying a glass of wine. Uh, oh, I thought. I hope this ends well. For the most part things did end well, and it’s always good to see Bill Berry playing with the band, though it’s a rare event these days. At the end of the band’s obligatory post-speech set of songs, Pete Buck’s wine finally kicked into overdrive. During the end of “Man in the Moon,” Buck picks up his Vox amplifiers and tosses them off the stage. I was horrified, not because it looked like Peter was apparently hammered, but because he THREW VOX AMPLIFIERS off the stage. If you know musical equipment, Vox amps are the shit. The only other amp I’d like to have is a tube-driven Portaflex bass amp. I’ve played through a Portaflex on a couple of occasions, having turned it on and left it on for over an hour, letting the tubes get hot before playing. And now I really want one.

Now that R.E.M. is in the hall of fame, I’m reminded of stories about the band members that I’ve heard over the years. One of my favorites comes from a friend of mine who has known the band. A long time ago a friend of his lived in the same apartments that Michael Stipe was living/squatting at the time. He came home late one night to have his attention drawn to a nearby dumpster by a noise that was coming from inside. Turns out it was Stipe, laying inside on the trash, repeating over and over, “I have become the dumpster…I have become the dumpster.”

One of my friends from college used to work in a restaurant downtown. On one particular evening his girlfriend was late picking him up after his shift was over. A customer and his wife offered a ride home, which he accepted. The first thing he noticed was that they drove a nicely restored Plymouth, which could go really fast and hang tight curves—as he experienced that night. In the dark of the backseat he noticed that with every turn the car made, something came flying across the floorboard, striking him in the ankles and shins. After a few times of being struck by this object, he reached down to pick up the unknown object. It was an MTV video music award. The driver was Bill Berry with his (now ex-) wife Mari, the moonman award tossed into the backseat like a discarded McDonald's wrapper.

My encounters with the individual members of the band haven’t been as exciting. In my teenybopper days working at a Burger King, Bill Berry came through the drive thru one night and managed to miss the left hand turn after ordering. He was also present at one of the last Pylon shows at the end of 1991. I was standing stage right near the front with a friend of mine when I looked over my right shoulder to see who/what was behind me. Standing a few feet away was Berry, a can of beer in his hand, wearing loose fitting grey sweatpants tied off with a rope/thick string, a sweatshirt with a tear around the collar, eyes no bigger than slits. He looked like an extra from the Pirates of the Caribbean films, but he was clearly having fun.

I’ve always admired and respected Mike Mills as a bass player and musician. When I first picked up a bass guitar, it was the basslines from R.E.M. songs that I used as my starting point on how to play. In fact, it was the Chronic Town EP that served as my “tutor” on how to play a bass. One evening I was downtown at the Georgia Bar downing pitchers of beer with friends of mine when I saw Mills hanging out at the popcorn machine with Pylon bassist Michael Lachowski. We had finished our last pitcher for the evening, when I, emboldened by the beer, decided I needed to go over and introduce myself and tell him what an influence he had been on my playing—which I did. After cornering him for a few minutes, it was time to go. As I left, I heard someone else come up and introduce themselves to him. I knew at that point that I had done something very uncool, as nobody was bothering him until I did. My friends gave me some well-intentioned grief about the encounter, to which I asked them to kindly shut the fuck up. Since then I’ve made it a point to not bother any of the band members should I encounter them in public. The last time I saw Mike Mills in public was at the end of 2002. My daughter and I were at an eastside restaurant waiting for our order when she ran in front of a grey-haired gentleman getting a refill on his drink. I told my daughter to be careful about running in front of people, but I never recognized that it was Mills she cut off until he was leaving. His grey hair made him look so old.

I don’t have many stories about Pete Buck, or at least he’s managed to fly under the radar. During the band’s Monster tour in 1994-95, three-fourths of the band members went down with some sort of physical ailment: Berry with a brain aneurysm, Stipe with a hernia, Mills with appendicitis. The only person to fail their pre-tour insurance physical? Pete Buck. There was also a local musician who went by the name “Mad Dog” Melton. Mad Dog had a reputation for getting really, really drunk before he went onstage. One day someone thought it’d be a good idea to have Buck keep an eye on Mad Dog, keep him sober before showtime. Talking about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. When the time came that night for Mad Dog to take the stage he was blitzed. If I’m not mistaken, his entire set consisted of an obscene limerick and a few chords on his guitar before he fell off the stage. Mad Dog fell off this world in August 2006.

So that’s it...stories I’ve heard about the members of R.E.M. that are moderately amusing but will never, ever, turn up in any written accounts or books about the band.