R.E.M., Collapse Into Now (Warner Bros.)
That’s still how I feel twenty years later.
I don’t know the name of the Austin, Texas, DJ who said that. But for years and years, as I played the cassette dub of Reckoning (played in full on Austin’s college radio station, recorded by and stolen from my father) over and over again through my young tender teens well into and past my college years, I heard those words every time. I don’t think it’s the repetition that makes me feel that no phrase could better define this band—this passionate, poetic, sweet, southern, spirit-stirring band from the sleepy college town of Athens, Georgia. It’s just the truth.
Really, there were no words, for me, to explain what their music has meant to my heart, my self, my life. You could say from the age of 10 on, when my dad handed me a copy of the short-lived music magazine called X, with R.E.M. on the cover, and said, “Look at this. I think you’ll like this band.”
Some people get bicycles and driving lessons from their dad. I got, thank god, music. It was the summer of 1985, and as the sun glowed through the ceiling-high windows of my father’s A-Frame home in the Hill Country town of West Lake, right outside of Austin, there they were—all four of them—Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry—looking cool in what I can only remember as these geometric poses with raised arms, or folded arms, legs jumping, standing firm on the ground all of them dressed in black, I think—on the cover of a glossy white magazine called X.
Then he put that recording of Reckoning on the boom box. I don’t think the album had even been released yet. I listened to Top 40. Some of it was good, but the music that came from those big round speakers to my young, shell-shaped ears was like a shot in the arm, shot to the heart, whatever song lyric (hey! Wilco and Bon Jovi respectively!) you wanna use—because lyrics and poetry and ghosts and kudzu and humidity and poetry and Faulkner and just everything really indescribable is just what R.E.M. sounded like to me, that fateful summer that began a decades-long love affair with the band that would be my life (props to Minute Men for that steal).
And when they get you, even if they put out a series of less-than-change-your-life-albums-that-you-don’t-even-buy for a number of years (see Monster to Accelerate, for me, let’s say, if we were indeed talking about me), they’ve got you for life. My heart stirs just to think of songs like “Gardening at Night”, “Radio Free Europe”, “Talk About the Passion,” “Lightnin’ One”, “Swan Swan H”, “Seven Chinese Brothers”, “Can’t Get There from Here”, “Finest Worksong”, “I Remember California”, “I Am Superman”, “You Are the Everything”, even “Stand” (that song was totally ironic by the way, way before ironic was cool), and the list goes on into Out of Time, which was a number one record. Guy friends, boyfriends and girls not comfortable with their sensitive side made fun of the major hit off that album, “Losing My Religion” just to infuriate me, but it’s still a favorite of mine.
So. Essentially, I’ve listened and loved every album from Murmur to Automatic for the People, when R.E.M. released Monster, the warmth was gone, it seemed. It all got more rocky and electronic and fuzzy and impersonal to me and I just kept listening to my old albums, and noticed, always noticed when a new album came out, gave it a shot, and left it out of my life. But they were and are always with me–have an imprint on my soul, make it dance wildly, and my love for this band never ever abated. They’ve been the soundtrack to my life, and after Automatic, were the singing bluebird in my heart that I didn’t let out, until now.
They’re back. The real, authentic, indescribable REM is back–have collapsed back to their roots, roots fully planted in the now.
The albums between Automatic and Now seemed a struggle, a searching, a bad A&R guy telling this divine group to keep up with the fuzzy electronic feedback production of the moment, none of which was helped by drummer Bill Berry’s decision to quit the band and devote his time to his family. I heard somewhere he took a long drive all across America, all the way home, after he quit, wanting only quiet to contemplate, to mourn his break from his first family–a group of guys in Athens, GA who made weird, Southern-infused, not-pop, not-punk, not-rock, not-county, not-folk music that became the catalyst of college rock, the underground thing that came after punk and before alternative and indie, an absolutely I-don’t-know-what-this-sound-is-or-how-to-describe-it-but-it-makes-me-weep-and-jump-with-joy-at-the-same-time-and-I-am-in-love-with-it sound that somehow made REM world-famous full-fledged rock stars and legends.
Berry was the drummer. He kept the rhythm. In a way, a very technical and spiritual way, he was the heart beat of REM and his departure seemed to wear the band down to the bone into vertigo, confusion, an off-kilter place where the amputated appendage feels like it’s there but is in fact, gone.
But REM went on. Those three can make a sound so seamless, so perfect. And continued to tour. And make records. Even magic, sometimes, especially on tour.
It all has come back, full circle, to that original grace and power. Collapse Into Now merges the deeper darker more electric edginess and wonder of Automatic with the wide-open-come-on-and-break-this-heart tenderness of Out of Time.
God, I hope you’re still reading, because I’m finally getting to the music. Produced in Nashville, New Orleans and Berlin, Collapse features our three heroes–Buck, Mills and Stipe–along with guest vocals from Patti Smith, Eddie Vedder and even Peaches.
It opens with a classic REM anthem scorcher, those solid drums, that Buck-Mills fusion of jangle guitar and driving, intricate base, and Stipe calling out with that unmistakable voice, rife with the powerful energy of his roiling heart. “It was what it was/Now let’s all get on with it.” Discoverer, he cries. Discoverer. It’s a song perfect greeting and a bait you take immediately, like those books whose first sentences are so ideal and original that you don’t put it down, just let it open your mind and take you in, a willing traveler upon the story to come.
Next comes “All the Best,” still rocking, hooking through your heart, with typical Stip self-eviscerating lyrics: “So over me/so high in my face/so talk to me and tell me where to place this/in my Quasimodo heart/that’s where i slit and fell/I rang the church bells till my ears bled red blood cells.”
A look at the past. A look at now. And they’re place in it. All the rest of the best of the lyrics are too good and too telling not to share: “‘I’m in a part of your dreams/that you don’t even understand/it’s just like me/to overstay my welcome, man.”
But as the song goes on, there’s an unrepentant claim from Stipe that eviscerates the listeners, too. He holds fast to the stone-cold certainty that some things really, finally get better with time. And that these guys in their fifties could school a hundred other younger bands to the ground with their sound.
They’ve done it in the past and they’re gonna do it again. It’s REM, man. No more pandering, no more empty promises from critics, the power indescribable is back, and God, when these guys have it, it’s out of this world, like music that falls straight from the heavens to the earth, and there’s no beating them: “Let’s sing in a rhyme/let’s give it one more time/let’s show the kids/how to do it/fine, fine, fine/I just had to to get that off my chest/and now it’s time to get on with the rest/all the best, all the best, all the best.”
The third track, Überlin, slows down for a repose, just like we like it, and we have a gorgeous mid-tempo dream/inner landscape in the city song reminiscent of Automatic for People’s “Man on the Moon.” A heart beat sound. Gorgeous lyrics, again, that hook you and never let you go. “Hey now, take your pills/And hey, now, make your breakfast/Hey, now comb your hair and off to work…I know, I know, I know/What I am chasing/I know, I know, I know that this is changing/I am flying on the stars to a meteor tonight/I am flying on the stars, the stars, the stars.”
Other favorite and incredible tracks include “Oh My Heart”, “Every Day is Yours to Win”, “It Happened Today”, “Walk it Back”, “That Someone is You”, “Me and Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I” and the incredible closer, “Blue”, where the sound is deep and wide and slow, with strings, rich-as-molasses guitar, and an ambiance worthy of Stipe’s hero–Patti Smith–to sing in her bone-deep, gorgeous staccato, dreamy–between Stipe’s poetry, which runs from the story of a raging party to missing his lover desperately to all those strange stream-of-consciousness words poured out perfectly, quickly, powerfully, just like they do in”Belong” off Out of Time, balancing a desperate voice with music you could float in. “I don’t have much, but what I have is gold, he says. “One afternoon, I saw your face,” follows Patti, singing with strength and quiet beneath Stipe’s words. “Twentieth century, collapse into now. And the dream gets deeper, darker, and it’s Patti singing, it seems, to Stipe.”Cinderella boy, you lost your shoe…Naked and alone…Into Blue.” Blue, blue, blue. A perfect soul-reflective vulnerability of the whole band, couched in clouds and darkness and uncertainty, rounds out the unrepentant battle cry of the opening “Discoverer,” finishing off a nearly perfect record from one of the best bands of our time.
Rest, rock, repose, weep. I think these guys didn’t care anymore, in the best way, as they recorded their final album for Warner Bros. They took all the best, all the best, all the best and put out a real REM record, the kind you’ll be listening to twenty years from now. No tour. Just take the record in your hands. It’s a perfect offering.
