It’s the first week of December 1987, and R.E.M. has simply completed a tour of Europe and North America, enjoying to the largest crowds of the group’s profession to date. They are on the cowl of the Rolling Stone, underscored with the declaration “America’s Best Band.” Their newest album, Document, is quick approaching platinum gross sales in the U.S. And they’ve a Top 10 hit.
Most bands can be thrilled, able to forge forward with declarations of continued greatness (bear in mind what Bono was saying about U2 in ’87). But the guys in R.E.M., bandmates for seven years, have been extra stunned by their quantum leap in recognition, perhaps even shocked by it, and positively skeptical.
“I can’t believe that we’re up there with [Bruce] Springsteen or whatever,” frontman Michael Stipe stated in that Rolling Stone cowl story. “It doesn’t really mean that much, but it does to the industry, and I guess to kids that read. And my mom got kinda weepy … No, she didn’t. But she couldn’t believe it, either.”
The disbelief made sense. R.E.M. had been promised a fabled “breakthrough” by music business consultants each time they’d put out a brand new LP, going again to 1983’s Murmur. That had but to be seen and the band had lengthy given up any such need. Sure, the critics have been adoring (solely to be outdone by the band’s hardcore followers) and gross sales improved with each launch – however this was a gentle form of development, in step with R.E.M.’s underground standing.
“There are a few things on this album that could do well on Top Forty radio,” guitarist Peter Buck advised Rolling Stone, simply earlier than Document’s launch on Aug. 31, 1987, “but then again I can’t imagine it happening, knowing us. So I don’t know if I have any commercial expectations for this one at all. I assume it will sell some, somebody’s got to buy it. I know my mom will buy three or four. I don’t see this as the record that’s going to blast apart the chart. Although you never know. Weirder things have happened.”
If R.E.M. occurred to scrape the singles charts, that was high-quality, so long as they might tour and make information, every one with a sonic strategy completely different to the one which got here earlier than. The band’s fifth album match firmly in that custom. As with earlier LPs, the quartet regarded to construct on what that they had accomplished, whereas concurrently transferring in an alternate route.
Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986 had introduced a cleaner and richer sound to the band’s recordings, partially by the use of producer Don Gehman. In the realm of R.E.M., it was extra direct musically and lyrically, with Buck’s spindly guitar wrapped round Stipe’s usually environmentally acutely aware pleading. Stipe and Buck, together with bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry, wished this subsequent file to be a bit weirder.
Listen to R.E.M.’s “Fireplace”
“This time around we wanted to make a tougher-edged record,” Buck stated. “This time we wanted to make a loose, weird, semi-live-in-the-studio album. We wanted to have a little tougher stance.”
With that notion, the band introduced on producer Scott Litt. At that time, he had gained the most consideration for helming Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine,” however R.E.M. have been curious as a result of he additionally had produced the dB’s Repercussion. After recording the one-off “Romance” with Litt for the Made in Heaven soundtrack, the guys thought it might be fascinating to make a full album with him.
R.E.M. and Litt agreed to file the album in the spring of 1987 at Nashville’s Sound Emporium studio – chosen by Buck, “because it [looked] a little like a Polynesian bar,” in response to Stipe. Litt’s mission aligned with R.E.M.’s in wanting to alter the band’s sound. He hadn’t been an enormous fan of the group earlier than that point as a result of he felt their information had been too “murky” sounding.
“I’ve always liked full-range records and treating vocals with care,” Litt advised the Chicago Tribune. “With R.E.M., I thought it was important to show that the music belongs on the radio, that it was every bit as worthy as Whitney Houston or whatever else was on there.”
While writing and recording Document, the members of R.E.M. have been much less involved with the radio than making a file that mirrored the fashionable world circa 1987. That’s why the LP’s title was ultimately chosen, as a substitute of alternate selections “No. 5” and “Table of Content” (each of which seem on the sleeve), in addition to “Last Train to Disneyland” (which doesn’t).
Listen to R.E.M.’s “Exhuming McCarthy”
Stipe, as the band’s singer and first lyricist, crafted political and observational songs that have been as pointed as the mix of rock, funk and folks music that was coming from Berry, Buck and Mills. “Exhuming McCarthy” drew connections between the Red Scare and Iran-Contra. “Welcome to the Occupation” decried U.S. meddling in Central America. Even the album’s lone cowl, of Wire’s “Strange,” appeared to mirror how R.E.M. felt about present occasions. Meanwhile, “Finest Worksong” opened the album with a call-to-arms – “The time to rise has been engaged” – forecasting how these 11 tracks can be doused in righteous anger.
“Michael is really concerned – we all are – about this neo-conservative wave in America,” Mills advised the Globe and Mail. “With all the repression of personal freedoms, the knee-jerk reactionism, it’s the sort of atmosphere old Joe [McCarthy] would fit well into, hence the song. But we try not to be dire about it. There’s a lot of whimsical humor and irony in Michael’s writing that we don’t really get credit for. I think people miss that a lot of the stuff we do is partly tongue-in-cheek.”
That goes for one in all Document’s (and R.E.M.’s) most well-known tracks, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” (which you can listen to at the top of the page), which merged real-life fears – like Stipe’s earthquake terror – with political references and daydreams about famous people with the initials L.B. having a birthday party with cheesecake and jelly beans. The song also forecasted the future’s media-saturated information overload with its rapid-fire lyrics, which exit the singer’s mouth like slugs from a Howitzer.
“End of the World” would become a modest hit on its way to pop culture immortality, whereas “The One I Love” would resonate much more immediately. With Berry’s crisp drum riff launching into Buck’s barbed wire guitar, the album’s lead single arrested listeners’ attention. The track was the one that beat the odds, buzzing radio stations internationally and earning R.E.M. their first Top 10 hit in America by rising to No. 9. Stipe got a kick out of casual fans who didn’t listen closely enough to hear him declare that the titular object of this dedication was also just “a simple prop to occupy my time.”
“It’s a brutal kind of song, and I don’t know if a lot of people pick up on that,” he told Rolling Stone. “But I’ve always left myself pretty open to interpretation. It’s probably better that they just think it’s a love song at this point … I don’t know. That song just came up from somewhere, and I recognized it as being real violent and awful.”
Listen to R.E.M.’s “The One I Love”
Whether because of “The One I Love”’s darker tendencies or in spite of them, the single brought R.E.M. hordes of new fans who pushed Document into the Top 10 and made it the band’s first-ever platinum release by January 1988. In the meantime, the band had completed their Work Tour to promote the album, which saw members struggling with the group’s increasing fame. Buck had a freak-out after playing to 12,000 fans and witnessing the bruising physicality of a general admission crowd. Stipe found himself becoming increasingly hostile to certain members of the audience.
“There was a point in the ’80s when I looked out at my audience and I saw people that – were I not on stage – they’d sooner slug me as they walked by me on the sidewalk,” Stipe told Filter Magazine in 2003. “These were other people. I was an ugly, horrible person on stage then [laughs] – spewing about Reagan and about this and that. It’s where a song like ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ came from. There was a point where I looked out and I saw these people and I realized: I’m the performing monkey. I’m the dancing clown … And it was really offensive to me and so I reacted the way anyone would react in that situation: you get very defensive and very insecure and very angry and you want to shove down people’s throats who you really are and see how much of it they can take. OK, well, I thankfully kind of grew out of that, but I had to learn the hard way.”
In so many ways, Document was a massive turning point for R.E.M., filled with big hits and hard lessons. As the band’s final studio LP with I.R.S. Records, it marked the ending of the band’s underground years – as R.E.M. would jump to Warner Bros. the following year and become an act that could fill arenas. But it was also the beginning of a new era, a fruitful studio partnership with Scott Litt resulting in a bevy of blockbuster albums and many more radio songs.
“We never made giant steps to make ourselves a viable, hit-making American band for American radio,” Stipe reflected on In the Studio With Redbeard. “Radio came to us … pop culture just swung into our little, stubborn trajectory.”
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